Private Arrangements (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

London
25 August

My dearest Philippa,

I apologize for my letter arriving late yesterday. The light these past couple of days, though thinner and cooler than the light of high summer, has a wonderful golden quality, especially late in the day. Miss Carlisle thinks I've made tremendous progress on “Afternoon in the Park.”

People are trickling back into London. Last night I had dinner at the Carlisles' and revealed myself a bounder when I admitted that I'd been in town for two weeks. Everyone else boasted that he'd spent the whole of August grousing in Scotland or sailing off the Isle of Wight.

I'll be overjoyed to see you tomorrow. I wish we were already married.

I enclose, as always, a thousand loving thoughts.

Yours ever devoted,
Freddie

C
amden's departure had not gone unnoticed. Such was the newsworthiness of the event that within thirty-six hours the whole of London knew he'd vacated his apartment and taken everything with him. The telegraph—indeed, the telephone—paled before the swiftness and efficacy of mouth-to-ear gossip transmission.

What did it mean?
Everyone had wanted to know. Had Lady Tremaine won her battle? Had Lord Tremaine permanently withdrawn from the war? Or had he only temporarily retreated to regroup?

Gigi paltered, fudged, and equivocated—when she could. When pressed hard, she lied outright. She didn't know, she repeated. Lord Tremaine did not communicate personal plans to her. She didn't know what he intended—didn't know, didn't know, didn't know—and therefore must curb her impatience just a bit longer.

The divorce papers were typed afresh, needing only her signature. She told the lawyers to sit on them. Goodman inquired whether the furniture and decor in Camden's bedchamber should be removed, covered, or polished daily in anticipation of his return. She had him leave everything alone. Her mother sent a fortune in telegrams. She ignored them en masse.

But she couldn't ignore Freddie. Freddie—bless him for having been so patient—showed mounting signs of distress.
Is there anything from Lord Tremaine's solicitors?
he asked every time they met.
I wish we could get married. Right away.
There was a fearful and almost frantic quality to his pleas. She gave the same carefully crafted answer each time and hated herself with ever greater venom.

Croesus was the only one who didn't pose questions she couldn't answer. But he looked dejected and listless in Camden's absence. She'd find him in the conservatory, napping on Camden's favorite rattan chair, the one with faded blue paisley cushions and cigar burns on the armrest, as if waiting for his return.

Maintaining this intractable status quo was like juggling flaming scimitars. She woke up tired and went to bed dazed with fatigue: parrying a thousand acquaintances' curiosity, keeping her mother at arm's length, cosseting Freddie as best as she could, and withholding the truth even from her few trusted friends.

The end of the season brought little relief. With rail travel as instantaneous as it had become, even her retreat to Briarmeadow provided no refuge. At the end of every week she hosted a three-day house party so that she and Freddie could see each other without any hint of impropriety. As a result, half of the time her house was swollen with people. Torrents of eager, unsatisfied inquisitiveness eddied and swirled, driving poor Freddie to distraction and making her as cross as a stranded dowager with a bladder full of tea and no place to empty it.

And guilt-ridden. And ashamed. And despondent.

She knew what she was doing, of course. She was doing her damnedest to postpone the moment of reckoning, the moment when she must either step forth to marry Freddie or at last face the fact that she could not, not even with Camden having completely removed himself from the melee.

But how could she tell Freddie that? He had been her faithful friend from the very first. Never in all this chaos had he blamed her, explicitly or implicitly, for anything. He had stood by her with courage and humility, enduring gossip that painted him as either a fool or a fortune hunter of the highest order.

She owed him. He should be rewarded for his loyalty and his trust in her. He'd done so much for her, the steadfast Sancho Panza on her wild-eyed quixotic quest. How could she do any less for him?

The brook was clear and shallow this time of the year. It murmured and soughed, with the occasional burble of a sunlit splash. The willows languidly trailed the tips of their soft branches on the surface of the stream, like a coy woman flaunting the luxuriance of her unbound hair with slow, teasing turns of her head.

