Chapter 4

Vivian sent for Mrs. MacGregor after breakfast the next morning. She was going shopping for Christmas decorations and knew little about London shops. Rather than go out with her own maid, Phyllis, a Staffordshire girl, she wanted company who knew the town.

“Annette would do, Milady. She was a London-born girl before Sir Richard hired her to be Deborah’s wet nurse. We have kept her on as a chambermaid. She might not know the most fashionable shops, but she will know where you can buy almost anything.”

Richard suggested that she take the coach. It was a strange vehicle for shopping within the town, but it was tight. It would keep out the wet from the slushy streets and most of the chill wind. She and Annette set out to buy Christmas.

She returned with her purchases and had them put into a sitting room before luncheon. She would supervise the decorations the next day. She had mail.

| Miss Martha Davis
| Accepts with gratitude
| the invitation of Lady
| Vivian Davis to sup with
| her and Sir Richard
| this evening at
| seven post meridian.
Martha had excellent penmanship for a nine-year-old girl. Vivian decided to keep the formalities until either Martha broke them or they were seated. Martha needed to be in a loving family, but she would need -- in seven years but it was not too soon to begin – to know how to behave in formal settings. Richard had been correct about the formal invitation. Martha was clearly seeing herself as grown up with the invitation. Vivian decided to dress formally.

After luncheon Richard again led her to the office.

“The household is yours to rule,” he said, “but we would come to grief if you chose a social life that required more expenditures than our income could comfortably cover.”

“Have I been profligate? Indeed, I have spent only for the Christmas decorations, and I brought back most of the money you gave me. Do you wish me to return it to you?” She thought, rather, that the household was much on a larger scale than the one her mother ran.

“Not in the least. Sometime soon, you must have some coin in your reticule, and the remainder of the Christmas-decoration money will suffice for now. It seems to me that there are several increases in expenditure beyond the current operation of the household. Are you content with the current operation of the household?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. She was not quite content with the solemnity his daughter showed, but this should have no monetary effect. Increased purchase of sweets? Well, she had already answered, and he had mentioned her pocket money.

“Beyond what we spend now, I count: Your clothes, all of your clothes, not just your ball wear; your pocket money; the extra food and wine needed for entertaining. These are very different concepts, and very different amounts, but they are all changes made by your entry into the household.”

“And also the salary for Phyllis.”

“I have counted that in the ordinary household accounts,” he said. “It is a change brought by your arrival, but a change already made. On the other hand, you have yet to buy any clothes. I could make a budget and say, you have this much for clothes to wear out to dinner, and that much for food and drink for entertaining others. That would be not only unnecessarily controlling, it would involve decisions where I am not qualified. When you want to give a dinner, you ask Cook how much it would cost to feed so many people at such and such a level; afterwards, you ask Dawkins how much it would cost to replace the wine the dinner guests consumed. Can you do that?”

“It should not be difficult.”

“Then could thirty-five pounds a month cover all that I have mentioned? -- The entertaining, your wardrobe, your other expenses?”

That was like asking whether the Atlantic could fill a fish pond. “I could never spend that much money,” she said. Then she remembered the expenses of her debut. “For Mary’s Season, it might not be enough.”

“The girls’ seasons, like their dowries, are other entries on the balance sheet. Anyway, there is no requirement that you spend it all. It is just that I can afford to be part of the social scene; I cannot afford to be one of the leaders.”

“Richard,” she said, “I never expected to lead the London social scene.” Indeed, she had had her London Season, and it had ended with a wedding. After all her fears during the first parts of the Season, that counted as a success. If Richard had said that she was never to attend a ball again, she would not have regarded that restriction as domestic tyranny.

When he had presented her with all his information, she went upstairs to prepare for supper. She had much more time than she needed, and she sat in her room and considered her marriage. Richard had told Mother that he would tell the complete truth. It had been truth, but far from complete. She had yet to see a burden of which she had not been warned. She had met several unexpected pleasures.

The matter of bed was one of them. Mother had spoken of sex as something that her husband would do to her that she must accept. Mother had warned her of the pain in the first time, but not in the comfort and pleasure of the later times. She had not mentioned the climaxes at all. Then Vivian remembered that her last climax had not been at Richard’s hand. Rather it had been during the sex act, albeit a strange sex act. She had understood that the man lay on the woman during sex. Even if you considered the climax as part of sex, Mother hadn’t mentioned it at all. One of the unexpected pleasures of marriage was the greatest pleasure she had experienced in her short life.

