The Arrangement (32 page)

Got my hooks into Savile!

God, but the woman was vulgar. I decided that she could lie awake from now until the end of the world and I wouldn’t lift a finger to help her.

I rose from the table.

“It doesn’t matter what your title might be, Harriet,” I said, “nothing will ever make you a lady.”

Upon which splendid exit line I swept out of the room.

* * * *

I stood in the passageway, unsure of where to go next. There had never been a dearth of things to do on a rainy day when I was at home, I thought. I forcibly restrained myself from going upstairs to the nursery, where I was afraid that I would embarrass Nicky by my overprotectiveness, and decided instead to go to the library and find a book to read.

The library at Savile Castle had an upper gallery that ran around three-quarters of the room, and the walls were hung, as were so many of the rooms at Savile, with portraits of the family and of their friends. The lower part of the room was lined with dark wood bookcases that held an extensive collection of books. The rich colors of the leather bindings glowed in the light of the lamps, which were lit against the dreariness of the day. Outside, the rain poured down, but the library seemed an oasis of light and warmth in the midst of the general gloom.

To my surprise, Ginny was there before me, sitting at a long table with a book of furniture drawings opened in front of her.

I said lightly, “I meet Harriet in the dining room and you in the library. It seems that none of the ladies in the house slept very well last night.”

She put a marker in her book. “No, I didn’t sleep well. In fact I lay awake all night thinking about Johnny Wester.” She rubbed her temples. “My God, Gail, what could have happened? How could that boy have been shot in the chest with an arrow in our own woods?”

I sat down on the opposite side of the table and regarded her somberly. “I don’t know, Ginny.”

“An accident like this has never happened at Savile before.” Her brown eyes were hollow-looking in her strained face. “Oh, we have the occasional poacher, I’m not saying that we don’t. But to be poaching in broad daylight! In the castle woods where there might be children about! That’s unheard of, Gail. Unheard of.”

“I don’t know what to think either, Ginny, except that I agree with you that it is an extremely frightening thing,” I returned.

“One can’t help but wonder how safe one’s own children are,” Ginny said somberly. “In fact, Raoul has gone into London today with the express purpose of hiring a few Bow Street runners to keep an eye on the children.” She crossed her arms over the chest of her rose-colored gown and shivered as if she was chilled.

I asked tentatively, “Do you know if it was determined whether or not the arrow that killed Johnny was a Savile arrow?”

Ginny gave me a sharp glance. “No, I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask Raoul about that.”

I got up, went to the window that faced the front drive, and looked out at the teeming rain. It was one of those rains that looked as if it was not going to let up all day. “Not a very nice day to be driving to London,” I commented.

“No, it’s not. But Raoul was determined to go, and I must confess I didn’t try to dissuade him. The thought of a deranged archer loose in the neighborhood makes me very uneasy.”

I turned around, determined to change the topic before the subject of Nicky could come up. “What book is that you are looking at?”

“Oh this.” She picked up the marker. “It is Thomas Hope’s
Household Furniture.
Since I will have to redo all the bedrooms at Austerby, I thought I might get some ideas of what is fashionable. Hope is all the crack these days, you know.”

“And have you seen anything you like?”

She shook her head. “I am afraid I don’t at all care for this new Egyptian look he seems to favor. I find that I much prefer Sheraton.” She gave me a charmingly mischievous smile. “Like my brother, I am hopelessly traditional.”

I refused to be drawn into a discussion of Raoul. “I have come for a book also, but I am looking for a novel.” I shook my head in amazement. “I must confess, I find it the strangest feeling to have nothing to do. At home I always found rainy days to be the perfect time to do my household and business accounts. And here I am now, looking for a novel!”

Ginny folded her hands on top of the open book and regarded me with interest. “You keep your own books, then, Gail?”

I regarded her in some amazement. “Of course I keep my own books. Who else should keep them?”

Ginny regarded me with even more interest and did not reply.

