‘I’m afraid I am. It can be both a blessing and a curse.’ This was all he could manage, over some sudden obstruction in his throat. They had drawn close to Robin now, and found him still squatting upon his haunches, with a little pile of stones and shells beside him. But he didn’t look up at their arrival, or even seem aware of it, being fully absorbed in gazing down in wonder at the miniature world of bustling life and colour in the rockpool by his toes. He didn’t seem to want to interfere with it as many another child would have done – to catch one of the crabs or the tiny fish and transparent shrimps, to make himself a mighty and destructive god in their universe – but was content merely to observe. Richard wouldn’t necessarily have expected such fierce concentration and forbearance from the livelier, more boisterous twin – but then, he was just learning to know them both after so many wasted years. He needed to remember that.
32
Viola sent off letters to her older sisters and to Emily, reassuring them that she and the boys were well and asking about their welfare and their families, and then set about her shopping with determination. By the time a couple of hours had passed, she had bought half the household goods in York, it seemed to her. She directed the slightly stunned shopkeepers to send the smaller parcels back to the rooms she had hired in the city’s most notable inn; the larger items were to be delivered by carrier’s cart as soon as possible, and she would pay for them herself, out of her own resources. All of the Castle’s inhabitants deserved more comfort than they currently knew, especially since it would soon be winter, and she was glad to be able to give it to them and not count the cost too closely. She realised that Winterflood had never needed her, apart from impersonally, as mother to its longed-for heir – the house and the estate had run like a well-oiled machine before she’d ever set foot in the place, and still did now, whether she was present or not. But Ventris was different, Ventris desperately needed her care, and this gave her a warm feeling, over and above the heady pleasure of spending money in a good cause.
The staff at the Golden Fleece could hardly do enough for her. They didn’t know or care that she had once been a duchess, as indeed why should they? What weighed with them was the Ventris name. Several of them spoke with easy familiarity of her late predecessor, who had been well known to everyone in the city before she’d retreated into a solitary existence towards the end of her life. Her blunt manners and many eccentricities, which had made her notorious in polite society, had apparently won their approval – since they didn’t have to live under her leaky roof – or at least engaged their amused interest.
Viola could be blunt too, if it came to it. She had an odd desire that these people too should not think her a soft, southern fool – a fine lady who had come sweeping in on a high horse and was afraid to get her hands dirty.
‘Well, I’m sure my husband’s aunt was a most admirable person,’ she said frankly, ‘but if she had a bedsheet in the Castle without fifty holes in it, I’ve yet to come across it. Perhaps she was buried with her best ones, for spite.’
The landlady cackled at this, and admitted that the old baroness had been a rare caution, and that much of a nipcheese, she’d counted the pennies over and over and left the shillings to look after themselves. If she could have taken her fortune with her, she implied, the lady would have done so, never mind just sheets.
‘With the result,’ Viola said cordially, ‘that I am obliged to remedy the deficit of years. But we are liberally provided with rags, I promise you, and may set up in business in that line to recoup some of our losses. Mice, also, we have in abundance, coming in from the abandoned parts of the building, though what they can have been eating all this time is a puzzle to me still.’
She decided to stay overnight, being by no means done with her shopping, slept well on sheets without great lumpy darns in them, and set out again in the morning after breakfast. She found it liberating to walk alone and unregarded along the narrow, medieval streets in the wintry sunshine, looking idly in shop windows at the wares displayed there, catching a glimpse of the great Minster every now and then when it appeared, framed by lesser but still ancient buildings over which it towered. Everyone was busy, or at any rate wrapped up in their own affairs, and nobody paid her any mind; she did not expect that they should, since she had no acquaintance in the city, and in truth wished for none. It was pleasant to be anonymous and unattended and to let her thoughts ramble where they would: the boys, who seemed to be happy in Yorkshire; Richard, who in many ways remained an enigma to her; their new life together, the possibility…
So she was surprised, and not entirely pleased, to hear herself addressed, hesitantly and by name, by a complete stranger. ‘Your grace – I beg your pardon, Lady Ventris. Forgive me for approaching you like this. It is urgent that I have speech with you, even though we have not been introduced.’
Viola turned to see a woman standing at a little distance from her in the shadow of an overhanging upper storey, regarding her with anxious interest. She was perhaps fifty or a few years more – her own mother’s age – and respectably though not fashionably dressed in good fabrics of sober, dark colours that looked like half-mourning. Her tones had been genteel, and she was a handsome woman, her dark hair sprinkled with grey, her face a little worn, as if by a life that had not been entirely untroubled by misfortune. It was impossible to imagine what in the world she might want.
The woman saw that Viola’s face was not welcoming, and added hastily, ‘I have been pondering whether I should write to you, since I had heard of your marriage and knew that you are in residence at Ventris Castle, but I could not see how to begin, it is so excessively delicate a matter. I am not importuning you, ma’am – I promise I am not. I require nothing from you but half an hour’s attention. There is something I must tell you, something important that you need to know, for your benefit rather than mine.’
Viola feared she might be beginning to see some light. ‘Is it about my husband?’ she asked with a fair assumption of casualness, inwardly cringing. ‘Because if it is, there is nothing you can tell me that?—’
‘It’s not about your current husband,’ the woman interrupted flatly. ‘I know nothing of His Lordship beyond his name and title, though I suppose I may have met him briefly when he was a babe in arms and I a young bride, and I assure you that I have not the least interest in him. It’s about your previous husband, in a way.’
