Hollybrook is two days from Ashcombe Park if one travels at the pace a woman in her twelfth week may travel. We stop at Basingstoke for the night and at Guildford for a fresh team. I sleep four hours at each. The rest I spend at the desk in the parlour of the Angel writing the next move.
Theodore meets the carriage in the gravel sweep at Hollybrook with a cup of beef tea in one hand and a face that has already, somehow, been told everything.
"Tell me you have not dropped a hoof off the Carrow chaise."
"Only nearly."
"And the gallery?"
"Nearly went up in flames."
He hands me the beef tea and an arm to climb the step. Theodore is forty-one, lean, has the slight lurch in the right hip that came home with him from Belgium. He was a Coldstream captain until Waterloo. He sold his commission the following spring. He keeps my mother's books and my mother's bodyguards and the names of three Bow Street officers who will, for a price, lose a particular page of report.
"And the cousin?"
"In need of a sling."
"The cousin's coachman?"
"Sworn before three Carrows and a magistrate."
"Splendid girl."
In the morning room my mother is in her Bath chair by the window with the political pamphlets at her elbow. Lady Margaret Hollybrook is forty-six. Her hair was once the dark Ashcombe-Vance red; it has gone the colour of a fox's pelt at dusk. Her face has the lines of a woman who has watched the world from a single chair for sixteen years and lost none of her sense of humour about it.
"Adrian knows the trust exists?"
"Adrian knows half a trust exists. He will know the rest by sunset tomorrow when Pell waits on Sir Henry."
"He will be looking now in the muniments room."
"Let him look."
I sit on the footstool beside her chair. She puts a hand on my hair, lightly, the way she used to put a hand on my hair when I was eight and had been told off by my father's elderly cousins.
"Cecily, my love. If you had not, at fifteen, fallen so dreadfully in love with him, today would be easier."
I do not answer.
The loving was real. So is the using. I find that a woman's accounts may carry both columns without one cancelling the other.
People live in the world. They have to settle their books somehow.
Theodore puts a folded paper into my lap. It is the engagement letter for the discreet midwife at Guildford who will conduct a second, blind, post-natal paternity examination — fresh blood from the cord, fresh blood from Adrian, both taken without the donors knowing the other has been asked. Antiquated method. Inadmissible in any court. Useful for the family record. The Carrows will not be permitted, in seven years, to argue the twins were not Adrian's; my own counsel will hold the engagement letter.
"You truly mean to set this up before the lying-in?"
"He said, at the table, the children might be any man's. I will have the answer locked in a drawer before he changes his mind."
My mother sighs.
"He will read your trust deed tonight and write you a letter tomorrow."
"He will not write."
"Your lord is a writing man, Cecily."
"My lord wrote me, in the spring of '16, that I did not warrant a place at his table. He has not written me since."
My mother does not press. She is not in the business of pressing.
A footman comes in with a salver. There is on the salver a sealed paper from town. It is not from Adrian. It is from no acquaintance of mine. The hand on the direction is unfamiliar.
I break the seal.
Inside, a single folded enclosure — a printed sheet, freshly inked. It is a Holywell Street pamphlet, the cheap kind, three pence on the corner of Drury Lane. The headline is a woodcut of a heavily-pregnant woman of fashion bowed before a peer; the peer has turned his face away. The caption reads:
THE MARBLE EARL'S HIDDEN MISS. — His Lordship of A——'s Surrey companion now far gone with infant of unproved father. Marriage line said to be a forgery. Lying-in expected at H——.
There is no signature on the note.
Half a minute later — it cannot be longer — Theodore comes in with the Town & Country and the Morning Post. Three more pamphlets. Two squibs. A satirical print already cut for sale.
The story is everywhere.
I look up.
Adrian's first letter from town is brought to Hollybrook at six the following morning by a rider who has changed horses three times. The seal is unbroken when Theodore brings it to me at breakfast.
I push it back across the cloth.
"To the fire, if you please."
A second comes at ten. A third at one. I do not break the seal of any of them.
The fourth he sends with his own outrider.
At three he sends one of his own footmen on horseback, who is shewn into the morning room and told, civilly, to wait. He waits two hours. He goes away without the answer he was sent for.
At seven I read one. Only because I want to know what tone he has settled on.
