Page 14 of Private Arrangements
“He is not convinced that we should be divorced for something as trivial as me wishing to marry someone else,” she said. It was beyond her to tell Freddie that her husband meant to invoke his long-abdicated rights and shag her until she showed something for it. Nor could she reveal that she would submit to this connubial copulation, while planning to make use of every device ever invented to block conception.
What was it about Camden that turned her into such a chiseler and now a double-crosser? “But he's willing to be reasonable. If we are still determined to marry in a year's time, he'll let the divorce proceed.”
“A year!” Freddie exclaimed. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, if that's his only condition, then it's not half so bad. We can wait a year. It will be an awfully long year, but we can wait.”
“Freddie.” She gripped his hand, gratitude inundating her heart. “You are so good to me.”
“No, no! You are the one who's good to me! Everyone else thinks I'm clumsy and dense. You are the only person who thinks I'm all right.”
On any other day she'd have preened with pride, to think that at last she possessed the depth and maturity necessary to appreciate a diamond of the first water like Freddie, when all about her, men and women were still blinded by superficialities. But today her depth and maturity truly made their presence known. She was more than humbled; she felt unworthy. But she could not say it. Freddie looked to her for strength and guidance. She must not tumble off her pedestal now.
“I am most certainly not. I know for a fact that Miss Carlisle thinks highly of you.”
Miss Carlisle was in love with Freddie. She was dignified and self-contained about it, but she could not conceal it from Gigi. Normally, Gigi would not have pointed out such a thing to Freddie. But these were not normal times, and her guilt overshadowed her possessiveness.
“Angelica? Really? She used to laugh at me all the time when we were younger, whenever I fell off my pony or some such. And she used to tell me that I was a veritable idiot.”
“People change as they grow older,” Gigi said. “At some point we learn to value kindness and constancy above all else, and in that, we cannot find better than you, Freddie.”
Freddie smiled in pleasure. “If you say so, then it must be so. Angelica hasn't been feeling quite well lately. I've been meaning to have a bottle of tonic sent to her. I think I'll deliver it in person now, and ask her if I've become less of a dunce over the years.”
The mantel clock chimed the half hour. Freddie had been in her parlor for fifteen minutes. She used to allow his calls to stretch for half an hour and more, but that was no longer possible with Camden's return.
“I think I'd better go,” Freddie said, standing up. “Though I hate to leave.”
She rose. “I hate it too. I wish—oh, never mind what I wish.”
Freddie clasped her hands in his broad, warm palms. “Are you sure you are quite all right, my love? Are you really sure?”
No, she was not all right. She felt ill and lonely. And appalled at herself. She was about to undertake a dangerous gamble, lying and cheating at both ends. And here she thought she had forever sworn off fraud and swindle.
She mustered a radiant smile for him. “Don't worry about me, darling. Remember what you yourself have said? Nothing can shake me. Nothing.”
Langford Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Perrin, began his five-mile afternoon walk a half hour earlier than usual. He liked a little unpredictability from time to time, as currently his life consisted of all the variety of a mediocre vicar's Sunday sermons. But he didn't mind it, not too much. A scholar needed peace and quiet to delve deep into the Homeric past and the heroic battles before the walls of Ilium.
One of his favorite places along the walk was a cottage located exactly two and a quarter miles from his front door. The cottage itself was ordinary enough: two stories, white walls, red trims. Its gardens, however, were worthy of a sonnet, if not a hoity-toity ode outright.
The front garden was a fantasia of roses. And not just the tight-budded roses he usually came across but full-open, immodest blooms from an earlier, less straitlaced era—big, riotous flowers weighing down bushes and drooping off trellises, ranging from the most pristine blush to a wine-dark, blowsy red.
He was curious about the back garden, where gardeners often concentrated the main of their energy and effort. But a high hedge surrounded the back garden, and all he could see was the ridge of what looked to be the roof of a sizable greenhouse. He did not wish to make the acquaintance of the cottage's residents, so he waited for that inevitable day when someone forgot to put away the ladder after trimming the hedge.
He had no scruples about peeking into a private garden. What was anyone going to do? Call the constable on him? The one thing he had learned from nearly thirty years of being a duke was that, short of actual murder, he could get away with just about anything.
Today, however, there was a ladder, though it didn't lean on the hedge. Instead, it had been put up against an elm tree across the lane from the garden. A woman stood on the ladder, her back to him, dressed in an afternoon gown much too fashionable and ridiculous for such things as climbing fifteen-foot ladders.
The woman was lecturing a cat, a kitten that she was attempting to perch on a branch twelve feet off the ground, a sight that halted Langford dead in his tracks.
“Shame on you, Hector! You are a cousin of the mighty lions of the savannah. You disgrace them! Now stay put, and you will be rescued in time.”
The kitten disagreed with her assessment. The moment she removed her hands, it leapt back into her bosom.
“No, Hector!” the woman cried as she caught the cat. “You will not do this again. You will not foil my plan. You will not be yet one more capricious male to stand between my daughter and a coronet of strawberry leaves!”
Langford's interest in the situation escalated dramatically, given that he was the only man in a fifty-mile radius known to possess a coronet of strawberry leaves—the ducal headgear worn at the coronation of a sovereign. He wasn't quite sure where his particular coronet was kept, though, there having been not a single British coronation during his lifetime.
“Listen to me, Hector.” The woman lifted the kitten until the creature's eyes were level with her own. “Listen and listen well. If you do not cooperate, I will cut every ounce of fish, liver, tongue, you name it, out of your meals. What's more, I will bring a dog into the house and feed it foie gras right in front of you. A dog, you understand, a dirty cur like Gigi's Croesus.”
The kitten meowed pathetically. The woman remained pitiless. “Now up you go, and stay this time.”
