Private Arrangements (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

5 June 1893

N
o, no, it won't do. Get me the green one instead,” said Langford. He unbuttoned the claret-colored waistcoat—the third he'd rejected—and handed it back to his valet.

A scowling, middle-aged man stared back at him in the mirror. He'd never been exactly handsome, but in his prime he'd been quite something to behold, always impeccably coiffed and garbed, always with the most desirable women of the upper echelon draped over his arms.

Fifteen years in the country and suddenly he was a bumpkin. His clothes were a decade out of fashion. He'd forgotten how to pomade his hair. And he was fairly certain that he no longer remembered how to seduce a woman. Seduction was a matter of mind. A man one hundred percent certain of himself had women eating out of his hand. A man eighty percent certain of himself had only pigeons eating out of his hand.

And this eighty percent man, for reasons listed only on the devil's tail, had invited Mrs. Rowland to tea— tea!—as if he were some fluttery little old lady looking forward to a bit of crumpet and gossip.

Or, worse, as if he were some sentimental sap seeking to turn back the clock thirty years.

His valet returned with a deep-green waistcoat, the color of a densely wooded valley. Langford shrugged into it, determined to stick with this particular selection whether he looked a prince or a frog. He looked neither, just a perturbed, confounded, and slightly apprehensive man who hadn't exactly let himself go nor exactly kept himself up.

It would have to do, he supposed.

Her landau pulled up before the manor at Ludlow Court at exactly two minutes past five. Beneath her lace parasol, she looked as dainty and prim as the queen's own teacup. Her choice of attire—an afternoon gown of pearl and pale blue—pleased him. He liked the creams and pastels that predominated her wardrobe, colors of an eternal spring, though had someone asked him during his man-about-town days, he'd have decreed such hues much too pedestrian.

He welcomed her himself, presenting his ungloved hand for her support as she alit from the carriage. She was both pleased and somewhat nonplussed—good, that made two of them.

“I called on you a few weeks ago, Your Grace,” she said, half coyly, half challengingly. “You were not home.”

They both knew he'd been home. But only he knew that he'd watched her from the window of an upper floor, in a mixture of exasperation and fascination. “Shall we to tea?” he said, offering his arm.

By ducal standards, Ludlow Court was more than modest, it was downright humble. A long time ago, in his twenties, Langford had been invited to Blenheim Palace. As his carriage approached that great edifice from a distance, he'd been consumed by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy: Compared to the colossus that was the Marlboroughs' ancestral estate, his own seat seemed merely a glorified vicar's cottage.

Blenheim Palace's facade of grandeur, however, quickly proved just that, a facade, or, to be more precise, an illusion. For as his conveyance drew near to the house, the facade itself turned out to be in a state of advanced ill-repair. Inside the great mansion, the curtains were molded and full of holes, the walls dark from badly maintained flues, and the ceiling water-stained in practically every room—this after the family had sold the famed Marlborough gems to help matters. A few years after his visit, the seventh duke had had to petition parliament to break entail so that the whole contents of the house could be auctioned off to defray family debts.

In contrast, the manor at Ludlow Court was a jewel box, a diminutive but perfect example of Palladian architecture with lucid, elegant lines, beautiful proportions, and an interior that Langford had been able to maintain—and occasionally update—with relative ease.

But as he passed through the anteroom and the grand entrance, with Mrs. Rowland's hand barely touching his arm, he wondered what she thought of it. Her current residence might be little larger than a hunting lodge, but he understood that she'd previously lived in a much grander place, one larger than his own and likely more modern and more lavishly furnished, given her late husband's fortune.

“You have rebuilt the terrace,” said Mrs. Rowland, almost as soon as they entered the south drawing room. One side of the room overlooked the terraced slope at the rear of the house, leading down to the spread of formal, geometric gardens and the small lake beyond. “Her Grace used to fret about it.”

“Did she?” Yet something else he didn't know about his own mother.

