The Arrangement

by Joan Wolf

  “Thanks be to God,” John Melville murmured softly, and I could see his sentiment reflected upon every Melville face at the table, Savile’s included.

  Harriet began purposefully to eat her soup, and Lady Regina turned to make conversation with me. “How is your son getting on with my boys, Mrs. Saunders?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  From the one sip of soup I had taken I knew it was mulligatawny and too heavily seasoned with curry for my taste. I put down my spoon.

  I said to Lady Regina, “I spent almost an hour in the nursery this afternoon and was very surprised to discover that what appears to have impressed Nicky most is Theodore’s battle arrangement.”

  Lady Regina cast her eyes upward. “Theo and his soldiers,” she said with resignation. “I don’t know where he gets his bloodthirsty tendencies—not from my husband, certainly.”

  “He gets them from his Melville blood, Ginny. How can you even ask?” Roger had finished his soup and now he put down his spoon. “We’ve always been a violent lot. How do you think this castle got built in the first place? As an abbey?”

  Lady Regina frowned.

  “All small boys like to play with soldiers, Ginny,” Savile said soothingly. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that Theo will be wanting Gervase to buy him a cavalry commission.”

  “I must tell you that I was deeply surprised to see how interested Nicky was in the soldiers,” I confessed to Lady Regina. “I think it was the battle formation that fascinated him. It was really quite detailed.”

  “Theo insisted that it had to be exact,” Savile said. “I had to look up every single regiment so that he could place them exactly where they were on the fateful day. It is that interest in the details of the real world that is so interesting about Theo. And that reminds me of Gervase, Ginny. All mathematicians must be interested in exact details.”

  Lady Regina bit her lip. “Do you think so, Raoul?”

  He nodded. “Now, when I play soldiers with Charlie, we make up our own battles. Charlie is interested only in what he can generate from his own imagination.”

  Lady Regina must have read my feelings on my face because she suddenly smiled at me and said, “You didn’t know that my brother still plays with toy soldiers, Mrs. Saunders?”

  “No,” I said, “I did not.”

  “It is one of my most closely guarded secrets,” Savile said. “I rely on you, ma’am, not to give me away.”

  I could not look at him. “Never,” I said lightly.

  The too-spicy soup went out and the fish, a boiled carp, came in. The wineglasses were refilled.

  “And do you cut out paper dolls too, Raoul?” Roger asked sweetly as he took an overlong drink of his wine.

  “Not as frequently,” Savile replied. “Caroline still likes the active toys her brothers use, and until this summer I had no other little girls to play with.”

  Harriet shot him a suspicious look.

  “My girls should not be playing,” she said. “They should be studying their letters and their numbers. They should be learning to draw and to play an instrument.”

  I said, unwisely, “All children need to play.”

  Harriet glared at me. “Yes, you’re such an expert on children, aren’t you? You’re an expert on how to get them, at any rate!”

  Savile started to say something, but suddenly I had had quite enough of Harriet.

  “Lady Devane,” I said, “I do not know what unfortunate circumstances in your own marriage have left you so embittered, but I can assure you that I am not connected with them. If you suspect your husband of having had an affair with me, then allow me to assure you that that did not happen. My own marriage was an exceedingly happy one, and my son is well loved by me and was well loved by my husband. I have no idea why Lord Devane left a sum of money to Nicky, but I suspect it had to do with things farther back in the past than relate to either you or me.”

  I pushed my fish plate out of my way and leaned forward. My voice deepened as I said with crystal clarity, “And if I find that you have disturbed my son’s peace of mind by suggesting that he might be connected to Lord Devane—in any way at all—I will see to it that something extremely unpleasant happens to you.”

  My voice sounded so menacing that I actually frightened myself.

  Absolute silence reigned in the room. I happened to glance at one of the footmen standing by the sideboard and saw a surprised little smile on his face. It was quickly gone, however, as his expression returned to one of gravity and disinterest.

  “Bravo,” John Melville said to me under his breath.

  Roger’s eyes were large and bright. “What do you have to say to that, Harriet?”

  Harriet’s slanted brown eyes were burning into mine.

  “I hope you understand me, because I mean it,” I said.

  Her eyes shifted, I could imagine her thinking of all of Aunt Margaret’s deadly herbs. “I understand you,” she muttered at last.

  I leaned back. “Good,” I said.

  The earl said coolly, “I believe we are ready for the next course, Powell.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After dinner the ladies withdrew to the drawing room and the men remained in the dining room with their port. I did not excuse myself tonight but instead talked to Lady Regina; we shared stories of what it was like to be a mother. Harriet sat in brooding silence, staring into the empty grate of the fireplace.

  Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself feeling quite comfortable with Savile’s sister. She was truly involved in the upbringing of her children, not the kind of woman who shuffled them off to the convenient care of nursemaids and tutors and then forgot about them. That involvement gave us a common ground.

  “It is true that I was brought up here at Savile,” she told me, “but the house I presently live in is nothing more than a simple gentleman’s residence. My husband is not a poor man, but neither is he vastly wealthy. It is only when they come to Savile that my boys get a taste of what it is like to live this sort of life.”

