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

Chapter 5

Her aunt did not come to breakfast. Petra came down with red-rimmed eyes and did not speak to Viven. The steward, a thin, sour man named Mr. Bracewell, appeared in the doorway of the small parlor at ten o’clock.

“Lady Marchmir wishes to see you in the yellow room,” he said.

Viven set aside her book and went.

The yellow room was where her aunt received tenants and tradesmen. It was a room designed to remind whoever entered it that they were being received, not welcomed. Lady Marchmir sat at the small writing desk with her back very straight, her hands folded on the polished wood. She did not rise. She did not offer Viven a seat.

“You will leave this house tomorrow,” Lady Marchmir said. Her voice was flat, emptied of all emotion. “You will go to your cousin Hesper in Northumberland. I have written to her. She will take you in. You will not correspond with anyone in this house. You will not, in particular, correspond with any person of rank in this county. Do you understand me?”

Viven understood. She had understood from the moment the front door had closed on the Duke last night.

“Yes, Aunt.”

“You have been ungrateful, Viven. Nine years I have kept you. Nine years I have fed and clothed and sheltered you. And in one evening, you have stepped where you were not asked to step. You have shamed my daughter in her own house.”

“I did not mean to shame Petra.”

“Do not use her name. You have not the right.”

Her aunt’s mouth tightened. She leaned forward slightly, and her voice dropped to something low and venomous.

“You were a stain on a linen my mother left me,” she said. “And I have washed you as best I could. And now I find you cannot be washed out. So I will burn the linen and be rid of you both.”

Viven did not flinch. She stood very still in the plain gray gown she had put on that morning, and she let the words land. They landed like stones in deep water, sinking to a place she would carry forever.

Her aunt watched her face for the flinch that did not come. Something in her expression grew colder. A woman who does not flinch when struck is a woman who cannot be struck again in the same way.

“You may go,” Lady Marchmir said.

“Yes, Aunt.”

Viven curtsied. She left the yellow room. She walked up the stairs to her small room, and she closed the door. She stood for a long moment with her back against it, pressing her hands flat against the wood, breathing in and out until the shaking stopped.

She did not weep. There was no time for weeping.

She was to leave the next day. She had a small trunk. She had two gowns and three books and a locket that had been her mother’s. She had a little money saved from the small allowance her aunt gave her, folded in a handkerchief at the bottom of the trunk. She began quietly and neatly to pack.

She did not think about the Duke. She did not let herself think about the Duke. He had said “I give you my word.” But he was in his own great house now, and Northumberland was very far, and words spoken in candlelight had a way of thinning in the morning sun.

Late in the afternoon, a note came to the servant’s door. Mrs. Puddik brought it up herself, her face creased with worry. It was folded small and sealed with plain black wax.

“A boy brought it from the north road, miss,” she said.

Viven opened it. The paper smelled faintly of horse and cold air. The writing was small and firm.

They will move you. Do not fear. Wherever they send you, I will find you. I have not spoken lightly.

C.T.

She read it twice. She folded it carefully. She held it in her hand a long moment, and then she slipped it inside the front of her gown, where it lay against the skin over her heart.

She did not know if the promise could be kept. She was going to Northumberland tomorrow. She would go anyway.

But she did not, in her narrow room, feel entirely alone.

That was a thing she had not expected.