Private Arrangements (21 page)

Camden left within minutes for the scenic ride down to Torquay that Mrs. Rowland had apparently promised him. Gigi had felt uncomfortable with him in the room, with her mother's sharp eyes assessing their every interaction, as if all their recent dealings could be deduced from a “Would you please pass the creamer?” But without his presence as a buffer, the awkwardness between the two women immediately came to the fore, as strong and unmistakable as the scent of vinegar.

“I visited Papa's grave last Friday,” said Mrs. Rowland, after nearly three minutes of unrelieved silence.

Gigi was surprised. They didn't speak of John Rowland very often. Grief was a private matter. “I saw your flowers when I went on Sunday.” John Rowland would have turned sixty-eight on Sunday had he survived the typhoid fever that took him at age forty-nine. “He always did like camellias.”

“Because you gave him a handful from the garden when you were three. He adored you,” said Mrs. Rowland.

“He adored you too.”

Her father had taken her along whenever he shopped for a present for his wife. Nothing was ever too good for his beautiful missus. He loved big, showy things—perhaps the reason behind her own flamboyant taste in jewelry, though she rarely wore any—but in the end he bought only cameos and modest pearls, because he didn't want his wife to have to wear anything she'd consider garish.

“We were married ten years and five months when he passed away.” Mrs. Rowland took a small cream cake, set it before her, and cut it into perfect quarters. “You'll be married ten years and five months in a fortnight. Life is uncertain, Gigi. Don't throw away your second chance with Tremaine.”

“I would rather we not speak of him.”

“I would rather we do,” said Mrs. Rowland firmly. “If you believe that I have schemed only because Tremaine is in line for a dukedom, then you are greatly mistaken. Do you think I never came upon the two of you together in the sitting parlor at Briarmeadow, holding hands and whispering? I'd never seen you so alive and happy, before or after. And I'd never seen
him
that way, completely without his reserve, for once acting his age, when he'd always carried the burden of the world on his shoulders.”

“That was a long time ago, Mother.”

“Not long enough for me to have forgotten. Or you. Or him.”

Gigi took a deep breath and finished her tea. It was already cold, and too sweet—because Camden's un-gloved hand had brushed hers when he passed the sucretière, and she didn't know two from four in the minute afterward. “What good does it do any of us to remember? I loved him then, I would not deny it. And perhaps he loved me too. But that is all in the past. He no longer loves me and I no longer love him. And if there are second chances going around, no one has offered me any, least of all Camden.”

“Don't you see?” cried Mrs. Rowland, exasperated, setting down her teacup with an uncharacteristic
thud.
A glob of milky brown liquid sloshed over the rim of the cup and spread into an astonishingly perfect circular stain on the embroidered tablecloth that Gigi had purchased during her ill-fated visit to Copenhagen. “That he is here in England, living in your house, being civil to you, persuading you to come with him to see me—all this, does it not mean anything to you? Does it have to be stated in so many words or carved on a stone tablet, for heaven's sake?”

Was it not enough that she had to struggle with it by herself? She did not need to hear it spelled out item by item by her mother, as if she were a dimwit chit from some Oscar Wilde play.

“Mother, you forget why he is here in the first place,” she said coolly. “We are divorcing. I have pledged my hand to Lord Frederick.”

Mrs. Rowland rose abruptly. “I will rest for a short while. It would not do for me to appear haggard before His Grace. But if you think that you love Lord Frederick a fraction as much as you love—not loved, but love—Tremaine, then you are a greater fool than any Shakespeare ever wrote.”

Gigi remained in the parlor long after Mrs. Rowland had swept out, trailing a faint wake of rose attar behind her. Slowly, absently, she finished the cream cake Mrs. Rowland had left behind, as well as the two small jam tarts that still remained on the three-tiered platter.

If only she could be certain that her mother was dead wrong.

Chapter Twenty-two

T
he duke, upon first glance, did not appear either a scholar or a reprobate—no book dust or buxom doxies clung to him. But he was certainly imposing as an aristocrat of the highest rank, with none of the golly-would-you-believe-my-good-luck mellowness that characterized the current Duke of Fairford, her father-in-law. No, this was a man born to lord over lesser beings and who'd done it authoritatively for the entirety of his adult life. A man who could cow half of society into hushed awe with his sheer ducalness.

Gigi was not immediately impressed. Despite an upbringing focused exclusively on becoming a duchess, she seemed to have inherited a democratic streak from her plebeian ancestors. “Good evening, Your Grace.”

“Lady Tremaine, you have decided to join us after all.” His corresponding wry amusement made it evident that he was not without a clue as to the purpose behind the dinner.

The surprise was her mother, who did
not
have a democratic bone in her body. Gigi would have expected some reverence on her part—and triumph that she'd finally maneuvered Gigi and the duke into the same room—but Mrs. Rowland's demeanor was rather one of grim determination, as if she were on a mission to Greenland, a grueling journey with nothing but barrenness at the end.

