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Chapter Nineteen

Three days after meeting the duke, Viv sat at her desk at dawn, a letter from her aunt Louisa before her. Putting aside the letter and pulling her wrapper close against the morning chill, she watched pink wisps of cloud flee to the east across a pale golden sky.

Aunt Louisa had warm praise for Mr. Larkin and strongly advised Viv to move forward with her plans for marriage, pointing out that Lady Melforth would soon be in need of a professional nurse rather than a companion, and that Viv would need an establishment of her own if she did not wish to abandon her dreams and return to her mother’s crowded household. The advice made perfect sense, and if Viv were truly betrothed to Mr. Edward Larkin, the support of her kind and resourceful aunt would be invaluable. As the matter stood, Viv’s stomach knotted at the thought of seeing Aunt Louisa later in the morning when they were to take Lady Melforth for the doctor’s recommended ride in Aunt Louisa’s landau.

The falseness of Viv’s position now struck her as an evil. She had passed from one small deception to an ever-growing string of them. What began with putting pebbles in her purse to deceive a potential pickpocket had led to firing a pistol at Mr. Larkin and becoming betrothed to him. In the beginning the pretense had been necessary to preserve her position as a companion and a writing partner for Lady Melforth. Now the book was finished and at the publisher, and with her palsy, Lady Melforth needed Viv more than ever, yet each day Viv piled lie upon lie, alienating Newberry, and involving her aunt and uncle in her deception. It was time to tell everyone that her betrothal was at an end, but she hadn’t ended it. She had planned to end it, but when the opportunity arose, she had not acted. She didn’t understand herself. Did she love him? Surely, she could not love a man she did not truly know. But it was impossible to deny her part in the kiss in the street. In the heat of that moment, she had known herself, unafraid and seeking, curious and alive, and she had wanted to go on kissing him, hungry for more, until the jarring piano note had brought her back to herself. Now he had simply vanished. Vanished was perhaps too strong a word, but he had stopped calling and sent no messages. She should count herself lucky.

She looked at the ring on her finger. She had grown used to the feel of it, as she had grown used to a certain energy she had in Lark’s presence, an eagerness to show him that women could handle whatever London threw at them. But she had got things wrong. He was not the man she thought he was. She did not know the real Edward Larkin or Lark. That man, whoever he truly was, had abandoned their betrothal as if he had tired of a game, and returned to his other life, the one he’d had before they met, a life that included the Duke and Duchess of Wenlocke.

When she looked back on their ruse, she saw how very careful he had been in presenting himself. He never claimed to be a man of rank or fortune. Rather, he allowed her to think that his circumstances were similar to hers. He let her believe he was a gentleman on the edge of fashionable society, perhaps a younger son, obliged to take a paid position, constrained to marry advantageously. The story he told of his dead parents and his maiden aunt was so conveniently vague that she could not place him in any rank of society.

Then their visit to the duke had unsettled what little she thought she knew. When she examined, moment by moment and point by point, the exchange between the duke and Lark, she could only conclude that in the duke’s study as in Lady Melforth’s drawing room on that first day, her pretend fiancé had slipped into a role.

He let the duke know what role he played by his careful announcement to the duke’s butler, by the way he introduced Viv, and then by the way he set her up to tell the duke that she regarded him as a lax employer. If she knew anything true about her betrothed, it was that he was good at pretending. That first day when he’d made his sham proposal, she had thought him an actor. Now she considered the possibility again.

At that point, her tumultuous thoughts took another turn when she considered the duchess, who greeted Lark with genuine delight and relief, as if she had been waiting for him to return from a great journey. Her warm welcome did not fit what Viv knew about the condescension with which exalted persons like dukes treated ordinary people in their employ. Rather, it seemed to Viv as if her grace’s taking Lark’s hands in hers had broken some resistance in him. He and the duke stood measuring each other, two strong men, slightly at odds, squaring off, neither willing to yield. By welcoming Lark, the duchess had changed the mood, made them both bend a little.

