Private Arrangements (4 page)

Bedfordshire
December 1882

G
igi disliked Greek mythology, because the gods were forever punishing women for hubris. What was wrong with a little hubris? Why couldn't Arachne claim that her skills were greater than Athena's, since they were, without being turned into a spider? And why should Poseidon be angry enough to toss Cassiopeia's daughter to a sea monster, unless Cassiopeia's boast was true and she really was more beautiful than Poseidon's own daughters?

Gigi was guilty of hubris. And she, too, was being punished by jealous gods. How else was she to view Carrington's abrupt and senseless death? Other roués lived to unrepentant old age, ogling debutantes with their red, rheumy eyes. Why shouldn't Carrington have enjoyed the same opportunities?

A fierce gust nearly made off with her hat. She rubbed the underside of her chin, where the hat ribbon chafed. Briarmeadow, the Rowland property, was eight thousand acres of woodland and meadows, most of it flat as a ballroom floor, except for this corner where the land rolled and sometimes creased into ridges and folds.

She'd grown up in a house nearer to Bedford. Briarmeadow, her home for the past three years, had been purchased with the express purpose of sweetening the deal for Carrington, since it shared a long border with Twelve Pillars, Carrington's country seat.

Gigi liked to walk the boundaries of Briarmeadow. Land was solid, something she could count on. She liked certainty. She liked knowing exactly how her future would unfold. Marriage to Carrington had promised her something along that line: No matter what else happened, she'd always be a duchess, and no one would ever again snub either herself or her mother.

With Carrington gone, she was back to being just Miss Moneybags. She wasn't head-turningly beautiful, no matter what her mother tried. She had been known to step on a toe or two on the dance floor. And, vulgarity of all vulgarities, she had an abiding interest in commerce, in the making of goods and money.

Overhead, thick clouds hung like giant wads of soiled linen, gray with stains of pus yellow. The snow would come down soon. She really should be turning back. She had another three miles to go before she'd come within sight of the house. But she did not want to go back. It was dejecting enough to contemplate by herself what might have been. It was ten times worse with her mother there.

Mrs. Rowland alternated between shock, despair, and an angry defiance. They'd do it again, she'd hug Gigi and whisper fiercely when she was in one of her wilder moods. Then she'd lose all hope, because they couldn't possibly repeat it—Carrington having been a rather unique case of debauchery, insolvency, and desperation.

A brook separated Briarmeadow from Twelve Pillars. Here there were no fences, the brook being a long-recognized boundary. Gigi stood on the bank and threw pebbles into the water. The spot was pretty in summer, with pliant green willow branches that danced in the breeze. Now the defoliated willows looked rather like naked old spinsters, all thin and droopy.

Across the brook the land rose into a slope. Suddenly, atop the slope, directly opposite her, a bareheaded rider appeared. She was taken aback. Besides her, no one ever came here. The rider, in a dark crimson riding jacket and buff riding trousers tucked into long black boots, charged down the slope. She was startled into stumbling backward, for fear the horse might gallop into her.

At the bottom of the slope, some fifty feet downstream from her, the rider guided his mount to a muscular, graceful leap, jumping clear across the twelve-foot-wide stream. He drew up his reins, halted, and looked at her. He'd been aware of her all along.

“You are trespassing on my land,” she shouted.

He came toward her, nudging the huge black horse with ease, ducking under the denuded willow branches. He didn't stop until he had a clear line of sight to her, about ten feet out. And she had her first good look at him.

He was handsome, though not as pretty as Carrington, who—poor sod, may the she-devils of hell not use him too hard—had been Byron reborn. This man here had features that were both sharper and nobler, set in a leaner, more masculine face. Their gaze met. He had beautiful, deep-set eyes, the irises a gorgeous green. A thinking man's eyes: perceptive, opaque, seeing much, giving little away.