Cecily — I had no hand in the broadsheets. The names came from elsewhere. I am pursuing the printers tonight. — A.
That tone, then. I burn it.
Theodore has had his own people on Holywell Street since dawn. The pamphlets were paid for through a clerk at a coffee-house in Cornhill, and through the clerk back to a draught on the account of Julian Carrow's man of business. The squibs are Julian's. The satirical print is Julian's. The two later pamphlets, however — the wickedest two, the two that take my mother's accident in '01 and turn it into a salacious rumour about how the late Lord Edmund got the limp out of her — are not from Julian's purse at all.
They are from a private account, drawn down through the same clerk, on the same morning, in another hand.
Theodore puts the bank's note on the table beside the toast rack.
The hand is Vivien Lyle's.
I sit for a moment looking at the toast rack and at her hand on the draught. The hand is the same hand that wrote, on Adrian's paper, consult some discreet apothecary in Cheapside.
I rise. I dictate to Pell's clerk, who has come down from town overnight to be at hand, the wording of a private memorandum addressed by name and seal to every member of the Carrow trustees' board. The memorandum lists in numbered points: the dates, the bank, the clerk, the draught on Mrs. Vivien Lyle's account, the precise pamphlets it bought, and Mrs. Lyle's hand on the August letter. Three appendices: the August letter; the bank's note; the printer's statement under oath.
I have it carried by hand to each trustee in town that night.
At a quarter to ten — I am sitting up with my mother in her parlour, both of us with our cups of weak chocolate — the footman brings up a card.
Mrs. V. Lyle.
It is not the card. It is on the silver. The card is the surface event. The real event is the maid who has been sent up behind the card to say that Mrs. Lyle is in the front hall, and that Mrs. Lyle is asking to be received, and that Mrs. Lyle has not come alone. Mrs. Lyle is shouting.
I look at my mother.
She turns over the page of her pamphlet.
"Do receive her, my love. I should not like to deprive you of the opportunity."
I go down.
Vivien is in the hall in a white evening pelisse with a sable trim — the French one, the one she wore at Adrian's table in '16 — and she is plainly not sober. There is a small bright spot at each cheekbone and a tear of rage at the corner of one eye that has missed its handkerchief.
"You bitch —"
The footmen at the door stiffen. Theodore, behind me on the stair, does not move. The shouting is what I want.
I cross to the centre of the hall. I do not climb back up the step. She is too unsteady to follow me out into the gravel; she will say it here in the hall, in front of two footmen, my uncle, and the lamp.
I open my reticule and take out the small brass mechanism Theodore had made at his clockmaker's last winter. It is the size of a snuff box. Inside it is a wax cylinder of the kind used by the Royal Society's experimenters in voice-recording. It will catch a clear human voice at three yards. It runs eight minutes.
I set the mechanism on the side table, plain, where she can see it.
"Mrs. Lyle, before you continue. I am recording you. You have not been struck dumb; I should advise you to consider whether you wish to be heard."
She laughs. It is the wrong laugh. She has had three glasses of port at her own house and a half pint of brandy in the chaise.
"Record me! Record me, Miss Hollybrook, by all means. Let the world hear it. Eight years I have ordered the man's coat. Eight years I have nursed him out of every fever. Eight years —"
"Yes, Mrs. Lyle. And in the ninth, what?"
"He will dismiss me for you? He will not. He cannot. He is not so foolish."
I stand quite still.
"He is not so foolish. He is unable. He requires me. He requires me at his elbow. The household requires me. The gallery at Ashcombe requires me. The children, Miss Hollybrook —" and she steps closer, near enough that I smell the brandy and the cold gravel on her shoes — "the children can yet be made not to come."
She holds my eyes a moment too long.
"That part," she says, "I have arranged before."
I reach over and stop the wax cylinder.
"Thank you, Mrs. Lyle. That is sufficient."
She realises, at last, what is on the side table.
She lunges for it.
Theodore is between her and the mechanism in two strides. He puts the mechanism in his coat. He hands her, instead, her shawl, which has slipped down her shoulder, and he says, in the voice that frightened French sergeants at Talavera: "Madam. Out."
She is screaming, in the gravel, when the door shuts.
I go upstairs.
