Private Arrangements, page 17
“You don't see a baby for a few months, and he doubles in size,” answered Camden. “Had an amusing evening?”
“Amusing enough. Pedar and I dined with your wife,” said Claudia.
His wife, whom he had not seen since May of '83, more than five years ago. Camden rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course you did.”
“I'm not making it up,” said Claudia. “Your wife is in town. She called on me three days ago. I called on her the next day and invited her to dinner. And she returned the invitation tonight. We dined at her hotel.”
It was to Camden's vast credit that he did not drop Hans on his head. “What is she doing in Copenhagen?”
“Sightseeing. A tour of Scandinavia. She's already been to Norway and Sweden.”
“Alone?”
The moment the treacherous syllables escaped, he wished he'd torn out his tongue instead.
“No, with her personal harem,” said Claudia, beginning to observe him too closely for comfort. “How am I to know? She hasn't introduced me to a paramour, and I haven't had her followed around. Find out for yourself, if you are curious.”
“No. I meant if she had her mother with her.” He handed Hans to the nanny. “Besides, Lady Tremaine's doings are none of my concern.”
“In case you haven't noticed, Lady Tremaine discharges her familial duties. She calls on Pater and Mater once a week when they are in London. She sends presents for my children for Christmas and their birthdays. And when Christopher mismanages his allowance, she is the one who compels him to adopt austerity measures,” said Claudia. “I think you should call on her. What's the harm? She is staying at the—”
He set a finger over her lips. “Remember what you said? I'll find out for myself, if I'm curious.”
Later that night his good sense turned to ash, much like the Cuban cigars he smoked with Pedar. He managed a splendid silence during the ride to Mrs. Allen's hotel. He managed to walk away from Claudia's carriage when he arrived there. He almost managed to enter the hotel, its doors already held open by two respectful doormen. It defeated him then, this absurd inquisitiveness concerning his wife's presence.
He had Claudia's carriage stopped, on the pretext of an errant cuff link. While conducting the make-believe search, he found out obliquely from the coachman to which hotel Claudia and Pedar had gone for dinner. And then, instead of calling on Mrs. Allen—a young, wealthy, attractive widow from Philadelphia who'd been strongly hinting all throughout the Atlantic crossing that they should repair somewhere private posthaste—he took himself across town to his wife's hotel.
He was assured that she was indeed alone, attended by an entourage that consisted of precisely one maid. That the only guests she'd received were Claudia and Pedar.
The driving question behind his restiveness answered, he should have been satisfied. Yet he found himself speaking to the hotel clerk of kroner, as in how many kroner the clerk stood to gain if he'd discreetly pass along information of interest concerning Lady Tremaine. Setting up clandestine arrangements to spy on her, to put it bluntly.
It was not difficult to discover her itinerary, as she relied on the hotel to supply her with transport. The very next morning he began receiving reports of her comings and goings. Within a few days he knew what she ate for breakfast, which monuments she'd visited, at what hour she took her evening bath, even where she'd stopped to buy some embroidered linen tablecloths.
Yet the more he knew, the more he had to know. How did she look? Had the years been kind to her? Was she the same woman he'd left behind? Or had she changed into someone unrecognizable?
He broke an engagement to dine with Mrs. Allen when he learned that Gigi would make an evening visit to Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen's premier amusement park. He had enough control left to not go anywhere near her during the day. But perhaps, just perhaps, he could catch a glimpse of her at night and still remain in the shadows.
He walked the acres of Tivoli Gardens until he thought he must already be in his dotage. At last he spotted her on the grand carousel. She was laughing, holding on to the gilded post of her wooden horse for dear life, her long white skirts streaming with the rotation of the carousel and the summer breeze off the sea.
She looked well. Better than well. Delighted.
In the bright orange glow of the park's artificial lights, she was something out of an old Norse fairy tale, elemental, dangerous, and downright crackling with sensual energy. More than a few men in the crowd stared at her, eyes round, mouths half open.
He gazed at her until he could no longer stand the asphyxiation in his chest. He didn't know what he'd been thinking. Somehow he had thought—had hoped, in the baser chambers of his heart—that she might appear wan and wretched beneath an impassive facade. That she yet pined for him. That she was still in love with him, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This woman did not need him.
He turned and walked away. He stopped the reports and the lunacy. He tried to forget that he'd gawked at her like a hungry mutt with its front paws upon the windowsill of a delicatessen. He made up to Mrs. Allen for his neglect and inattentiveness.
And then came the encounter on the canal.
Mrs. Allen looked very fetching in her peach-and-cream Worth gown. The scenery behind her, however, held its own. The houses that lined the canal were painted in unabashedly spirited colors, the hues of a fashionable Englishwoman's wardrobe: rose, yellow, dove gray, powder blue, russet, and puce. As the sun approached its zenith, the canal glittered, ripples of silver beneath the boats that plied the waterways.
“Oh, my goodness gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Allen, latching on to his elbow. “You must look at that!”
He turned away from the storefront display of model ships he'd been perusing and looked in the direction she pointed.
“That open window on the second story. Can you see the man and the woman inside?” Mrs. Allen giggled.
