“It was Elizabeth’s favourite. That is all.”
“I am not—”
“I will discuss Edmund no longer. Not without evidence.” He opened the door and stepped aside. “Do not touch my personal belongings again.”
She went, her nose stinging and eyes burning. She had gone a few paces when his voice reached her.
“Violet.”
She stopped but did not turn.
“If you find any evidence, bring it to me. I will listen.”
She walked on without answering, but the knot in her chest loosened by one thread.
Chapter nineteen
Lady Carstairs
Violet
The gown had come that afternoon in a box near as long as Violet was tall, and three of Madame Renard’s girls had carried it up the stairs between them with the care of pallbearers. Sarah had lifted it free of the paper and held it to the window, and the silk had taken the grey afternoon light and changed to the colour of the inside of a shell.
Violet had not asked how a gown that wanted two weeks had been finished in one. She knew. The chemist from Lamb’s Conduit Street had knelt upon her drawing-room carpet two days before and read an apology off a folded sheet in a voice that would not hold steady, and she had understood from that, if from nothing else, that her husband had been about the town on her behalf and had left a particular kind of weather behind him wherever he went. She had thanked the man and sent him out and had not known, afterward, what she felt. It was a strange thing to be defended so fiercely by a man who treated her like atax collector, except for those late hours when the animal in him demanded an audience.
Sarah dressed her as the light went. The sleeves were the great gigot she had promised since the first morning, full at the shoulder and narrowing to the wrist, and the waist drawn in close. When Sarah had done with the pins and stood back, Violet looked at the woman in the glass for a moment then looked away because she did not know how to be looked at.
The Duke of Iredell was glorious in the evening black. The clean line of him against the dark squab, the white at his throat, the way the lamp found his square jaw and straight nose. She had been married to him some weeks and had not grown used to the look of him. And tonight, she found she could not look at him at all.
Violet drew out the card from her reticule and held it across the dim space between them. The duke took it without a word. She watched him read it and saw the line come down between his brows.
He looked at the card a moment longer than expected then gave the direction to the coachman through the front glass. He sat back and the carriage moved off into the wet.
She would not have said he was angry. Anger she had seen on him, the heat of it, the vein at his temple. This was something with the heat gone out of it, colder and further down. It filled the carriage and left no room for her in it.
She became aware that she was working the seam of her glove between two fingers, the small, worried motion her hands made. She made them stop. She laid them flat in her lap, one upon the other, and held them so.
“Why did you accept this one?”
His voice came quiet out of the dark. She had not expected him to speak, and it took her a moment.
“I did not know any of the names. There were a great many cards, and I could not tell a good house from a poor one. So I asked Sarah. She marked the ones I ought to answer.”
“Sarah.” He said it without inflection.
“She said this one was an old set, and a good house, and that the connection would matter to me. That I should be glad of it later.” Violet looked at the card where it lay upon the seat beside him.
He nodded then turned his face to the window, and the silence came back worse than before.
“Have I made a mistake?” she asked.
She thought he would not answer, but he spoke at last in his deep timbre.
“I find them dull,” he said. “The whole set. Cards and a great deal of music and very little wit. You need not have troubled.”
“I am sorry. I shall be more careful.”
“Do not accept their invitations again,” he said to the window.