Gigi shook her head. This was so far out of her perception of reality that she had no choice but to deny it. “No one is ever happy about a divorce. I don't think he regrets letting me go. He is simply peeved that I couldn't leave well enough alone and had the temerity to interrupt his orderly life for the unworthy cause of my own happiness. In any case, he's already given his word. One year and I'm free to do as I choose.”
One year from last night. She still couldn't think about it without being engulfed in vile heat.
“Amen to that,” Freddie said fervently. “You must be right. You are always right.”
When he looks at you he sees only the halo he has erected about you.
“I think I should return to the ballroom,” she said, rather abruptly. “People will start to talk. We don't want that.”
Freddie obligingly shook his head. “No, no, certainly not.”
She wished for once he'd grab her by the shoulders, damn all the people in the ballroom, and kiss her as if the whole world was on fire. This was all Camden's fault. She had been perfectly happy with who Freddie was before he got here.
She stood up, kissed Freddie lightly on the forehead, and gathered her skirts to leave. “It'll do you no harm to pay some mind to Miss Carlisle. Resume ‘Afternoon in the Park.' I'd like it for a birthday present.”
A garden party was in full swing. Set against a profusion of red tulips and yellow jonquils was a kaleidoscopic parade of women, the edges of their creamy skirts blurring like a distant memory. In the middle of this swirl of colors, an oasis of calm. A man sat at a small table by himself, his cheek in his palm, his gaze enthralled by someone just outside the frame of the painting.
Lord Frederick was a far more talented and vivid painter than Camden had guessed. The painting radiated warmth, immediacy, and charming wistfulness.
A Man in Love, said the small inset on the bottom of the frame.
A man in love.
At his sister Claudia's house in Copenhagen, there was a framed photograph of Camden, taken the day after New Year's Day 1883. He'd been waiting for his mother and Claudia to finish their primping in advance of a family portrait, and the photographer had captured him in a pose nearly identical to that of Lord Frederick's man in love—daydreaming in an armchair, his head propped up in his hand, smiling, gazing somewhere beyond the range of the camera.
He had been looking out the window in the direction of Briarmeadow and thinking of her.
The photograph remained Claudia's favorite, despite all his efforts to persuade her to get rid of it. I like looking at it, she'd insist. I miss you like that.
Some days he, too, missed it. The optimism, the headiness, the feeling of walking on air. He knew perfectly well now that it'd been based on a lie, that he'd paid for those few weeks of unbridled happiness by never being able to feel anything like that again, and still he missed it.
He might divorce her, but he'd never be free of her.
Gigi's sitting room was dark, but light flowed out of her bedroom, casting a long, narrow triangle the color of old gold coins along the angle of the bedroom door, which had been left slightly ajar. Strange, she was certain she had switched off the light before going out.
When she reached her bedroom, she discovered the light to be from Camden's apartment. The connecting door between their bedrooms was wide open. But his bedroom, though lit, looked empty, his bed undisturbed from when it had last been made.
Her heart rate accelerated. She had deliberately stayed out very late to avoid a repeat of last night. Surely he wouldn't bother waiting up when he still had three hundred sixty-three nights left to impregnate her.
But where was he? Fallen asleep in his chair? Or possibly still out on the town somewhere, seeing to his own amusement? But what did she care what he did in his own time? She should simply close the door—very quietly—and get herself to bed.
Instead, she walked into his bedroom.
The sight of the fully restored room still made her throat tighten. It took her back to the time when she used to flop down on his bed and weep at life's unfairness.
The day she emptied the bedchamber was the day she took charge of her life. Three months later she met Lord Wrenworth and began a torrid affair that further boosted her confidence. But this was where it all began, the decoupling of her life from Camden's, the choice to move on, no matter how lonely and uncertain the future.
His personal effects were nowhere to be seen, except for a watch on a silver chain that lay on the demilune table opposite the bed, an intricate timepiece from Patek, Philippe & Cie. She turned the watch over. On the back was an inscription wishing him a happy thirtieth birthday from Claudia.
She put down the watch. The console table stood not far from the half-open door to the sitting room. A bright light washed in, but the sitting room itself was as silent as the bottom of the ocean.