A Most Improper Duchess, page 19
After all, why would he pretend? What type of man did not want to be a duke?
‘What happens now?’ Vivianne sat in the sitting room of Number 10 with Lorelei. Dressed in black travelling clothes, the duchess remained as calm and steady as she had been throughout all their lessons together.
‘Tillman will hire genealogists to comb the family tree and begin the search. A host of pretenders will come forward. There will be investigations. Eventually, the man with the strongest claim will petition parliament and become the next duke.’
‘I meant for you. The estate has been your home for a long time. You will have to leave?’
‘Tillman is my home.’ Lorelei spoke the gentle words with her usual abruptness. ‘I’ve always wanted to live by the sea. Perhaps, once all this is settled, that’s what we’ll do.’ Outside, wheels crunched on the gravel. Lorelei rose and embraced Vivianne briefly, before she stepped back, blinking fast. ‘Stupid tears. One should never show emotion to those below…’ Lorelei caught herself, then captured Vivianne in her arms again. ‘But I suppose I can make you my exception.’
Vivianne followed Lorelei to the door. Tillman handed his wife into the carriage, and then climbed in after. The driver pushed the door shut. Lorelei leaned out as they began to drive away, her voice almost lost to the horse’s jingle. ‘Tell him I said he is allowed to be happy. He deserves to be.’
The carriage rolled down the drive, turned onto Honeysuckle Street, then disappeared from sight. Vivianne turned back to the entrance, then paused. No Arley. No Cecil. There was nothing inside Number 10 for her. She could have called for the carriage, but that was the transport of a lady, and she couldn’t summon the desire to play the pretence anymore.
And her boots would not wear themselves into comfort if she did not walk them in.
It really was a pretty driveway and a lovely villa with a beautiful garden. A hint of a branch from an ancient oak gestured from behind the tall sandstone columns. But overall, it was too set back from the neighbours, too distant from the people, for her taste, really.
The groundsmen open a side gate, and Vivianne stepped out onto the street.
‘He left you an allowance, didn’t he? Made some kind of provision in his will?’
Vivianne spun and knocked hard into the fence. Winton, his hair a mess, his chin unshaved, stepped from the shadows.
Vivianne shook her head. ‘Why would he? We were to be married.’
‘But you must have had something. How did you get your dresses? Your shoes, and everything?’
‘He looked after me,’ she said. ‘Not always in the right way, but in the best way he could. I am sure Lorelei will not leave you destitute. She will still pay your allowance—’
Winton ran his fingers over his scalp before he cried out in anguish. ‘I don’t want an allowance, I want my bloody share!’ He looked up at her. ‘You’re lying. I’ll go to the papers, I’ll give them what I know. I’ll sell your story.’
Part of her tore at this man’s frustration, but she also railed against it. It wasn’t fair, but when was life? The poor of Paris, the dancers, the grisettes, nothing about their life was fair. They did the best they could with the cards dealt by fate, and his hand may not have been as lucky as Arley's, but it was better than most.
Vivianne stamped her foot as her familiar fury bubbled and brewed. 'I may not be a lady, but you will not speak to me that way. I was a grisette. I survived the siege. I ran the barricades. And after all that, I managed your Londres. Do your worst, Monsieur West. I am not ashamed of my past. Perhaps you need to settle your debts with your own.’
And having nowhere else to go, Vivianne crossed the street and ascended the short set of stairs to Number 5, to the sanctuary still offered by Mrs Crofts.
Four days after Lorelei returned to the country, Winton followed through with his threat, and with a shake of a headline, Vivianne was once again a dancer of the Palais Garnier. Invisible informants claimed to have known all along, to have been her manager and arranged the meeting with the duke. And every report seemed to forget why he had even been there at all, as if she had tempted him from across the Channel. There was no mention of Spencer & Co.
That same morning, Vivianne upended her breakfast into her chamber pot for the third day in a row. Sitting in the parlour, waiting for her society members to arrive for their weekly meeting, Mrs Crofts’ conversation became shallow, and direct. Her once sympathetic gaze hardened.
