Private Arrangements, page 2
If there ever existed extenuating circumstances for matricide, this was it. First thing tomorrow, she'd set loose two dozen famished goats in Mrs. Rowland's prized greenhouse. Then she'd corner the market on hair dyes and force the woman to show her graying roots.
“You have a choice,” he said amicably. “We can resolve it privately. Or we can have sworn testimonies from these gentlemen. You know every word they utter would be in all the papers.”
She blanched. Freddie was her very own human miracle, steadfast and loyal, loving her enough to willingly take part in all the hassle and ugliness of a divorce. But would he still love her when all her former lovers had testified to their affairs on public record?
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice rose. She took a deep breath to calm herself. Any emotion she displayed before Tremaine was a show of weakness. “I had my solicitors send you a dozen letters. You never responded. We could have had this marriage annulled with some dignity, without having to go through this circus.”
“And here I thought my lack of response adequately conveyed what I thought of your idea.”
“I offered you one hundred thousand pounds!”
“I'm worth twenty times that. But even if I hadn't a sou, that's not quite enough for me to stand before Her Majesty's magistrate and swear that I never touched you. We both know perfectly well that I shagged you to a fare-thee-well.”
She flinched and grew hot. Unfortunately, not entirely from anger. The memories of that night—no, she would not think about it. She had forgotten it already. “This is about Miss von Schweppenburg, isn't it? You are still trying to punish me.”
He gave her one of his cool stares that used to turn her knees to pudding. “Now, why would you think that?”
And what could she say? What could she say without dragging up their entire complicated and bitter history? She swallowed. “Fine,” she said, as indifferently as she could. “I have an evening engagement to keep. But I should be home about ten. I can permit you a quarter hour from half past ten.”
He laughed. “As impatient as always, my dear marchioness. No, tonight I will not be visiting you. I'm weary from my travels. And now that I've seen you, I'll need a few more days to get over my revulsion. But rest assured, I shall not be bound by any asinine time limits. I will stay in your bed for as long as I want, not a minute less—and not a minute more, no matter how you plead.”
Her jaw dropped from sheer stupefaction. “That is the most rid—”
He suddenly leaned toward her and placed an index finger over her lips. “I wouldn't finish that sentence if I were you. You will not enjoy eating those words.”
She jerked her head away, her lips burning. “I would not want you to remain in my bed if you were the last man alive and I'd had nothing but Spanish flies for a fortnight.”
“What images you bring to mind, my lady Tremaine. With every man in the world perfectly alive and no aphrodisiacs at all, you were already a tigress.” He pushed away from the desk. “I've had all I can take of you for a day. I wish you a pleasant evening. Do convey my regards to your beloved. I hope he doesn't mind my exercises in conjugal rights.”
He left without a backward glance.
And not for the first time.
Lady Tremaine watched the door closing behind her husband and rued the day she first learned of his existence.
Chapter Two
Eleven years earlier . . .
London
July 1882
Eighteen-year-old Gigi Rowland gloated. She hoped she wasn't too obvious, but then, she didn't really care. What could the bejeweled, beplumed women in Lady Beckwith's drawing room possibly say? That she lacked becoming modesty? That she was hard-edged and arrogant? That she reeked of pound notes?
They had predicted, at the beginning of her London season, that she would be an unqualified disaster, a girl with no class, no comportment, no clue. But lo and behold, only two months into the season and she was already engaged—to a duke, a young, handsome one no less. Her Grace the Duchess of Fairford. She liked the sound of it. She liked it tremendously.
The same women who had scorned her had been forced to stand before her and offer their felicitations. Yes, the wedding date had been set—in November, just after her birthday. And, yes, thank you, she already had her first consultation at Madame Elise's for the wedding gown. She'd chosen a lush cream satin, with a twelve-foot train to be made of silver moiré.
Secure in her soon-to-be exalted status, Gigi settled deeper into the bergère chair and snapped open her fan as other, fiancéless debutantes prepared to entertain the ladies with their musical skills—Lord Beckwith being notoriously lengthy with his postdinner cordials and cigars, sometimes keeping the gentlemen for more than three hours.
