PrivateArrangements



 

Chapter Eight




December 1882


Theodora's letter arrived on the midday post three days after Camden's encounter with Miss Rowland. The sheaf of rose-scented paper notified him of her imminent marriage to a Polish nobleman—imminent only in the past tense. The letter had been composed two days before the date of the wedding, but not posted for another three days.
Camden could not imagine Theodora being married to anyone else. People in general made her nervous; even he did, to some extent, though she'd let him hold her hand and kiss her. She'd have been happiest far removed from the rest of humanity, a musical recluse in a chalet high up the Alps, with no neighbors but the cows at their summer pasture.
He worried about her. But even as he did, he could not stem the tide of excitement that the news engendered. Desire. Fascinated lust. Sensual bedazzlement. Covetousness by any other name was still rapacious. He wanted Miss Rowland. He wanted to laugh with her. He wanted to burn with her. And now he could.
If he married her.
Marriage, however, was a serious matter, the commitment of a lifetime, a decision not to be rushed. He tried to approach the matter rationally, but like idiotic, lust-addled young men since time immemorial—to which club he never imagined he'd belong—all he could think of was Miss Rowland's eagerness on their wedding night.
She'd probably be the one to come into his room, rather than the other way around. She'd allow him to keep all the lights on so he could visually devour her to his heart's content. She'd spread her legs wide, then wrap them tightly about him. And he might even make her look at what he'd do to her, so he could watch her flushed cheeks, her lust-glazed eyes, and listen to her moans and whimpers of pleasure.
God, he would make love to her for days running.
After a night of internal debate, during which much voluptuous fantasizing and very little sensible debate occurred, Camden resolved to put the choice to the Fates. If Miss Rowland was there again by the stream that day, he'd propose to her within the week. If not, he'd take it as a sign that he should hold off until the end of next term to allow time for more solemn reflection.
He spent the entire day at the bank of the brook, pacing up and down, all but climbing the naked trees. But she did not come. Not in the morning, not in the afternoon, not when the sky turned blue-black. And that was when he realized he was far gone: Not only was he immensely unhappy with the Fates, but he'd decided that the Fates could all go drown in a cesspit.
He returned his horse to the stable and requested a brougham be readied for him immediately.


The footman hesitated and looked inquiringly at Gigi. Her plate was still almost full. She pushed it aside. The plate disappeared to be replaced by another, a compote of pears.
“Gigi, you hardly ate anything,” said Mrs. Rowland, picking up her fork. “I thought you liked venison.”
Gigi picked up her own fork and excavated a cube of pear from the clear syrup. She was being too obvious in her preoccupation. Her mother never worried that she ate too little. Quite the opposite. Mrs. Rowland usually feared that Gigi's appetite was too robust, that her corsets wouldn't lace tightly enough to achieve any decent approximation of the wasp waist.
She stared at her fork and could not accomplish the simple task of putting it in her mouth. Her stomach churned already. She had no confidence it could handle the sugar-drenched piece of fruit.
She set down the fork. “I'm not that hungry tonight.”
Merely terrified.
What she'd done was in every way unprincipled, and quite possibly criminal. Worse, she'd not only perpetrated a fraud, she'd made an incompetent mash of it. She'd been too impatient, her methods too crude. Any half-wit could pick up the rank odor of villainy and sniff the trail right to her door.
What would Lord Tremaine do should he find out? And what would he think of her?
A footman entered the dining room and spoke a few low words to Hollis, their butler. Hollis then approached Mrs. Rowland. “Ma'am, Lord Tremaine is here. Should I ask him to wait until dinner is finished?”
It was a good thing Gigi had quit all pretense of eating, or she'd have dropped everything in her hand.
Mrs. Rowland rose, radiant with excitement. “Absolutely not. We shall go greet him this instant. Come, Gigi. I've a suspicion that Lord Tremaine didn't come all the way to see me.”
Mrs. Rowland was no doubt hearing wedding bells. But scandal and ruin loomed large in Gigi's mind. She would live out the rest of her life like Miss What's-her-name, the mad old spinster in a wedding dress, laying waste to her estate and infecting everyone with her bitterness.
She had no choice but to follow her mother, bleakly, grimly, a foot soldier who shared little of the general's optimism for victory and spoils, who saw only the bloodbath ahead.