‘You must miss Paris,’ she finally said.
‘Non,’ Vivianne replied.
‘You don’t have any friends there you’d like to visit?
A knock sounded at the door, and Vivianne rose from her seat. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs Crofts. I will always be grateful.’ Vivianne took up her small traveling case that she had left in the hall and made her way to the door. Outside, on the street, a hack was waiting.
Mrs Crofts, her black skirts swishing, rushed to follow. ‘You’re leaving? Is that all you are taking? What about your wardrobe? Your belongings?’
‘They belong to a duchess, which I am not and will never be. Sell them if you like. You can use the funds for your society.’
Vivianne kept her expression schooled as Mrs Crofts visibly squirmed with the prospect of injecting a substantial amount of money into her cause but accepting it from a decidedly immoral source. Vivianne left the matron of morality to her deliberations, and stepped out of the town house. By the door, the grey cat with the white tipped tail gave a small mew. She held out her hand and he balanced on his hind legs to brush his head against her.
‘It was lovely to meet you, Monsieur Spencer. Please look after Arley’s friends for him. I know he will miss them very much.’
Phineas accompanied her to the French coast, then set her on her way to Nantes.
‘What will happen if he’s ever found out?’ she asked as they said their goodbyes.
He shrugged. ‘It’s never been done before. Or if it has, no one has been found out. It could be viewed as treason.’
‘He could be tried? And imprisoned? Or even…’ She couldn’t even say the word. Arley faking his death had been torturous enough. The prospect of him actually being lost would break her. ‘We shouldn’t have done this. Perhaps...’
‘It’s too late now,’ Phineas snapped. ‘The only thing for it is to make the best of it.’
During her years in the capital, Paris had been altered so thoroughly that some days she struggled to remember how it had looked to her seventeen-year-old self, so it was with surprise that Vivianne found the village of her childhood—the fence lines, the stone cottages, the dress of the women—almost unchanged. It seemed incongruous that so much of the world had been in flux, yet the open paddocks that had been her first dance stage were the same as when she had been a barefoot child in love with the feeling of taking a musically inspired step.
Vivianne took a shaking breath and rapped on the rough wooden door.
She had skin a little more weathered than in her memory, a little darker from working in the sun, and a few more heavy wrinkles lined her eyes, but the woman who answered the door was unmistakably her mother.
Vivianne itched to rush into her arms, but her mother took a step back. She scanned her, from her toes to her head, her eyes lingering on her stomach. Vivianne raised a protective hand and rested it on the small bump.
‘You are with child?’
Vivianne could only nod.
‘Your husband?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘I told you this would happen.’
All her emotions swirled, and through her tears, her relief, her fear and her joy, Vivianne scratched out, ‘Yes, Maman, you were right. Shall I go now?’
‘Is that Vivianne?’ her father called from deep in the house, before he emerged from the shadows. He shoved aside and grasped Vivianne by the waist, before swirling her in a tight circle. ‘Louisa, it is Vivianne! She has come home!’
‘Maman does not want me back,’ Vivianne howled. She cried so often with the baby.
‘Still with the melodrama, always with the melodrama. I did not say I would not have you back,’ Maman sniped. ‘I only said that I was right.’ And with a strangled cry, her mother wrapped her arms around her and Papa both. ‘Oh, my child. How I have missed you.’
The new routine of work, where her toughened hands were an asset, and not a mark against her, fell into an easy pattern. She helped with the laundry, walked the cows through the paddock, and when no one was looking, she stretched onto her toes and spun a pirouette. The movement made her nauseous, but she did it anyway. She watched the road for Arley, never seeing him, but trusting he would come. In the evenings, she sat by the fire and with Maman, darned socks.
‘You cannot stay unmarried,’ her mother said. ‘It is not proper.'
‘I have no wish to wed just because I am with child,' Vivianne replied.
‘There is a man in town. Tall. He has started a school.’ Maman snipped at a loose thread.
