Page 81 of Private Arrangements
“Will you remonstrate me for my lack of punctuality now?” Gigi said later, still mostly breathless, lying with her head on his arm.
“That and your utter want of respect toward the beauty and splendor of the public rooms of my house.”
“I like them. They quite suit my parvenu tastes.” The private quarter, which housed his Impressionist collection, was by contrast cool and serene. “I was looking for something to say that would immediately establish my English eccentricity.”
“I think you've succeeded beyond all hope,” he said. “They will prattle of this night for years to come, especially if you go into confinement nine months from today.”
She smiled to herself. “You think you are so virile.”
“IknowI'm so virile.” He kissed her earlobe. “Let's just hope the second time's the charm.”
She didn't immediately catch the significance of his words. When she did, she found herself scrambling to a sitting position. He'd obliquely referred to her first pregnancy, which had ended in a miscarriage. But she had never spoken of it, not even to her mother. Had hidden it, along with her ravenous love, in the deepest recesses of her heart, a secret prisoner in the dungeon, whose clanking chains and whimpers of despair only she heard in the witching hours of the night.
“You knew,” she whispered.
She shouldn't be so surprised. It was silly to believe her mother wouldn't have found out about it—and that once she did, she wouldn't have told Camden in the hope of forcing a reaction from him.
“Only years after the fact. I got quite drunk the day I learned of it. I believe I smashed my entire model ship collection.” He sighed, smoothing a strand of her hair between his fingers. “But perhaps that was out of jealousy, since your mother mentioned the miscarriage in the same breath she invoked Lord Wrenworth's name.”
She lay down again, facing him. “You? Jealous? You are with a different woman every time I turn around.”
“Guilty as charged in Copenhagen. But I didn't sleep with anyone in Paris.”
What she really wanted to know was what he'd been doing with the former Miss von Schweppenburg. But his extraordinary claim about Paris perked her ears nevertheless.
“Who was that woman calling on you late at night, then?”
“A rising actress at the Opéra. I hired her to knock on my door and sit in my apartment for a few hours, so that you'd assume the worst and hurt as much as I did. But I didn't touch her, or any other woman. I was faithful to you, for what that's worth, until I learned that you'd taken a lover already.”
That would make him celibate for at least two and a half years after he'd left her. “Why? Why were you faithful to me?” she marveled.
“Oh, I had no time. Within weeks after my arrival in America I'd taken on such astronomical loans I could scarcely eat or sleep for fear of defaulting. I was up at five every morning and never went to bed before one.” He grimaced a little at the memory, then smiled at her. “You could also say I had no intention. I wantedyou.I wanted to stomp back into your life one day, twice as wealthy as you, if possible. I imagined decadent, histrionic reunions and wasted a river of sperm masturbating to these fantasies.”
She knew what the word meant—it was what the Muscular Christians were trying to prevent, through a regimen of rigorous sports that would leave English men and boys too exhausted for anything but dead slumber—though she was sure she'd never heard it spoken aloud before. She'd thought it a dirty word, but the way he said it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, made voluptuous images dance before her eyes.
If she weren't already naked, she'd rip off her clothes and throw herself at him. She took one of his hands and rubbed the moist inside of her lower lip against the calluses of his palm. “Tell me one of those fantasies.”
He leveled a dirty look at her. “Only if you promise to act your part in it.”
She bowed her head with becoming humility. “Well, I did tell myself that I would be the most obliging wife who ever lived.”
He smiled wickedly, pulling her to him. “Oh, this is getting better and better.”
In between fulfillment of his inventive—at times highly unorthodox—fantasies, Gigi and Camden talked about the children they would have and all the things they couldn't wait to do together. At Christmas they'd visit his grandfather in Bavaria. Come spring she would show him the gorgeous West Country of England and Wales. And in summer, if she wasn't already too far gone in her pregnancy, they'd sail the Aegean and the Adriatic on theMistress.
“Take me somewhere to ride,” she said. “I haven't been on a horse since you walked out on me the first time.”
“I've a country house in Connecticut, on a pretty piece of land. We'll sail up tomorrow.”
Thinking of the arrangements made her remember Beckett. “Your butler . . . do you know that—”
“I was the one who told him to go far away. We were both shocked when three years later he came for a position I'd advertised. He immediately begged pardon and turned to leave. I stopped him. To this day I don't really know why.” Camden shrugged. “By the end of the year, he'll have worked for me for seven years.”
Whatever his reasons, she was grateful. “It's a well-run house,” she murmured. “And what of his son?”
“He was in a Liverpool jail for a year or two, then went to South Africa when gold was discovered. He married last year.”
She breathed a further sigh of relief. It was most agreeably humbling to learn that her sins hadn't stopped the earth from spinning or other people from getting on tolerably with the rest of their lives.