Gigi didn't know what she'd expected to find here. Camden flying down the hill like a Cossack and sweeping her up, perhaps. She shook her head, amazed at her own persistent idiocy.

Still she didn't leave. In ten and a half years she'd forgotten how pretty this spot could be, how quiet, with no sounds except for the soft laughter of the brook, the rustle of the morning breeze as it skittered between leaves and branches, the lowing of sheep in the meadow behind her, grazing on a high green carpet of lucerne, and . . .

Hoofbeats?

Her heart ricocheted against her rib cage. The horse was coming from her own property. She whirled around, picked up her skirts, and sprinted up the slope.

It was not Camden but Freddie. Her surprise was almost stronger than her disappointment. She didn't even know Freddie could ride. He had an awkward seat but hung on stubbornly, somehow zigzagging the horse forward on a prayer.

She ran toward him. “Freddie! Be careful, Freddie!”

She had to help him untangle his boot from the stirrup as he dismounted, the heel having caught on the way down.

“I'm fine. I'm fine,” he reassured her hastily.

She glanced at her watch. Freddie usually arrived on the 2:13. But it was not even eleven o'clock yet. “You are early. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is as it should be,” he answered, as he inexpertly tethered the horse to a salt lick. “I didn't know what to do with myself. So I caught an earlier train. You don't mind?”

“No, no, of course not. You are always welcome here.” Poor Freddie, he'd become thinner each time she'd seen him. She felt a pinch in her heart. Her darling. How she wanted him to be happy.

She kissed him on his cheek. “Did you paint well yesterday?”

“I'm almost done with the picnic blanket.”

“Good,” she said, smiling a little to herself, enjoying his enthusiasm the way a parent enjoyed a child's. “What about the items on the blanket? The picnic basket, that one remaining spoon, the half-eaten apple, and the open book?”

“You remember?!” Freddie looked to be in shock.

So he'd noticed her preoccupation. She supposed it would have been too much to hope that he hadn't. “Of course I remember.” Though only vaguely. And only because she'd asked him repeatedly. “How are they coming along?”

“The book is giving me fits, half in the sun and half in the shade. I can't make up my mind whether the shadows should be tinged with ochre or viridian.”

“What does Miss Carlisle think?”

“Viridian. That's why I'm not sure. I thought they'd be ochre.” He took a few steps in the direction of the stream. “Are we still in Briarmeadow? I don't remember ever being this far from the house.”

“That's Fairford land over there, beyond the water.”

“Land that would have been yours one day.”

She glanced at him but caught only his profile. “I've land enough.”

Freddie sighed. “What I meant was, if you and Lord Tremaine had not had your falling out. Or if you'd managed to patch things up between the two of you.”

“Or if the seventh duke had not died just before he was to marry me,” she said. “Life does not proceed according to plans.”

“But you probably don't very often wish that the seventh duke hadn't died.”

She opened her mouth to say something that would put his mind at ease, as she'd done innumerable times in recent months. But suddenly, the conceit and stupidity of it struck her. Freddie knew. Even if he hadn't acknowledged it, he understood that everything had changed.

His anxiety could not be soothed away with mere words, nor eradicated even with a wedding ceremony. Like the phantom of a haunted house, it might recede into the woodwork when the sun was high and the day bright, only to return with a vengeance at the onset of long nights and howling storms.

Her lack of a response hung heavy in the air. Freddie looked a little shocked. Like her, he'd probably become accustomed to the elaborate reassurances she manufactured with the efficacy of industrial processes. But she was a sham. The castle on the hill she'd built them was no more real than a painted fort on a stage backdrop.

Freddie walked away from her, as if needing the distance to sort out his own thoughts. She could still coddle him, go on feigning that everything would be all right. But it would be an egregious lie.

It was a sad reflection on her arrogance—and naïveté, to some extent—that she remained convinced for so long that she could still make
him
happy, even if he couldn't do the same for her. There was no such thing as a marriage with one happy spouse. Both must be or neither.

She caught up with him at the edge of the meadow.

“The light is good here,” he said halfheartedly. He looked like something out of one of his beloved Impressionist paintings, a pensive, melancholy figure
en plein air,
against a brilliant sky and a verdant landscape.

