The Arrangement

by Joan Wolf

  He was like sunshine—warm, life-giving sunshine, and imperceptibly my body lifted toward him.

  He kissed me, his body bending over mine, his fingers resting on my neck, his thumbs rubbing gently up and down my collarbone. He kept on kissing me, and my arms went up to circle him and hold him close.

  I kissed him and kissed him, loving the feel of his strength against me, the feel of his shirt under my hands, the smell of his skin, the texture of his hair.

  His mouth finally lifted from mine and moved down to follow the line of my arched throat. “Gail,” he muttered. “God, Gail, what you do to me.”

  “Mmm… The feeling is reciprocal,” I said shakily.

  He pressed me back against the pillows and I felt his hands beginning to move on my all-too-responsive body. I placed my hands between us and began to unbutton his shirt. He lifted himself away from me, balancing on his hands and remaining perfectly still until I had finished. Then I pulled his shirt free of his trousers and slid my hands under the loosely hanging cambric to touch his warm, bare skin. And once again he moved.

  How can I describe what happened between us that night? The mechanics of love are the mechanics of love, and I suppose what happens between one set of lovers does not vary so very much from what happens between another. What differs, however, is the feeling. What differs is the fire, the passion, the intensity. The tenderness.

  That night Raoul and I became lovers. When I felt him surge inside me, when I held him close and felt him penetrate deeply into my body, making us one, we became lovers. When I felt the hot, drenching pleasure that his thrusting organ gave me, when the piercing beauty of the nightingale entwined itself indistinguishably with the way his golden body moved with mine on the moonlit bed, when at last my insides rocked with explosions of pleasure so intense that my whole body shook with them, then we became lovers. And after it was over, when he lay quietly with his body all along mine and his golden head resting in the hollow between my neck and shoulder, I knew that no other man would ever mean to me what this man did.

  That thought should have made me sad, because I knew I could not have him. But the summer was only beginning then, and I had not yet begun to dwell upon the fact that eventually we would have to part.

  * * * *

  Raoul left me sometime during the early morning and we met again at breakfast. He was at the table when I walked in, and the smile that he gave me was little more than the deepening of a fold at the corner of his eye.

  My heart completely turned over.

  I went to get a plate of food from the sideboard and took a place at the table that was not next to him.

  Lady Regina was the only other person at the table and she gave me a pleasant greeting.

  “John and I are going to inspect the new outbuilding work this morning, Mrs. Saunders,” Raoul said, “but the boys have coaxed me to have the bathhouse pool filled so that they can swim this afternoon. Would you care to have lunch on the bathhouse grounds while the children enjoy themselves?”

  “Nicky does not swim,” I said.

  “So you have told me. But he really should be taught, and that is one of the reasons I agreed to fill the pool.”

  “All of my boys learned to swim in the bathhouse pool,” Lady Regina said. “So did Raoul and John and I, for that matter. If Nicky is to spend the summer here at Savile, I think it would be wise for him to learn to swim.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “Do you swim, Lady Regina?”

  She smiled at me. “Yes, I do. And since you are visiting here for the summer, I would like you to call me Ginny, and for you to allow me to call you Gail.”

  I looked at her in stunned surprise. Considering the way she had received the news of what bedroom I had been given, I would never have expected such congenial treatment.

  “Th-that is very kind of you, Lady Regina,” I said.

  “Ginny,” she corrected firmly.

  “Ginny,” I repeated faintly.

  She looked at her brother. “Do you mind if I join your picnic this afternoon, Raoul?”

  He had been regarding her with an oddly thoughtful expression, but his response to her question was instantaneous. “Of course not. I shall extend the invitation to the rest of the family as well.”

  Ginny sighed.

  I brought the subject back to the issue that concerned me most. “Just who is going to teach Nicky? Mr. Wilson?”

  “I am quite sure that the boys have managed to extract a promise from my brother to swim with them,” Ginny said.

  Raoul chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mrs…ah, Gail.” He gave his sister his blandest smile, then turned back to me. “I taught both Charlie and Theo to swim. I am sure I will have no problem with Nicky.”

  I didn’t think he would, either.

  “Now, Ginny,” Raoul said, “shall I have them send out the china and crystal for you to dine off of, or do you merely want a basket luncheon with a few footmen?”

  “The basket luncheon,” Ginny said immediately. “We shall have to feed the children as well.”

  “Excellent,” Raoul said. He stood up. “I told John I would meet him in fifteen minutes, so I hope you ladies will excuse me.”

  We assured him that we would, and I forced my eyes not to follow him as he left the room.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After breakfast Ginny took me for a walk in the gardens that lay beyond the castle walls. We descended the terrace steps and took the path that would lead us by the stables, which were partially screened from our view by several plantings of evergreens. It was amazing to me how the relatively small area within the castle walls had been so completely transformed from what must once have been a teeming medieval household into the elegantly ordered surroundings of a nineteenth-century nobleman.

  “Raoul has had the stable block almost completely rebuilt in the last five years,” Ginny told me as we strolled along the stone pathway. “The carriage house in particular was quite ancient and it was also much too small to house my brother’s collection of vehicles, so he had it torn down and completely rebuilt. He even installed a carriage wash!”

