SHE CAUGHT THE FALLING CHILD FROM THE COLLAPSING BALCONY—UNAWARE THE DUKE SAW EVERYTHING

Chapter 3

She cried for perhaps three minutes. Then she stopped. She washed her hand in the basin. The water stung. She changed her stockings, which were soaked through. She pinned her hair back into its plain knot. She went down to the drawing room because it was nearly eleven o’clock, and at eleven o’clock her aunt would expect her to sit with the yellow embroidery hoop that no one in the house cared about.

She told no one what had happened.

Mrs. Puddik told the gardener’s sister to say nothing. The gardener’s sister, still weeping with gratitude, agreed. The steward declared that the balcony had fallen in the night from the weight of the rain. The stones were carted away. By afternoon, the wall where the balcony had stood looked blank and bare, as if it had never existed.

Petra, coming down to dinner, said, “Oh, that ugly thing is gone at last. Good.”

Viven bent over her embroidery hoop and pushed the needle through the cloth and did not lift her eyes. But she thought, with a strange, steady feeling in her chest, that she had done a thing that day that mattered. It did not matter that no one knew. It mattered because she knew.

Three days passed. The rain came and went. The lanes turned to mud and then to hard-packed earth again. The fields went from brown to a deep, wet green. On the fourth day, Petra burst into the small parlor where Viven sat mending a torn hem. Her face was pink with excitement.

“He is coming,” Petra said. “Mother had a note. The Duke of Sarrow is coming to dine on Thursday. She thinks he means to declare himself at last.”

Viven pushed the needle through the fabric. “That is good news.”

“You will wear the brown gown,” Petra said. “The one with the plain sleeves. Mother does not want you in anything that draws the eye.”

“Of course,” Viven said.

Petra swept out in a cloud of rose water and rustling silk. Viven finished the hem. She thought about the Duke and felt nothing in particular. She had made her peace long ago with what she could and could not have. He was to be Petra’s. Petra was pretty and rich. Viven was neither. This was how the world was arranged. She was not the sort of woman who wasted her strength trying to bend a thing that would not bend.

She had been a shadow at the edge of every room for nine years. She knew her place.

She had thought she knew it.

Thursday arrived with a cold, clear sky. The house was scrubbed and polished until every surface gleamed. There were three kinds of soup, a fish in cream sauce, a pheasant stuffed with herbs, and a syllabub of thin cream and sherry. Viven wore the brown gown with the plain sleeves. Her hair was pinned in a tight knot at the back of her head. She sat where she was told to sit — three places down from the Duke, between Petra’s dull cousin from Bath and the vicar’s wife, who spoke only of her nerves.

She kept her eyes on her plate. She spoke when spoken to. She was, as she had been for nine years, a shadow at the edge of the room.

The Duke sat at her aunt’s right hand. He was tall and dark and quiet. He did not smile once through the first course. Viven, who did not mean to look at him, looked once because it was hard not to. His face was strong and still. There was a small scar at the corner of his jaw. His hands, when he lifted his glass, were steady in a way that told her he had been steady for a long time about many things.

He did not look at her. She did not expect him to.

After the second course, her aunt said in a voice that was meant to sound casual, “Your Grace, our Petra plays the pianoforte quite finely. Perhaps after dinner she might be persuaded.”

“That would be pleasant,” the Duke said. His voice was low and even. It did not lift or fall much.

Petra colored prettily. Viven kept her eyes on her plate.

“And Miss Ashkam,” the Duke said.

The room went still.

Viven did not lift her head. There was no Miss Ashkam at the table who was likely to be addressed by a duke. It took her a full second to remember that she was Miss Ashkam. She lifted her head.

Every face at the table had turned toward her. Every face was surprised. Her aunt’s mouth hung open in a small, round shape she had never seen before.

“Yes, Your Grace?” Viven said. Her voice was steady. She had learned long ago how to make it steady when she needed to.

“I understand you were of some assistance in the yard here on Tuesday last,” the Duke said.

The room went silent. Not the ordinary silence of a conversation pausing — a deeper silence, the kind that felt like all the air had been sucked out of the space. The servant behind the sideboard stopped moving. The great clock in the hall ticked suddenly loud. The vicar’s wife, who had been about to speak of her nerves, closed her mouth.

Her aunt’s face changed color — first pink, then white.

Viven looked at the Duke. She did not know how he knew.

“I did what anyone would have done, Your Grace,” she said.

“That is not so,” the Duke said. He said it without heat, without raising his voice, as one states a plain fact. It was the plainness that made the room stay silent.

Her aunt drew in a breath as if to speak, and did not. Petra’s face was going through a slow set of small changes, none of them pleasant.

“May I ask Your Grace — ” her aunt began, her voice strained, ” — what event you are referring to?”

The Duke did not take his eyes from Viven. “The old balcony on the west wing fell on Tuesday morning. Miss Ashkam caught a falling child from the collapsing balcony. I saw it from the lane. I was unaware, I believe, that I saw everything.”

The words landed like stones in still water. Viven could not breathe. She had thought no one had seen. She had lived four days believing no one had seen.

“Well,” said her aunt at last, in a voice that was not bright at all, “how very brave of you, Viven. You did not say.”

“I did not think it was of consequence,” Viven said quietly.

“It was of consequence,” the Duke said. He lifted his glass, did not drink, and set it down again. He turned to her aunt. “The child is well, I trust?”

“Quite well, Your Grace.”

“Good.”

He took up his knife and cut a piece of pheasant. The room did not recover. The silence held like a held breath for a long moment longer, until the vicar’s wife said something about the weather, and everyone was grateful. The talk started up again in the wrong places, in the wrong keys.

Viven looked down at her plate and could not eat. She could feel the Duke’s gaze on her like a hand reaching across the table, even though he was not looking at her anymore.