Obligingly, he scanned the windows on the opposite bank, until he felt the weight of someone's gaze on him.
Gigi!
She sat at the bow of a pleasure craft a stone's throw away, under the shade of a white parasol, a diligent tourist out to reap all the beauty and charm Copenhagen had to offer. She studied him with a distressed concentration, as if she couldn't quite remember who he was. As if she didn't want to.
He looked different. His hair reached down to his nape, and he'd sported a full beard for the past two years.
Their eyes met. She bolted upright from the chair. The parasol fell from her hand, clanking against the deck. She stared at him, her face pale, her gaze haunted. He'd never seen her like this, not even on the day he left her. She was stunned, her composure flayed, her vulnerability visible for miles.
As her boat glided past him, she picked up her skirts and ran along the port rail, her eyes never leaving his. She stumbled over a line in her path and fell hard. His heart clenched in alarm, but she barely noticed, scrambling to her feet. She kept running until she was at the stern and could not move another inch closer to him.
Mrs. Allen chose that moment to link her arm through his and lay her head against his upper arm, rubbing her cheek against his sleeve like a well-scratched kitty.
“I'm famished,” said Mrs. Allen. “Won't you take me to a restaurant that serves cold buffet?”
“Of course,” he said dumbly.
Gigi didn't move from her rigid pose at the rail, but she suddenly looked worn down, as if she'd been standing there, in that same spot, for all the eighteen hundred and some days since she'd last seen him.
She still loved him. The thought echoed wildly in his head, making him hot and dizzy. She still loved him.
All at once, he could not even recall what had been her trespass against him. He knew only, with absolute certainty, that he had been the world's premier ass for the past half decade. And all he wanted was everything he'd sworn would never tempt him again.
He sleepwalked through lunch and rushed Mrs. Allen back to her hotel for her afternoon beauty nap, turning down her invitation to join her as if she exhibited symptoms of the bubonic plague. He raced about Copenhagen, to the barber's, the jeweler's, then back to Claudia's house for his best day coat.
He walked into his wife's hotel with a freshly shaven jaw and a wilting bunch of hydrangea bought from an elderly flower vendor about to go home for the day. He felt as nervous and stupid as a pig living next door to a butcher. Standing before the hotel clerk, he had to clear his throat twice before he could get his question out.
“Is . . . is Lady Tremaine here?”
“No, sir, I'm sorry,” said the clerk. “Lady Tremaine just left.”
“I see. When is she expected to return?” He would wait right here. He would never go anywhere again without her.
“I'm sorry, sir,” said the clerk. “Lady Tremaine is no longer with us. She vacated her suite and departed for the harbor. I believe she was trying to board the Margrethe, leaving at two o'clock.”
It was five minutes past two o'clock.
He raced out of the hotel, flagged down the first carriage for hire, and promised the cabbie the entire contents of his wallet if the cab but reached the harbor before the Margrethe left. But when he arrived, all he could see of the Margrethe was three columns of smoke in the distance.
He gave the cabbie double the usual fare anyway and stared at the horizon. He could not believe it. Could not believe that all his hopes of a future together would come to aught, so swiftly and pitilessly.
For the first time in his life, he felt lost, hopelessly rudderless. He could follow her to England, he supposed. But being in England would crush them with all the weight of their infelicitous history. Would remind him incessantly of why he'd left her in the first place. In England neither of them could be spontaneous. Or forgiving.
Perhaps it just wasn't meant to be.
It took hours, but in the end he convinced himself that his guardian angel must have toiled on his behalf. Imagine if she had actually been there. Imagine if he had actually thrown all caution to the wind. Imagine if he had actually gone back to her, a woman he could never again trust.
He told himself he could not imagine any such thing. He really couldn't. Not a sensible man like him. His fingers closed over the velvet box that contained the diamond-and-ruby necklace he'd bought, all fire and sparkling beguilement, like her. Mrs. Allen would have one hell of a parting gift from him.
The blue hydrangea he threw into a canal, watching the bouquet drift in the water until it disintegrated. Who'd have believed that after all these years, she still possessed the power to shatter him without even once touching him?
Chapter Twenty-one
31 May 1893
Gigi wished she could better predict this man who was her husband.
She'd been infinitely certain that he'd demand lovemaking in the confines of her private coach on the way to Devon—so certain, in fact, that she'd taken precautions. And suffered erratic heartbeats from the moment they left the house together.
He, on the other hand, began working on the designs of some mechanical contraption before the train even departed Paddington Station, leaving her with little to do other than watch the world hurtle by at sixty miles an hour, feeling entirely daft.
And self-conscious. And a little light-headed.
He'd paid her a compliment, an unadulterated compliment, on something that genuinely mattered to her. She felt like a green debutante at her first ball after an unexpected dance with the most extraordinary, notorious rake of them all: She knew perfectly well that the fizzy warmth in her was unreciprocated, unwise, and uncalled for, but there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it.
He wrote in a quick, slanted hand, unraveling reams of equations that would look to the uninitiated as incomprehensible as the hieroglyphs before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Even she, having been extensively tutored in higher mathematics and mechanics—so that she wouldn't be hampered by ignorance when dealing with her own engineers—could understand only parts of it, looking at the numbers and symbols upside down.
