Private Arrangements (17 page)

Chapter Eighteen

25 May 1893

M
rs. Rowland greeted Langford, His Grace the Duke of Perrin, with a welcome that was noticeable for the absence of the effusive, sycophantic warmth she plucked out of thin air so easily. Not that one could find fault with her hospitality. But whereas she had once been eager—indeed, greedy—for any furtherance of their acquaintance, this evening she'd metamorphosed into a walking embodiment of correct politeness. Even the soft, pastel gowns she favored had been replaced by a relentless black, like the crepe of a widow in first mourning.

She received him in a parlor lit as brilliantly as the Versailles. So many candles blazed that he wondered if some parish church wasn't missing its altar. The windows facing the country lane were open, the dimity curtains only half drawn. Any passerby could clearly see the entire interior of the room.

Was she so eager to advertise her increasing familiarity with him? Possibly. But the path outside was lightly used during the day and barely trod at night. She might as well have painted herself a sign—
The Duke of Perrin calls at this estimable residence—
and then planted it face-down in her garden.

“Would you care for something to drink?” she asked. “Tea, pineapple water, or lemonade?”

He was fairly certain that no one had offered him lemonade since he turned thirteen. And it did not escape his attention that she gave him no choice of spirits.

“A cognac would do very well.”

Her lips thinned, but she apparently couldn't quite summon up the wherewithal to deny a duke a simple request of beverage. “Certainly. Hollis,” she said to her butler, “bring a bottle of Rémy Martin for His Grace.”

The servant bowed and left.

Langford smiled in satisfaction. There, that was better. Lemonade indeed. “I trust your trip to London was rewarding?”

She laughed, a sound both startled and inauthentic. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

She touched the cameo brooch she wore at her throat. He could not help staring at the contrast of her white fingers against the stark, light-devouring crepe. The skin on her hand, though delicate, lacked the succulence and translucency of first youth. He was reminded that she was, indeed, several years older than him, a woman approaching fifty. Granny Snow White.

But damned if she wasn't more beautiful than a bevy of nubile girls, more beautiful even than herself at age nineteen. As a rule, gorgeous women aged worse than plain ones—they had the greater fall. She, however, had acquired, somewhere along the way, a self-worth that had little to do with her beauty yet adorned her better than pearls and diamonds—an underpinning of substance beneath her still-lovely skin.

“I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting your cousins at the theater,” she said. “Lady Avery and Lady Somersby were kind enough to invite me to sit in their box.”

The significance of her statement did not immediately register. So she ran into Caro and Grace—a lot of people did, to their delight or chagrin, depending on whether they received juicy gossip or were probed three fingers deep for it. Then it dawned on him. Mrs. Rowland here hadn't had any idea at all of the person he had been before his present incarnation as the reclusive, practically asexual scholar.

And what would they have told her? Probably the bitch fight, the fire, and the time he hired all of Madame Mignonne's girls. They were far from the worst sins he had ever committed, but they ranked high in notoriety. And the virtuous—though opportunistic—Mrs. Rowland was shocked and dismayed enough to temporarily shelve her idol-worshipping mien and her breathless voice.

Truly, as if he could be deterred from more nefarious intentions by a few open windows and fifteen yards of reproachful black crepe, he who had successfully lifted a number of mourning skirts in his day, and sometimes before open windows too.

Not that he entertained any such designs concerning Mrs. Rowland. Had they met twenty years previously, well, it would have been quite another story. But he had changed. He was now aged and tame.

On most days.

“I trust they regaled you with stories of my youthful indiscretions,” he said. “I'm afraid I haven't led the most exemplary life.”

Obviously she hadn't expected him to confront the issue head-on. She attempted a nonchalant wave of her hand. “Well, what gentleman is without a few peccadilloes to his name?”

“Just so.” He nodded with grand approval at her sudden insight. “The intemperance of summer leads to the ripe maturity of autumn. Thus it has always been, thus it always will be.”

He almost laughed at the confusion his philosophizing caused in her. But her manservant came to the rescue with the delivery of the cognac, an excellent blend composed of fine eau-de-vie that had been aged fifty years in old Limousin oak barrels.

They moved to the card table she had set up and she tentatively inquired if they could, at this early stage, play for something other than one-thousand-pound-a-hand stakes. “My daughter and I played for sweets, butterscotch, toffee, licorice . . . you see what I mean, Your Grace.”

“Certainly,” he said magnanimously, especially given that he had played thousand-quid hands no more than three times in his life, after which even his vice-laden heart could no longer tolerate the awfulness of losing a year's income in a single night.

She rose and retrieved a large golden embossed box. “My daughter sent me these Swiss chocolates Easter last. She knows I'm very fond of them.”

The chocolates were packed in several trays, with most of those on the top tier already eaten. She discarded the top tray, then set one full tray before herself and one before him.

“What games did you play with your daughter?” he said, shuffling the decks of cards on the table.

“The usual games for two—bezique, casino, écarté. She is an excellent card player.”

“I look forward to a few games with her when she arrives,” he said.

Mrs. Rowland did not answer immediately. “I'm sure she would be delighted.”

It would appear that while Mrs. Rowland could best a Drury Lane professional when it came to premeditated fabrications, she wasn't as smooth when a spontaneous instance of barefaced lying was required. Managing a husband and a fiancé at the same time was no mean task. He could see very well why Lady Tremaine refused to participate in her mother's harebrained schemes to add a third man to the already combustible mix. A few beats of silence passed as he dealt the cards faceup.

“Perhaps you'd rather play a few hands with her husband,” said Mrs. Rowland. “She is not yet sure of her itinerary, so he might come in her stead.”

“She is married?” He feigned great surprise.

“Yes, she is. She has been married to the Duke of Fairford's heir for ten years.” Pride still informed her answer. Pride and a trace of despair.

The first ace landed in his lap. He shook his head slightly as he collected the cards, shuffled them, and held the deck out for her to cut. “I confess myself baffled, Mrs. Rowland. When you recommended your daughter to me, I had assumed her unattached and your gentle interest in my person intended to bring about a friendship between your daughter and myself.”

She stared at him as if he'd asked her to undress. Well, he
was
stripping 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 the
Phaedo
and 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.