  Lady Regina might not be wealthy, I thought, but I was quite certain that she was rich as Croesus compared to me.

  “Devane Hall is not as imposing as Savile Castle either,” Harriet said, making her first contribution to the conversation, “but Papa has poured a great deal of money into improving it.” She set her jaw in a way that gave her an unfortunate resemblance to a bulldog. “It isn’t fair that Roger should get the benefit of all of Papa’s money.”

  I had noticed before that Harriet’s speech was much more genteel than her father’s and had wondered how that came to be. It was only later that I discovered that she had been sent away to school in Bath when she was a child so that she could learn to be a lady. The first thing they had corrected was her speech. Unfortunately, the one thing they had not been able to correct was her soul.

  It did not take the gentlemen very long to rejoin us and it did not take Savile very long after that to propose showing me the rose garden.

  “I would like to say good night to Nicky first,” I said, glancing toward the doorway as if it were an escape route from deadly danger. Perhaps after I made my good nights in the nursery I could decently retire to my own bedroom, I thought.

  “We’ll have the children brought down to us, shall we?” Lady Regina asked, effectively scotching my scheme. She wrinkled her nose. “I am not precisely in the condition to favor climbing all those stairs more than twice in one evening.”

  I felt immediate contrition. “Of course you are not, my lady.” I took a deep breath and added heroically, “Nor is Lady Devane.”

  So the children were fetched, and the Nicky who bade me a buoyant good night did not seem the same boy who had huddled next to me on the seat of Savile’s phaeton that morning.

  He’s beginning to grow up, I thought.

  Once the children were out of the room, Savile turned once more to me and again proposed showing me the rose garden. Everyone else in the room began ostentatiously to talk at once as
I accepted, trying not to betray by a quiver in my voice the sudden loud beating of my heart.

  “Aside from the kitchen garden, the rose garden is the only garden that lies within the castle walls,” Savile informed me genially as he escorted me toward the French doors that led off the drawing room onto the wide stone terrace. “There are more extensive gardens, of course, beyond the eastern wall, but we’ll save those for another day.”

  Behind me I heard Lady Regina ask John Melville what he thought of the new brewer’s building.

  We walked across the terrace to steps that led down to a stone-paved path that followed the perimeter of the entire house. The sides of the path were planted with lady’s mantle, lavender, and achillea, which also grew in pockets between the stones of the pathway, giving the whole picture a lovely look of relaxed abundance. We turned the corner of the house in silence, passed under high hedges topped with a rose arch, and entered into the rose garden.

  It was quite gloriously beautiful, so artfully managed that it looked utterly natural even though I knew that this could not possibly be the case. Climbing roses grew everywhere, even up the old medieval castle walls. There were white roses with glossy dark foliage, roses of a pale, delicate pink, and brilliantly colored yellow roses, brighter than butter. There were magnificent plantings of beautiful shrub roses, the colors a deep red, pink-red, and white, and sprinkled in among all these displays of the queen of flowers were poppies, geraniums, and lady’s mantle.

  We stopped to look around and to inhale the heady fragrance.

  “It is beautiful, my lord,” I said sincerely. “Everything about your home is utterly beautiful.”

  I could tell from the look on his face that my words had pleased him.

  It made me feel very happy to have pleased him.

  Things were clearly going from bad to worse with me.

  We walked through the garden, ostensibly admiring the flowers, but all the while we both knew that we were here for something else. Then we were standing next to the great medieval wall and looking up at the setting sun, which was glistening off the chimney pots on the roof of the house. Savile put his hands on my shoulders and turned me so that my back was to the wall and I was facing him. The sinking sun shone slantingly onto his face, gilding his skin and his hair. The look on his face as he scanned my countenance was hard and intent, not at all his usual genial expression.

  He said, “I have not been able to get you out of my mind. You haunt my nights, and lately you have even been keeping me from my work during the daytime hours as well.”

  “Oh,” I said brilliantly. My heart had begun to hammer in my chest and the pulse to race in my throat. I put my hand up to my neck to hide it from him.

  “I want you to know that you’re perfectly free,” he said. “I didn’t invite you here to pressure you into becoming my mistress. You are welcome to remain here for as long as you want. John will find a new establishment for you, just as I promised he would, and I will leave you strictly alone.”

  I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.

  “Do you understand me, Gail?” he said. “My desire for you has nothing to do with how welcome you are in my home.”

  “Yes,” I said, my mouth dry. “I understand, my lord.”

  A tendril of hair had fallen forward across my forehead and he reached out to brush it back, letting the lock slide through his fingers as if he were feeling the texture of silk. The touch of his fingers sent shivers through my entire body.

  “All you have to do,” he said, “is say no.”

  I swallowed and tried to speak, but words just wouldn’t come. He waited. Finally I whispered, “I don’t know.”

  He raised his hands and cupped my face as if it were a rose he was admiring. He bent his head to mine and kissed me.

  My back was against the hard stone wall and my face was turned up to his. He kept on kissing me and after a moment I opened my lips and kissed him back. His strong body was pressed against me, and of its own volition my body softened and bent into place along the hard lines of his.

