Page 57 of Private Arrangements
He spat the tooth powder out of his mouth and pulled open the door. Mrs. Rowland's door opened a second later. “Good heavens, what was that?” she cried.
“The ceiling, probably,” he said.
Gigi, too, was in the hallway, her face very pale against the midnight blue of her peignoir. “What's the matter with your house?” she said tightly to her mother.
Camden began opening doors. The room next to his seemed fine, except that several pictures had fallen off the wall. He opened the door to the middle chamber. A gust of debris greeted him. Almost the entire ceiling had collapsed, blanketing the floor and the furniture in dust-ridden chunks of plaster and timber. Above him gaped the cavernous void of the attic.
“Good heavens! How did this happen?” Mrs. Rowland moaned. “This is a most sturdy house.”
“I don't think anyone should sleep on this floor until the ceiling is repaired and the integrity of the entire structure inspected,” said Camden.
“You and I can share the governess's room on the ground floor,” said Gigi to Mrs. Rowland. “Do you have a spare cot for Camden?”
“Nonsense!” cried Mrs. Rowland. “Lord Tremaine is a first-time visitor to this house. I will not have him spend the night on a cot in the parlor like hired help. I will ask to be put up at Mrs. Moreland's cottage down the lane—she has two daughters who visit her, so she always has a spare chamber made up. You and Camden take the governess's room.”
“I will take the cot and sleep in the parlor,” said Gigi. “I'm not a first-time visitor. It doesn't matter where I sleep. Or I can come with you to Mrs. Moreland's.”
“Absolutely not to either of your mad propositions!” Mrs. Rowland recoiled in grandiose horror. “I will not have that kind of gossip bandied about. The two of you may divorce up a storm in London, but here I have my reputation to consider. I will not have people asking why my daughter would not share a room with her lawfully wedded husband. There, I think I hear Hollis coming up. I will confer with him about the arrangements. Mind that you do nothing to embarrass me, Gigi. No cots whatsoever.”
After Mrs. Rowland hurried down the steps with surprising energy and bounce, Gigi cursed under her breath. “Arrangements my foot,” she said, her voice seething. “She arranged for the ceiling to cave in! This house was inspected from top to bottom only a year ago because I was worried that it might be getting a bit decrepit. Itissound. Ceilings in sound structures do not just fall in like that, and certainly not so beautifully, exactly in an unoccupied room so that nobody gets hurt.”
“We have underestimated your mother's determination.”
“She should be having an affair with the duke, that's what she should be doing,” Gigi huffed. “Look at her, she is sacrificing the roof over her head to herd us into the same bedchamber when we already—never mind.”
Camden felt his heart beginning to pound. He hadn't planned on paying Gigi a conjugal visit, this being Mrs. Rowland's house and all. But if they were going to be stuck in the same—and chances were, fairly cramped—room and forced to share a bed, well . . .
“Do you have anything that needs to be carried?” he asked.
She shot him a suspicious glance, but in the light spilling out from all the open doors, he noticed she was no longer as pale as she'd been a minute ago. “No, thank you. You go on.”
He went down the stairs. Hollis showed him to the governess's room. Camden found himself in a chamber both larger and prettier than the one he had been given, its walls covered in a cream damask with elegant persimmon-and-moss arabesque patterns. Pink and white ranunculus in painted Limoges vases stood on each nightstand. The bed itself was quite large, the white summer bed linen already invitingly turned down.
“Mrs. Rowland uses this chamber for afternoon repose in the summer,” Hollis informed him. “It is cooler than the upstairs chambers.”
Camden turned off the lamps and opened the window shutters. Night air wafted in, cool, moist, and heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. A waxing moon was on the climb, its light pale and lucid. He discarded his robe, and, after a brief hesitation—Who was he trying to fool? Napoleon wanted Russia less badly than he wanted to lie with her—he removed the rest of his clothing too.
Gigi came only after a good quarter hour. Her footsteps stopped outside the door. Then nothing happened. The silence unfolded and unrolled, shrouding him in its oppressive strata, chafing at his patience and nerves.
The doorknob finally turned, softly. She closed the door behind her but advanced no further, standing with her back against it, her feet just beyond the imprint of moonlight. He was reminded of a night long ago, in a different house that also belonged to Mrs. Rowland, where a similarly lustrous moon also silvered a long swath of the room—the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.
“Like old times, isn't it?” he said, after a full minute had passed.
More silence. “What do you mean?” she said at last, her voice slightly creaky.
“Don't tell me you've forgotten.”
She shifted, barely audible sounds of silk sliding on flesh and against the panels of the door. “So you were awake,” she said accusatorily.
“I'm a light sleeper. And I was on an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house.”
“You took advantage of me.”
He chuckled. “What did you expect, after you felt me up and down? I could've done more and you'd've let me.”
“I could've done more too. I almost climbed back into your bed that night. Would have been a short path to the altar.”
“You don't say,” he murmured. “What stopped you?”