Being a parent -- albeit a step parent -- was another pleasure. The girls would laugh with her, and Deborah, at least, would hug her. She had been told she would be a mother to them, but she had expected much more of the drudgery and none of the joy. She realized that Miss Walters experienced the drudgery. She was certainly not depriving her of the joy. Miss Walters was depriving herself of the joy as certainly as she was depriving the girls of it.

And, then, the freedom. Mother had hinted something of that. A married woman ruled her household -- under, of course, her husband. Richard seemed to wish to enlarge her rule. If she understood him correctly, he wished her in charge of their social life. She would decide what the two of them would do socially.

She rang for Phyllis. She would bathe and wear one of the gowns she had worn for visiting. Her thoughts of her marriage led to thoughts of her husband. Naked in the warmth of the bath water, she remembered how Richard had come to her, aroused her, and satisfied her. Then, she remembered that Phyllis was in the room. The warmth of the water could have explained her blush, and she washed herself and let Phyllis dry and dress her.

“Thank you for your kind invitation, milady,” Martha said when she entered the dining room. She curtsied deeply, and rose smoothly.

“You are quite welcome, Miss Davis. Shall we be Martha and MamaVivian for the rest of the conversation?”

“You are no longer wroth with me, MamaVivian?” Martha asked when they had been seated.

“Wroth with you? Martha, I corrected you. That is what a mother does; she corrects her daughters. I expect to correct you much less often than my own mother corrected me, but that is because of the services of Miss Walters.” She waited for a response, but none came. “Another thing that mothers do is to love their daughters. Just because I corrected you last evening, I still loved you then. I certainly still love you now.”

“I did not learn of this fault,” Richard said.

“Husband,” she said, “I shall, of course, answer any question you have. It was a minor fault, though, and one I did not consider worthy of a report to her father. You put me in authority, and I exercised that authority according to my judgment. Martha made a remarkably smooth curtsey, although you saw that. Her note showed excellent penmanship. It would be both unfair and misleading to report to you every fault I see in her and not report every excellence.”

“I was only asking out of curiosity. You are in authority, and you are exercising that authority exceedingly well.”

“That is kind of you to say.” She felt that she was feeling her way through a thicket at midnight, not exercising any authority well. “And, Martha, you have many excellences. At your age, you will have many faults, as well. What would happen if Miss Walters said, ‘You left the I out of “parliament” again. I will never teach you any more spelling’? In the same way, when I see you make an error in behavior, I will correct it. That neither means that you are a bad girl nor that I have stopped loving you.” Indeed, if the girls were wrong, it was in the direction of behaving too well. A parent could never say that, though, and Miss Walters would rightly consider that a betrayal. Richard -- Richard and she, now, from Miss Walters’s point of view -- were paying Miss Walters to teach the girls to behave well.

Martha smiled, but said nothing.

“It was kind to notify Deborah of supper,” she said. “Was that your own thought, or had Miss Walters sent you?”

“No, MamaVivian.” Martha’s answer left Vivian nonplussed. She had given the girl a choice, and Martha had not answered it.

“There is more to the situation than you have told me. Why did you stop there?” she asked.

“Miss Walters says that children should not speak to their betters except to answer direct questions.”

“Well, that is a good rule in some situations. It does not serve us now, however. We invited you to sup with us so that I could learn about you. If I do not know the correct question, then I cannot learn what I should know without your telling me. Now, what is it that I might not know about yester eve?”

“Mary told me to get Deborah.” So Mary took care of her sisters. “Miss Walters stops us from eating when she has finished her meal. She says that we should learn to take small bites, and yet not to dawdle.” Indeed, Martha was eating when not talking. She was taking small bites, but she was taking them with dispatch.

“Well, it was kind of Mary to send you, and kind of you to come,” Vivian said. “Did you get enough to eat?”

Martha smiled. “Yes, MamaVivian. When I told Miss Walters what you had said about your having delayed me, she stopped eating to tell us about the history of Rome. She does not dawdle, but she sometimes talks while we are eating to give us time.” Miss Walters was humane, then, and human as well. Vivian would give odds that Miss Walters thought that the girls had not noticed that trick.

“We are going to have Christmas in London this year. What good things do you remember from Christmases past?”

Martha remembered several things. Little was on her list that could be purchased, and Vivian had already purchased those things. Did Wassailers travel London? Well, they should be ready for them.

