Page 2 of Private Arrangements
He stopped midway down the gallery, suddenly unable to go on. She had furnished this house to be a fantasy-come-true for the boy he had been when he married her, the boy who must have mentioned, during their long hours of rapt conversation, something of his preference for understated houses and his love of modern art.
He remembered her spellbound concentration, her soft questions, her burning interest in everything about him.
Was the divorce but a new ruse, then? A cleverly sprung trap to re-ensnare him when all else had failed? Would he find her perfumed and naked on his bed when he threw open the door to his bedchamber?
He located the master's apartment and threw open the door.
There was no her, naked or otherwise, on his bed.
There was no bed.
And nothing else either. The bedchamber was as vast and empty as the American West.
The carpet no longer showed depressed spots where chair legs and bedposts had once stood. The walls betrayed no telltale rectangles of recently removed pictures. Thick layers of dust had settled on floor and windowsills. The room had stood vacant for years.
For no reason at all, he felt as if the breath had been kicked out of his lungs. The sitting room of the master's apartment was sparkling clean and fully equipped—tuft-backed reading chairs, shelves laden with well-read books wrinkled at the spines, a writing desk freshly supplied with ink and paper, even a pot of amaranth in bloom. It made the void of the bedchamber all the more pointed, a barbed symbol.
The house might have been, once upon a time, designed with the single-minded goal of luring him back. But that was a different decade—another age altogether. He had since been eviscerated from her existence.
He was still standing in the doorway, staring into the empty bedchamber, when the butler arrived, two footmen and a large portmanteau in tow. The nothingness of the chamber made the butler blush an extraordinary pink. “It will take us only an hour, sir, to air the chamber and restore the furnishing.”
He almost told the butler not to bestir himself, to let the bedchamber remain stark and barren. But that would have said too much. So he only nodded. “Excellent.”
The prototype of the new stamping machine Lady Tremaine had ordered for her factory in Leicestershire refused to live up to its promise. The negotiation with the shipbuilder in Liverpool dragged on most unsatisfactorily. And she had yet to answer any of the letters from her mother—ten in all, one for each day since she'd petitioned for divorce—in which Mrs. Rowland questioned her sanity outright and fell just short of comparing her intelligence to that of a leg of ham.
But that was all expected. What made her head pound was the telegram from Mrs. Rowland three hours ago:Tremaine came ashore at Southampton this morning.No matter how she tried to explain it to Freddie as something par for the course—There are papers to sign and settlements to be negotiated, darling. He has to come back at some point—Tremaine's arrival portended only trouble.
Her husband. In England. Closer than he had been in a decade, except for that miserable incident in Copenhagen, back in '88.
“I need Broyton to come in tomorrow morning to look at some accounts for me,” she said to Goodman, handing over her shawl, her hat, and her gloves as she entered the town house and walked toward the library. “Kindly request Miss Etoile's presence for some dictations. And tell Edie that I will wear the cream velvet tonight, instead of the amethyst silk.”
“Madam—”
“I almost forgot. I saw Lord Sutcliffe this morning. His secretary has given notice. I recommended your nephew. Have him present himself at Lord Sutcliffe's house tomorrow morning at ten. Tell him that Lord Sutcliffe prefers a man of sincerity and few words.”
“That is too kind of you, madam!” Goodman exclaimed.
“He's a promising young man.” She stopped before the library door. “On second thought, have Miss Etoile come in twenty minutes. And make sure no one disturbs me until then.”
“But your ladyship, his lordship—”
“His lordship will not be taking tea with me today.” She pushed the door open and realized Goodman was still there, hovering. She turned halfway and glanced at him. The butler wore a constipated expression. “What is it, Goodman? The back troubling you again?”
“No, madam, it's not. It's—”
“It's me,” said a voice from inside the library. Her husband's voice.
For a long, stunned moment, all she could think was how glad she was that she had not invited Freddie home with her today, as she often did after an afternoon walk together. Then she could not think of anything at all. Her headache faded, replaced by a mad rush of blood to her head. She was hot, then cold. The air about her turned thick as pea soup, fine for gulping but impossible to inhale.
Vaguely, she nodded at Goodman. “You may return to your duties.”
Goodman hesitated. Did he fear for her? She entered the library and let the heavy oak door close behind her, shutting out curious eyes and ears, shutting out the rest of the world.
The windows of her library faced west, for a view of the park. The still-intense sunlight cascaded through clear glass panes at an oblique angle and landed in perfect rectangles of warm clarity on her Samarkand carpet, with its poppies and pomegranates on a field of rose and ivory.
Tremaine stood just beyond the direct light, his hands braced against the mahogany desk behind him, his long legs crossed at the ankles. He should be a figure in relative obscurity, not particularly visible. Yet she saw him all too clearly, as if Michelangelo's Adam had leapt off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, robbed a Savile Row bespoke tailor, and come to make trouble.
She caught herself. She was staring, as if she was still that nineteen-year-old girl, devoid of depth but full of herself.