“Yes, rather. But she chose not to repair it so as not to disturb your father in his illness,” Mrs. Rowland said. “She was a very good woman.”

That, he'd realized only too late. In his proud adolescent years, he'd secretly thought his mother too frumpy and countrified, possessing none of the regality and glamour befitting the consort of a prince of the realm. Her anxious love he'd borne as if it were a millstone about his neck, little suspecting that he'd be adrift without it.

“She never said anything to me about it. And I fear I was too obtuse and self-occupied to guess it of her. I had it repaired only when I began giving weekend parties here.”

“It is very pretty,” she said, gazing out the window at the exuberant apricot-gold roses blooming along the balustrade. There were roses on her wide-brimmed hat, roses confected from ribbons of pale blue grosgrain. “She would have liked it.”

“Would you prefer to take tea on the terrace instead?” he asked impulsively. “It is a beautiful day without.”

“Yes, I would, thank you,” she said, smiling a little.

He ordered a tea table set up outside under an extended awning, with a white tablecloth and a few cuttings of the roses she was just admiring set in a crystal vase.

“I think it's high time I apologized,” she said, as they settled into their seats, side by side on a wide angle so that they each enjoyed an uninterrupted view of his gardens.

“That is hardly necessary. I thoroughly enjoyed myself at the dinner and found both the food and the company fascinating.”

“I don't doubt that.” She laughed, rather self-consciously. “For theater you couldn't do much better. But I wish to apologize for my entire scheme, from the very beginning, when I sent away all my servants and stranded my kitten in a tree so that I could demand your assistance.”

He smiled. “I assure you I did not participate in your scheme as an unwitting dupe. I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to be your temporary and rather churlish Sir Galahad.”

She colored. “That much I've surmised, believe me, from later events. But it still behooves me to apologize for my original deceit.”

Tea arrived amid much pomp and ceremony. Mrs. Rowland took both sugar and cream, the little finger of her right hand held just slightly extended, a delicate curl like a petal of oriental chrysanthemum.

“As much as I approve of your acknowledgment concerning this ‘original deceit,' it's your subsequent tale that concerns me more,” he said, ignoring his tea and watching her stir hers with a languid, creamy daintiness. “Would you apologize for that too?”

“Only if it were a blatant fabrication.”

In his distraction he took a sip of tea. He still disliked it. “Do you mean to tell me it wasn't a blatant fabrication?”

She went on stirring her tea. “After much thoughtful reflection, I've decided that I don't know anymore.”

He cursed his curiosity. And his lack of tact. A more circumspect man would not have asked the question and would not have to deal with the wide-open vista of her answer.

“Perhaps you could help me decide,” she said. “I'd like to know you better.”

I'm not a young woman anymore. So I've decided against a young woman's wiles in favor of a more direct approach.
That, at least, was no fabrication. “What would you like to know?”

“Many things. But, most pressingly, how and why did you come to be the person you are today? I find it an intriguing mystery.”

His heart thudded. “No mystery there. I almost died.”

But she wasn't so easily satisfied. “My daughter almost died at age sixteen. That experience only made her more of what she already was, not a different person altogether—which you, by all accounts, have become.”

She raised her teacup and let it hover just below her lips, her wrist as steady as the pound sterling. “My instincts tell me that I cannot understand you until I know the story behind your transformation. And that your story is more than a man's brush with death. Am I wrong?”

He considered a variety of answers and rejected them all. Having enjoyed the privilege of bluntness his entire life, he was ill-suited to suddenly take up prevarication.

“No,” he said.

The teacup continued to linger in the vicinity of her chin, a shield almost, a disguise too, to hide her dangerous perspicacity behind a bit of glazed fine bone china painted with ivy and roses. “If I may be so forward, was there a woman?”

He didn't
need
to answer her question. But then, he didn't need to invite her to tea either. He didn't know his plans any more than she did hers, possibly a lot less.

“Yes, there was a woman,” he answered. “And a man.”

