The Arrangement (22 page)

We stopped to look around and to inhale the heady fragrance.

“It is beautiful, my lord,” I said sincerely. “Everything about your home is utterly beautiful.”

I could tell from the look on his face that my words had pleased him.

It made me feel very happy to have pleased him.

Things were clearly going from bad to worse with me.

We walked through the garden, ostensibly admiring the flowers, but all the while we both knew that we were here for something else. Then we were standing next to the great medieval wall and looking up at the setting sun, which was glistening off the chimney pots on the roof of the house. Savile put his hands on my shoulders and turned me so that my back was to the wall and I was facing him. The sinking sun shone slantingly onto his face, gilding his skin and his hair. The look on his face as he scanned my countenance was hard and intent, not at all his usual genial expression.

He said, “I have not been able to get you out of my mind. You haunt my nights, and lately you have even been keeping me from my work during the daytime hours as well.”

“Oh,” I said brilliantly. My heart had begun to hammer in my chest and the pulse to race in my throat. I put my hand up to my neck to hide it from him.

“I want you to know that you’re perfectly free,” he said. “I didn’t invite you here to pressure you into becoming my mistress. You are welcome to remain here for as long as you want. John will find a new establishment for you, just as I promised he would, and I will leave you strictly alone.”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.

“Do you understand me, Gail?” he said. “My desire for you has nothing to do with how welcome you are in my home.”

“Yes,” I said, my mouth dry. “I understand, my lord.”

A tendril of hair had fallen forward across my forehead and he reached out to brush it back, letting the lock slide through his fingers as if he were feeling the texture of silk. The touch of his fingers sent shivers through my entire body.

“All you have to do,” he said, “is say no.”

I swallowed and tried to speak, but words just wouldn’t come. He waited. Finally I whispered, “I don’t know.”

He raised his hands and cupped my face as if it were a rose he was admiring. He bent his head to mine and kissed me.

My back was against the hard stone wall and my face was turned up to his. He kept on kissing me and after a moment I opened my lips and kissed him back. His strong body was pressed against me, and of its own volition my body softened and bent into place along the hard lines of his.

I reached up to slide my arms around his neck and the rest of the world seemed to disappear. I no longer smelled the roses or felt the stones of the wall through the thin muslin of my dress. All I felt was the body of this man as it pressed against mine, the demand his mouth was making on mine, and the desire that was rising within me with all the vitality of sap rising in the springtime.

He had me hard up against the wall by now and his hands had come up to caress my breasts. Our mouths explored each other’s hungrily, and my hands moved urgently up and down his back, feeling the strength of it even through his expensive black superfine coat.

I was lost, and we both knew it.

A voice broke through the intensity of our mutual desire.

“Raoul, where are you?”

Lady Regina had to repeat herself three times before we managed to break away from each other.

We stood a few feet apart, trying to catch our breaths and straighten our clothes. Savile’s hair was hanging over his forehead and wordlessly I smoothed it back for him.

Savile’s raw-sounding curse was still rasping in my ear when his sister and his cousin John joined us in the garden.

“Harriet and Roger are going at it with a vengeance, so we decided to escape and join you,” Regina said pleasantly.

“I can well imagine that there is no love lost between the two of them,” I said evenly, proud that my voice was under control. I was extremely grateful for the rapidly failing light, however, as I was very much afraid that my lips were swollen. Fortunately, my hair was too short to become really disordered.

“So how do you like our rose garden, Mrs. Saunders?” John asked.

“It is very beautiful,” I replied.

“I was just telling Mrs. Saunders that the rose garden is a new addition to the grounds,” Savile said.

His voice sounded perfectly normal as well.

He turned to me and continued, “Originally this section within the walls housed many of the outbuildings. That is why the bedrooms look out on the kitchen garden and not on the rose garden. The original occupants did not wish to look from their bedroom windows and see the bake house and the potting shed.”

