Page 96 of Under Her Protection

"You moved at the correct time. She has been playing this for twenty-five years. We will not catch her tonight."

"Yes."

"Thank you, for this evening and for everything you have done for me.”

"Mm."

"Get some sleep, Ms. Cole."

Avery closed the laptop.

She did not leave. She put the laptop in the bag, stood up, accepted a glass of Armagnac from Vivienne, drank it in one, and said, to Leo, "I am on the sofa in the library. Do not wake me before eight."

"Copy."

She went down the hall. The library door closed.

Vivienne stood up.

Her feet, on the carpet, were not, quite, under her.

Leo came round the low table.

She took Vivienne's hand. She did not say anything. She walked her down the corridor to the stairs and up the stairs to the bedroom, and Vivienne went with her, and at the door of the bedroom Vivienne stopped and put her free hand flat on the jamb, and she breathed, once, and Leo did not rush her.

"Leo."

"Yes."

"I am very frightened."

"I know."

"I am going to lose the company."

"No."

"I am going to lose the chairmanship."

"No."

"I am going to lose the way my name is spoken in rooms, which has been the currency I have been using for many years.”

"Vivienne."

"I have spent thirty-two years becoming this woman, and there is a woman on the rue Saint-Lambert who has spent twenty-five years preparing to take it apart in a fortnight, and I am — "

"Vivienne."

"Yes."

"Come to bed."

For a second Vivienne did not move. She had not said, in her own house, the sentence beginning I am very frightened ever.

She came to bed.

She came to bed in the black silk dress still on her, because Leo did not, tonight, ask her to take it off, and Leo, who had taken off her shoulder rig and her earpiece and her shoes but not her trousers or her shirt, lay down on the linen on top of the covers and opened her arm, and Vivienne, who was fifty-two, and tired, and in a dress she had worn for hours, got onto the bed and into Leo's arm on top of the linen, and lay on her side against Leo's side, and put her forehead against Leo's shoulder.