He was thinking about curtains. Green ones, in a room that had been pink for two years. He had walked past Violet’s room and seen them and stopped in the corridor and stood there like a man who had lost his way in his own house.
There were other things. A smell of something herbal and sharp in the kitchen passage where for twelve years there had been only damp stone and coal. A brass clock on the mantel in the morning room, flowers in a jug on the hall table, things cut from the garden. His mother had done that. He had forgotten until he saw it and then he could not stop remembering.
The last time he had gone to her, three nights ago, she had not clutched the sheets. Her hands had lain at her sides. He had lifted her nightgown and touched her thigh and she had not flinched. And the absence of the flinch had gone through him with more force than it should have. He had worked the oil longer than the act required, and when she exhaled, he had felt it in his own chest.
He did not know what to do with any of it. His wife was filling his house the way water fills a crack in stone—slowly, and into every space he had left empty, and with a patience that suggested she meant to stay. He had married her for an heir. He had not anticipated that she would make the house feel and smell different. That the house would feel like home at last.
The carriage turned into the square. Iredell House stood tall and grey. The lamps were lit in the lower windows. Through the glass of the morning room, he could see the brass clock, and beside it, the shape of someone moving. His wife, or her shadow, crossing the room with something in her hands.
“Your Grace?”
Henry climbed down. The rain met his face. He went up the steps and Patten opened the door, and the house took him in, and it smelled of lavender and his wife’s footsteps were somewhere above him on the stairs.
Chapter fourteen
The Stillroom
Henry
He went to her at midnight in his dressing gown with nothing beneath it, and her room was empty.
The bed had been turned down. One candle guttered on the table, the fire had gone to embers, and the nightgown the maid had laid out lay uncreased. He stood in the doorway between their two rooms and felt the wanting in him sour into temper.
He had wanted her all week. It was undignified, the degree of it, and he had not come down the connecting passage to find a cold grate and no wife in the bed. That she was not where a man could find her at midnight struck him first as an offence, and only second, with a small unwelcome lurch, as a worry.
He took the candle and went to look.
Henry knew by now that his wife would not be found in the drawing room or the library or one of many rooms designed for leisurely pursuits, according to Mrs Greer’s accounts.
He went to the garden first and upon finding it cold and empty, he headed to the kitchen. A light showed under thestillroom door at the end of the kitchen passage, the one room in the house he had not entered in over a decade.
His duchess was on the floor among some of the larger jars. She had taken a dozen of them and set them in a half-circle on the swept flags and was working through them one at a time. Prising the old wax, lifting each to the candle to read its brown label, setting it back. What she opened gave up a fine grey powder onto her fingers, and a smudge of it crossed one cheekbone where she had pushed her hair off her face.
He should have gone back up. He did not. He stood in the doorway and watched his wife work, smudged and angry, and felt the wanting start in him, low and unreasonable.
He opened the door wider and stepped inside. Violet turned her head, pushed up on her palm, and sat taller.
“Your Grace.”
“It’s late,” he said.
“It is. I could not sleep, so here I am.”
“I was expecting you to be waiting for me in your room.”
She tilted her head almost imperceptibly. “I did not know if you were coming. It seemed you had made alternative arrangements.”
“How do you mean?”
She turned back to her work. “You and Sarah Baker. I heard you yesterday in your chamber.”
Henry searched his memory for the occasion she spoke of.
“Sarah has been in this house since I was fifteen and she six. She needed to speak to me in private.”
“And do you make a habit of inviting a maid to your private chambers for discourse?”
“When I am rushed, occasionally. Mrs Greer has been to my room several times.”