Private Arrangements, page 14
“As unfashionably hale as ever, from what I observed last night.” He let a moment pass, during which Lady Wrenworth's eyes widened, before adding, “At dinner.”
“And did you take the opportunity to observe the stars too last night? They were out en masse.”
It took him a second to remember his glib assertion that he was indeed an amateur astronomer on the night he and the Wrenworths had first been introduced. “I'm afraid I'm more of an armchair enthusiast.”
“Most of Society to this day hasn't the slightest clue about Lord Wrenworth's precise fields of study. And I'm ashamed to confess that I myself had no idea of his scientific pursuits until well after we were married. How did you become familiar with his publications, my lord, if you don't mind my curiosity?”
How? My daughter has not been quite herself since her unfortunate miscarriage in March two years ago. But her recent friendship with Lord Wrenworth has had quite a salubrious effect on her.
“I read scientific and technological papers as a matter of course, both to gratify my interest and to keep up with the latest advances.” Quite honest so far. “One simply cannot mistake Lord Wrenworth's brilliance.”
The second part wasn't a lie either. Lord Wrenworth was, without a doubt, brilliant. But he was but one bright star in a galaxy of luminaries, in an age when advances in human understanding and machine prowess came fast and furious. Camden would not have singled him out had he not been Gigi's first paramour.
“Thank you.” Lady Wrenworth glowed. “I quite share that opinion.”
She drove off with a friendly wave.
Fourteen hours and forty-three minutes. Would this day never pass?
“I beg your pardon, Lady Tremaine.”
Gigi paused in her search for Freddie amid the throng at the Carlisles'. “Miss Carlisle.”
“Freddie asked me to tell you that he is in the garden,” said Miss Carlisle. “Behind the rose trellis.”
Gigi almost laughed. Only Freddie would think it necessary to mention—to a woman who secretly loved him, no less—that he'd be “behind the rose trellis,” a spot of seclusion highly conducive to behavior not countenanced inside the ballroom. “Thank you, though perhaps he shouldn't have troubled you.”
“It's no trouble,” Miss Carlisle said softly.
Miss Carlisle was more handsome than pretty, but she had bright eyes and a sharp, quick wit. At twenty-three, she was in her fourth season and widely believed by many to have no real interest in matrimony, since she would come into control of a comfortable inheritance on her twenty-fifth birthday and since she had turned down any and all proposals directed her way.
Would Miss Carlisle still be unmarried today if Freddie hadn't fallen head-over-heels in love with Gigi's art collection? Freddie believed he and Gigi to be kindred spirits who felt keenly the passage of time, the loss of a gently fading spring, and the inexplicability of life's joys and pains, when ironically she had bought the paintings solely in the hope of pleasing and mollifying Camden.
Why had she never told him that she preferred the future to the past and rarely bothered about the meaning of life? She felt a rush of guilt. If she had, today Freddie probably would be engaged to Miss Carlisle, a woman with a clear conscience, rather than to Gigi, who, behind his back, allowed another man to have his way with her.
Could she claim martyrdom and higher purpose when she didn't unequivocally hate the swift coupling between Camden and herself? She hadn't even thought of poor Freddie until this morning.
She found Freddie pacing in the middle of the diminutive garden, having left his roost behind the rose trellis.
“Philippa!” He came forward and placed his evening jacket about her shoulders, enveloping her in his generous warmth and a strong waft of turpentine.
She glanced at him. “Have you been painting in your good clothes again?”
“No, but I spilled some sauce on myself at dinner,” he answered sheepishly. “The butler cleaned it. Did a very decent job too.”
She slid her knuckle against his cheek. “We really should have some jackets made out of oilcloth for you.”
“Wouldn't you know it?” he cried. “That's what my mother used to say.”
She started. Had she been patronizing? Or condescending? It hadn't felt that way.