Equally intriguing was the duke's deportment toward Mrs. Rowland. A man such as he did not know how to be
nice.
He probably tolerated his friends and treated everyone else with condescension. Yet as he complimented Mrs. Rowland on her flower arrangements, he displayed a solicitude and a delicacy Gigi hadn't sensed in him before.

Camden arrived late, his hair still slightly damp from his bath. He'd returned from the seashore only thirty minutes ago.

“May I present my son-in-law, Lord Tremaine,” said Mrs. Rowland, in a rare bit of archness. “Lord Tremaine, His Grace the Duke of Perrin.”

“A pleasure, Your Grace,” said Camden. Despite his hurried toilette, he seemed more settled into the role of affable, oblivious host than anyone else. “I've had the pleasure of reading
Eleven Years Before Ilium,
a most illuminating work.”

The duke raised one black brow. “I had no idea my modest monographs could be found in America.”

“As to that, I wouldn't know either. I received a copy from my esteemed mother-in-law, when she was in London last.”

The duke turned his monocled gaze to Mrs. Rowland. He'd have resembled a
Punch
caricature if it weren't for his commanding presence and his sardonic self-awareness.

Mrs. Rowland shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then back again. Gigi's eyes widened. The men in the parlor might not understand the significance of that seemingly unremarkable motion. But Gigi knew that Mrs. Rowland
never
fidgeted. She could hold as still as a caryatid, and for about as long.

“My mother is a learned acolyte of the Blind Bard,” said Gigi. “You will find few women, or men for that matter, sir, more thoroughly knowledgeable concerning all things Homeric.”

This revelation startled the duke again, in a way that felt more complicated than simply a man's surprise that a woman would know something in his field of expertise. He inclined his head in Mrs. Rowland's direction. “My compliments, madam. You must tell me how you came to develop a passion for my arcane subjects.”

Mrs. Rowland's response was a high castle wall of a smile. Camden glanced Gigi's way. Apparently she wasn't the only one to have noticed something highly irregular.

Hollis announced that dinner awaited. Mrs. Rowland, with almost obvious relief, suggested that they pair off and proceed to the dining room.

For Victoria, about the only silver lining to the cumbersome evening was that the duke didn't immediately succumb to Gigi's charms.

She'd fretted about Gigi's looks throughout her daughter's girlhood, as the child stubbornly refused to blossom into the kind of flawless beauty Victoria had been but instead grew unfashionably tall, with wide shoulders and a challenging gaze that was Victoria's despair. Then, a few years ago, after Victoria at last realized she no longer needed to train her eyes on the girl's gown and coiffure for signs of imperfection, she noticed something quite confounding.

Men stared at Gigi. Some of them gawked. At balls and soirées, they had their eyes glued to her as she walked, talked, and occasionally—largely with indifference—glanced their way. When Victoria mentally distanced herself and studied her daughter as a stranger would, she was shocked to realize just how obscenely attractive Gigi might be to the masculine sex.

She had no words to describe the kind of primal allure Gigi exuded, an incandescent sensuality that surely didn't come from Victoria. It made Victoria feel old, past her prime, her vaunted beauty a distant second place to Gigi's youth, luminosity, and glamour.

Gigi looked as well as she ever did in a dinner gown of vermilion velvet, the skin of her throat and arms glowing in the lambent light like that of a Bouguereau nymph. The duke spoke to Gigi as he ought to, making the obligatory grunts concerning the relative proportion of precipitation to sunshine in recent days in both London and Devon. But unlike Gigi's husband, who glanced at her over his wineglass with every other forkful, Perrin kept most of his attention on the plate before him, gravely tasting the successive courses of
soupe
d'oseille, filet de sole à la Normandie,
and duck
à la Rouennaise.

“Allow me to compliment you, madam, on your chef,” the duke suddenly looked up and said. “The food is nowhere near as terrible as I expected.”

Victoria was absurdly pleased. Ever since the night when they'd gambled over chocolates and she'd practically told him to drag her upstairs and ravish her lonely old bones, she'd been on pins and needles.

She could repeat to herself only so many times that, in desperate embarrassment at being found out, she'd made up the whole thing on the spot. The only problem was that she was a terrible impromptu liar. Without hours and days of prior preparation, she either blurted out the truth or bungled so badly the odor of her mendacity could be scented a furlong away.

Had she told the inadvertent truth instead? Was this whole exercise in folly simply an opening for her to grab the duke by his lapels and make him take notice of her at long last? He hadn't entirely believed her, but he didn't disbelieve her enough. There was something about truth, the visceral ferocity of it, that seeped under and around incredulity, no mattter how well-founded and watertight.

“Thank you,” she said, “though I cannot return the compliment on your tact.”

“Tact is for others, madam.” As if to underscore his point, he glanced at Gigi and Camden and said, “Forgive the curiosity of a dotard who retired from Society many years ago, but is it commonplace nowadays for a couple about to divorce to be on such apparently friendly terms?”

“Quite so,” answered Camden, his tone as smooth and creamy as a dish of flan. He looked at Gigi. “Wouldn't you say, my dear?”

“Without a doubt,” said Gigi dryly. “We do loathe scenes, don't we, Tremaine?”