Gigi turned her attention to more important matters. Should she do something fantastical with the cake, have it done in the shape of the Taj Mahal or the Doge's Palace? No? Then she'd have the layers made in an unusual shape. Hexagons? Excellent. A hexagonal cake covered in gleaming royal fondant icing, with garlands of—
The music. She looked up in surprise. The performances usually ranged from acceptable to execrable. But the creamy, exquisite young woman at the bench was as adept as the professional musicians Gigi's mother sometimes engaged. Her fingers glided across the piano keys like swallows over a summer pond. Crystalline, sumptuous notes caressed the ears the way a good dish of crème brûlée caressed the tongue.
Theodora von Schweppenburg. That was her name. They'd been introduced just before dinner. She was new to London, from a minor principality on the Continent, the daughter of a count, by right a countess herself—but it was one of those Holy Roman Empire titles that went on to all descendants, so it meant little.
The performance ended, and a few minutes later Gigi was surprised to find Miss von Schweppenburg at her side.
“Many congratulations on your engagement, Miss Rowland.” Miss von Schweppenburg spoke with a light, pleasing accent. She smelled of attar of rose underpinned with patchouli.
“Thank you, Fräulein.”
“My mother would like me to do the same,” Miss von Schweppenburg said with a small, self-conscious laugh, sitting down on a straight-back chair next to Gigi. “She has ordered me to ask you how you accomplished it.”
“It is simple,” Gigi answered, with practiced nonchalance. “His Grace is in financial straits, and I have a fortune.”
It was less simple than that. Rather, it had been a campaign years in the making, waged from the very second Mrs. Rowland at last inculcated in Gigi that it was both her duty and her destiny to become a duchess.
Miss von Schweppenburg would not be able to duplicate Gigi's success. Nor would Gigi herself. She knew of no other marriageable duke with such overwhelming arrears that he'd be willing to marry a girl whose only claim to gentility was her mother, a country squire's daughter.
Miss von Schweppenburg's eyes lowered. “Oh,” she murmured, turning the handle of her lace fan round and round within her palms. “I don't have a fortune.”
Gigi had guessed as much. There was a sadness to her, the somber melancholy of a high-born woman who could only afford to have a parlor maid come in every other day, who moved in the dark after sunset to save on candle wax.
“But you are beautiful,” Gigi pointed out. Though long in the tooth, she thought, at least twenty-one or twenty-two. “Men like beautiful women.”
“I don't do it very well, this . . . beautiful woman undertaking.”
That, Gigi had seen for herself already. At dinner Miss von Schweppenburg had been seated between two eligible young peers, both of whom had been piqued by her beauty and her shyness. But there'd been something glum about her reticence. She'd paid scant attention to either man and, after a while, they'd noticed.
“You need more practice,” said Gigi.
The girl was silent. She drew the tip of her fan across her lap. “Have you ever met Lord Reginald Saybrook, Miss Rowland?”
The name sounded vaguely familiar. Then Gigi remembered. Lord Reginald was her future husband's uncle. “I'm afraid not. He married some Bavarian princess and lives on the Continent.”
“He has a son.” Miss von Schweppenburg's voice faltered. “His name is Camden. And . . . and he loves me.”
Gigi smelled a Romeo-and-Juliet story, a story whose appeal escaped her. Miss Capulet should have married the man her parents chose for her and then had her torrid but very discreet affair with Mr. Montague. Not only would she have stayed alive, she'd have realized, after a while, that Romeo was just a callow, bored youth with little to offer her other than pretty platitudes. It is the east, and Juliet is the sun indeed.
“We've known each other a long time,” continued Miss von Schweppenburg. “But of course Mama would not let me marry him. He has no fortune either.”
“I see,” Gigi said politely. “You are trying to remain true to him.”