She couldn't look away. There was something about him that was instantly appealing to her, something in his bearing, a confidence that was unlike either Carrington's arrogant sense of prerogative or her own unyielding obduracy. Poise forged with finesse.

“You are trespassing on my land,” she repeated, because she couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Am I?” he said. “And you are?”

He spoke with a subtle accent, not French, German, Italian, or anything else she could immediately think of. A foreigner?

“Miss Rowland. Who are you?”

“Mr. Saybrook.”

Was he—no, not possible. But then, who else could he be? “Are you the Marquess of Tremaine?”

Carrington had died heirless. His uncle, the next male in line, had inherited the ducal title. The new duke's eldest son took on the courtesy title of the Marquess of Tremaine.

The young man smiled a little. “I suppose I have become that too.”

He
was Theodora von Schweppenburg's beau? She had envisioned a man as spineless and ineffectual as Miss von Schweppenburg herself.

“You are returned from university.”

He had not attended Carrington's funeral alongside the rest of his family because of his classes at the École Polytechnique in Paris. His parents had been vague about what he studied. Physics or economics, they'd said. How could anyone possibly confuse the two?

“The university lets us out for Christmas.”

He dismounted and approached her, leading the black stallion behind him. She tamped down her discomfort and remained where she was. He removed his riding glove and offered her his hand.

“Delighted to meet you at last, Miss Rowland.”

She shook his hand briefly. “I guess you know who I am, then.”

The first snowflakes began to fall, tiny particles of puffy ice. One landed on his eyelash. His eyelashes, like his brows, were of a much darker shade than the molten gold at the tips of his hair. His eyes, she was sure, were the color of an Alpine lake, though she'd never seen one.

“I was going to call on you tomorrow,” he said. “To offer my condolences.”

She chortled. “Yes, as you can see, I am inconsolable.”

He looked at her, truly looked at her this time, his eyes scanning her features one by one. His scrutiny discomfited her—she was more accustomed to being pointed at behind her back—but it was not unpleasant, coming from such a rivetingly handsome man.

“I apologize for my cousin. He was most inconsiderate to die before marrying you and leaving an heir.”

His bluntness took her aback. It was one thing for her mother to say something along that line, quite another to hear it repeated by a complete stranger to whom she hadn't even been properly introduced.

“Man proposes, God disposes,” she said.

“A crying shame, isn't it?”

She was beginning to like this Lord Tremaine. “Yes, it is.”

The snowflakes suddenly increased in dimension, no longer icy sawdust but fingernail-size fluffs. They fell densely, as if all the angels in heaven were molting. In the minutes since Lord Tremaine first appeared, the sky had become visibly darker. Soon dusk would cloak the land.

Tremaine looked about them. “Where is your man, or your maid?”

“Don't have one. I'm not out in public.”

He frowned. “How far away is your house?”

“About three miles.”

“You should take my horse. It's not safe for you to walk that long in the dark, in this weather.”

“Thank you, but I don't ride.”

He looked into her eyes. For a moment she thought he meant to ask her outright why she was afraid of horses. But he only said, “In that case, permit me to walk you home.”

She breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Permission granted. But you should be forewarned that I am disastrous at small talk.”

He pulled on his glove and looped the stallion's reins about his wrist. “It's quite all right. Silence does not derange—pardon—disturb me.”

The word
déranger
in French meant
to disturb.
He didn't really have an accent. His English, a language that he hardly ever spoke, was simply somewhat rusty.

They walked in silence for a while. She couldn't resist glancing at him every minute or so to admire his profile. He had the classical nose and chin of an Apollo Belvedere.

“I conferred with my late cousin's solicitors before coming to Twelve Pillars,” Tremaine said, breaking the silence. “He left us a complicated situation.”

“I see.” She certainly did, being intimately acquainted with Carrington's financial particulars.

“The solicitors gave me the sum of his outstanding debts, a staggering number. But for four-fifths of the amount, they could not show me any demands from creditors that are less than two years old.”