“And what,” Vivian asked as the meal was coming to an end, “would you like to ask me?” Martha, with her efficient eating, and Richard, who had barely participated in the conversation, had already finished their suppers. Vivian was not quite done, yet, and Martha was sitting quite politely. She expected some questions about Staffordshire or what the Season was like.

“Why did you and Father marry?” asked Martha. She must have seen shock on Vivian’s face, because she looked sorry that she had asked that question.

“That is a perfectly good question en famille.” She didn’t want her asking something like that in front of company. “The short answer is that your father proposed and I accepted. I am not the right person to ask why he proposed, but I accepted, in part, because he was the only man who did propose.”

“I had seen her smile,” Richard said. “Apparently, few other men had. You might have seen it outside in the snow. You certainly heard her laugh then. I needed brightness in my life, and your MamaVivian is brightness personified.” He had never spoken like that to her. She remembered the incident when he tickled her in the mirror, though. “That is a real smile,” he had said. She blushed when Martha looked at her.

“I could have refused your father’s proposal,” she said. How many problems that would have caused were not for nine-year-old ears. “But when I accepted, I did not know the reasons for acceptance that I would list now. We often say, ‘I shall be totally honest with you.’ Often, however, what we say then is not all the truth. It is only the bad things. So it was with your father. What I did not know marrying him was that he was exceptionally kind.” She did not know about the joys that he brought to the bedchamber either, but she could not tell his young daughter that.

“Is Father really kinder than most husbands?” Martha asked.

“Well, he is the only husband that I have ever had. That makes it very hard to make comparisons. He is much kinder than I expected. My new family has produced many happy surprises. The careful penmanship of your letter was one of them.” Let us stay away from the surprises of her bedroom, and -- most especially -- the surprises she received in his bedroom.

“That was my fair copy,” Martha said. “I sometimes spill the ink.” That must be an apology for her criticism of her sister.

“Sometimes, I do, as well. That is why I am careful to cap the inkwell and wipe the quill before I let anyone come near. I spilled more at nine, of course, and even more at seven.”

“Yes, MamaVivian.”

“When I rise, Martha,” Vivian said, “you should rise with me. Whenever you are a guest at dinner, you rise when your hostess does, and the gentlewomen leave the gentlemen.” The she rose and walked out. After following her, Martha left her for the children’s quarters. Richard, who had not smoked a cigar from his smell and the time it had taken, came out to join her.

“You were marvelous,” he said. “The girls have needed a mother as much as I have needed you.” Well, if she was not to be loved, she was to be needed. She was appreciated, as well. “I remain, however, curious.”

“It was nothing. When I saw sisters in school, I sometimes envied those who had sisters to care for them. And Mary cared for Deborah, and Martha came down so she would not be late for her meal. Then, sometimes, I would see how older sisters could treat their younger sisters, and I would thank God I did not have that sort of bully in my family. Well, while doing her favor, Martha asked Deborah whether she were bothering me. I will not have those girls think that speaking with me was bothering me. I told her so. Then she said that Deborah was sometimes messy with ink. I told her that she should be less conscious of her sister’s faults, and more conscious of her own. At table, she confessed to me that she sometimes spills ink, as well. All of these are trivial, and I do not want her feeling that trivial faults will be reported to her father. I may, sometime, need to report their grave faults to you as a punishment for them.”

He offered his arm, and she took it. They walked up the stairs together. “Is it utterly selfish of me to rejoice that mine was the only proposal?” Richard asked.

“I am very happy that I accepted yours. I am less certain that I would have accepted another.” But, would she have done so? The widower who said that he did not love her had seemed a cold offer.

“And you consider my kindness that great a recommendation?” he asked when they were outside her dressing room. He kissed her before she could answer. The kiss was gentle at first, when he invaded her mouth, though, he plundered it. His hands stroked her derriere and then grasped it.

“The kindness would have been enough, and it something that I can discuss with Martha. I cannot say a word to her about the pleasure that you bring to my bed.”

“You find it pleasure, then?”

“That is good enough a word.” That was the only word she had, but it was a mild one for what she felt.

“Well, then, I should be certain to visit you tonight, should I not? We wish you to have all the pleasure that a marriage can afford.”

She laughed. “I am happy to attract you away from your habit of avoiding me,” she said. He had been in her bed the last two nights.

Vivian had learned to her surprise that Miss Walters released her charges for the hour or more before they were served supper. She tutored the girls one at a time, and then set each one free until supper time. Vivian had not known that when the girls had no interest in coming down from their floor. As the Christmas season neared and they grew fonder of her, they started to come down and seek her out.