‘I am not marrying any man—’
‘English.’ Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘Not very useful. He is no good in the fields and cannot cook for himself. His father does everything for him. Smart at some things, stupid with others. If you roll with him, then tell him the baby is his, he will believe you.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, you can marry him. He will give your baby a name.’
‘Non… did you say he is English?’
‘I said you cannot be fussy.’
It couldn’t be anyone else, but the following day, as Vivianne sat in the kitchen, scuffing the dirt floor beneath her sabots as she waited for the knock at the door, her heart flipped between rapidity and cessation. They’d been apart more than they’d been together, the world had spun out from beneath them with more speed than she’d had stamina for. Impulsiveness had driven so much of her life and ended so badly.
What if this was the same?
What if it wasn’t him?
She was so lost in her worries, she did not register the tap at the door.
‘Your visitor!’ Her mother clapped her hands before her face. ‘Take him into the orchard,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘No one will see you there.’
Framed in the doorway, the summer sun streaking behind him, his hand tapped the side of his brown coat. He stood tall and stiff, with the same dignified air of a duke, even though he wore a neat town suit and well-worn shoes. He held a bunch of hastily gathered wildflowers. His hair had grown a little long, and his chin had a slight stubble—the afternoon growth of a man who shaved himself.
‘My name is Mr Knight. I’m new in town. I brought you these.’ He held out the flowers. ‘Would you like a walk?’
Vivianne didn’t dare speak until they were away from the house, over the small rise and out of sight of the cottage.
‘Mr Knight?’
Arley laughed. ‘Phineas’s idea of a joke, I assume. But I think I asked you to change enough for me. It seemed to fit. And you?’ His eyes wandered her body, and unmistakably lingered over her stomach and the small bulge of her growing belly, so obvious against her petite frame. ‘How many months?’
‘Maybe four. He kicks sometimes.’
‘He?’
‘I think so.’
A glimmer of delight flashed in his eyes, and he tapped his fist against his side, expending energy he could not otherwise show. ‘I did not expect it quite so soon.’
‘We did little to avoid it.’
‘I suppose we didn’t. We were very improper.’ Then he laughed, his tone both familiar and fresh. It was not the measured laugh of Arley the duke, or the exuberance of Monsieur West, but a new lightness. It was the laughter of a man in control of his destiny, and with all the freedom and fear that came with it.
His stiffness melted with the sun’s embrace. He told her of his escape and how he had been smuggled first south, then across the Channel in the hold of a merchant vessel, before landing in Nice. From there, he had made the slow journey around the coastline.
‘I took up rooms in town with Cecil. I’ve been teaching. Latin and Greek. Not much interest in English.’ He chuckled. ‘I’m finally putting those lessons from Oxford to use. And teaching children—it’s incredibly satisfying.’
She told him of her life in the spotlight, the article when she’d become unravelled and her departure from Mrs Crofts.
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. ‘Do you regret it? You could have been a duchess.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’ She leant into his soft linen and slid her hands beneath his coat to gather about his waist, enjoying the awkward push of her stomach against him. She stroked at the centre line of his back and tugged his shirt tail from his trousers.
‘Are you trying to seduce me?’ he asked.
‘I am. I need a father for my child, and my mother says that if I bed the silly Englishman, he will believe me when I tell him the child is his and he will marry me.’
‘So, everyone will think my child is not mine? Blood, and legacy, will mean nothing?’
‘Oui. And they will think you a fool for being so easily manipulated.’
‘What a fall from grace this is.’ He laughed, then ran his hands down her back and nuzzled into her neck. He found her mouth and stole a kiss. ‘Seduce me, country wench, then lie to me. I cannot wait to make you my wife.’
Chapter twenty-five
Meanwhile, back on Honeysuckle Street…
‘He’s not dead. He’s happy. It says so, right here, in his letter. That’s how I know. Because he wrote to us. From an undisclosed location. How else would I know?’ Phineas pushed the note into the centre of the table.