Viv shivered in the thin wrapper. Her ruminations on the mystery of her betrothed always led so far before her thoughts ran into a wall of unknowns like the angry bear of a man in the park, the effect on her betrothed of the Penitent Women’s Hospital, and the puzzle of what he wanted from the duke.

Outside her window, the clouds were breaking up. She folded her aunt’s letter and tucked it away. She was foolish beyond permission to moon over a man she meant to break off with, and she needed to find a way to tell her aunt the truth.

*

At the unfashionable hour of eleven, Lady Louisa’s well-sprung landau, pulled by a pair of magnificent black horses, wound through Hyde Park. To see the two old friends side by side on the seat of the landau made Viv realize how frail Lady Melforth had become. She was far from the commanding figure Viv had met in Bath the previous September. Under the influence of a mild April sun, a light breeze, and cheerful conversation, Lady Melforth unbent so much as to smile from time to time. Her smile had changed from a broad, confident parting of the lips and turning up of the corners, to something more like a bared-teeth grimace. Only a softening of her eyes made the expression recognizable as a smile. At least the trembling hand relaxed as the ride progressed.

If Lady Louisa noted the shocking change in her friend, she gave no sign of it, but kept the conversation to happier times. “Aurora was always our leader,” Lady Louisa confided to Viv. “We thought her quite daring. One night, she led us out of a very dull ball, where gentlemen were scarce, through a garden and a mews to the site of a famous elopement, the very window from which the heiress, Miss Tudbury, descended to run off with her dashing lieutenant of the Guards.”

“What became of you all? Did you resolve to elope? Did you return quietly to the ball?” Viv asked, doing her part to keep the conversation light.

Lady Louisa smiled. “I’m sure I had Miss Tudbury in mind when I told my papa, your grandfather, Viv, that I would marry my Oswald, a mere baronet! By the time my brother Richard married your mother, Papa was quite used to his children going their own way in matters of love.”

“You would find me a sad case, now,” said Lady Melforth, “if I tried to lead you anywhere.”

“Not at all,” said Lady Louisa staunchly. “You may be at a low ebb momentarily, Aurora, but I know your spirit. You will rally. You must make use of my landau as often as you like when Oswald and I return to Atwood.”

“Are you leaving London, Aunt?” Viv asked. So far there had been no opportunity for a private moment to confess the truth.

“Tomorrow. But we will return to celebrate when your book comes out.”

Lady Melforth, who seemed not to hear them, looked down, plucking at her gown, and made no answer. Viv’s spirits sank, but she reminded herself that the actual proofs must cheer her ladyship. Viv was counting on it.

Lady Louisa turned to Viv with a determined look. “And, now dear girl, you must tell me your wedding plans. Oswald and I quite liked your Mr. Larkin.”

Viv offered her aunt a faint smile. Lady Melforth was perhaps not fully attending, but Viv did not want the truth of her deception to add to her ladyship’s distress. They had reached the park’s southern gate and turned toward Mayfair, and Viv thought of a perfect way to shift the conversation, the Women’s Penitent Hospital.

“Ma’am,” she said to Lady Melforth. “Can you endure a few more minutes of shaking?”

“If you really think it does some good.”

“That’s the spirit, Aurora,” said Lady Louisa.

Viv turned to her aunt. “Aunt, may we take a turn along Grosvenor Place? I want to ask you both, from your knowledge of London about an institution there that I came upon in our Green Park walk.”

“You’ve made me curious, dear girl,” said Lady Louisa. She spoke with her coachman, who turned the horses at the appropriate corner.

“Here,” cried Viv, as they came upon the Women’s Penitent Hospital. “Do you know anything of this place?”

The coachman stopped the carriage. Viv’s companions stared first at the hospital and then at her. Except for the large signs proclaiming the nature of the building, it might have passed for a block of apartments or a tradesman’s warehouse. A pair of stone obelisks marked an opening in the iron railing separating the building from passersby. Viv was not entirely ignorant on purpose of such a place, but she could see nothing in its plain brick and stone exterior to overset her pretend fiancé.