Page 55 of A Most Improper Duchess
He shrugged. ‘It’s never been done before. Or if it has, no one has been found out. It could be viewed as treason.’
‘He could be tried? And imprisoned? Or even…’ She couldn’t even say the word. Arley faking his death had been torturous enough. The prospect of him actually being lost would break her. ‘We shouldn’t have done this. Perhaps...’
‘It’s too late now,’ Phineas snapped. ‘The only thing for it is to make the best of it.’
During her years in the capital, Paris had been altered so thoroughly that some days she struggled to remember how it had looked to her seventeen-year-old self, so it was with surprise that Vivianne found the village of her childhood—the fence lines, the stone cottages, the dress of the women—almost unchanged. It seemed incongruous that so much of the world had been in flux, yet the open paddocks that had been her first dance stage were the same as when she had been a barefoot child in love with the feeling of taking a musically inspired step.
Vivianne took a shaking breath and rapped on the rough wooden door.
She had skin a little more weathered than in her memory, a little darker from working in the sun, and a few more heavy wrinkles lined her eyes, but the woman who answered the door was unmistakably her mother.
Vivianne itched to rush into her arms, but her mother took a step back. She scanned her, from her toes to her head, her eyes lingering on her stomach. Vivianne raised a protective hand and rested it on the slight bump.
‘You are with child?’
Vivianne could only nod.
‘Your husband?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘I told you this would happen.’
All her emotions swirled, and through her tears, her relief, her fear and her joy, Vivianne scratched out, ‘Yes,Maman, you were right. Shall I go now?’
‘Is that Vivianne?’ her father called from deep in the house, before he emerged from the shadows. He shovedMamanaside and grasped Vivianne by the waist, before swirling her in a tight circle. ‘Louisa, it is Vivianne! She has come home!’
‘Mamandoes not want me back,’ Vivianne howled. She cried so often with the baby.
‘Still with the melodrama, always with the melodrama. I did not say I would not have you back,’Mamansniped. ‘I only said that I was right.’ And with a strangled cry, her mother wrapped her arms around her and Papa both. ‘Oh, my child. How I have missed you.’
The new routine of work, where her toughened hands were an asset, and not a mark against her, fell into an easy pattern. She helped with the laundry, walked the cows through the paddock, and when no one was looking, she stretched onto her toes and spun a pirouette. The movement made her nauseous, but she did it anyway. She watched the road for Arley, never seeing him, but trusting he would come. In the evenings, she sat by the fire and withMaman, darned socks.
‘You cannot stay unmarried,’ her mother said. ‘It is not proper.’
‘I have no wish to wed just because I am with child,’ Vivianne replied.
‘There is a man in town. Tall. He has started a school.’Mamansnipped at a loose thread.
‘I am not marrying any man—’
‘English.’ Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘Not very useful. He is no good in the fields and cannot cook for himself. His father does everything for him. Smart at some things, stupid with others. If you roll with him, then tell him the baby is his, he will believe you.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, you can marry him. He will give your baby a name.’
‘Non… did you say he is English?’
‘I said you cannot be fussy.’
It couldn’t be anyone else, but the following day, as Vivianne sat in the kitchen, scuffing the dirt floor beneath her sabots as she waited for the knock at the door, her heart flipped between rapidity and cessation. They’d been apart more than they’d been together, the world had spun out from beneath them with more speed than she’d had stamina for. Impulsiveness had driven so much of her life and ended so badly.
What if this was the same?
What if it wasn’t him?
She was so lost in her worries, she did not register the tap at the door.