She deciphered that he was working on something about the heating and exchanging of gases. When his calculations moved on to angular momentum, she further deduced that he was refining the design for an internal combustion engine.
She had her doubts about the automobile. Certainly it was wonderful and novel and—nowadays—feasible. But who other than the most adventurous and the most wealthy would want to own and operate one, when carriages were so much simpler and more convenient in town and trains a great deal faster and more reliable over long distances? At least one's horses were not likely to die three times going from London to Brighton.
But she was curious enough to have paid a visit to Herr Benz in Mannheim the previous summer and was about to negotiate a license to build Benz engines in her own factory. The internal abacus she'd inherited from her Rowland ancestors swiftly calculated the savings she'd realize if she could use Camden's design—if it worked.
And if he were truly her husband.
“What's the matter with your engine?”
“It can't expel exhaust gases fast enough when its rotational speed exceeds one hundred revolutions per minute,” he said, without looking up. Without expressing any surprise at her familiarity with subjects outside the grasp of the overwhelming majority of women— and men, for that matter.
But then, he knew all about the Honorable Mr. Williams, who'd been her tutor before he became her lover.
The partial vacuum created by the exodus of exhaust gas drew fresh air and fuel into the cylinder. The expanding gas created from the ignition of the air-and-fuel mixture powered the engine, but residual exhaust gases that were not expelled would reduce its efficiency.
“You should begin the expelling cycle at an earlier point in the crankshaft's rotation,” she said. “That would sacrifice a bit of power but improve your efficiency.”
“Correct.”
“The trouble comes in determining at which precise point, doesn't it?” she said. Her engineers had agonized over the voltage of the third rail they had designed for London's new underground tubes.
“Always,” he answered. “The design can be refined only to a certain point. I've narrowed it down to two possibilities and determined their angles to within one point two degrees. Now my engineers in New York will modify the engine and test it.”
“Good thing you won't get your hands dirty.”
“But getting my hands dirty is half the fun. I always build my own designs. I can build anything.” He glanced at her and smiled. Her heart thudded to a stop. The sun really did shine brighter when he smiled. “Would you like to be the first English lady to rumble down Rotten Row in a horseless carriage?”
She smiled despite herself. That fizzy warmth—half effervescent elation, half heedlessness—spread unabated within her. “I know you really can build anything. I know your little secret.”
He was puzzled. “Secret?”
“Claudia's gown that she wore to her first ball.”
“Ah that,” he said, relaxing. “That's not my secret so much as hers. She was rather mortified, if I remember correctly, that other people had ball gowns made by Monsieur Worth, while hers was cobbled together by her brother.”
“So modest.”
“When I say cobbled, I mean cobbled. I had no idea how to manufacture the kind of neckline she wanted without the bodice falling off her. So I took apart one of my mother's mesh bustles and wired the entire décolletage. She was terrified during the ball that the gown would either kill her or poke some handsome swain in the chest.”
“She showed it to me when she came to England in 1890,” said Gigi. “I couldn't believe that you made it until she swore it on the lives of all her children.”
“It was my first and last foray into haute couture,” he said dryly. “I was nineteen and thought there was nothing I couldn't do. When Claudia wept for hours on end because there was no room in the budget for a new gown for her first ball, I thought, how hard could it be? After all, couture was just the softer side of engineering, and I'd cut and sewn plenty of sails for my model ships.”
“She said you were a wizard.”
“Claudia has rose-colored hindsight. I never knew what panic was until the ball was two days away and I still hadn't figured out how ten yards of skirts should gather and drape under the bustle. All the non-Euclidean geometry in the world couldn't have dug me out of that hole.”
She thought of the gown, lovingly packed in layers of tissue, kept in Claudia's old chamber at Twelve Pillars. I have the best brother in the world, Claudia had said that day, a not-so-subtle reminder that Gigi should get on a transatlantic liner posthaste.
“You did all right in the end.”
“I wired the skirt too,” he said.
They both burst out laughing. The corners of his eyes crinkled in mirth, laugh lines that she'd never seen before—lines that had come from the sun and the salt of the sea, marks of a man in his prime.
He stopped and looked at her. “Your laughter is the same,” he said. “I used to think you all sophisticated and worldly, until you laughed. You still laugh like a little girl getting tickled, all hiccupy and breathless.”
What did one say to something like that? If he were anyone else, she'd consider it a declaration, not necessarily of love but of great fondness. What was she to make of it when it did come from him?
He quickly changed subjects. “Before I forget, I've never thanked you for keeping Christopher in line, have I?”
Christopher had gotten himself into a few scrapes over the years. Nothing terribly alarming—no illegitimate children, ruinous debts, or criminal friends—but his parents worried and wrung their hands. After Saint Camden and Mostly Sensible Claudia, Their Graces were ill equipped to deal with a more temperamental offspring. So Gigi had stepped in dutifully, extricated Christopher from potentially harmful situations, unleashed stern lectures Their Graces were too softhearted to deliver, and ruthlessly choked off his allowance whenever he deserved it.
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