After a short time, his handsome face broke into one of the smiles that must have undone countless women. “You wrote, asking me to forgive him, but I had to go and shoot him anyway. I did have to, you know.”
“So you both claimed. To show I was worth fighting for.”
“That, yes,” he said. “But there’s more. Complicated, as Ripley said. If I hadn’t shot him, you’d be truly sorry. You’d feel guilty about what you did and sorry for me, because I would have been so noble and self-sacrificing. What an appalling prospect! Good thing, then, I shot him.”
“I should not call it a good thing, but you did spare me a great deal of penitence.”
“And myself a sick-making stain on my otherwise black reputation.”
“If you’d hurt him a whit more than you did, I should have made you a great deal more than sick,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Do you know, when you pushed me off him the other day, that was the first time a woman ever knocked me over?”
“I sincerely hope it won’t be the last.”
“Wicked girl,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and laughed.
He laughed, too. And if he felt regrets, and if they went deep, he put them in a place where they couldn’t bother him.
Ripley, dancing with his sister, was looking in the same direction as most of his guests: at Ashmont, laughing with the Duchess of Ripley.
“You do have the devil’s own luck,” Alice said. “Had you come home from the Continent one day later—”
“Don’t say that. You’ll give me nightmares. I know it was luck, every step of the way. When the whole business started, I was cursing you for going to Aunt Julia’s.”
“I? What had I to do with it?”
“If you were at the wedding, I reckoned you’d get the bride back to the groom and the minister in no time.”
“Or I might have helped her go.”
“That thought hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I doubt many thoughts occurred to you,” she said.
“Be that as it may, luck was with me again. You were far away. But not with Aunt Julia.”
“I was with her. For a time.”
“And then the Drakeleys? Really?” His gaze went to Blackwood, who was on the other side of the room, dancing with Lady Charles. “Have you something to tell me?”
“No.”
The dance was ending and Lady Charles was saying to Blackwood, “I should have thought you would have continued to the Drakeleys that day, and collected your wandering wife.”
“Didn’t know she needed collecting.”
“I’m not surprised. Men usually don’t know a blessed thing. I recommend you dance with her.”
“Dance with my own wife? What a shocking proposition.”
“I thought you enjoyed shocking people. Ah, here is Lord Frederick.”
The fair-haired gentleman bowed. “Lady Charles.”
“Lord Frederick,” she said crisply. “What do you think of men dancing with their own wives?”
“Stranger things have happened,” said he. “Will you dance, Lady Charles?”
Lady Charles’s eyebrows went up. “With you?”
He looked about. “I was not aware of asking on behalf of any other gentleman.”
“Good heavens. Strange things, indeed.”
But she let him lead her out.
Hours later, after their guests had gone, the Duke and Duchess of Ripley stood on the small balcony overlooking the garden and watched the sky lighten into the grey twilight that so often passes for dawn in London.
They were dressed for bed, but they were drinking champagne.
“That went off well, I thought, for my first do,” Olympia said. “Not that I had much to do with it. I’m so glad I was practical and sensible enough to marry a man who likes to entertain, leaving me at leisure to rampage through his library.” She looked up at him. “Though I fear the party might have been a little tame for your taste.”
“Now that I’m an old, married man, my tastes have grown more subtle,” he said. “I savor the fact that we threw the ton into an uproar. And you and Ashmont made a splendid show of flirting, tantalizing everybody with promises of complications, possibly deadly.”
“Did we appear to be flirting?” she said. “I had no idea. I have so much to learn.”
“I’d rather you didn’t become an expert, but I fear you will. You made a good show, in any event. And you weren’t the only ones. There was Blackwood looking daggers at Alice and vice versa.” He sipped his champagne. “Been away for a year. Don’t know whether this is a recent development or it’s been going on for a good while. Wish I knew what that was about, but she tells me it’s none of my bloody business.”
“And you can’t ask Blackwood.”
Ripley gave her a shocked look. “Certainly not.”
“It isn’t done,” she said, shaking her head. She’d noticed as well the way Blackwood and Alice watched each other, and the way they each contrived to do it when the other wasn’t looking. She was vastly curious about them, too, but it was rather too early in her marriage, she felt, to try to get involved in her sister-in-law’s private life. That didn’t mean she’d never do it. She hoped they’d be like sisters, and get along at least as well as her mother and aunts did, and that if Alice wanted to talk or wanted help, she’d turn to Olympia. And vice versa.
But that was for the future.
“So there was Alice,” he said. “And what else? Oh, yes. Aunt Julia and Ashmont’s Uncle Fred. Talk of looking daggers.”
“Yes, something between them,” Olympia said. “One sensed it when he came to Camberley Place.”
“I know I heard something, sometime,” he said. “Some old story. Think I heard it from my mother. But I’m damned if I can remember the details.”
Olympia remembered what Lady Charles had said to her.
Charles was not my first choice . . . I married him in resignation, if not despair.
“I believe there is a story,” she said. “Your aunt hinted at it to me. But she did not offer details. I only know it happened before she married your uncle.”
“That must be twenty-five years ago.”
“Whatever the story is, I thought they danced well together, daggers or not.”
“Not surprising,” Ripley said. “They’re diplomatists of the highest order. Not that one could tell, the way they went at each other that day, after you read Ashmont’s letter and walked out.”
“Fatal day. Fatal letter.” Olympia leaned on the railing and closed her eyes. “I walked out of the house and on to my lovely ruination. What a pity one can be ruined only once.”
“Not necessarily.”
She turned and looked inquiringly up at him, forgetting the champagne glass in her hand. The drink spilled over the railing.
He took the glass from her. “I think you’ve had too little,” he said. “Let’s go inside and have some more, and I’ll tell you my plan. One of those what-you-call-ems.”
“I have no idea what you call them.”
He gestured her toward the open doorway, which led to her apartments. She walked in ahead of him.
He set their glasses down. “Like charades or a tableau, but—no, like a vignette? Or a play. In this one, you’ve never been ruined before.”