Miss von Schweppenburg hesitated. “I don't know. Mama would never speak to me again if I don't marry well. But strangers make me . . . uncomfortable. I only wish Mr. Saybrook were more eligible.”
Gigi's opinion of the girl deteriorated rapidly. She respected a woman out to marry to her best advantage. And she respected a woman who sacrificed worldly comforts for love, though she personally disagreed with such decisions. But she could not tolerate wishy-washiness. Miss von Schweppenburg would neither commit to this Camden Saybrook, because he was too poor, nor commit to her husband-hunting, because she enjoyed too much being loved by him.
“He's very handsome, very sweet and kind,” Miss von Schweppenburg was saying, her voice reduced to a whisper, almost as if she were talking to herself. “He writes me letters and sends lovely presents, things he'd made himself.”
Gigi wanted to roll her eyes but somehow couldn't. Someone loved this girl, this utterly useless girl, loved her enough to go on wooing her, even though she was being paraded before all of Europe for takers.
A moment of stark despair descended upon her that she would never know such love, that she would go through life sustained only by her facade of invincibility. Then she came to her senses. Love was for fools. Gigi Rowland was many things, but she was never a fool.
“How fortunate for you, Fräulein.”
“Yes, I suppose I am. I only wish . . .” Miss von Schweppenburg shook her head. “Perhaps you might meet him at your wedding.”
Gigi nodded and smiled absently, preoccupied once again with the structural elegance of the cake to be served at her imminent wedding.
But no wedding ever took place between Philippa Gilberte Rowland and Carrington Vincent Hanslow Saybrook. Two weeks before the wedding day, His Grace the Duke of Fairford, the Marquess of Tremaine, Viscount Hanslow, and Baron Wolvinton, after six hours of solid drinking in honor of his upcoming nuptials, climbed up to the roof of his friend's town house and attempted to moon all of London. All he accomplished was a broken neck and his own demise by tumbling four stories to the ground.
Chapter Three
9 May 1893
Victoria Rowland was not quite herself.
She knew this because she had just decapitated all the orchids in her beloved greenhouse. Their heads rolled on the ground in beautiful, grotesque carnage, as if she were enacting a floral version of the French Revolution.
Not for the first or even the one thousandth time, she wished that the seventh Duke of Fairford had lived two weeks longer. Two measly weeks. Afterward he could have swilled poison, tied himself to a railroad track, and, while he was waiting for the train, shot himself in the head.
All she wanted was for Gigi to be a duchess. Was that too much?
Duchess—everyone had called Victoria that when she was a young girl. She'd been beautiful, well-mannered, serene, and regal; they were all convinced she was going to marry a duke. But then her father was defrauded out of almost everything they had, and her mother's long, lingering illness plunged the family finances from merely precarious to catastrophic. She'd ended up marrying a man twice her age, a rich industrialist looking to infuse some gentility into his bloodline.
But John Rowland's money had been deemed too new, too uncouth. Suddenly Victoria found herself shut out of drawing rooms where she had once been welcome. Swallowing her humiliation, she swore that she would never let the same happen to her own daughter. The girl would have Victoria's polish and her father's fortune, she would take London by storm, and she would be a duchess if it killed Victoria.
Gigi had almost done it. In fact, she had done it. The fault there lay entirely with Carrington. And then, to Victoria's amazement, she had done it again, marrying Carrington's cousin, heir to the title. How happy and proud Victoria had been on the day of Gigi's wedding, how resolutely giddy.
And then everything went wrong. Camden left the day after the wedding, with no explanations to anyone. And no matter how much she begged, cried, and wheedled, Victoria could not get a word as to what had happened out of Gigi.
What do you care? Gigi had said icily. We have decided to lead separate lives. When he inherits I'm still going to become a duchess. Isn't that all you've ever wanted?
Victoria had had to content herself with that while she corresponded with Camden in secret, dropping bits and pieces of Gigi's news between descriptions of her garden and her charity galas. Four times a year his letters came, as reliable as the rotation of the seasons, informative, and amiable to a fault. Those letters kept her hopes alive. Surely he meant to come back one day or he would not bother writing to his mother-in-law, year in, year out.
