The night he'd hired Mlle. Flandin had been the worst. What had he said to Gigi just before he closed the door on her? Don't be so cheaply available if you want me. Go home. If I want you, I know where you are.
He must have waited at the window for an hour, his anger deteriorating into a corrosive anxiety. Yet his pride forbade that he should give in, walk out of his apartment, and make sure she hadn't fallen down a flight of steps. Eventually she'd emerged on the sidewalk, head down, shoulders hunched, like a battered camp follower. She did not look up at his window as she walked away, she and her lengthening shadow.
Three days later he heard that she had packed up and returned to England. How easily she gave up. He got drunk for the first time in his life, a hideous experience that he would not repeat for another two years, until the day he learned that she had miscarried weeks following their wedding.
He checked his watch again. Fourteen hours and fifty-five minutes before he could have her again.
Someone addressed him by his title. He glanced about the park and saw a woman waving at him from atop a handsome victoria that she drove herself. She wore a dove-gray morning gown and a matching hat atop her dark chestnut hair. Lady Wrenworth. He raised his hand and returned the salute.
They shook hands as he maneuvered his horse into a trot alongside her carriage.
“You are up early, my lord Tremaine,” said Lady Wrenworth.
“I prefer the park with the morning mist still in the branches. Is Lord Wrenworth well?”
“He has been quite well since you last saw him yesterday afternoon.” Flecks of slyness flavored her reply. It seemed that Lord Wrenworth had married no empty-headed beauty. He supposed she was the best Wrenworth could do after Gigi. “And my lady Tremaine?”
“As unfashionably hale as ever, from what I observed last night.” He let a moment pass, during which Lady Wrenworth's eyes widened, before adding, “At dinner.”
“And did you take the opportunity to observe the stars too last night? They were out en masse.”
It took him a second to remember his glib assertion that he was indeed an amateur astronomer on the night he and the Wrenworths had first been introduced. “I'm afraid I'm more of an armchair enthusiast.”
“Most of Society to this day hasn't the slightest clue about Lord Wrenworth's precise fields of study. And I'm ashamed to confess that I myself had no idea of his scientific pursuits until well after we were married. How did you become familiar with his publications, my lord, if you don't mind my curiosity?”
How? My daughter has not been quite herself since her unfortunate miscarriage in March two years ago. But her recent friendship with Lord Wrenworth has had quite a salubrious effect on her.
“I read scientific and technological papers as a matter of course, both to gratify my interest and to keep up with the latest advances.” Quite honest so far. “One simply cannot mistake Lord Wrenworth's brilliance.”
The second part wasn't a lie either. Lord Wrenworth was, without a doubt, brilliant. But he was but one bright star in a galaxy of luminaries, in an age when advances in human understanding and machine prowess came fast and furious. Camden would not have singled him out had he not been Gigi's first paramour.
“Thank you.” Lady Wrenworth glowed. “I quite share that opinion.”
She drove off with a friendly wave.
Fourteen hours and forty-three minutes. Would this day never pass?
“I beg your pardon, Lady Tremaine.”
Gigi paused in her search for Freddie amid the throng at the Carlisles'. “Miss Carlisle.”
“Freddie asked me to tell you that he is in the garden,” said Miss Carlisle. “Behind the rose trellis.”
Gigi almost laughed. Only Freddie would think it necessary to mention—to a woman who secretly loved him, no less—that he'd be “behind the rose trellis,” a spot of seclusion highly conducive to behavior not countenanced inside the ballroom. “Thank you, though perhaps he shouldn't have troubled you.”
“It's no trouble,” Miss Carlisle said softly.
Miss Carlisle was more handsome than pretty, but she had bright eyes and a sharp, quick wit. At twenty-three, she was in her fourth season and widely believed by many to have no real interest in matrimony, since she would come into control of a comfortable inheritance on her twenty-fifth birthday and since she had turned down any and all proposals directed her way.
Would Miss Carlisle still be unmarried today if Freddie hadn't fallen head-over-heels in love with Gigi's art collection? Freddie believed he and Gigi to be kindred spirits who felt keenly the passage of time, the loss of a gently fading spring, and the inexplicability of life's joys and pains, when ironically she had bought the paintings solely in the hope of pleasing and mollifying Camden.