Read Private Arrangements Online
Authors: Sherry Thomas
Tags: #England - Social Life and Customs - 19th Century, #Man-Woman Relationships, #General, #Romance, #Marriage, #Historical, #Fiction, #Love Stories
Private Arrangements (8 page)
“And what would you have chosen?”
“Engineering,” he answered easily. “I study mechanics at the Polytechnique.”
“Your parents said something about physics or economics.”
“My parents are still in denial. They think mechanics sounds too common, too much grease and smoke and soot.”
“But why engineering?” Her father had worked with dozens of engineers. They were an earnest and rather single-minded tribe, seemingly having nothing at all in common with the elegant marquess beside her.
“I like to build things. To work with my hands.”
She shook her head. Hands. The future duke liked manual labor. “Well, don't tell anyone else what you've told me,” she cautioned. “They wouldn't understand at all.”
“I don't. I only told you because you spend as much time with your accountants and solicitors as you do your dressmaker. You are pushing to define a new normality as surely as I am.”
She'd never thought of herself quite that way. She was more an idiosyncratic ignorer of established boundaries than a glutton for the new and the uncharted. But perhaps they were one and the same, each one implying the other.
She looked at him, at his calm, unhurried progress, his gloved hand holding on securely to the horse's tether. His other hand he extended to the lower branches of the Old Willow, brushing their supple tips.
“I—” she began, and did not finish.
The Old Willow.
They were going by the Old Willow. Which was at least a furlong away from the hitching post. She couldn't believe it. Yet as she glanced back, the hitching post in the distance was the size of a matchstick.
“Yes?” he prompted her, keeping up their stately pace.
She looked back one more time to make certain her eyes hadn't cheated her. There was no mistake. She'd come some two hundred yards, her nausea having dissipated somewhere along the way, her hands no longer gripping the reins but holding them loosely, almost casually.
Somehow, in animated conversation with him, the impossible had happened. She'd forgotten her fear and her body had relaxed into a comforting, familiar rhythm.
“We've done more than fifty yards, I think,” she murmured.
He looked behind. “So we have.”
“You knew we'd gone past fifty yards long ago, didn't you?”
He didn't answer her directly. “Would you like me to help you dismount?”
Would she? Suddenly she felt dizzy again, not with fear but with the exhilarating absence of it, the way simple robust health felt a blessing and a miracle after a long, painful illness. No, she didn't want to dismount. She wanted to ride, to hurtle along in a mad dash.
He stepped back. “Go ahead,” he said.
So she did. It felt wonderful, the sensation as new as the first shoots of spring, as weightless as walking on water. She gave in to the moment, to the euphoria of once again being young and fearless. The horse, as if sensing her elation, flew.
If she could distill the sensations that flooded her—the headlong rush, the metrical, earthy hoofbeats pounding away beneath her, the dense evergreen woods tearing by at the periphery of her vision, and the cold wind that was utterly powerless before the fire of her exuberance—she would have the essence of joy.
She heard herself laugh, all breathless, incredulous delight. She urged the horse to even greater speed, feeling its strength and spirit radiate into her every organ and sinew.
Only as the horse sped up the next incline did she rein it to a stop, then turned it around. Lord Tremaine was there in the distance. He set his thumb and forefinger against his teeth and whistled, a piercing note of conspiratorial celebration. She grinned, feeling her mirth spread from ear to ear, and answered his call, galloping back toward him as if she were a medieval knight at tournament and he her striking post.
He ran toward her, as light-footed and swift as a creature of the African savannah, and reached her just as she slowed. She unhooked her feet from the stirrups and threw herself into his waiting arms. He easily took the impact of her momentum and weight, lifting her high in the air and spinning her around.
“I did it!” she yelled, unladylike and thrilled.
“You did it!” he cried at almost the exact same moment.
They grinned hugely at each other. He set her down but left his hands around her waist. She happily let her hands remain on his shoulders. “I couldn't have done it without you.”
“Don't encourage me, I'm not so modest to begin with.”
She laughed. “Excellent. I hate modesty with a passion.”
And loved him to distraction. He had done it. He had cajoled and wheedled and lured her out of her self-imposed exile from all things equestrian and restored a treasured joy to her life.
Her hands crept toward his collar, and then, before she knew it, she was cradling his face in her palms, the tips of her ring fingers brushing at his earlobes. He went still, the laughter in his eyes transmuting to a dark, quiet intensity, almost forbidding if he hadn't momentarily chewed on his lower lip.
She carved a thumb along his cheekbone, tracing its subtle contour, feeling the weight and the heat of his unwavering, unblinking stare. This was—or should be— their moment, the coming together of two kindred souls in an instant of ecstatic camaraderie.