Even the duke was left momentarily speechless by this bravura performance. He moved on to a safer topic. “I understand you've quite the Midas touch, Lord Tremaine.”

“Hardly, sir. It's Lady Tremaine who has the head for business. I but try my best to reach financial parity with her.”

Victoria glanced at Gigi, hoping she'd heard the admiration in Camden's words. But the quick shadow of confusion in Gigi's eyes suggested that she heard something else instead.

“I'd always thought it otherwise,” said Victoria. “Lady Tremaine builds upon the success of her forefathers. But you started with nothing.”

“I wouldn't say so, madam. I'm no Horatio Alger, hero beloved of the American imagination,” replied Camden. “My first acquisitions were made with substantial loans obtained against Lady Tremaine's inheritance.”

Gigi choked on her wine. She coughed into her napkin as Hollis rushed to her side with a fresh napkin and a goblet of water. She took a long draft of water and promptly resumed her ingestion of the slices of duck on her plate.

Victoria took it upon herself to ask the question that Gigi didn't. “I had no idea. How were you able to do that?”

Camden, like his cousin before him, had signed a marriage contract that prohibited any direct access to Gigi's fortune. “I proved to them who I was and who she was. I had the marriage papers and the announcement from the
Times.
The Bank of New York decided quite on its own that my wife would come to my rescue should I be in danger of defaulting,” he said, his smile subtly feral.

Good grief. Dazzled by his polish and finesse, Victoria had never observed this brazen side to her son-in-law. She'd always thought the once-upon-a-time affection and friendship between the calculating heiress and the urbane marquess endearing but odd, as the two could not be more different one from the other. How she'd underestimated Camden by equating his burnish of faultless manners with a lack of inner ferocity.

The duke took an appreciative sip of his Burgundy, a fourteen-year-old Romanée-Conti. Victoria was rather shocked to see that he was smiling a little.

He was not classically handsome, his features more rough-hewn than refined, with unruly brows and a Mont Blanc of a nose—a face that lent itself easily to terrifying scowls. But his smile—a slight, underdeveloped one at that—was utterly transforming. It illuminated his fine chestnut-brown eyes, animated his lips, and melted his hauteur with surprising warmth and earthy machismo.

She did not use the word lightly—in fact, she'd never applied it to any living man—but he looked nigh on
irresistible.
Suddenly she saw why otherwise properly reared ladies fought over him like harpies.

“There are few things I loathe more than small country dinners,” he said. “But, madam, had you only informed me that such remarkable diversion lay in store for me, I would not have compelled you to provide additional entertainment.”

A moment of absolute silence. Victoria was too disoriented to feel embarrassed. She hadn't yet grasped that the focus of the conversation had abruptly shifted from the Tremaines to her dealings with the duke.

“Dear sir,” said Gigi wryly, “pray do tell.”

“Oh, Gigi, please, none of that unseemly interest,” Victoria huffed. “His Grace but requested that I play a few hands of cards with him, which I gladly obliged.”

“Sir,” Gigi addressed the duke, a sly smile on her face. “I've heard that you were a scoundrel. I see that you are at least a rascal.”

“Gigi!” Victoria cried, mortified.

But the duke seemed amused rather than offended. “I
was
a scoundrel in my youth, to put it kindly. As for my rascally demands, let's just say I could have stipulated a great deal more and still received compliance.”

Victoria felt her face flame a color as bright as Gigi's gown. Oh, how she hated to blush in public, so inelegant and infantile. Camden, bless him, was eating with gluttonous zest, as if he hadn't heard a word of the conversation in the last five minutes. Gigi, taking a cue from her husband, gave the remaining slice of duck breast on her plate another good poke. The duke, however, wasn't done.

“Young lady,” he addressed Gigi. “I hope you realize how fortunate you are, at your age, to still have a mother who would dance with the devil for you.”

It was Camden's turn to cough into his napkin, though in his case it sounded more like choked laughter than actual choking. The dinner, up to that point a parody, if a rather barbed one, was now a farce.

She'd known the dinner to be a bad idea for a while now, hadn't she, thought Victoria wildly. Why, oh, why hadn't she called it off? Why had she persisted as if the duke were Moby Dick and she the crazed Captain Ahab, who would either harpoon him or die trying?

Gigi was not one to take lectures sitting down. “Sir, I hope you realize that, while I am eminently grateful, I have also reminded my mother, pointedly, that no dancing with the devil is necessary on my behalf. I already have the affection and the fealty of a good man. My future happiness after my divorce is already assured.”

The duke sighed exaggeratedly. “Lady Tremaine, I do not profess to know the marvelous qualities of this other man. But why wage—and waste—a divorce when it's more than evident to me that you and your husband haven't even tired of each other yet?”

Having silenced Gigi and strangled Camden's mirth, His Grace turned to Victoria and smiled again, a full smile this time. She nearly melted into her chair, leaving nothing behind but a whalebone corset and an assemblage of skirts.

“Madam”—he raised his glass in a toast—“this is the most sublime Burgundy it has ever been my privilege to enjoy. You may be assured of my everlasting gratitude.”