She pointed downstream. “See where the willows grow close to the bank? That's where I first met Lord Tremaine.”

Freddie scuffed the sole of his boot against an exposed rock. “Love at first sight?”

“Close enough, within twenty-four hours.” She took a deep breath, and another. It was time to come clean. “In some ways I was a victim of my youth and inexperience: I'd never been in love before and I couldn't handle the intensity of my emotions. But mostly I was my own worst enemy—I was too selfish, too myopic, and too ruthless. I knew it was terrible to deceive him into thinking that his intended had already married someone else, but I went ahead and did it anyway.”

Freddie gasped. It was the first time she'd ever told him—or anyone, for that matter—what lay at the core of her marital infelicity. Little wonder. It was an ugly story, full of what she liked least about herself.

“What I did bought me three weeks of happiness— rotten happiness at that—and then utter downfall.” She sighed. “Life has its way of teaching humility to the arrogant.”

“You are not arrogant,” Freddie said stubbornly.

Oh, Freddie, beloved Freddie. “Perhaps not as much as I used to be, but still arrogant enough not to have informed you of the truth from the very beginning— about my marriage, about the paintings . . .”

Freddie turned toward her. “Do you really think I love you because you had certain paintings on your walls? I was already in love with you long before I ever set foot in your house.”

She took his hands in hers, gazed at their linked fingers, and slowly shook her head. “Alas, I'd hoped it was the paintings. That would make you and Miss Carlisle perfect for each other.”

“Angelica wants to make me into something I'm not. She wants me to be the next Bouguereau, the most renowned artist of my day. But I'm not meant to be either famous or prolific. I'm a slow painter, and I don't mind it. I paint what I like and when I like. And I'd rather not second-guess whether a particular shadow is ochre or viridian.”

She smiled ruefully. “I can sympathize with that. Though I'd have wished that between you and Miss Carlisle—”

“I love
you.”

“And I adore you,” she said, fully meaning every word. “I know of no better man than you. But should we marry, there'd be three of us in this marriage, always. That is not fair to you. And in time it would become intolerable.

“I've agonized about it day and night. You have been the dearest friend. I kept asking myself, how could I let you down? How could I hurt you? But I've come to see that I would completely betray your trust were I to continue this pretense that we could go on as if nothing has changed. Things have changed, and I can no more undo these changes than I can make water flow uphill. I can only be honest with you, once and for all.”

Freddie's head lowered. “Do you still love him?”

The question that she'd once dreaded, that he hadn't dared to ask six weeks ago. “Yes, I'm afraid. I don't know how I can apologize to you enough—”

“You don't need to apologize to me for anything. You've never let me down, and you didn't this time either.” Freddie enfolded her in an embrace. “Thank you.”

She was befuddled. “Whatever for?”

“For liking me as I am. I never much cared for myself until you came along. You don't know how wonderful the past year and a half has been for me.”

Dear Freddie, only he could be so sweet to thank her at a time like this. She hugged him back fiercely. “You are the most wonderful person I've ever met, bar none.”

When they let go of each other, his eyes were rimmed in red. She, too, had to fight the urge to cry, a sigh and a tear for something that simply wasn't meant to be, a lovely courtship that would have collapsed under the weight of a complicated marriage.

Freddie was the first to speak. “You'll be going to America now, I guess?”

She shrugged, trying to be nonchalant about it. “I don't know.”

Camden had let her go with such ease and graciousness; he must have already come to the conclusion that he no longer wanted her, that the offer of reconciliation had been an aberration brought on by an emotional surge that could little withstand the force of reason.

He would have gone on with his life already, taken a new lover or two, perhaps even begun to pay some mind to those beauteous young American misses being paraded before him, with their perfect American teeth and perfect American noses. Would he really want her to show up and spoil all his brand-new plans?

“Come.” She placed her hand on Freddie's elbow. “We'll walk back. It's time for lunch. My groom can get the horse later. Tell me what is it you will do, now that you have declined to be the next great, world-renowned artist?”