She spread her fingers, pushing her kidskin-clad fingertips into his hair, pulling his head down toward hers. She wanted him. She needed him. They were perfect for each other. One kiss, just one kiss. And he'd know it too, not just deep in his heart but foremost on his mind.
He didn't stop her. He was compliant to the gentle pressure of her hands, his eyes gazing down at her with an almost befuddled wonder. Bliss erupted in her. He'd seen the light. He'd at last understood the unique, rare splendor of their bond.
They came so close she could count his eyelashes—and no closer.
“I can't,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I'm pledged to another.”
Her bliss turned to cold daggers in her heart. Her limbs froze. But disbelief still reigned, like a mother's denial over a child's abrupt and senseless death. “You
really
want to marry Miss von Schweppenburg?”
“I've told her that I would,” he answered obliquely.
“Does she care?” Gigi could barely keep the bitterness out of her voice.
He sighed. “I care.”
Her hands dropped. The pain in her chest was her hopes charring to ashes. But still those hopes smoldered, pinpricks of unbearable light in piles of hot cinder. “And what if you hadn't pledged yourself to her?”
“What if my departed cousin had chosen a less fateful way to express his disdain for the great city of London?” His eyes were such raw intoxication, all ruinous gentleness and wistful resignation. “Life is intractable enough as it is. Don't torment yourself with what-ifs.”
The opportunities she'd lost with Carrington's death had not beleaguered her, because they were only those of title and privilege, a business alliance fallen through. She was the daughter of an entrepreneurial man. She understood that even the most careful nurturing didn't always yield the fruits one sought.
With Lord Tremaine, she'd lost all detachment and perspective.
“You have already proposed to Miss von Schweppenburg?”
“I will.” He was unequivocal. “When I hear from her next.”
Slowly, unwillingly, she began to understand that for good or ill, he intended to marry Miss von Schweppenburg. Neither the prospect of riches nor the promise of carnal delight would lure him away from this chosen path.
Her entire happiness—something she hadn't even known she remotely cared about—had hung on his answer. And he'd doomed her. He might as well have shot the stallion out from under her as she galloped toward him in feckless rapture.
“I'm sure you will be very happy together,” she said. A lifetime of training under Mrs. Rowland was barely enough to force that platitude past her larynx with any semblance of dignity.
He bowed and handed the reins of the horse to her. “The day flees. You'll return home faster riding.”
He helped her mount. They shook hands again as they bid each other good day. This time, he did not linger in his touch.
Half a mile out, it hit Gigi that Lord Tremaine didn't know exactly where Miss von Schweppenburg was.
Last season, Mrs. Rowland, in a mood of largesse, had invited the countess and Miss von Schweppenburg to attend a garden party. They'd declined—with a longish note full of regret from Miss von Schweppenburg—as they'd have departed London already.
Gigi had thought it strange that a team with nothing but advantageous marriage on their mind would leave before the most fruitful time of year for proposals: the end of July. She was, however, not surprised to later hear of rumors that pressing debts had forced the von Schweppenburgs to leave town sooner than they'd wished. Perhaps they'd underestimated the cost of a London season. Perhaps such was their usual practice and this time they misjudged the patience of their landlord and creditors.
She hadn't cared then to find out what exactly was the case. And she didn't now. The important thing was that Lord Tremaine's intelligence on Miss von Schweppenburg's whereabouts and goings-on at any given point in time wasn't much better than Gigi's. And if Miss von Schweppenburg's waffling stance was any indication, he was by far the more reliable correspondent of the two.
Part of her recoiled at the direction of her thoughts.
Beyond this point there be monsters.
But just as a locomotive hurtling at full speed could not be stopped by a mere wooden fence across the tracks, her thoughts rumbled on, to the defiant
clickety-clack
of
if only . . . if only . . . if only . . .
If only Miss von Schweppenburg were already married. Or if only Lord Tremaine came to believe, somehow, that such was the case.
Do not consider such a thing,
begged her good sense.
Do not even think it.
But her good sense was no match for the wrenching pain in her heart, for her crushing need of him. She could bear everything, if only she could have him for a year, a month, a day.
If he would not offer her this opportunity, then she'd create it herself, by fair means or foul, at whatever cost, come plague or locust.
Chapter Seven
13 May 1893
T
he hansom cab stopped. “Yer house, guv,” said the driver.
A long line of landaus and clarences filled the curb up and down from the Tremaine town house. His wife was having herself a party, it seemed, with some thirty, forty people in attendance. Camden had been gone four days to visit his parents. Was she celebrating his disappearance off the face of the earth already?
