“Put it back where it belongs.” She held out her hand, and after a moment he gave it over. “In the stillroom. On the shelf beside her jars, where she kept it. Where it should have stayed.”
He reached for her hand and held it a moment against his cheek, his eyes closed.
“She would have liked you,” he said.
“I am certain I would have liked her.”
He was quiet a moment. Then, chuckling at a memory, he said, “She kept bees. Before my father made her give it up…”
He went on, there in the low light, telling her small things he had told no one—the bees, and the way she sang flat and did not care who heard—his voice easing as he spoke, the dead woman becoming, by slow degrees, a living one. Violet stayed at the arm of the chair and listened, and let him remember, and the fire sank in the grate. After a while she was no longer hearing the words, only the sound of him: a man talking about his mother in the dark, at last.
She rose, she was uncertain why, and the room turned slowly under her, and she put her hand on the chair to steady herself and saw that her hand was shaking.
The pain in her back had moved.
“Violet.”
He was on his feet before she had time to ask him not to be. She felt his arms come round her, and she heard him call out a name. And then she was being lifted. She saw the green book on the floor where he had dropped it. Then she saw her eyes holding her gaze, her slackened mouth, and heard her gentle voice saying,It’s a shame I didn’t know about your condition sooner.
Chapter thirty-nine
The Ball
Violet
London, May 1830
The new maid was called Bessie. She set the cup on the table and stepped back, and Violet looked at it for longer than a cup of tea required.
Bessie was trying very hard. She had good hands and a willing disposition and a tendency to apologise for things that did not require apology, and Violet found that she preferred all these qualities to the alternative. Bessie had been a housemaid at Iredell House for two years before Mrs Greer had elevated her, and her respect for the dressing table bordered on the worshipful.
“One moment, Your Grace. I have nearly got it.”
Violet sat before the glass while Bessie worked at the pins. The gown was ivory silk, cut close the waist with sleeves full at the shoulder and narrowing to the wrist. She watched Bessie’s reflection and thought of the woman who used to stand where Bessie stood. She made herself stop. She was behind a differentsort of door, and the hands in her hair were clumsy and kind and entirely her own.
“There is a box come for you, Your Grace.” Bessie reached into the lower drawer of the dressing table and took out a small box wrapped in paper.
“Mr Patten carried it up himself. He said it was to go to you and to no one else.”
It weighed almost nothing in her hands. She unfolded the paper and found a box no larger than a snuffbox, and inside it, on a twist of cotton wool, a single hair pin: a pearl set in fine gold, round and pale and perfect.
A note was folded beneath it. She knew the hand before she had it open.
My Duchess,
This pin has been owned by no one before you. I chose it for no reason but that it put me in mind of you. Wear it tonight if it pleases you. If it does not, it is yours regardless. ~H
She read it twice. Then she set it face-down on the table before her tears fell on it.
“Your Grace, are you well?” Bessie asked.
“Yes, Bessie. I am very well, thank you.” She held the pin out across her palm. “Put in this one, Bessie.”
Bessie took it gingerly and worked it into the coil at Violet’s crown and stepped back. The pearl sat there catching the candlelight as though it had grown out of her. It was hers. Given to her by her husband who was also hers.
The ballroom was lit below them. She could hear the orchestra tuning through the floor and imagined that Cranbrook was issuing instructions to persons who had not asked for them.
“There, Your Grace.” Bessie stepped back. “Shall I fetch the pearl drops?”