It was the first meeting of Spencer and Co since the wedding that wasn’t. Since Arley had pushed his skiff into the river and Phineas had taken the carriage out past the docks and thrown his oar in the water. Since the world had made a fuss for a moment, then sunk back into itself. Since with a disturbing accuracy, Arley’s prediction that almost no one would miss him had been proved correct.
‘It’s incredibly irresponsible,’ Lawrence said, his voice filling with his familiar stubbornness that he so often directed at Phineas. That he himself took pains to coax from the man. Lawrence leant across the table and snatched the note up, then began to read aloud.
Phineas has, I hoped, told you enough. I am sorry, my fellow board members and neighbours, to have deceived you. So much of my life has been one of pretence and putting on a show. Some days I could scarce remember where the reality ended, and the façade began.
Until I learnt that it is not the lies that matter, but who we tell them to. And I will live a life of lies so that those I love can be their honest selves.
I spent so much of my life watching you all. Your lives, your loves, your squabbles. Always an onlooker. Until that day last year when Hamish forced me to attend that meeting in the front parlour of Number 4, and it opened a new world. Camaraderie. Friendship. Frustration. What it means to be a neighbour. And while I did not at the time feel it for myself, I believed completely in Iris’s sincerity when she said that travel was not only about discovering new places but discovering oneself.
I am finally ready to embark on my own adventure.
Sincerely,
A.
Lawrence pushed the note across the table, all his indignation gone. ‘He fell in love.’
‘With her mind,’ said Elise.
‘And her anger,’ said Hamish.
‘And her passion,’ said Rosanna.
‘And with life.’ Phineas swallowed and blinked away a mist across his eyes. He would not cry. He never did. He took up the note and walked to the fireplace, then struck a match against the stone and leaned into the cold hearth. He held the flame against the corner of the letter until it caught and the paper curled, then he dropped it into the grate as little yellow flames licked and ate the last shred of evidence. The A, with its small flourish, was the final drop of ink to be consumed.
The closest thing he’d had to a friend, gone.
‘We should have stood by him,’ Iris said, her voice only audible because of the depth of silence in the room. ‘By both of them. As you all stood by me. Never again. From this point on, no matter the onslaught, we stand together.’ Iris tapped the table with her pen. She turned to Elise. ‘How many bookings do we have?’
Elise riffled through her papers. ‘Some tours are selling well, others slow. The mini-grand tour is not quite half booked.’
‘That’s our point of difference. Our flagship. Less than half is not enough to break even. We’ll have failed before we’ve begun.’ Spencer nudged at Iris’s leg, and she leant down and scratched his head. He arched and purred into her hand. ‘A painter by the side of the Seine. Dancing in the gardens. Experiences to ignite a ready mind,’ she mumbled under her breath. ‘Elise, make a note. We will need to call the printer to have new brochures made. Let us find a way to put Miss Chevalier’s Paris onto our tour.’
epilogue
Two years later
Arley hoisted his son over his head and set him to rest on his shoulders. Addi gripped his knees against Arley’s neck and scrunched a handful of hair in his palm. ‘Papa. Papillion.’
‘Butterfly,’ Arley said as the two of them watched its haphazard path through the air.
Addi tapped his cheek. ‘Non, Papa. Papillion.’
The boy would argue with him over everything.
He was entirely too much like his mother.
Arley balanced the canvas bag of bread and fruit on his hip and lay a steadying hand over Addi’s feet as they walked down the street. The boy was getting stronger, and only gripped tight if they took a corner a little too fast. He had good balance and a sound posture. Arley was certain he’d be a good rower. Vivianne insisted he was made for the stage. Addi spent his days hitting things with sticks. Who of them would be correct about his destiny? Only time would tell.
After easing their way into their life together, they’d settled in Vannes. It was a town big enough that they could disappear into a type of anonymity, but small enough that the news and conversation of the outside did not penetrate to any great depth. And the double storied townhouses with their bright yellow, red and blue painted facades had reminded him a little of the row of identical townhouses, each with a different coloured door.