“Do you know what Angelica said to me?” Freddie asked her gleefully. “She said a man my age ought to have more care. She also said that I'm dawdling because I'm scared my next work won't turn out any good, that I should get off my lazy posterior and put paint to canvas.”
They rounded the rose trellis and sat down on the discreetly placed bench, the one on which Miss Carlisle was supposed to receive her wedding proposals. Freddie chuckled. “I know you said she thinks well of me. But she certainly doesn't sound that way tonight.”
Gigi frowned. The only painting Freddie had finished in '92 hung in her bedchamber. She always asked about his progress on his next painting, but she'd never paid any substantial attention to his creativity, considering it little more than a hobby, a gentlemanly amusement.
Miss Carlisle saw it differently. Miss Carlisle saw Freddie differently. Gigi was happy to indulge Freddie's absentmindedness and artistic hesitations—as long as he adored her, she didn't care if he lolled on the chaise longue and ate bonbons from sunrise to sunset. But Miss Carlisle saw a diamond in the rough, a man who could make quite something of himself if he but put in the effort.
Was Gigi's affection for Freddie purer or more self-serving? Or perhaps, more to the point, wouldn't Freddie prefer to have made something of his talents?
Freddie rested his head against her shoulder and they fell silent, inhaling the moist air, heavy with the sweetness of honeysuckle. She'd always felt peaceful like this, with him leaning into her and her fingers combing through his fine hair. But today that tranquillity eluded her.
Was Camden right? Was Freddie's adulation of her all construed on mistaken assumptions? She shook her head. She would not think of her husband when she was with her beloved.
“Lord Tremaine was most charitable toward me yesterday,” sighed Freddie, instantly dashing her resolution. “He could have abused me a thousand ways and I'd have submitted to it.”
Gigi sighed too. Camden had garnered nothing but praises since his return. He was said to possess the refinement of a true aristocrat and the elegance of a Renaissance courtier. And it certainly didn't hurt that he looked the way he did. If he remained in England for much longer, Felix Wrenworth would need to surrender his honorary title of the Ideal Gentleman.
She wanted to warn Freddie about Camden. But what could she say? In the official version of their history, which Freddie accepted without question, she and Camden had agreed to live separately from the very beginning. She could not utter a word against Camden without exposing herself.
“Yes, that was very considerate of him,” she mumbled. And then he came home at night, set me against a bedpost, and stuffed me, dear Freddie.
“But are you certain he will agree to a divorce?” asked Freddie, with the innocent puzzlement of a child being told for the first time that the world was round.
Gigi immediately tensed. “Why shouldn't I be? He said so himself.”
“It's just that . . .” Freddie hesitated. “Don't mind me. I'm probably still flustered, that's all.”
She pulled away from him so she could speak to him face-to-face. “Did he say or do anything? You must not let him intimidate you.”
“No, no, nothing of the sort. He was a complete gentleman. But he asked me questions. He . . . tested me, if you will. And I, well, I don't know. I couldn't read him all that properly. But I thought—not that I'm often right in my thinking—I thought he didn't look like he'd be happy to let you go.”
Gigi shook her head. This was so far out of her perception of reality that she had no choice but to deny it. “No one is ever happy about a divorce. I don't think he regrets letting me go. He is simply peeved that I couldn't leave well enough alone and had the temerity to interrupt his orderly life for the unworthy cause of my own happiness. In any case, he's already given his word. One year and I'm free to do as I choose.”
One year from last night. She still couldn't think about it without being engulfed in vile heat.
“Amen to that,” Freddie said fervently. “You must be right. You are always right.”
When he looks at you he sees only the halo he has erected about you.
“I think I should return to the ballroom,” she said, rather abruptly. “People will start to talk. We don't want that.”
Freddie obligingly shook his head. “No, no, certainly not.”
She wished for once he'd grab her by the shoulders, damn all the people in the ballroom, and kiss her as if the whole world was on fire. This was all Camden's fault. She had been perfectly happy with who Freddie was before he got here.