But could Gigi not leave well enough alone? What was the girl thinking, risking something as nasty and damaging as a divorce? And for what, that all-too-ordinary Lord Frederick, who wasn't fit to wash her drawers, let alone touch her without them? The thought made Victoria ill. The only silver lining she could see was that this was sure to make Camden sit up and take notice. Perhaps he'd even come back. Perhaps there'd be a passionate confrontation.
Camden's telegram the day before, informing her of his arrival, had made her walk on clouds. She dashed off one back to him, scarcely able to contain her jubilation. But this morning his response came, thirty-one words of unrelenting bad news: dear madam stop please kill your hopes now stop as a merciful act to yourself stop I mean to grant the divorce stop after a certain interval stop yours affectionately stop camden.
And she had grabbed the nearest garden implement and mangled all her lovely, rare, painstakingly raised varietals. Now she dropped the shears, like a contrite killer flinging away her murder weapon. She must not go on like this. She would end up in Bedlam, an old woman with wild white-streaked hair, beseeching the pillow not to abandon the bed.
Fine, so she could not prevent the divorce. But she would find Gigi another duke. In fact, one lived right down the lane from her cottage here, a few miles from the coast of Devon. His Grace the Duke of Perrin was a rather intimidating recluse. But he was a man of able body and sound mind. And at forty-five years of age, he was not yet too old for Gigi, who was getting dangerously close to thirty.
So Victoria had wanted the duke for herself when she'd been an eligible young lady, living in this very same cottage on the periphery of his estate and his sphere. But that was three decades ago. No one else knew of her erstwhile ambition. And the duke, well, he didn't even know she existed.
She'd have to abandon her duchesslike reserve, forget that they had never been introduced, and barge into his path, which took him past her cottage each afternoon right about quarter to four, in fair weather and foul.
In other words, she'd have to act like Gigi.
When Camden returned to the town house after his morning ride, Goodman informed him that Lady Tremaine wished to confer with him at his earliest convenience. No doubt she meant that he should present himself that very moment. But that would not be at his convenience at all, as he was both hungry and disheveled.
He breakfasted and bathed. Giving his hair one last rub, he let the towel drop to his shoulders and reached for the fresh clothes he had laid out on the bed. At that precise moment, his wife, in a blur of white blouse and caramel-colored skirts, burst through the door.
She took two steps into the room and stopped, a furrow instantly forming between her brows. As promised, the bedchamber had been aired, cleaned, and furnished, an entire handsome redwood set—bedstead, nightstands, armoire, and chest—roused out of long slumber in the attic and pressed into service. Beneath the large Monet that hung above the mantel, two pots of tailed orchids bloomed silently, their fragrance light and sweet. But despite all the buffing and polishing Goodman had ordered, a musty scent clung to the resuscitated furniture, an odor of age and blank history.
“It looks exactly the same,” she said, almost as if to herself. “I had no idea Goodman remembered.”
Goodman probably remembered when she had last broken a nail. She had that effect on men. Even a man who left her behind never forgot anything about her.
In those days when he'd felt more charitable toward her, Camden had been certain God lingered over her creation, breathing more life and purpose into her than He bestowed on lesser mortals. Even now, with the ravage of a sleepless night plain on her face, her onyx-dark eyes still burned brighter than the night sky over New York Harbor on Independence Day.
“May I be of some assistance?” he said.
Her gaze turned to him. He was quite decent. His dressing gown covered everything that needed to be covered and most of the rest of him too. But she did look surprised and then, faintly but unmistakably, embarrassed.
She did not blush. She rarely blushed. But when she did, when her pale, snooty cheeks turned a shade of strawberry ice cream, a man would have to be mummified not to respond.
“You were taking a long time,” she said brusquely, by way of explanation.
“And you suspected me of deliberately making you wait.” He shook his head. “You should know I'm above such petty vengeances.”
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