“One can perfectly understand that, particularly when the kitchen garden is so pretty,” I said. I feigned a small yawn. “I beg your pardon, but I must be more fatigued than I had thought.”

“Tea will be served in less than half an hour,” Lady Regina told me. “Shall we all return to the drawing room?”

We returned to the drawing room, and since no one stared at me I imagined that what I had been doing in the garden was not emblazoned on my face. I drank my tea and ate a slice of buttered bread, then took my candle from among those laid out near the drawing-room door and made my way upstairs to my room.

The bedroom windows were open to the warm summer air and I went to stand in front of them and listen to the sounds of the night. Somewhere a nightingale was pouring out its soul in ecstasy and I felt a lump come into my throat.

Mary came into the room with quiet efficiency and asked if she could help me undress. I accepted her assistance with a smile, and when she offered to have my yellow gown pressed so that it would be ready for the day after tomorrow, I accepted that offer as well. I got into bed and waited until she had left, then I rose and returned to the windows.

The nightingale was still singing and I shut my eyes and listened, breathing in the scents of the night and trying not to think. Then, very slowly, I went to the wardrobe and took down from the top shelf a package of herbs.

I remembered so vividly the day that Aunt Margaret had given me my first packet of this particular herbal mixture. It had been precisely one week before Tommy and I were married, and she had come to my bedroom and handed it to me and said, “Wait to have children, Gail. You are so young. You and Thomas need to establish yourselves. Take a dose of these every day, and wait.”

Aunt Margaret had been too late with her herbal mixture, however. Six months after Tommy and I were wed, Nicky was born.

I looked now at the package I had brought with me from Deepcote. After Nicky’s birth I had realized that Tommy and I could not afford another child, and I had begun to make the mixture myself. I assumed it was efficacious, as for the duration of my marriage I had never found myself in the family way.

After Tommy’s death I had never had occasion to use those herbs, but I had brought them with me to Savile. My decision to become Savile’s mistress had been made before that kiss in the garden.

It took him almost an hour and a half to come. I had left the candle burning next to my bed and was sitting up against my pillows, looking at the pages of a book but registering very little, when I heard a soft knock at the bedroom door.

“Come in,” I called quietly.

The door opened and he was there, so tall that his head barely cleared the doorway. He was wearing only his white dinner shirt and his dress trousers. He shut the door behind him and said, “I was stuck in the library with Roger. I was beginning to think I was never going to get rid of him.”

I closed my book and put it on my bedside table. “I knew you would come,” I said.

At that he began to cross the room in his distinctively long, lithe stride.

“Gail,” he said. He reached the bed, then sat down on its edge and looked for a lengthy, searching moment into my eyes. What he saw there must have reassured him, because he lifted one of my hands, turned it, kissed the blue veins that were visible at my wrist, and murmured, “Thank God.”

Under his lips, my pulse accelerated like that of a racehorse.

“My lord,” I breathed.

He looked up. “Raoul,” he said. “I want to hear you call me Raoul.”

I wet my lips. I tried to slow my breathing, slow my pulse. I said, “Raoul.”

He smiled his wonderful smile. “It seems as if I have been waiting forever to hear you say my name.”

He was like sunshine—warm, life-giving sunshine, and imperceptibly my body lifted toward him.

He kissed me, his body bending over mine, his fingers resting on my neck, his thumbs rubbing gently up and down my collarbone. He kept on kissing me, and my arms went up to circle him and hold him close.

I kissed him and kissed him, loving the feel of his strength against me, the feel of his shirt under my hands, the smell of his skin, the texture of his hair.

His mouth finally lifted from mine and moved down to follow the line of my arched throat. “Gail,” he muttered. “God, Gail, what you do to me.”

“Mmm… The feeling is reciprocal,” I said shakily.

He pressed me back against the pillows and I felt his hands beginning to move on my all-too-responsive body. I placed my hands between us and began to unbutton his shirt. He lifted himself away from me, balancing on his hands and remaining perfectly still until I had finished. Then I pulled his shirt free of his trousers and slid my hands under the loosely hanging cambric to touch his warm, bare skin. And once again he moved.