  It was a beautiful summer morning, and the Savile flags that topped each of the four castle towers were rippling in the soft southeasterly breeze. The path took us closer to the stables and I looked at the impressive stone buildings that were spread in front of us.

  “None of the buildings looks new,” I said.

  Ginny gave me a pitying look. “Of course they don’t. They look exactly as they always did, only bigger. Raoul insisted that the new carriage house must be built of exactly the same stone as the old one. The masons were able to use some of the stone from the original building, of course, but they had to bring in a great deal more from the local quarries.”

  I thought of all the stone that must have been hauled across the causeway to satisfy Savile’s whim.

  “It must have cost a fortune,” I said before I could stop myself. I felt my face flush. “I beg your pardon, Ginny, I should not have said that. It is none of my affair how the earl chooses to spend his money.”

  The earl’s sister smiled. “It did cost a fortune. And it is costing Raoul another fortune to rebuild the outbuildings as well. He is employing an enormous number of people, however, and God knows that since the war there are far too many people in this country who desperately need work.”

  I knew that what Ginny had said was true. The great majority of the soldiers and sailors who had defeated Napoleon had returned to an England whose wartime economy had collapsed, leaving them with little or no means of earning bread for themselves and their starving families.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is a dreadful situation. I am certain the men who are employed here at the castle are very grateful to be working on the earl’s rebuilding projects.”

  “Of course they are,” Ginny replied matter-of-factly. “And that is precisely why Raoul has undertaken them. Did he tell you that he has also built a model village to house all of the additional workmen and
their families?”

  “No,” I said quietly, “he did not tell me that.”

  One reached the gardens by passing through what must once have been a postern gate in the castle walls behind the stable block. Ginny and I emerged from the shadows of the walls, and the first sight I had of the gardens was of a sea of emerald-green grass with sunlight shining off the lake water. I drew in my breath.

  “Come and sit down,” Ginny said. “I wouldn’t mind getting off my feet for a minute or two.”

  “Of course,” I said quickly.

  She made a face at me as she led me toward one of the flower beds. “I’m afraid I am feeling this pregnancy more than I did my other ones. I must be getting old.”

  I hesitated. Then, since she had been the one to bring up the subject, I asked, “How far along are you?”

  “Seven months.”

  “That is a good enough reason for feeling tired,” I said briskly. “You have just walked too far.”

  She shook her head, pressed her hand briefly to her back, and sighed as she took her seat on a garden bench. She did look tired, I thought.

  I sat beside her, looked around me, and exclaimed, “What a pretty garden!”

  And indeed it was a very pretty garden. All the flower beds had been separated into individual colors, a pattern that was unusual and quite striking. The white garden in which we were sitting, for example, had a weeping pear, white foxgloves, and silver foliage plants that were particularly beautiful.

  A high wall of evergreens separated the garden from what Ginny told me were the castle outbuildings.

  “In medieval times the castle had to be completely self-sufficient, of course, and even today we produce most of what is needed for the household right here on the estate,” she said. “It is certainly easier and cheaper to brew ale for hundreds of people in one’s own backyard than it is to have it hauled from a distant place and then have to store it.”

  If I had been overwhelmed before by the scale upon which Savile lived, this conversation with his sister served only to intimidate me further.

  Ginny got slowly back to her feet. “I will leave Raoul the pleasure of displaying the outbuildings to you.”

  She turned to go back to the house, saying in a conversational tone, “A man like Raoul should be in the government, of course, but as long as Lord Liverpool and the Tories are in power he will have nothing to do with Westminster.”

  “Does he cast his vote in Parliament?” I asked cautiously, not wanting to seem too curious.

  “Oh, he votes against Liverpool’s government all the time, not that it does much good, unfortunately. At the moment they have the majority.”

  We strolled along in the sunshine, and in my mind I tried to reconcile the fiercely tender lover I had known last night with the great noble I was hearing about today from his sister.

  Ginny’s words had somehow made him seem very distant from me.

  I wondered if perhaps that had been her intention all along.

  * * * *

  When we arrived back at the house it was to discover that Harriet had just received a letter from her father saying that he would arrive at Savile later in the day. That gave Harriet a reason to forgo the picnic, which she had not been very interested in in the first place.

  Roger was the only one who did not attempt to conceal his glee at Harriet’s decision to remove herself from the outing.

  “Really, Roger,” Ginny scolded him as the three of us waited at the front door for the low-slung curricle and Roger’s horse to be brought around, “you must try for at least a modicum of civility when you address Harriet.”

  “Why?” Roger replied. His pale hair shone like silver in the summer sun and his eyes were as clear and as blue as the sky above us. “I don’t like her. I resent her quite bitterly. In fact, I have strong doubts that the expected little bundle is George’s at all. I wouldn’t put it past Harriet to have gotten herself in the family way just to keep her hold on Devane Hall.”

  “Roger!” Ginny was truly appalled.

  As the same thought had crossed my mind, I was considerably less horrified by Roger’s suggestion than Ginny was.

  “How can you say such a dreadful thing?” Ginny demanded.