Her features froze in momentary shock. Carefully, she set down her teacup. Presumably the stability of her wrist was no match for the excitement of her rather salacious imagination.

“Goodness gracious,” she mumbled.

He laughed a little, with rue. “Would that it were that kind of uncomplicated sordidness.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You have probably heard about the hunting incident. I was shot, bled profusely, was put into surgery for six hours, and barely survived,” he said. “But you are right. That in itself had no more life-changing effect on me than a hangover or a bad case of indigestion.”

A week after Langford was out of danger, Francis Elliot, the man who'd shot him, came to see him. Elliot had been a classmate at Eton, the one whose house in the next county Langford had frequently visited when he was home on holiday. Over the years, their once-close friendship had gradually cooled, and they saw relatively little of each other, Langford living fast and footloose, Elliot settling down to be the staid, responsible, unimaginative landowner in the mold of his forefathers.

That particular morning, Langford, highly peevish from both pain and ennui, had lambasted Elliot on his shoddy marksmanship and slandered his manhood in general. Elliot held his tongue until Langford ran out of pejoratives—no easy feat, as Langford, trained to be a man of letters, possessed a near-infinite supply of belittling words.

Then, for the first time in his life, Langford heard Elliot shout.

“It turned out that the man who shot me did so deliberately, though he hadn't meant to almost kill me. That was the result of nerves and bad aim—because I'd seduced his wife.”

Mrs. Rowland had lifted a cucumber sandwich. She went still. He'd shocked her without even getting to the worst part of it.

“I had no idea what he was talking about. I'd never met his wife as far as I was concerned, until I remembered, very vaguely, an encounter at a masked ball given by another friend of mine six months previously. There'd been a woman, a young matron with a forlorn air about her.

“What had been an evening's diversion for me, nothing more, had precipitated a domestic crisis for my friend. He loved his wife. They were going through a difficult phase, but he loved her. Loved her deeply, passionately, if also awkwardly and inarticulately.”

At first, Elliot's tale invoked in Langford nothing but contempt. He would never let a woman, any woman, matter half so much to him. Any man who did so had only himself to blame for such an idiotic attachment.

Then, after his initial outburst, Elliot did something startling: He apologized. Through gritted teeth, he apologized for everything—for his lack of character, his lapse of judgment, for taking his despair out on Langford when it was his own fault that his wife was unhappy in the first place.

Langford, still irked, accepted his apologies with no pretension of graciousness. But after Elliot's departure, he couldn't get the man out of his head, couldn't stop seeing the expression on Elliot's face as he apologized, an expression that held only self-reproach and a determination to do the right thing despite the avalanche of scorn he was sure to trigger.

With this unconditional apology, Elliot had proved himself, despite his earlier action, to be a man of fortitude, conscience, and decency—everything Langford scorned and despised as too plebeian for his exalted self.

“I didn't want to change or be changed,” said Langford. “The way I'd lived was a highly pleasurable, highly addictive way to live. I was loath to give it up. But the damage was done. I was shaken. In the subsequent days of my convalescence, I began to question everything I'd taken for granted about my choices in life. How many others had I hurt in my mindless quest for amusement? What worthy use, if any, had I made of my talents and my vast good fortune? And what would my poor mother have thought of it all?”

Mrs. Rowland listened with grave concentration, her eyes never leaving his. “What happened to your friend and his wife?”

It was a question that still plagued him in the dark of the night. From what he'd learned, they seemed to be fine, with no reports of shameful squabbles or unseemly fondness for the bottle. “I understand they have produced three children together. The eldest came along about a year after he shot me.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” she said.

“But that doesn't really tell us anything in and of itself, does it?” A man and his wife could very well procreate in mutual abhorrence. He wanted to picture for himself a family in harmony, but his mind would only paint images of silent, frightened children walking on eggshells around parents locked into a hideous bitterness. A bitterness for which Langford was responsible.