The butler, though distressed to see his return, hid it well under a layer of huffy solicitude. Milord must be tired. Would milord care for a bath? A shave? Dinner delivered to his room? Camden half-expected an offer of laudanum too, to tumble milord into a quick, insensate slumber, so that milady's soirée could continue unhindered.
“Are more people expected?” he asked. They would be, if there was to be a ball.
“No, sir,” Goodman answered stiffly. “It is only a dinner.”
Camden consulted his watch. Half past ten. The guests should be in the drawing room by now, both the men and the women, getting ready to take their leave in the next half hour in order to make the rounds of balls and
soirées dansantes.
He pushed open the double door to the drawing room and saw his wife first, splendid in a surfeit of diamonds and ostrich feathers. Next to her stood an exceptionally handsome man, who, with a frown on his face, seemed to be admonishing her. She listened to him with an expression of exaggerated patience.
Slowly, one by one, then by twos and threes, the guests realized who had come amongst them, even though none of them had ever met him. The hum of conversation faded, until even
she
had to glance at the door to see what had caused the hush.
Her mouth tightened as she registered his presence, but she let not a second pass before putting on a bright, false smile and coming toward him. “Camden, you are back. Come, do meet some of my friends. They are all dying to make your acquaintance.”
Such breathtaking insolence. Such cheek. Such bollocks. He hoped Lord Frederick liked wearing skirts. Camden took his wife by the elbows and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He had heard that he had the most courteous marriage known to man. Far be it for him to argue otherwise. “Of course. I would be delighted.”
Following her lead, her guests received him amicably, though most of them didn't quite achieve her smoothness. The handsome man from her tête-à-tête she introduced last, by which time he was standing by a tall brunette as uncommonly fine-looking as himself.
“Allow me to present Lord Tremain,” said his wife. “Camden, Lord and Lady Wrenworth.”
So this was Lord Wrenworth, The Ideal Gentleman, according to Mrs. Rowland, and Gigi's erstwhile lover.
“A pleasure, my lord,” said Lord Wrenworth, with all the creamy innocence of a man who had never cuckolded Camden.
Camden found he was almost enjoying himself. He appreciated a fine bit of farce. “Likewise. You wouldn't be the same Felix Wrenworth who authored that fascinating article on the capture of comets by Jupiter?”
This took everyone aback, especially Lady Tremaine.
“Are you an astronomy enthusiast as well, my lord?” asked Lady Wrenworth, her tone tentative.
“Most assuredly, my dear lady,” Camden answered with a smile.
His wife glanced uneasily at her former lover.
The guests, faced with the choice of either being the first to observe and gossip about the Tremaines appearing in public together or attending a ball not so different from the one they went to three days ago, forgot to leave.
Camden did not disappoint. He was a charming host. But better than that, he was candid, to a degree.
How long did he intend to stay in England?
A year, at least.
How did he like his house?
His house, which he liked exceedingly well, was on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. But he found his wife's house agreeable enough.
Was not Lady Tremaine looking very fine tonight?
Fine was much too tame a word. He'd known Lady Tremaine since she was practically an infant, and she'd never looked anything less than spectacular.
Had he met Lord Frederick Stuart yet?
Lord who?
It was past midnight—and after a few pointed reminders from his wife about their subsequent commitments—that their guests finally prepared to depart. Lord and Lady Wrenworth were the last to leave. As Lady Wrenworth exited the front door, Lord Wrenworth turned around, pulled Gigi close, and whispered something into her ear, as if her husband weren't standing only five feet away.
She laughed, a sudden swell of mirth, and literally shoved Lord Wrenworth out the door.
“Let me guess. He proposed a ménage à trois?” Camden asked lightly, as they mounted the stairs side by side.
“Felix? No. He has become a tiresome proponent of home and hearth since his marriage. In fact, he was arguing most tediously against the divorce the whole evening, before you came along.” She, too, kept up her winsome facade. “Well, if you must know, he said, ‘Shag him silly.' ”
“And are you going to take his sage advice?”
“To scrap the divorce or to shag you silly?” She chortled, her nimbus of sexual charisma unmistakable. “I'm not accepting counsel from Lord Wrenworth at this juncture, or from anyone else stupid enough to think that I should remain married to you. Frankly, I would have expected better from him. Freddie considers him a friend.”
Poor Freddie,
he thought.
“Well,” she said, as they prepared to go their separate ways. “Should I expect a visit tonight?”
“Unlikely. I don't wish to upset my stomach. But do be on the lookout for them in the coming days.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can't wait.”
She had said the same thing to him once before, on the last day of their short-lived happiness. Then she had meant it, had been pink-cheeked with delight and anticipation. As had he.
“I can,” he said.
She sighed, a weary flutter of air. “Go to hell, Camden.”