  “Easily,” Roger assured her.

  At that point, the horses arrived from the stables. Roger swung up into the saddle of his bay Thoroughbred, and two footmen assisted Regina into the low front seat of the curricle. I got in on the other side and picked up the reins, and one of the footmen climbed into the seat behind us. We headed toward the causeway.

  The sight of a Greek temple nestled under wide-spreading English oaks was still incongruous to me, perhaps even more so today as a picnic had been set out on the perfectly scythed English lawn. Lawn chairs were set in a circle in the shade of one of the oaks, and baskets of food and flagons of drink reposed upon a large trestle table that was covered with a pristine white linen tablecloth.

  From within the equally white columns of the bathhouse came the shrieks of boys’ voices and the deeper sound of men’s laughter. Roger went to stand in the doorway and look in, offering comments, while Ginny and I went to sit in the lawn chairs under the trees.

  “Raoul and John,” Ginny said to me over the voices and the sounds of splashing. “I often wish my husband would play with his children the way my brother does, but it is just not his way.”

  “I believe some men relate to their children better as they grow older,” I said.

  “Yes, I believe that is true.” She shook her head. “Gervase loves his boys, of course, but in fact it is Caroline who can get him to do anything. She manipulates him shamelessly.”

  “She is a beautiful little girl,” I said sincerely.

  “She is a handful,” Ginny returned. “The tantrum she created when I said she could not come today! But she would have insisted that she be permitted to swim with the boys, and that I simply could not allow.”

  The two of us talked on about our children. Eventually the splashing from within the temple stopped, and, about half an hour after we had arrived, the gentlemen emerged to join us for lunch.

  My eyes went immediately to Raoul. He was wearing a blue jacket and a shirt with no neckcloth, so the strong column of his neck was bare. His neatly brushed wet hair looked light brown, not gold. He said to his sister, “But where is Harriet?”

  “She received word from her father that he would arrive this afternoon, so she decided to wait for him at the castle.”

  “Oh dear,” said another voice, “So Cole really is coming back?”

  I looked with a little shock and surprise at John Melville. I had been so completely attuned to Raoul that I had not even noticed his cousin’s presence.

  A younger voice spoke from the region of the bathhouse stairs. “Did you bring the food with you, Mama?”

  “Yes I did, Theo,” Ginny said. “I expect you’re starving after all that activity.”

  “Famine stricken,” Charlie assured her, clattering down the bathhouse steps in a very unclassical manner.

  “Well, go and tell Edward that I wish him to open up the baskets,” Ginny said.

  I looked at my damp-haired son. “Did you like the pool, Nicky?”

  He grinned at me. “I put my face in the water, Mama, and I floated! I just lay there in the water and I floated!”

  “Good heavens,” I said. In fact, it sounded like the sort of thing a dead body did, and I can’t say it gave me a great deal of confidence. I looked at Raoul. “How can learning to put his face in the water help to keep him from drowning?” I demanded.

  “It’s just a start, Gail,” he said peacefully. Then, to Nicky: “Why don’t you run along with Charlie and Theo and get some food, Nicky.”

  Nicky ran off happily, and Savile came to take the chair next to mine. “If one is afraid to get one’s face wet, then one can’t swim, it’s as simple as that,” he explained. “That is why the first thing to do in teaching a child to swim is to get him accustomed to gettin
g his face wet. Now that he is comfortable doing that, Nicky will be able to learn how to stroke. He’ll be swimming by the end of the week.”

  John had taken the seat opposite mine, and he must have seen my doubtful look because he joined in to second Raoul. “It’s true, Mrs… Gail.” He gave me a nice smile. “We’re all islanders here, and I can assure you that we know about things like that.”

  The picnic was perfectly lovely, my first real experience of what it meant to live a life of leisure. The food was plentiful and hearty, tending toward the kind of meat pastries a boy would like rather than the more exotic dishes that I was certain Raoul’s mother had served to her guests, and we helped ourselves from what the footmen had laid out upon the trestle table. Raoul had two rowboats tied up on the shore in front of the bathhouse grounds, and had promised that after we had eaten he would take the boys out for a boat ride while John Melville took me in the other boat.

  Lady Regina had opted to stay behind to rest in her chair, and Roger said he would keep her company. “I cannot understand this relentless desire you have to keep busy all the time,” he complained to Raoul, “but I can assure you that I do not share it.”

  “I can well believe that, Roger,” Ginny said dryly. She poked a cushion behind her back to support it and beckoned to one of the footmen to bring her a footrest. “The most exercise you ever get is the flick of the wrist that it takes to deal the cards!”

  Roger was not at all put out. “You know me well, my dear Ginny,” he said smoothly.

  “I have no intention of conversing with you,” she warned him. “I am going to take a nap.”

  “Dearly as I love your conversation, I can assure you that I will survive an hour or so without it,” he said. “In fact, I believe I will take a nap as well.”

  John looked disgusted.

  Raoul looked incredulous.

  I said to him, “If that boat overturns, you promise me you will rescue Nicky?”

  He turned to me. His hair had dried while we ate lunch and it once more shone golden in the sunshine. “I promise,” he said.