Page 44 of A Tale of Two Dukes
Viola sent off letters to her older sisters and to Emily, reassuring them that she and the boys were well and asking about their welfare and their families, and then set about her shopping with determination.
By the time a couple of hours had passed, she had bought half the household goods in York, it seemed to her.
She directed the slightly stunned shopkeepers to send the smaller parcels back to the rooms she had hired in the city’s most notable inn; the larger items were to be delivered by carrier’s cart as soon as possible, and she would pay for them herself, out of her own resources.
All of the Castle’s inhabitants deserved more comfort than they currently knew, especially since it would soon be winter, and she was glad to be able to give it to them and not count the cost too closely.
She realised that Winterflood had never needed her, apart from impersonally, as mother to its longed-for heir – the house and the estate had run like a well-oiled machine before she’d ever set foot in the place, and still did now, whether she was present or not.
But Ventris was different, Ventris desperately needed her care, and this gave her a warm feeling, over and above the heady pleasure of spending money in a good cause.
The staff at the Golden Fleece could hardly do enough for her.
They didn’t know or care that she had once been a duchess, as indeed why should they?
What weighed with them was the Ventris name.
Several of them spoke with easy familiarity of her late predecessor, who had been well known to everyone in the city before she’d retreated into a solitary existence towards the end of her life.
Her blunt manners and many eccentricities, which had made her notorious in polite society, had apparently won their approval – since they didn’t have to live under her leaky roof – or at least engaged their amused interest.
Viola could be blunt too, if it came to it. She had an odd desire that these people too should not think her a soft, southern fool – a fine lady who had come sweeping in on a high horse and was afraid to get her hands dirty.
‘Well, I’m sure my husband’s aunt was a most admirable person,’ she said frankly, ‘but if she had a bedsheet in the Castle without fifty holes in it, I’ve yet to come across it. Perhaps she was buried with her best ones, for spite.’
The landlady cackled at this, and admitted that the old baroness had been a rare caution, and that much of a nipcheese, she’d counted the pennies over and over and left the shillings to look after themselves.
If she could have taken her fortune with her, she implied, the lady would have done so, never mind just sheets.
‘With the result,’ Viola said cordially, ‘that I am obliged to remedy the deficit of years. But we are liberally provided with rags, I promise you, and may set up in business in that line to recoup some of our losses. Mice, also, we have in abundance, coming in from the abandoned parts of the building, though what they can have been eating all this time is a puzzle to me still.’
She decided to stay overnight, being by no means done with her shopping, slept well on sheets without great lumpy darns in them, and set out again in the morning after breakfast. She found it liberating to walk alone and unregarded along the narrow, medieval streets in the wintry sunshine, looking idly in shop windows at the wares displayed there, catching a glimpse of the great Minster every now and then when it appeared, framed by lesser but still ancient buildings over which it towered.
Everyone was busy, or at any rate wrapped up in their own affairs, and nobody paid her any mind; she did not expect that they should, since she had no acquaintance in the city, and in truth wished for none.
It was pleasant to be anonymous and unattended and to let her thoughts ramble where they would: the boys, who seemed to be happy in Yorkshire; Richard, who in many ways remained an enigma to her; their new life together, the possibility…
So she was surprised, and not entirely pleased, to hear herself addressed, hesitantly and by name, by a complete stranger. ‘Your grace – I beg your pardon, Lady Ventris. Forgive me for approaching you like this. It is urgent that I have speech with you, even though we have not been introduced.’
Viola turned to see a woman standing at a little distance from her in the shadow of an overhanging upper storey, regarding her with anxious interest. She was perhaps fifty or a few years more – her own mother’s age – and respectably though not fashionably dressed in good fabrics of sober, dark colours that looked like half-mourning.
Her tones had been genteel, and she was a handsome woman, her dark hair sprinkled with grey, her face a little worn, as if by a life that had not been entirely untroubled by misfortune.
It was impossible to imagine what in the world she might want.
The woman saw that Viola’s face was not welcoming, and added hastily, ‘I have been pondering whether I should write to you, since I had heard of your marriage and knew that you are in residence at Ventris Castle, but I could not see how to begin, it is so excessively delicate a matter. I am not importuning you, ma’am – I promise I am not.
I require nothing from you but half an hour’s attention.
There is something I must tell you, something important that you need to know, for your benefit rather than mine. ’
Viola feared she might be beginning to see some light. ‘Is it about my husband?’ she asked with a fair assumption of casualness, inwardly cringing. ‘Because if it is, there is nothing you can tell me that?—’
‘It’s not about your current husband,’ the woman interrupted flatly.
‘I know nothing of His Lordship beyond his name and title, though I suppose I may have met him briefly when he was a babe in arms and I a young bride, and I assure you that I have not the least interest in him. It’s about your previous husband, in a way. ’
‘Really?’ Viola raised her eyebrows. This was most unexpected. ‘You do know that the previous Duke of Winterflood has been dead these three years or more?’
‘I am aware. I was bound to take an interest in the matter, as you will see. My name is Lesmire, ma’am, Julia Lesmire.
I have been living in York for some years with my family – my late husband and my grown children, and my little grandchildren now.
But I was Julia Armstrong once, long ago, and Duchess of Winterflood, like you. I was Edward’s first wife.’