He was there, standing in the middle of the drawing room—the epitome of her desires, the instrument of her downfall, the eligible young scion who groomed horses and ran just slightly shady games of probability.
“My lord Tremaine,” gushed Mrs. Rowland. “Such a pleasure to see you, as always. What brings you to our humble abode at this unusual hour?”
“Mrs. Rowland. Miss Rowland.” Did he glance at her? Was that a flash of intense longing or chagrin? “I do apologize for intruding on your evening.”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Rowland airily. “You know you are always welcome here, any time. Now do answer my question. My curiosity slays me.”
“I'm here for a private word with Miss Rowland,” replied Lord Tremaine, with breathtaking directness. “With your permission, of course, Mrs. Rowland.”
For the very first time in her life, Gigi felt faint without having first suffered a concussion. Either he'd come to denounce her or he'd come to propose to her. Unthinkable as it might have been a few days ago, she fervently hoped it was the former. He'd castigate her for the scum that she was. She'd grovel hopelessly for forgiveness. Then he'd depart and she'd lock herself in her room and bang her head on the wall until the wall gave.
“Most certainly,” acceded Mrs. Rowland, with admirable restraint.
She withdrew from the room, closing the door behind her. Gigi did not dare look at him. She was certain that that, in itself, already betrayed her culpability.
He drew close to her. “Miss Rowland, will you marry me?”
More bloodcurdling words she'd never heard. Her head snapped up. Her eyes met his. “Three days ago you were determined to marry someone else.”
“Today I'm determined to marry you.”
“What happened in the meantime to change your mind so drastically?”
“I received a letter from Miss von Schweppenburg. She has married into the Princely House of Lobomirski.”