She stood up, kissed Freddie lightly on the forehead, and gathered her skirts to leave. “It'll do you no harm to pay some mind to Miss Carlisle. Resume ‘Afternoon in the Park.' I'd like it for a birthday present.”
A garden party was in full swing. Set against a profusion of red tulips and yellow jonquils was a kaleidoscopic parade of women, the edges of their creamy skirts blurring like a distant memory. In the middle of this swirl of colors, an oasis of calm. A man sat at a small table by himself, his cheek in his palm, his gaze enthralled by someone just outside the frame of the painting.
Lord Frederick was a far more talented and vivid painter than Camden had guessed. The painting radiated warmth, immediacy, and charming wistfulness.
A Man in Love, said the small inset on the bottom of the frame.
A man in love.
At his sister Claudia's house in Copenhagen, there was a framed photograph of Camden, taken the day after New Year's Day 1883. He'd been waiting for his mother and Claudia to finish their primping in advance of a family portrait, and the photographer had captured him in a pose nearly identical to that of Lord Frederick's man in love—daydreaming in an armchair, his head propped up in his hand, smiling, gazing somewhere beyond the range of the camera.
He had been looking out the window in the direction of Briarmeadow and thinking of her.
The photograph remained Claudia's favorite, despite all his efforts to persuade her to get rid of it. I like looking at it, she'd insist. I miss you like that.
Some days he, too, missed it. The optimism, the headiness, the feeling of walking on air. He knew perfectly well now that it'd been based on a lie, that he'd paid for those few weeks of unbridled happiness by never being able to feel anything like that again, and still he missed it.
He might divorce her, but he'd never be free of her.
Gigi's sitting room was dark, but light flowed out of her bedroom, casting a long, narrow triangle the color of old gold coins along the angle of the bedroom door, which had been left slightly ajar. Strange, she was certain she had switched off the light before going out.
When she reached her bedroom, she discovered the light to be from Camden's apartment. The connecting door between their bedrooms was wide open. But his bedroom, though lit, looked empty, his bed undisturbed from when it had last been made.
Her heart rate accelerated. She had deliberately stayed out very late to avoid a repeat of last night. Surely he wouldn't bother waiting up when he still had three hundred sixty-three nights left to impregnate her.
But where was he? Fallen asleep in his chair? Or possibly still out on the town somewhere, seeing to his own amusement? But what did she care what he did in his own time? She should simply close the door—very quietly—and get herself to bed.
Instead, she walked into his bedroom.
The sight of the fully restored room still made her throat tighten. It took her back to the time when she used to flop down on his bed and weep at life's unfairness.
The day she emptied the bedchamber was the day she took charge of her life. Three months later she met Lord Wrenworth and began a torrid affair that further boosted her confidence. But this was where it all began, the decoupling of her life from Camden's, the choice to move on, no matter how lonely and uncertain the future.
His personal effects were nowhere to be seen, except for a watch on a silver chain that lay on the demilune table opposite the bed, an intricate timepiece from Patek, Philippe & Cie. She turned the watch over. On the back was an inscription wishing him a happy thirtieth birthday from Claudia.
She put down the watch. The console table stood not far from the half-open door to the sitting room. A bright light washed in, but the sitting room itself was as silent as the bottom of the ocean.
She pushed the door open and saw rolls of blueprints, dozens of them, on chairs and tables. On the writing table, held open by a paperweight, a slide rule, and a tin of bonbons, was a sheet of white draft paper.
She saw Camden only after she had opened the door fully. He was seated in a low-slung Louis XV chair, clad in the black dressing gown that brought out the dark flecks in his green eyes, turning them the color of summer foliage at dusk. A book lay open in his lap.
“You are up early,” he said, taking his sense of irony out for some exercise and fresh air, no doubt.
“Must be that Protestant work ethic I keep hearing so much about,” she said.
“Did you do well at cards tonight?” His gaze dipped to the décolletage of her gown. “I'd guess you did.”