  I reached up to slide my arms around his neck and the rest of the world seemed to disappear. I no longer smelled the roses or felt the stones of the wall through the thin muslin of my dress. All I felt was the body of this man as it pressed against mine, the demand his mouth was making on mine, and the desire that was rising within me with all the vitality of sap rising in the springtime.

  He had me hard up against the wall by now and his hands had come up to caress my breasts. Our mouths explored each other’s hungrily, and my hands moved urgently up and down his back, feeling the strength of it even through his expensive black superfine coat.

  I was lost, and we both knew it.

  A voice broke through the intensity of our mutual desire.

  “Raoul, where are you?”

  Lady Regina had to repeat herself three times before we managed to break away from each other.

  We stood a few feet apart, trying to catch our breaths and straighten our clothes. Savile’s hair was hanging over his forehead and wordlessly I smoothed it back for him.

  Savile’s raw-sounding curse was still rasping in my ear when his sister and his cousin John joined us in the garden.

  “Harriet and Roger are going at it with a vengeance, so we decided to escape and join you,” Regina said pleasantly.

  “I can well imagine that there is no love lost between the two of them,” I said evenly, proud that my voice was under control. I was extremely grateful for the rapidly failing light, however, as I was very much afraid that my lips were swollen. Fortunately, my hair was too short to become really disordered.

  “So how do you like our rose garden, Mrs. Saunders?” John asked.

  “It is very beautiful,” I replied.

  “I was just telling Mrs. Saunders that the rose garden is a new addition to the grounds,” Savile said.

  His voice sounded perfectly normal as well.

  He turned to me and continued, “Originally this section within the walls housed many of the outbuildings. That is why the bedrooms look out on the kitchen garden and not on the rose garden. The original occupants did not wish to look from their bedroom windows and see the bake house and the potting shed.”

  “One can perfectly understand that, particularly when the kitchen garden is so pretty,” I said. I feigned a small yawn. “I beg your pardon, but I must be more fatigued than I had thought.”

  “Tea will be served in less than half an hour,” Lady Regina told me. “Shall we all return to the drawing room?”

  We returned to the drawing room, and since no one stared at me I imagined that what I had been doing in the garden was not emblazoned on my face. I drank my tea and ate a slice of buttered bread, then took my candle from among those laid out near the drawing-room door and made my way upstairs to my room.

  The bedroom windows were open to the warm summer air and I went to stand in front of them and listen to the sounds of the night. Somewhere a nightingale was pouring out its soul in ecstasy and I felt a lump come into my throat.

  Mary came into the room with quiet efficiency and asked if she could help me undress. I accepted her assistance with a smile, and when she offered to have my yellow gown pressed so that it would be ready for the day after tomorrow, I accepted that offer as well. I got into bed and waited until she had left, then I rose and returned to the windows.

  The nightingale was still singing and I shut my eyes and listened, breathing in the scents of the night and trying not to think. Then, very slowly, I went to the wardrobe and took down from the top shelf a package of herbs.

  I remembered so vividly the day that Aunt Margaret had given me my first packet of this particular herbal mixture. It had been precisely one week before Tommy and I were married, and she had come to my bedroom and handed it to me and said, “Wait to have children, Gail. You are so young. You and Thomas need to establish yourselves. Take a dose of these every day, and wait.”

  Aunt Margaret had been too late with
her herbal mixture, however. Six months after Tommy and I were wed, Nicky was born.

  I looked now at the package I had brought with me from Deepcote. After Nicky’s birth I had realized that Tommy and I could not afford another child, and I had begun to make the mixture myself. I assumed it was efficacious, as for the duration of my marriage I had never found myself in the family way.

  After Tommy’s death I had never had occasion to use those herbs, but I had brought them with me to Savile. My decision to become Savile’s mistress had been made before that kiss in the garden.

  It took him almost an hour and a half to come. I had left the candle burning next to my bed and was sitting up against my pillows, looking at the pages of a book but registering very little, when I heard a soft knock at the bedroom door.

  “Come in,” I called quietly.

  The door opened and he was there, so tall that his head barely cleared the doorway. He was wearing only his white dinner shirt and his dress trousers. He shut the door behind him and said, “I was stuck in the library with Roger. I was beginning to think I was never going to get rid of him.”

  I closed my book and put it on my bedside table. “I knew you would come,” I said.

  At that he began to cross the room in his distinctively long, lithe stride.

  “Gail,” he said. He reached the bed, then sat down on its edge and looked for a lengthy, searching moment into my eyes. What he saw there must have reassured him, because he lifted one of my hands, turned it, kissed the blue veins that were visible at my wrist, and murmured, “Thank God.”

  Under his lips, my pulse accelerated like that of a racehorse.

  “My lord,” I breathed.

  He looked up. “Raoul,” he said. “I want to hear you call me Raoul.”

  I wet my lips. I tried to slow my breathing, slow my pulse. I said, “Raoul.”

  He smiled his wonderful smile. “It seems as if I have been waiting forever to hear you say my name.”