Page 12 of A Tale of Two Dukes
It was easy enough to arrange a marriage, it seemed, when both parties were fully of age and the gentleman, even if he could not afford to restore a large, neglected estate in the north of England, could afford an expensive special licence.
Viola was not privy to Lord Ventris’s negotiations with the Archbishop of Canterbury (or, more realistically, some representative of his), but if either of those clergymen entertained any qualms, they overcame them, and the licence was granted without difficulty.
Ventris’s dubious reputation was apparently not grounds enough for refusal, perhaps because he was a peer now too, a member of the House of Lords, and therefore a person of influence and consequence.
Viola knew she had Sabrina’s support in her equivocal undertaking; she now had the more difficult task of speaking to her mother.
She didn’t need her approval, but in common courtesy, she must tell her, and she couldn’t put it off any longer.
This would result, she knew, in something uncomfortably close to an interrogation.
If a career had been open to her and matchmaker was not considered a profession, her mama could have made a success at the head of Bonaparte’s secret police.
Mrs Constantine, who had been a widow for some years now, lived in a small rented house in Bloomsbury with her three younger daughters, their family estate having gone to a cousin.
She had a modest jointure, which would not by itself have been enough to support life in London nor the cost of the younger girls’ come-outs; Sabrina, Viola and their next sister Allegra split the bulk of the family’s expenses between them, and so they went on very well.
Nobody could doubt that soon enough, another Miss Constantine would be respectably betrothed, despite their lack of fortune, humble birth and unfashionable residence.
The Duchess found her mother alone when she called in Great Russell Street a couple of days after her encounter with Ventris.
She hadn’t seen him since, but he’d been keeping her updated with his progress by note, and they had discussed their plans by this medium, which was perhaps easier than face to face, given what had happened last time they’d met.
It seemed the marriage was really happening.
Tomorrow morning, early, they would be visiting their lawyers together.
‘Mother,’ she said abruptly, ‘I’m getting married.’
Mrs Constantine had never been one for the social niceties or for any form of pretence.
Though she had by the sheer force of her personality found good husbands for two of her daughters and made a most spectacular match for Viola, she hadn’t done it through toadying manners or bowing and scraping to her social superiors.
Perhaps she’d simply frightened the gentlemen into offering, or mesmerised them till they were utterly in her power.
‘Sabrina informed me that you had had a proposal,’ Leontina said calmly.
‘And of course, I have heard the gossip about Brummell, which I was not foolish enough to believe.’ She had set down her needlework upon her daughter’s entrance and sat looking at her with sharp, dark eyes.
The room was a little shabby, as London lodgings often were, but no one was likely to notice that when she was present, and she did not give a fig about such things herself.
‘I should have realised that you would be vulnerable now that Emily Naismith has left you and you are all alone to brood. Why are you doing this, Viola? Please do not tell me that you are in love with him, whoever he is.’
‘I would not dream of telling you that, Mama,’ she said, feeling herself flushing as though she were eighteen again.
‘That is an obvious absurdity. It is Lord Ventris – Edward’s cousin, who was Mr Richard Armstrong.
He has recently inherited an estate and title, but by some quirk of his aunt’s will, he cannot gain the money to support it unless he marries and has a child within eighteen months. ’
‘I see why he offers for you; it is eminently sensible of him, so clearly he has a brain in his head. But I do not see why you accept him. You are as secure in life as any woman can ever hope to be, and you have your freedom besides.’
‘The boys need a father, and he is the only man I can trust to care for them as Edward did. Also, I… I’m tired of being alone now they’re growing up.
It’s nothing to do with Emily making a life for herself, as she is quite entitled to do.
I’m sure she wants a baby before it is too late, and I’d like another child myself.
’ Leontina was intimidating even to her own daughters; Viola never felt less like a grown woman with children and responsibilities of her own than when she was in her mother’s astringent presence, struggling to explain herself.
Mrs Constantine considered her dispassionately.
‘Such folly. I speak of you, not Emily, of course; she has done well. I suppose it is of no use telling you to take up a hobby to fill your time. Watercolour drawing, perhaps, or philanthropy. Horticulture. Bee-keeping. No? I understand this man has a very poor reputation indeed, even if one discounts half the gossip, but I see that you are prepared to overlook it. You’ve always been impulsive; it is a fault. Have you told the boys yet?’
‘Not yet. I mean to go and see them tomorrow and tell them in person, after we have met with the lawyers and agreed on the drawing-up of the papers. And then I’ll go home to Winterflood.
I hope you’ll come, Mama, and bring the girls.
Sabrina and Laurence are coming. We’re to marry there; his estate is too far for everyone to travel, and besides needs extensive renovations to make it more habitable.
He wrote to tell me that his aunt, despite her wealth, was allowing the castle to fall down around her ears in recent years.
She was too old and stubborn to manage it as she should.
’ Before the end of this rather breathless and unnecessarily long speech, Viola was disagreeably aware of her own voice echoing fatuously in her ears. She ceased abruptly.
‘As long as he does all this work with his own money and not yours. But do you think Winterflood is a good idea? Might it not be simpler to be married in London?’
‘Ventris lives in lodgings in London, Mama. Wherever we choose to marry, we will be obliged afterwards to go and live either at Winterflood or Armstrong House, at least for a while. And I would prefer to be in the country. I mean to find a tutor and take the boys out of school after Christmas, perhaps sooner, and it will be better for them to be at home rather than in the dirt and smoke of London. There will be memories of Edward at both houses, if that’s what concerns you.
There is no difference.’ Why was she talking so much?
Mrs Constantine said nothing more on the subject, perhaps seeing with her usual ruthless practicality that it was pointless to argue any further. ‘Do you think they will mind?’
Viola shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t know. They adored Edward, and they’ve never met Ventris. It will be strange for them, to have someone new standing in the relation of a father. But I think it will be good for them in the long run, once they have accustomed themselves. Don’t you?’
Her mother shrugged, reluctant to commit herself. ‘It will be strange for you, too, and more than that, if he tries to exert fatherly authority over them when you have been their sole parent these past few years.’
There was no denying the truth of this. ‘I expect we shall fight over that, and other things. I’m sure we shall, in fact.
He is a provoking sort of a person, not calm like Edward or Father or Laurence.
And you know I have a hot temper much like yours, so I do not suppose it will be a tranquil existence.
I am prepared for that. I’m not suffering under any illusions that it will always be easy. ’
‘You’re talking about passion.’
God, her mother was sharp. ‘I don’t know how you can tell that, but yes, I am.
It seems we have that connection. But it’s not why I’m marrying him.
’ She would not even allow herself to think further on that, not in her mother’s presence.
The woman was extraordinarily quick, and terrifyingly frank, and quite capable of plucking her most private thoughts from the air.
‘Then I must wish you happy. Perhaps there is already a little Ventris on the way.’
‘Mother! There is not.’
‘That’s a pity. You realise of course that if you do not give him a child in time, you will be saddled with him and his tumbledown castle for life, all for the sake of getting the boys a father and warming your own bed. Would it not be much easier to take a lover?’
Mrs Constantine’s motherly advice was not always of a conventional nature, so Viola was not as taken aback as she might have been. ‘I could do that, of course, but then my famous fertility would be a cause of anxiety rather than an advantage, would it not?’
Her mother agreed that it would, unless of course her lover was a woman, and after that, there seemed little more to be said.
Few people would have believed that her mama’s advice upon hearing she was to marry again had been that she should instead find a woman to take to her bed and keep her satisfied and happy; only members of the Constantine family would not have been surprised in the least.