‘Really?’ Viola raised her eyebrows. This was most unexpected. ‘You do know that the previous Duke of Winterflood has been dead these three years or more?’
‘I am aware. I was bound to take an interest in the matter, as you will see. My name is Lesmire, ma’am, Julia Lesmire. I have been living in York for some years with my family – my late husband and my grown children, and my little grandchildren now. But I was Julia Armstrong once, long ago, and Duchess of Winterflood, like you. I was Edward’s first wife.’
33
A few minutes later, the two women sat together in the private parlour that Viola had hired for her stay at the inn. Tea had been brought, more for appearances’ sake than anything else – as though this was a normal social call between acquaintances, when it most emphatically was not.
Madame Lesmire said earnestly, ‘I’m glad I came across you, Lady Ventris, but it was not quite by chance. Our maid’s sister is employed in this inn as an abigail, and is accustomed to talk idly of the visitors, particularly if they are ladies of quality. I heard last night that you were here, and was coming on purpose to seek you out this morning when we met. You were described to me; I could not fail to recognise you, and besides, I have seen your portrait in a print shop before now. Fashionable beauties, such as people of all ranks like to stare at – I was one myself once, long ago. How strange it seems.’
‘I can’t imagine that you have come merely to share impressions of Edward as a husband,’ Viola said drily. ‘In any case, I have absolutely no intention of doing anything of the kind, I promise you.’ She could see that the woman had some distinct aim in mind, and wished that she might get to the point without further delay. She had some faint inkling that this point, when it came, would be nothing that she’d be glad to hear. Julia did not seem to be malicious in her intent – far from it – but she was highly agitated about something. It could hardly be anything good. Were dramatic and unexpected revelations about the past ever positive, in life or in fiction?
‘No, I have not the least desire to discuss him in that manner, nor any expectation that you would wish to if I did. That would be most awkward, and in any case, my time with him was so long ago that my recollections of it are not strong, nor are they of such a nature that I wish to dwell upon them now. In brief, we found ourselves quite quickly to be ill-suited and unhappy; I ran away in 1781 with Philippe, who was my lover. He had his faults too, as I came to discover, but that is of no possible significance to you. All this would be before you were born, ma’am. Edward divorced me – but of course he did; he wanted a child, a son and heir more than anything in the world, and so remarried, to a lady named Elizabeth, whom I have heard he came to adore, as he never did me.’
‘But Elizabeth did not give him a son, or a daughter,’ Viola said quietly. ‘I did, many years later. Two, in point of fact.’
‘Did you?’
They regarded each other in silence. Julia said at last, her face serious, ‘I won’t ask you any questions; I make no accusations. I wish for no secret knowledge. God knows your life is none of my business, and though I daresay people have envied you, I am not one of them. I will merely share some facts about myself, and you can make of them what you will. Edward and I were married for five years. We were young. We did not love each other – love matches were not usual in those days, at our rank of society – but we found ways to please each other. We found themfrequently– all the more often because we had so little else to say to each other. Even when he no longer pleased me in the least, even when we began to grow apart, I knew my duty, and Edward certainly knew his. I shudder to remember how well he knew it. And yet I never was with child, not the least suspicion of it. With Philippe… I carried his daughter in my belly before I married him, in the Catholic rite, in France. We went on to have four more children, in seven or eight years. There would have been more, had I not begun to be more careful, for the sake of my health and the infants I already had. Was Elizabeth ever in the family way, do you know, in all their long years together?’
Viola shook her head, trying to keep her face impassive. But she could not lie to this woman who was being so painfully frank with her. ‘Not that I ever heard. I believe it was a great grief to her.’
‘And to Edward, I am sure.’
‘Certainly to Edward.’
Madame Lesmire went on, frowning, ‘These matters I had not thought about for years are on my mind now, because a man came to see me a week or so ago, a stranger. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to find me, he told me, after a casual remark someone recently made to him that they had seen me in the street here and thought they recognised me after many years. And though I did not invite him into my house, he more or less forced his way in, and frightened me, though I admit he offered me no overt violence. He called me Duchess in a sneering sort of way – a title I have no right to. He made insinuations, on the matters I have just revealed to you. Whoever he was – he did not give me his name – he seemed to know somehow that I had never carried Edward’s child, and nor had Elizabeth, and invited me to say that it was noteworthy, that I had proved so very fertile afterwards. With another man. And that you, by contrast, had provided Edward with his precious heir a mere year or two after your marriage, even though Edward was older then, and, he presumed, lessvigorous.’
Viola shivered at the word, and at the echo of an unpleasant personality she heard in it, and Julia nodded. ‘I liked nothing about the man, nor any of the things he said to me. His purpose was blackmail, it seemed to me, though he never clearly stated it. His insinuation was that Philippe and I were never truly married, or he would say we weren’t, that my past is a scandalous secret, and that my children, who have good positions here in York as solid tradespeople, and are all of them respectably wed, are nothing more than bastards, and their mother a common… I’m sure you can imagine the words he used. If all this came out, I fear their business would be ruined, or at least badly damaged, and their lives too. They have already had trouble enough to rebuild everything after my husband let things slide before his death.’
‘I am very sorry that this trouble has come to your door when you did nothing to invite it,’ Viola said softly. ‘What exactly did he want from you?’