In the morning the cylinder is in the trustees' hands and in Adrian's. By noon a notice runs in Adrian's own gazette dismissing Mrs. Lyle from the patronage and household of Ashcombe in terms cold enough to break the glass. By three the Morning Post is calling her by name. By five the satirical print in the Burlington Arcade has had her face engraved over Marie Antoinette's, with a small dog at her feet and a label about apothecary's mixture.
The pamphlets are still calling me a gold-digger. The pamphlets will catch up.
She has fallen first.
She does not stay fallen quietly.
Three nights after her dismissal she comes back to Hollybrook. It is dark and there has been a thin cold rain since the afternoon. She has hired a chaise from the Bell at Guildford; she has paid the post-boy double; she has come without bonnet, without shawl, in the same white pelisse, now spoiled to the colour of weak tea. The sable at the cuffs has gone to ruin.
She gets out at the gate. Theodore's man stops her at the lodge. She stands at the lodge gate and shouts my name into the avenue until two more of Theodore's men come down with lanterns.
I take my candle and go down to the front step. I do not cross the gravel.
She sees me. She points.
"You stand there — you — and look as if you have done nothing! I gave him eight years of my life. I gave him his very household. You crawled in at fifteen with calf eyes and a dowry too small to buy the man's hunter, and you have bought him with — with a child!"
"Mrs. Lyle."
"What had you that I did not? You! A creature without a title, without a portion, without —"
"Without your peculiar talent for forgery, certainly."
It stops her, for a breath.
"You think this — this manoeuvre — is cleverness. It is — it is —"
"Mrs. Lyle, I think it is what it is." I come one step down. The candle does not flicker; the rain has stopped. "I plotted at his lordship in plain sight. With my own body. With my own risk. With the trust deed in my own reticule. That is what I have done. — Now you. You read his private letters. You answered them in his name. You instructed a woman three months gone with his child to seek out an apothecary you knew by reputation in the inquest reports. You paid for pamphlets that took my mother's lamed spine and made comedy of it.
"You and I have both used him, Mrs. Lyle. The difference is I used him out in the open with my own person. You used him in the dark with his own hand."
Her face has gone fixed.
"I have not —"
I take from the inner pocket of my dressing-gown a small leather wallet. I throw it at her feet on the gravel.
"There is in that wallet — copies, in Mr. Pell's hand — three drafts you drew on your bank for the printers at Holywell Street, the August letter on Ashcombe paper in your hand, and three lines of your handwriting on a note from the apothecary's clerk, who appears to be willing, for a sum, to recall your face. The originals are with my counsel and with the trustees."
She stares at the wallet at her feet.
She does not pick it up.
She drops her face into both hands.
It is at that point that the black travelling coach turns into the avenue.
It has the Carrow arms over-painted in plain black — the discreet town carriage. Adrian gets down before the step is properly set. He is bare-headed again, his cravat undone at the throat, the wet shoulders of his coat dark against the pale collar.
Vivien sees him. She lets out a noise like a dog struck across the back.
"Adrian — Adrian, you have come — I knew you would come —"
She runs at him along the gravel.
He sidesteps her.
She has been running on bad shoes in cold rain. She does not catch herself. She goes down full length onto the wet gravel, the white pelisse splitting at the seam along the shoulder, her bare wet hands palms-up on the stones.
Adrian does not bend to help her up.
He looks down at her.
"Vivien." His voice has the dryness it uses for accounts. "You have known me since you were twenty. You have known, since you were twenty, exactly which trespasses on my privacy I shall never forgive. There are three of them. You have committed all three."
Her face turns up to him from the gravel, half her hair down on one side.
"But I love —"
"I did not ask you to."
She does not move.
I look at the scene from my step. I find I am surprised — not by Adrian, but by the absence of pleasure in me. I had thought, all this last week, that the moment Adrian Carrow set Vivien Lyle down in writing would be the moment I uncorked something in myself. There is no cork. There is only the cold step under my slippers and the small inconvenient observation that I am, as Theodore would say, bored with watching her cry.
It is a waste of an evening, that is all.
I turn and go back up the steps.
I hear Adrian say to his coachman to take Mrs. Lyle home. I hear him say, also, to his outrider, to fetch the apothecary at Hollybrook's tenant village in case the lady has done herself any injury falling.
He has, the wretch, manners.
I shut the door before he reaches it.