She was incensed that he made free use of her house and her staff without informing her of his movements—the least courtesy, surely. She was also profoundly relieved by the small respite of his absence.
The way she had ogled him this morning—at his torso, which seemed to have been sculpted by the hands of Bernini himself, smooth, lean, lithe, with long, beautifully sinewed arms like those of a seasoned sailor—could she have done anything more mortifying short of dropping her handkerchief and falling to the floor in a dead faint?
She and Freddie sat down side by side on the chaise longue. “Tell me what he wanted,” said Freddie. “He must have wanted something.”
She had been able to think of nothing but what Camden wanted. Even now, with him miles away, she was still distracted and tense. Disaster, that was what he wanted. For what else could bedding her achieve but somehow, somewhen, calamity on an epic scale?
“He is not convinced that we should be divorced for something as trivial as me wishing to marry someone else,” she said. It was beyond her to tell Freddie that her husband meant to invoke his long-abdicated rights and shag her until she showed something for it. Nor could she reveal that she would submit to this connubial copulation, while planning to make use of every device ever invented to block conception.
What was it about Camden that turned her into such a chiseler and now a double-crosser? “But he's willing to be reasonable. If we are still determined to marry in a year's time, he'll let the divorce proceed.”
“A year!” Freddie exclaimed. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, if that's his only condition, then it's not half so bad. We can wait a year. It will be an awfully long year, but we can wait.”
“Freddie.” She gripped his hand, gratitude inundating her heart. “You are so good to me.”
“No, no! You are the one who's good to me! Everyone else thinks I'm clumsy and dense. You are the only person who thinks I'm all right.”
On any other day she'd have preened with pride, to think that at last she possessed the depth and maturity necessary to appreciate a diamond of the first water like Freddie, when all about her, men and women were still blinded by superficialities. But today her depth and maturity truly made their presence known. She was more than humbled; she felt unworthy. But she could not say it. Freddie looked to her for strength and guidance. She must not tumble off her pedestal now.
“I am most certainly not. I know for a fact that Miss Carlisle thinks highly of you.”
Miss Carlisle was in love with Freddie. She was dignified and self-contained about it, but she could not conceal it from Gigi. Normally, Gigi would not have pointed out such a thing to Freddie. But these were not normal times, and her guilt overshadowed her possessiveness.
“Angelica? Really? She used to laugh at me all the time when we were younger, whenever I fell off my pony or some such. And she used to tell me that I was a veritable idiot.”
“People change as they grow older,” Gigi said. “At some point we learn to value kindness and constancy above all else, and in that, we cannot find better than you, Freddie.”
Freddie smiled in pleasure. “If you say so, then it must be so. Angelica hasn't been feeling quite well lately. I've been meaning to have a bottle of tonic sent to her. I think I'll deliver it in person now, and ask her if I've become less of a dunce over the years.”
The mantel clock chimed the half hour. Freddie had been in her parlor for fifteen minutes. She used to allow his calls to stretch for half an hour and more, but that was no longer possible with Camden's return.
“I think I'd better go,” Freddie said, standing up. “Though I hate to leave.”
She rose. “I hate it too. I wish—oh, never mind what I wish.”
Freddie clasped her hands in his broad, warm palms. “Are you sure you are quite all right, my love? Are you really sure?”
No, she was not all right. She felt ill and lonely. And appalled at herself. She was about to undertake a dangerous gamble, lying and cheating at both ends. And here she thought she had forever sworn off fraud and swindle.
She mustered a radiant smile for him. “Don't worry about me, darling. Remember what you yourself have said? Nothing can shake me. Nothing.”
Langford Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Perrin, began his five-mile afternoon walk a half hour earlier than usual. He liked a little unpredictability from time to time, as currently his life consisted of all the variety of a mediocre vicar's Sunday sermons. But he didn't mind it, not too much. A scholar needed peace and quiet to delve deep into the Homeric past and the heroic battles before the walls of Ilium.