“Don’t you keep your own household accounts, Ginny?” I asked curiously. I knew that my mother had always kept our household books at home. From earliest childhood, I had always assumed that keeping the household books was something that women did. I had certainly kept the household books for Tommy and me. In fact, starting from the age of ten, I had kept the household books for Aunt Margaret. I had always had a head for figures.

Perhaps women of the aristocracy did not keep their own books, I thought. After all, their households were so much larger than the ones I had dealt with. Perhaps they hired stewards to do the work for them.

“I not only keep the household accounts, I keep an eye on the estate accounts as well,” Ginny replied promptly. “I have an excellent steward, but it is never a good idea to let the reins fall from one’s own hands completely. And if I left the accounts to Gervase, we should be bankrupt in no time!”

I smiled and came back to sit across from her at the table.

Ginny smoothed her hand along the page of the book in front of her, and her long narrow fingers were a poignant, female reminder of Raoul’s. She asked, “You like country life, don’t you, Gail?”

I replied readily, “I like it very much, but then I have never lived anywhere else but the country so my standard of comparison is somewhat limited.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You have never been to London?”

“No. And I confess that I should like to go someday. Nicky would adore to see Astley’s Amphitheatre and the beasts
in
the Tower.” I grinned and confessed, “Truth to tell, so should I.”

She traced the lines of a particularly outrageous Egyptian-style sofa with her finger. “What about parties and driving in the park and Almack’s and all that sort of thing?”

I stared at her in amazement. “ ‘That sort of thing’ is about as far above my reach as…as Gervase’s comet is,” I told her firmly. “My father was a country doctor, Ginny. I would never be granted a voucher for Almack’s!”

I did not mention the other things that stood between me and social respectability—the six months between my wedding and Nicky’s birth, George’s suspicious bequest to Nicky, and the fact that I was living at Savile as Raoul’s mistress.

These things should have been apparent enough to Ginny, I thought irritably. I couldn’t understand why she should bring up such a subject in the first place.

But it seemed that Ginny was not finished. “Your father was a gentleman, was he not?”

I said grimly, “He was a country gentleman of little consequence and no fortune, and the daughters of such men are not admitted to Almack’s.”

Ginny gave me an enigmatic look and did not reply.

This was a subject I was determined to drop, and I went back to our original topic. “In the absence of a countess, who does the household accounts here at Savile?”

“The same person who did them when Savile did have a countess,” Ginny said dryly. “John.”

“Oh,” I said in some surprise.

Ginny said, “That is why Raoul personally does so much of the supervising of the outdoor estate, because John has to spend a great deal of his time going over the tradesmen’s receipt books, the servants’ wages book, the tax books—in short, the accounts that I do for Austerby, although they are on a much smaller scale than the accounts for Savile.”

I said in wonder, “Savile is still rather like a medieval manor, is it not?”

“In a way it is,” Ginny said. “Raoul loves it with a passion, you know. He dutifully goes to London each year for the parliamentary session and the social season, but he is always happiest here at Savile.”

“I can understand that,” I said sincerely. “His family’s roots are deep in the soil here and he feels that strongly.”

Ginny hesitated. Then: “It posed a problem with Georgiana, Raoul’s love of Savile,” she said slowly. “Georgiana was a creature of the town. She hated Savile and longed for London every time she was forced to spend a few months down here. It caused some…strife…between them.”

“Oh,” I said, at a loss as to how to respond to the confidence. “Well, if two people truly love each other, surely they manage to make accommodations.”

Ginny went back to tracing the ugly Egyptian sofa. She did not look at me as she said, “To be honest, I think what love there might have been between the two of them had waned long before Georgiana died. Raoul was brokenhearted that he lost his son, but Georgiana’s death left him feeling more guilty than truly sorrowful.”

Ginny’s words were certainly putting a different picture on Raoul’s marriage from the one given to me by John. It occurred to me that an outsider never really knows what goes on within the intimacy of a marriage, although I could not deny that the idea that Raoul might not have loved the elegantly aristocratic Georgiana gave a lift to my heart.