How can I describe what happened between us that night? The mechanics of love are the mechanics of love, and I suppose what happens between one set of lovers does not vary so very much from what happens between another. What differs, however, is the feeling. What differs is the fire, the passion, the intensity. The tenderness.

That night Raoul and I became lovers. When I felt him surge inside me, when I held him close and felt him penetrate deeply into my body, making us one, we became lovers. When I felt the hot, drenching pleasure that his thrusting organ gave me, when the piercing beauty of the nightingale entwined itself indistinguishably with the way his golden body moved with mine on the moonlit bed, when at last my insides rocked with explosions of pleasure so intense that my whole body shook with them, then we became lovers. And after it was over, when he lay quietly with his body all along mine and his golden head resting in the hollow between my neck and shoulder, I knew that no other man would ever mean to me what this man did.

That thought should have made me sad, because I knew I could not have him. But the summer was only beginning then, and I had not yet begun to dwell upon the fact that eventually we would have to part.

* * * *

Raoul left me sometime during the early morning and we met again at breakfast. He was at the table when I walked in, and the smile that he gave me was little more than the deepening of a fold at the corner of his eye.

My heart completely turned over.

I went to get a plate of food from the sideboard and took a place at the table that was not next to him.

Lady Regina was the only other person at the table and she gave me a pleasant greeting.

“John and I are going to inspect the new outbuilding work this morning, Mrs. Saunders,” Raoul said, “but the boys have coaxed me to have the bathhouse pool filled so that they can swim this afternoon. Would you care to have lunch on the bathhouse grounds while the children enjoy themselves?”

“Nicky does not swim,” I said.

“So you have told me. But he really should be taught, and that is one of the reasons I agreed to fill the pool.”

“All of my boys learned to swim in the bathhouse pool,” Lady Regina said. “So did Raoul and John and I, for that matter. If Nicky is to spend the summer here at Savile, I think it would be wise for him to learn to swim.”

I looked at her in surprise. “Do you swim, Lady Regina?”

She smiled at me. “Yes, I do. And since you are visiting here for the summer, I would like you to call me Ginny, and for you to allow me to call you Gail.”

I looked at her in stunned surprise. Considering the way she had received the news of what bedroom I had been given, I would never have expected such congenial treatment.

“Th-that is very kind of you, Lady Regina,” I said.

“Ginny,” she corrected firmly.

“Ginny,” I repeated faintly.

She looked at her brother. “Do you mind if I join your picnic this afternoon, Raoul?”

He had been regarding her with an oddly thoughtful expression, but his response to her question was instantaneous. “Of course not. I shall extend the invitation to the rest of the family as well.”

Ginny sighed.

I brought the subject back to the issue that concerned me most. “Just who is going to teach Nicky? Mr. Wilson?”

“I am quite sure that the boys have managed to extract a promise from my brother to swim with them,” Ginny said.

Raoul chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mrs…ah,
Gail.”
He gave his sister his blandest smile, then turned back to me. “I taught both Charlie and Theo to swim. I am sure I will have no problem with Nicky.”

I didn’t think he would, either.

“Now, Ginny,” Raoul said, “shall I have them send out the china and crystal for you to dine off of, or do you merely want a basket luncheon with a few footmen?”

“The basket luncheon,” Ginny said immediately. “We shall have to feed the children as well.”

“Excellent,” Raoul said. He stood up. “I told John I would meet him in fifteen minutes, so I hope you ladies will excuse me.”

We assured him that we would, and I forced my eyes not to follow him as he left the room.

After breakfast Ginny took me for a walk in the gardens that lay beyond the castle walls. We descended the terrace steps and took the path that would lead us by the stables, which were partially screened from our view by several plantings of evergreens. It was amazing to me how the relatively small area within the castle walls had been so completely transformed from what must once have been a teeming medieval household into the elegantly ordered surroundings of a nineteenth-century nobleman.