Page 46 of Private Arrangements
She stared at him as if he'd asked her to undress. Well, hewasstripping her bare, in a way. She tugged at the cameo brooch as if her collar was buttoned too tight. “Your Grace, I assure you—the mere thought of it! I—”
“Now, now, Mrs. Rowland”—he had not yet completely forgotten how to be smarmy—“a mother's machination to marry her daughter off to a man of consequence might not be the loftiest of human endeavors, but it is a time-honored one. Yet here I find that your daughter is a woman already safely and advantageously wed. For what purpose, then, have you sought out my company so assiduously, to the extent that you were willing to chase me down outside your house and promise to engage in activities that you otherwise despise?”
Her response was a resounding silence.
“Your bet, madam,” he reminded her.
Mutely, she set three pieces of chocolate on a doily at the center of the table. He dealt her card facedown and his faceup. A measly five of spades. Next he dealt both of their cards facedown.
She placed her hands over her cards but did not lift them. Her cheeks flushed wine-dark. “I should like to answer your question now, sir. The answer is one that would embarrass both you and me—mortify me, in fact—but you deserve to know it.”
She ran her tongue over her lower lip. “The truth is I've had quite enough of widowhood. And I've looked about my vicinity and come to the conclusion that you would make a fine husband for me.”
He nearly dropped both his jaw and his cards. She had caught him as flat-footed as a five-hundred-pound man.
“I've watched you walk past my house every day these past five years, on fair days and foul,” she continued, gazing at him with her beautiful eyes. “Every day I wait for your appearance at the bend of the road, where the fuchsia tree grows. I follow your progress until you can no longer be seen beyond Squire Wright's hedge. And I think about you.”
He knew she was lying as surely as he knew that there had been something going on between the queen and her late manservant John Brown. But somehow he couldn't quite prevent her words from affecting him. Images came to mind of Mrs. Rowland in her bed at night, her hair and breasts unbound, bemoaning her loneliness, wanting, needing, pining away for a man. For him.
“But it isn't until now that I've plucked up the courage to do something about it,” she said, her voice soft as a spring night. “I'm not a young woman anymore. So I've decided against a young woman's wiles in favor of a more direct approach. I hope I've not offended you with my forwardness.”
It wasn't often that he didn't know up from down, east from west. But he had to try damned hard to remind himself that when she thought of him, it was only with the intention of providing her daughter that elusive coronet of strawberry leaves, as she had so bluntly informed her fur ball of a cat.
“Why me?” He cleared his throat when he realized his voice sounded closer to a croak. “Pardon my observation, but you are a well-looking woman of independent means. If you would but put out the word—”
“But then I'd have to wade neck deep amongst sycophants and fortune hunters. My desire to be free of them was one of the reasons that motivated my return to Devon,” she said quietly, reasonably. “As for why I have set my cap on you, sir, I suppose it's because I've been influenced by Her Grace your late mother.”
“My mother?”
His mother had perished of pneumonia four months after his father passed away. Had she lived longer, he probably would have led a more upright life, if only to protect her from the likes of Caro and Grace.
“I'm sorry to have misled you, Your Grace, by pretending not to know your identity the day we met.” At last she looked down at her cards and turned them over. An ace and a jack, a natural twenty-one. “The truth is, though we have never been introduced, I've known you for many years. I lived in this house in my youth, and I remember well catching sight of you from these windows when you were home from school on holidays.”
He took the sugar tongs she offered and paid her three chocolates from his tray. “How did you meet my mother?”
“When I helped to run the charity bazaar in sixty-one, she was the honorary patroness. She took a liking to me and invited me to a weekly tea at Ludlow Court.” Mrs. Rowland smiled wistfully. “In private she was both gracious and ordinary—ordinary in that her concerns were the same as any other woman's: her husband and her son. I didn't realize it at that time, but looking back, I think she was quite lonely, stranded in the country because of the late duke's poor health, with few friends and even fewer diversions that she could indulge in without appearing callous to His Grace's illness.”
He stared at her, no longer sure whether she was still fabricating tales but desperately hoping she wasn't. He had not spoken to anyone about his poor mother—his parents—in years. No one ever thought to ask him how he felt about being orphaned. They merely assumed, by his subsequent behavior, that he was all too glad to have his parents out of his profligate way.
Mrs. Rowland picked up a piece of chocolate wrapped in translucent paper and rolled it between her fingers. The paper crinkled and scrunched softly. “She didn't mention His Grace's illness much. She already knew it was only a matter of time. But she did speak at length about you. She was proud of you and looking forward to your First in Classics. She even showed me a letter that Professor Thompson at Trinity College had written to you, answering your question concerning a point raised in thePhaedoand complimenting you on your grasp of ancient Greek. But she was also worried. She said you were wild as the jungles of South America and a conundrum to her. She fretted that neither she nor your father could keep you in line. And she feared that your unruliness would only grow without the influence of a strong, steady wife.”
If Langford were any closer to speechlessness, he'd personify it. Mrs. Rowland's revelations shocked him far more than he had thought possible or even likely. Five minutes ago he had been smugly certain that he knew more about Mrs. Rowland than she could ever guess. But now exactly the reverse was true. She had observed him as an adolescent, she had been a confidante to his mother, she had even read the prized letter from Professor Thompson.
“Why did we not meet if you were, as you say, a frequent visitor to Ludlow Court?”
“Because I stayed no more than half an hour for each visit, and because you were always away somewhere at teatime even when you were home on holiday. In summer you'd have gone to Torquay for seabathing, in winter, out stalking a deer or visiting a classmate in the next county.”
Because he never had any time for his mother. He dined with her when he was at home and thought that simple act discharged all his duties and responsibilities as a son.
“As you might imagine, my conversations with a loving mother left a lasting, positive impression of her son, leading to my current intentions. . . .”
“Until you were waylaid by Ladies Avery and Somersby and informed of the more sordid aspects of my past.”
“Actually, my daughter was the first to tell me.” She smiled wryly. “She disapproves of you. But I think a judgment of you based only on your prodigal years is perhaps as biased and incomplete as that made solely on what one knows of you before and after those years.”
She raked in the chocolates, set them in a neat pile before her, and cleared the cards. “Your turn to wager, Your Grace. Though I'd understand perfectly should you no longer wish to stay, now that I've revealed myself as both a fraud and a schemer.”
No, she hadn't merely revealed herself to be a schemer. She was still a schemer. She was still weaving fact and fiction together in order that her daughter could rise from the ashes of her divorce more socially prominent than ever.