No, she has not. Gigi had plucked that name out of a book on European nobility she'd found in her mother's collection. She'd studied Miss von Schweppenburg's note, then composed her deception, carefully incorporating Miss von Schweppenburg's half apologies and powerless wistfulness. Then she'd taken everything to Briarmeadow's gamekeeper, an old man who'd been a forger in his youth and who regarded her with an indulgent, grandfatherly fondness.
“I see,” she said weakly. “So you've decided to be practical.”
“I suppose you could say part of my decision was motivated by pragmatism,” he said quietly, coming so close that she could smell the cold crisp scent of winter that still clung to his jacket. “Though for the life of me, I can't remember any of those reasons.”
He tipped her chin up and kissed her.
She'd kissed men before—several—when she got bored at balls or chafed from her mother's stricture. She considered the activity more bizarre than interesting and had sometimes studied the man she kissed with her eyes wide open, calculating the size of his debt.
But from the moment Lord Tremaine's lips touched hers, she was consumed, like a child tasting a lump of sugar for the very first time, overcome by the sweetness of it all. His kiss was as light as meringue, as gentle as the opening notes of the Moonlight Sonata, and as nourishing as the first rain of spring after an endless winter drought.
Light-headed and amazed, she drank in the kiss. Until simply being kissed by him wasn't enough anymore. She cupped his face and kissed him back with something far beyond enthusiasm, something closer to desperation, tremulous and wild.
She heard the muffled groan in his larynx, felt the physical change that signaled his arousal. He broke the kiss, pushed her an arm's length away, and stared at her, his breaths heavy and labored.
“My God, if your mother wasn't on the other side of the door . . .” He blinked, then blinked again. “Was that a yes?”
It was not yet too late. She could still take the nobler path, confess everything, apologize, and keep her self-respect.
And lose him. If he knew the truth, he would despise her. She couldn't face his anger. Or his scorn. Couldn't live without him. Not yet, not yet.
She wrapped her arms about his waist and laid her cheek against his shoulder. “Yes.”
The joy she felt at his fierce embrace was riddled with terror. But she'd made her choice. She would have him, for better or worse. She would keep him in the dark, for as long as possible.
And when they were married, she would look upon his sleeping form, marvel at her vast good fortune, and ignore the constant encroachment of fear that tainted her very soul.
* * *
Camden had no idea he had it in him to be so happy. He was not the kind to derive unbridled joy from the pulse of the universe or any such nonsense. He never rolled out of bed wanting to breathe deeply of life it-self—a poor man with well-meaning but inept parents to coddle and younger siblings to support had no time for such silly luxuries.
But with her by his side, he couldn't help being exuberant. She possessed magical properties, strong and bracing as a draft of the finest vodka and yet keeping him always at a delightful degree of tipsiness, that elusive point of equilibrium at which all the spheres of heaven came into exquisite alignment and a mere mortal sprouted wings.
During their three-week engagement, he called on her with a frequency that was positively indecent, on most days riding over to Briarmeadow both morning and afternoon and accepting her mother's invitations to remain for tea and dinner without so much as a perfunctory protest that he must not impose too much on his kind hostesses.
He loved talking to Gigi. Her view of the world was as jaundiced and unromantic as his own. They agreed that, at the moment, neither of them amounted to anything, as he was no more responsible for his bloodline than she was for her million-pound inheritance.
And yet for an inveterate cynic, she was as easy to please as a puppy. The inadequate bouquets he scavenged from Twelve Pillars' dilapidated greenhouse incited such euphoric responses that Julius Caesar on his triumphant return to Rome after the conquest of Gaul could not have been more madly thrilled. The rather modest engagement ring he bought her, with funds he'd saved for his passage to America and his first workshop, to be modeled after that of Herr Benz, brought her nearly to tears.
The day before the wedding, he drove to her house and sent for her to meet him in front. No gloomy blue cape this time; she arrived like a column of flame, in a mantle of rich strawberry red, with rosy cheeks and wine-colored lips to match.
He grinned, as he always did now when he met her. He was an ass, to be sure, but a happy ass. “I have something for you,” he said.
She laughed giddily when she opened the small wrapped package to reveal a still-warm pork bun. “Now I truly have seen everything. Dare I guess you pillaged every last flower from your greenhouse yesterday?”
She glanced about them in the mischievous way she had, signaling to him that she was about to come forward and kiss him, the public nature of her front lawn be damned. He stopped her, holding her forearms with his hands, so that she couldn't get any closer.
“I have something else for you.”
“I know what you have for me,” she said saucily. “You wouldn't let me touch it yesterday.”
“You can touch it today,” he whispered.
“What?!” She was still a virgin, after all. “Out here, where everyone can see us?”
“Oh, yes.” He laughed at her expression of shock and mortified interest.
“No!”
“All right, then, I'll take the puppy and go home.”
“A puppy?” she squealed, like the nineteen-year-old she was. “A puppy! Where is it? Where is it?”
He lifted the basket out of the carriage, but swung it away from her eager hands just as she reached for it. “I understand you don't wish to touch it in public.”
She grabbed the other end of the basket. “Oh, give me, give me! Pleeeease. I'll do anything.”
He laughed and relented. She fumbled open the lid of the basket and out poked the brown-and-white head of a corgi puppy, wearing behind its neck a slightly lopsided blue bow made from ribbons Camden had pilfered from Claudia. Gigi squealed again and lifted the puppy. It regarded her with serious, intelligent eyes, not quite as thrilled as she was at their meeting but pleased and well-behaved nevertheless.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she inquired breathlessly, offering it pieces of the pork bun. “How old is it? Does it have a name?”
Camden cast a glance at the puppy's rather obvious testicles. Perhaps she wasn't as knowledgeable as he'd thought. “He's a boy. Ten weeks old. And I've decided to call him Croesus in honor of you.”
“Croesus, my love.” She touched her cheek to the puppy's nose. “I shall get you a grand gilded water bowl, Croesus. And we will be the best of friends forever and ever.”
At last she looked back at Camden. “But how did you know I've always wanted a puppy?”
“Your mother told me. She said she preferred cats and you pined for a dog.”
“When?”
“The day we met. After dinner. You were there. Don't you remember?”
She shook her head. “No, I don't.”
“No doubt you were too busy looking at me.”
Her hand came up to her mouth. But then a slow smile spread across her face. “You noticed?”
He was tempted to tell her that not even at a memorably farcical soirée in St. Petersburg, during which both the hostess and the host attempted to seduce him, had he been ogled that much. “I noticed.”
“Oh, dear.”
She buried her face against the puppy's neck. She was blushing and, God help him, he had an erection the size of Bedfordshire.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled by Croesus's coat. “It's the best present anyone has ever given me.”
He was touched and humbled. “It makes me happy to see you happy.”
“Until tomorrow, then.” She leaned in and kissed him, a sweet, lingering kiss. “I can't wait.”
“It will be the longest twenty-four hours of my life,” he said, kissing her one last time on the tip of her nose. “An eternity.”
The next twenty-four hours turned out to be exactly that: an eternity, a hellish eternity.