She had worn one of her less modest pieces. It was, to be sure, a cheap trick to divert attention at the gaming tables, but she disliked idling her assets when she could make use of them. “Who told you about it?”
“You. You told me that once you were married, you planned to never dance again and to spend all your time at balls separating English fops from their cravat money.”
“I don't remember ever saying anything like that.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
He rose and walked over to her, opening the book in his hands to an oversize page. The page was folded into quarters. He unfolded it. “Take a look.”
She immediately recognized the large illustration as a rendering of Achilles' shield. Mrs. Rowland adored Book 18 of the Iliad, and many a night, as a child, Gigi had gone to sleep listening to the description of the great shield Hephaestus had wrought for Achilles, the five-layered marvel that depicted a city at peace and a city at war, and just about every other human activity under the sun, all surrounded by the mighty river Oceanus.
She had seen other imaginings of the shield, most of which, too faithful to Homer's depictions, were crammed with details of dancing youths and garlanded maidens, resulting in a filigree so fine that it could not possibly outlast the vigor of even one battle. But this particular interpretation was lean, shorn of minutiae, yet muscular and menacing in its austerity. The sun, the moon, and the stars shone down on the wedding procession and the bloody slaughter in equal serenity.
“It is the oeuvre of the man whom your mother would like you to marry,” Camden said as he restored the page to its folded state. “If you can't hang on to me.”
Gigi was surprised enough that she took the book from Camden and inspected its spine. Eleven Years Before Ilium: A Study of the Geography, Logistics, and Daily Life of the Trojan War by L. H. Perrin. The family surname of the dukes of Perrin was Fitzwilliam, but by custom a peer signed his title.
“Fancy that.” She gave the book back.
Camden set it aside. “Since you are here, have a look at some of my designs.”
He'd done nothing to indicate the slightest sexual interest in her. Yet the hairs on her neck abruptly stood on end. “Why should I be curious?”
“So you'll know whom to blame when Britain loses the next America's Cup Challenge.”
She was dismayed despite her preoccupation. “You are helping the American side?”
Some forty years before, an American yacht had raced fourteen yachts from the Royal Yacht Squadron around the Isle of Wight and won by a whopping twenty minutes. According to legend, the queen, watching the race, asked who was second, and the answer she received was “There is no second, Your Majesty.” Ever since then, English syndicates had been trying to best the Americans and win back the cup. To no avail.
“I'm helping the New York Yacht Club, of which I'm a member,” he said.
He walked ahead of her to the writing desk and glanced back, waiting. The light of the standing lamp beside him caressed his hair, illuminating its sun-bleached locks. His expression was kind and patient—too kind, too patient.
She felt the tug of gravity on her feet. Only her refusal to reveal any weaknesses in herself forced her to move, one heavy heel at a time, to stand before the desk.
As she bent her neck to inspect the design, he moved behind her. “It's more of a preliminary drawing at this stage,” he said.
He spoke next to her ear. A filament of pleasure zigzagged through her, acute and debilitating. She felt his hand brush aside the tendrils of hair that had escaped from her low chignon. Then his fingers settled on her nape.
“I see,” she said, her voice tight.
“I can do the detailed scale drawing myself,” he murmured, undoing the top button of her gown. “But mostly these days I have a draftsman do it for me.”
She stared down at the designs. At the center was a yacht, appearing as it would at sea, sails fully deployed. To the side he had drawn a cross section of the hull and a view of the vessel in dry dock.
He reached around her and pointed at a deep, narrow protrusion from the keel halfway down the length of the yacht, while his other hand unmoored her buttons easily, languidly, and all too swiftly.
“I hope the fin keel will give the yacht greater lateral stability,” he said, as if he were addressing a group of engineering students, even as he opened her gown all the way to her hips. “You want the yacht to ride as high as possible, to increase hull speed. But a vessel barely in the water would capsize that much more readily.”
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