“If they were such opposites, then why did they marry?” I asked, thinking that since Ginny had introduced the subject she might be willing to answer my question.

“You’ve seen the portrait of Georgiana,” Ginny said. She looked up from her book and her brown eyes met mine. “And what woman in her right mind would not want Raoul?”

I felt myself blushing, and she mercifully looked away.

“It was not until after the wedding that they discovered they had nothing in common,” she concluded.

I thought of the instant sexual attraction between Raoul and myself and wondered if perhaps we were in the same situation as he and his wife had been, if history might be repeating itself.

Not on my part.
That answer came almost instantly. I loved and admired almost everything about him. Even if I could have, I wouldn’t have changed a hair on his head.

On the other hand, there were probably quite a few things he would change about me.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked Ginny cautiously.

“It must be the gloomy day loosening my tongue,” she replied. “That, and being worried about the mad archer.” Once more she rubbed her temples. “There’s nothing like a good gossip to take one’s mind off one’s troubles,” she said semi-humorously.

“Yes…” I said slowly. “I suppose that is so.”

* * * *

I chose a book that Ginny recommended, not one of the gothic romances that had always sounded so silly to me but a delightful book about people whom one could actually imagine knowing. It was called
Pride and Prejudice
and it kept me enthralled for all of the morning and most of the afternoon. In fact, I was still curled up in the library in a large leather chair that faced the fireplace and had its back to the door when Mr. Cole came into the room with a man whose voice I immediately recognized as that of the Mr. Wickham I had met at the Black Swan.

The men did not move very far from the door, and my presence was hidden from them by the back of my chair. At first I was so involved in my book that I did not realize that anyone had come in, but when the men began to talk, and I recognized their voices, I listened shamelessly.

Now, in the normal course of things, of course I would have made my presence known. But things were far from normal at Savile Castle these days and I was fully prepared to put aside the niceties of good manners if it would help me to learn anything that might shed light on the mysterious accidents that had beset us of late.

The two men were speaking in low voices, but, fortunately, my hearing was excellent.

Wickham said, “I am pleased to be able to inform you that I have in my possession the paper that you desire.”

“Let me see it, then,” Cole returned in a grim-sounding voice.

Wickham laughed with genuine amusement. “Do you think I’m a fool? I’m not handing it over to you just like that. It would be only too easy for you to rip it up before I could get it back, and then I’d be out all my money. It’s not the sort of paper that can be replaced.”

It occurred to me suddenly that the name of the villain in
Pride and Prejudice
was Wickham. This Wickham did not seem very much better.

“How did you get your mitts on it?” Cole asked.

“I’ve been rummaging around among my brother’s things for weeks and I finally found it. I didn’t think he would have destroyed it; he’s too weak to have done that. He’s just the sort who would hold on to it, and worry about it, and do nothing. Well, now he doesn’t have it any longer— I do. And I plan to do something with it.”

Stealing from his own brother. This Wickham sounded like a very pleasant fellow indeed, I thought.

“Does your brother know you’ve got it?” Cole asked.

“No. But it’s not the sort of paper you can deny, is it? Everything is in order, just like I told you.”

I heard Mr. Cole pacing back and forth. He seemed to be coming closer to me. My heart began to beat harder and I made myself as still as I could in my chair.

“Well, if you’ve got the goods all right, then I’ll buy them from you,” Mr. Cole said at last.

“That’s what I’m here for. But you’ve got to come up with the blunt.”

Now it seemed that Wickham’s voice was moving closer. My heart was hammering in my chest.
Please, please,
I thought,
stay by the door. Don’t come any closer to this chair.

I couldn’t bear to lose the chance to find out something that might bear on the strange accidents we had been having at Savile.

They were still moving closer to me.

“Oh, I can come up with the dibs all right, sonny,” Mr. Cole said. “That piece of paper, if it really exists, is easily worth a thousand pounds to me.”

“A thousand pounds! It’s worth bloody more than that, Cole, and you know it.”