The winter was long. The wedding was in the spring. Between the promise and the wedding, there was a whole cold country to cross. And Lady Mariset had not been the only one with something to say. The letters began arriving before Christmas.
Some were kind. Most were not. There were relations of the Duke, distant cousins, aunts twice removed, who had opinions about who ought to marry a duke and who ought not. There was a cousin in London who wrote a letter of such elegant cruelty that Petra threw it into the fire without letting Vivienne read past the first line. There was talk in drawing rooms Vivienne had never entered.
Vivienne at the Duke's request, spent the fortnight before Christmas at Ravenholm itself. Petra came with her. This was not, the Duke pointed out, negotiable. Vivienne was to see the house that would be her house. She was to meet the servants who would be her servants.
She was to walk the gardens and stand in the great hall and understand what she was accepting so that she would accept it with her eyes open. The house was terrifying. She admitted this to Petra on the first night. It was terrifying not because it was grand, it was grand, but she had been prepared for that. It was terrifying because it was cold.
There was no other word. Room after room of beautifully painted ceilings and marble mantelpieces and portraits of stern men who had all been dukes, and every room felt like a room in which no one had laughed in 50 years. The Duke saw her face at dinner the second night. He did not ask what was wrong. He said, "When the plates had been cleared, would you like to see something?" Yes, he took her with Petra at a discrete distance behind them up a small staircase at the back of the house along a corridor she had not been shown that morning to a door at the end.
He opened it. Inside was a small room with a fire lit. It was not grand at all. It had a low ceiling and a worn rug and a chair by the fire that had been sat in for a very long time. There were books on a table beside the chair.
There was a rough drawing pinned above the mantel. The drawing had been done unmistakably by a small child. It showed three stick figures under a large sun. "This is my room," the Duke said. "The one I use."
The other rooms are for other people. Not this one. Vivienne looked at the drawing. "Tomas gave it to me," the Duke said. "Last month he began to speak a little."
He wanted me to have this. I did not want to hang it in a room where servants would tidy it. Petra behind them made a small sound. Vivienne did not turn to look at her. She looked at the drawing.
She looked at the chair. She looked at the fire. I can live in a house that has a room like this in it, she said more to herself than to him. "That is what I hoped," he said.
Christmas came, Christmas passed.
In the third week of January, a small item appeared in a London paper suggesting that the Duke of Ravenholm's forthcoming marriage to a Miss Ashcom of no particular family was in some doubt, and that his grace, upon reflection, was said by close friends to be reconsidering. The item was unsigned. It was, everyone agreed, the sort of item that could be planted by anyone with a shilling and a wish to see damage done. The Duke read the item at his breakfast table. He read it once.
He set the paper down. He asked Pel to bring him his writing case and he wrote three letters. He sent one to the paper. He sent one to his lawyer. He sent one to Vivienne.
The letter to Vivienne was very short. It said, "Do not believe anything you read about us that is not written in my hand. I will be at the cottage on Friday. Yours." Vivienne read the letter twice. She folded it.
She put it in the drawer where she kept her mother's earrings and the pressed maragold from the day of the announcement and the small piece of linen she had never told him she had kept. She did not answer the letter. She did not need to. He would be there on Friday.
He came on Friday. He came alone in the plain coat on the dark bay. He came into the parlor with the winter clinging to his shoulders and he stood in front of her in front of Petra and said, "I need to ask you something and I need you to say the true thing, not the kind thing. I will." Do you wish to stop? No.
Are you afraid? Yes. Of the house? No. Of the people.
They will not stop. Not all of them. Not for years. Some of them will hate you until they die because they had daughters and their daughters are not you. I know I will not always be able to shield you.
I will do everything I can. There will still be days when someone will hurt you, and I will not know until after. I know, Vivienne. It was the first time he had used her name without the miss in front of it. It landed in the room like a small clear bell.
Yes, I am not asking you if you can bear it. I am asking you if you wish to. She looked at him. She looked at Petra, who was pretending very hard to be looking at her mending. She looked at the small parlor with its lavender smell and its chipped teacups and its garden beyond the window where the first snowdrops had come up in the frost that morning.
"I wish to," she said. He nodded once. He did not smile. He did not need to. "Then we go on," he said.
They went on.
Spring came slowly as spring did in that county. The elms began to green. The lanes began to dry. By the middle of March, the marigolds Vivienne had cut in the autumn had been gone for months, but new growth was in the beds, and Petra was out in the garden most afternoons with a small trowel and a large hat, and the wedding was 3 weeks away.
Two weeks before the wedding, Lady Mariset Vaughn sent a letter to Ravenholm. It was addressed to the Duke, not to Vivienne. It was two sentences long. It said, "I shall not attend. I wish her every happiness. It is not a joke."
The Duke read it, folded it, and put it in the same drawer as Vivienne's letters. He did not show it to her until years later.