Private Arrangements (3 page)

Chapter Three

9 May 1893

V
ictoria 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.”

Her expression was a pained sneer. “Of course. You prefer your vengeance grand and spectacular.”

“As you like,” he said, bending to step into his linen. The bulk of the bed stood between them, the top of the mattress as high as his waist. But this act of dressing was nevertheless a display of power on his part. “Now what's this urgent business of yours that can't wait until I'm dressed?”

“I apologize for barging in on you,” she said stiffly. “I'll see myself out and wait for you in the library.”

“Don't bother, since you are already here.” He pulled on his trousers. “What do you wish to speak to me about?”

She'd always been quick on her feet. “Very well, then. I have given some thought to your conditions. I find them both too vague and too open-ended.”

So he'd gathered. She was hardly the type to let anyone walk over her. In fact, she preferred to be the one doing the walking over. He was only surprised that she hadn't come earlier with her objections.

“Enlighten me.” He tossed the towel on a chair by the window, untied his dressing gown, and dropped it on the bed.

Their eyes met. Or rather, he looked at her in the eyes and she looked at his bare torso. As if he needed any more reminders of the naughty, cheeky young girl who used to send her fingers out on feats of alpinism up his thighs.

Now their gazes met. She blushed. But she recovered quickly. “Heir-producing is an uncertain business,” she said, her tone brisk. “I assume you want male issue.”

“I do.” He pulled on his shirt, tucked in the bottom, and began to fasten the trouser buttons at his right hip, adjusting his parts slightly to ease the discomfort caused by his reaction to her.

Her gaze was now somewhere to his right. The bedpost, probably. “My mother never managed one in ten years of marriage. Besides, there is always the possibility that one of us, or both, could be barren.”

Liar.
He chose not to call her on it. “And your point is?”

“I need an end in sight, for myself and for Lord Frederick, who should not be asked to wait forever.”

What had Mrs. Rowland said in her irate letter to him?
Lord Frederick, I will cede, is very amiable. But he has all the brains of a boiled pudding, and all the grace of an aged duck. I cannot fathom, for the life of me, what Gigi sees in him.
Camden snapped his braces over his shoulders. For once, Mrs. Rowland's shrewdness failed her. How many men were to be readily found in England who'd faithfully stand beside a woman in the midst of a divorce?

“. . . six months from today,” his wife was saying. “If by the beginning of November I still have not conceived, we proceed to the divorce. If I have, we will wait 'til I give birth.”

He could not envisage an actual child, not even a pregnancy. His thoughts stopped at the edge of a bed and went no further. Part of him revolted at the very idea of any sort of intimacy with her, even the most impersonal kind.

And then there were other parts of him.

“Well?” she demanded.

He collected himself. “What if you present me with a female child?”

“That is something I cannot help.”

Was it?

“I can see merits to the concept of limits, but I cannot agree to your particulars,” he said. “Six months is too short a time to guarantee anything. One year. And if it's a girl, one more attempt.”

“Nine months.”

He held all the trumps in this game. It was time she realized that. “I did not come to haggle, Lady Tremaine. I am indulging you. A year or there is no deal.”

Her chin tilted up. “A year from today?”

“A year from when we start.”

“And when is that going to be, O Lord and Master?”

He laughed softly at her acerbic tone. In this she had not changed. She would go down fighting. “Patience, Gigi, patience. You'll get what you want in the end.”

“And you would do well to remember that,” she said, with all the haughty poise of Queen Elizabeth just after the sinking of the Spanish Armada. “I bid you a good day.”

His gaze followed her retreating back, her efficient gait, and the dashing sway of her skirts. No one would know, by looking at her, that she just had her head handed to her on a platter, surrounded by her entrails.

Suddenly he was reminded that he had once liked her.

Too much.

Chapter Four