In Mayfair, 1814, She Was Humiliated in a Dress Shop When They Mocked Her for Counting Twelve Shillings and Four Pence—Until a Duke Walked In, Chose Her, and Revealed He Knew the Truth About Her Disgraced Father

PART 8

They were married in the last week of October, at St George’s in Hanover Square, and Lydia refused to allow a wedding that had been designed by anybody except herself.

This caused a certain amount of friction with three dowagers, two of Nathaniel’s aunts, and the Countess of Leven, who had offered her house, her cook, and her opinion. Lydia declined the house and kept the cook, and chose the flowers herself, and did not have a single ostrich feather anywhere.

Her mother was carried to the church in a chair and stood — was upright, on her own two feet, holding her daughter’s arm — for the first time since the previous winter. The physician Nathaniel had sent had been to the cottage eleven times. He had said, the second week, that the lady’s principal ailment had been two years of grief and damp, and that he could treat one of them.

There was a modest crowd outside the church. Not the enormous one that would have come for a society wedding, and not the small one that comes for a scandal, but the middle sort — Mayfair, mostly, arriving to be seen attending the wedding of the Season’s most-discussed couple, and reasonably sure by then that they had always expected it.

Viscount Castlereagh sat three rows from the front in a plain black coat.

Mr Arthur Penhallagan’s name was read out in the parish register as the father of the bride, with his rank and his service written after it, which was the first time in two years that either had been written down anywhere publicly. Lydia had asked for that specifically, in writing, in a letter she had sent herself. She had asked that it not be a speech. She did not want anybody explaining her father to a congregation. She wanted it written in a book that would still be there in a hundred years, so that anyone who went looking for it would find out what he had actually been.

Nathaniel stood at the altar in grey, because she had told him black was for funerals and he had told her that she was very managing, and had then ordered the grey anyway, and had told the tailor that the bride had chosen the cloth, which was not true, and which he said with a completely straight face.

He watched her come down the aisle.

She did not wear the midnight blue silk. That gown had been for a ballroom, and it had done exactly what it was built to do, and Lydia had had it wrapped in tissue and put away in the Ashborne vault with a note in her own hand for whoever opened that case in fifty years.

She wore cream. Nothing particularly extraordinary. A little embroidery at the hem, done by her mother, badly, over four evenings.

Nathaniel went very still when he saw it, which was the closest thing to visible emotion the ton had ever managed to observe in him, and three of the four hundred guests wrote it down.

When the vicar asked whether he would take this woman, he said I will in exactly the same voice he used in the House of Lords when he was about to win an argument, and half the congregation recognised it and half of them found it unexpectedly moving.

When the vicar asked Lydia, she looked at him for a long second before she answered.

She was thinking — later, she admitted it — about a dress shop on Bruton Street, and twelve shillings and four pence rolling across a mahogany floor, and a man crouching down in front of a kneeling woman in a room full of people who thought she was filth.

She said I will.

Mayfair, the following June.

The Ashborne town house in Grosvenor Square had been shut up for two years when Nathaniel got it, because his father had died in it and the son had not wanted to live anywhere he could hear his own footsteps.

It was open now, and it had been open every Wednesday since February. Lydia had insisted on it. She had discovered, over that first winter, that she had a talent for the specific kinds of work that a duchess is actually for — the pensions and the parish schools and the widows of men whose names nobody remembered, and the quiet redistribution of a very large amount of money in directions that had nothing to do with fashion.

She also had a talent for Parliament, which she exercised by reading the dispatches aloud to her husband in the evenings with her feet on the fender, and telling him exactly where she thought he was wrong, which he found so useful that he had twice changed his vote on a bill and once lost an argument to her in front of his own secretary.

They had gone back to Bruton Street once, in March, on their way somewhere else. He had not told her he was doing it. The carriage simply turned the corner and stopped.

Madame Vivien’s had become a milliner’s.

“Do you want to go in?” Nathaniel had asked.

“No.” Lydia had looked at the window for a while — the same window she had stood at with twelve shillings and four pence in her reticule and no expectation of surviving the afternoon. “I want to stand here for a minute and then go and have lunch.”

Neither of them had ever mentioned Arabella Wentworth’s name aloud again after the ballroom. There was nothing left to say about it and no pleasure in saying it. The world had handled the matter in its own way, which is to say slowly and completely.

Harriet Finch married a curate in Devon two years later and, by all accounts, became unexpectedly kind.

Lady Arabella Wentworth did not marry. She was not received in London, and after a year or two she was not received in the country either, and in the end she went abroad with her mother’s money and was spoken of, in the drawing rooms that had once been hers, in the past tense.

Lydia heard about it once, from a woman at a ball, who told her with great relish and clearly expected some satisfaction.

She did not find any, which surprised her.

On a Thursday evening in June, in the long gallery at Grosvenor Square, Lydia stood at the window with the last of the light going down over the square and the room behind her full of candles, and heard her husband come down the passage.

He stopped beside her, at her shoulder, and looked out at the same nothing she was looking at.

“You are thinking about the shop,” he said.

“I am thinking about the coins.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.” She turned her hand over against the windowsill, palm up, and he took it without being asked, the way he had taken it in a shop full of people. “Twelve shillings and four pence. Rolling across the floor. And you crouched down in the middle of the room and picked one of them up.”

“It was a sixpence.”

“It was filthy.”

“It was yours.” He said it lightly. “I have it still. It is in the top drawer of my study with your father’s file, and if you tell anybody I shall deny it.”

Lydia laughed, and turned her face up to his, and the last of the evening light caught the diamonds at her throat — a tiara brought up from a vault by a footman who had not been allowed in the room, and a necklace heavy enough to ransom a minor king, and a woman who had been given both for one reason only, which was that her father had died keeping a promise nobody was allowed to know about.

“Say it anyway,” she said.

“Say what?”

“The thing you said in the shop.”

He put one hand flat against the small of her back and drew her in, and he crouched slightly so that they were on the same level, which he had done every single time since the first one, and which he would still be doing forty years later.

“I believe you dropped this, Miss Penhallagan.”

And in the house that had stood shut and silent for two years, in the square that had spent a week believing a lie about her, the last of the light went down through the window and lay in a long gold bar across the floor where the coins had once rolled, and neither of them moved for a while.

THE END.