“Interesting.” She was beginning to see where he was going with this. How had he pieced it together so quickly? He must not have been in England for more than two or three days or she'd have learned about his presence already.

“So I made them show me his marriage contract instead.”

A very shrewd move. “Did you find it soporific reading?”

“On the contrary, I quite admired it. As watertight a legal document as I'm likely to come across this lifetime. I noticed that you'd absolve him of all his debts upon marriage.”

“There might have been such wording.”

“You are the one who holds the lion's share of his arrears, aren't you? You bought out his creditors and consolidated the preponderance of his debts to persuade him to marry you.”

Gigi looked upon Lord Tremaine with a new, almost warm respect. He was young, twenty-one or so. But he was sharp as a guillotine blade. That was exactly what she had done. She had eschewed Mrs. Rowland's advice to win a duke in drawing rooms and ballrooms and had gone about it her own way. “That's right. Carrington didn't want to marry the likes of me. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiation table.”

“Did you enjoy the dragging?” He glanced down at her.

“Yes, I rather did,” she confessed. “It was amusing threatening to strip his house bare to the last plank on the floor and the last spoon in the kitchen.”

“My parents are convinced of your grief.” She heard the smile in his voice. “They said tears streamed down your face at his funeral.”

“For nearly three years of hard work down the drain, I cried like a bereaved mother.”

He laughed outright, a rich sound with all the beguilement of spring. Her heart skipped a beat.

“You are an unusual woman, Miss Rowland. Are you also fair and honest?”

“If there's no disadvantage to me.”

She could swear he smiled again. “Good enough,” he said. “I'd like to negotiate a deal with you.”

“I'm all ears.”

“Twelve Pillars generates a decent income, if managed properly. That, combined with the sale of nonentailed properties, should help pay off Carrington's creditors, if you hold off calling in your portion of his debts.”

“I'm not infinitely rich. Acquiring Carrington's liabilities was a heavy outlay, even for me.”

“I'm willing to cede you an advantageous interest rate if you would let us pay you back in quarterly installments, starting next year this time and finishing in, let's say, seven years.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. “Why don't you marry me instead?”

Marrying the new duke's heir had always been the first alternative, but she had been unenthused about the enterprise. Carrington had poked everything that moved, but he had no loyalty except to himself, and that was something she could understand and even appreciate, on occasion. She recoiled at the idea of a mawkish husband who pined away for another woman, especially a woman for whom she had so little admiration.

Lord Tremaine in person, however, had already proved anything but useless. She warmed up to the idea of an alliance with him like a pan on a stoked stove. “Upon our marriage I'll cancel seventy percent of the debts.”

He gave her a long look, but his response was not the shock and amazement she had anticipated. “Why only seventy percent?”

“Because you are not a duke yourself and probably would not be for many years.” She considered being a bit more demure and giving him time to think. But the next thing out of her mouth was “What say you?”

He was silent a moment. “I'm deeply honored. But my affections are already pledged elsewhere.”

“Affections change.” Good Lord, she sounded like the devil out to purchase his soul.

“I should like to think that I have some constancy to my character.”

Damn Miss von Schweppenburg. Why should that drawing-room ornament be so lucky? “You are probably right. But I do not require your affections, only your hand.”

He stopped, putting a hand on the stallion's neck to signal the horse to halt. She stopped too. “You are very ruthless toward yourself, for someone so young,” he said, with a gentleness that made her want to clutch his hand and tell him everything that had happened to make her the hard-bitten female she was. “Why?”

She shrugged instead. “I've had to deal with fortune hunters since I turned fourteen. And grande dames who wouldn't give me the time of the day.”

“Affection and good opinion—are they not at all a consideration for you in marriage?”

“No. So I would not mind that you love someone else. In fact, you can spend all your time with her, if you like. Once our marriage is consummated, you need only to come back to me when you need heirs.”