The Arrangement

by Joan Wolf

  “It is just that they will call me a baby if I don’t, Mama,” he said earnestly. A tuft of hair was sticking up at the back of his head and he looked so precious that I wanted to cry. “It is not that I don’t want to spend the night with you.”

  I thought of Raoul’s words and took a deep breath. “If you wish to go back upstairs, that is perfectly fine with me.”

  “You will be all right alone?” Nicky asked anxiously.

  I could almost have laughed, the turnabout was so ludicrous.

  “I will be fine,” I said.

  He began to scramble out from beneath the covers. “Well then, I think I will go upstairs.”

  I had not yet undressed, and I said, “I’ll accompany you.”

  The footman sitting outside my door went with us and on the third floor we encountered yet another footman sitting in the passageway outside the nursery apartment.

  “We’ll see that Master Nicky gets safely tucked up for the night,” both young men assured me.

  Since Nicky clearly did not want me to escort him into Charlie’s room, I thanked them and went slowly back downstairs to the bedroom that now would contain neither Nicky nor Raoul but just my lonely self.

  Nicky was growing up, I realized, and for the first time I let myself wonder what I was going to do when he really was grown up and I was alone. I had never thought that way before. I had never let my eyes look that far ahead.

  Raoul had been right about one thing, I thought. I couldn’t try to stop my son from growing up just because I was afraid of what my life was going to be like without him.

  I got into my solitary bed and blew out my candle.

  Once, perhaps I might have been able to marry again, I thought. Once, perhaps I could have settled for life with Sam Watson.

  “Twere all one

  That I should love a bright particular star

  And think to wed it, he is so above me.”

  Shakespeare’s poignant words sounded in my mind.

  Raoul, I thought with something that approached anguish. Oh, Raoul.

  I had rebuffed him tonight, and he had been very angry. It was not that I did not trust him, it was just that I was utterly convinced that the facts surrounding Nicky’s birth had absolutely no bearing on the problem we were faced with at Savile.

  I thought about being the one to make the first move and going to him that night, but even if I did go down the stairs to his room, I was not certain that he would be there, and the thought of encountering his valet was unnerving, to say the least.

  So I lay awake instead and tried to occupy my mind by thinking about the people who were living at Savile Castle and trying to imagine who might possibly have something against my son.

  Raoul and Ginny I did not even consider.

  Roger I had already singled out as a likely suspect.

  Who else might have a motive? I wondered.

  Harriet? Could she hate Nicky, whom she thought was George’s bastard son, so much that she wanted to do away with him? I acquitted the pregnant Harriet of being personally responsible for any of the attacks, but there were plenty of villains for hire now in the postwar world and she certainly could have engaged someone to do her dirty work for her.

  It was hard to know what was going on in Harriet’s mind. She spoke very little, except to her father, and manifested herself to the rest of us mainly as a heavy, brooding, spiteful presence.

  I would not put it beyond her to wish Nicky dead.

  Then there was Mr. Cole. He had made no attempt to hide the fact that he resented George’s bequeathing twenty thousand pounds of Cole money to what he considered George’s bastard, but could that resentment be so severe that he could try to do away with Nicky? Unlike Roger, Cole still had an enormous amount of money, and now he had the prospect of a possible grandson to inherit Devane Hall.

  Of course, there was that mysterious Mr. Wickham and the information he was trying to sell to Cole. But Wickham very probably represented Cole’s other business interests and had nothing to do with Nicky at all.

  The final member of the Savile household was John Melville, and the only reason I considered John at all was that he was Raoul’s heir. I remembered him warning me on several occasions that Raoul would never marry again, and, while I was not foolish enough to think that John feared that Raoul would marry me, I remembered how he had told me several times how much Raoul had suffered when his wife and child died.

  Could John hope that the death of another child whom Raoul had grown fond of—Nicky—might reinforce his determination never to marry again?

  Upon reflection, I had to admit that this was a ridiculously weak argument.

  In fact, the only villain who made any real sense to me was Roger. I wondered if perhaps I ought to go against Raoul’s advice and get Nicky away from the castle, but I was afraid that if I was on my own, with no protection for Nicky but myself, he would be even more vulnerable. After all, I wouldn’t be hard to find for anyone determined upon mischief.

  I would remain at the castle, I decided, and I determined that in the morning I would ask Raoul if he could get a Bow Street runner to keep an eye on Roger as well as on the boys.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It was raining when I woke the following morning and I went down to breakfast with a headache. There was no one in the dining room and I sat drearily at the table sipping my coffee and nibbling desultorily on a muffin.

  Harriet came in when I was starting on my second cup of coffee and I stared at her in surprise. She never came downstairs in the morning but had been breakfasting in her room ever since I had come to the castle.

  “I didn’t expect to see you, Harriet,” I said with a note of inquiry.

  “I didn’t sleep well,” she replied gruffly, “I thought that if I got out of my room for a while perhaps I might be able to nap later.”

  Once again I felt an unwanted twinge of sympathy for George’s widow. She really looked miserable. Her skin was sallow and there were dark circles under her eyes. I thought that this wait to see whether or not she was bearing a son must be hellish, and a comparison to Anne Boleyn suddenly popped into my mind.

  “You need to sleep or you will make yourself ill,” I said in a gentler voice than I had ever used to her before.

  “I can’t sleep, though,” she replied fretfully. “I lie there and I try and I try and I try, but I can’t!”

  I had had my share of nights like that, so I knew what she was talking about.

  “Will it be so very dreadful if this child is a girl?” I asked. “You will still have your title, after all.”

  “It can’t be a girl” she replied tensely. “Papa would be unbearably disappointed if it was a girl. He wants a grandson who will be Lord Devane of Devane Hall. I have to do this for him. I have to.”

  “But he will still have a daughter who is Lady Devane,” I pointed out again.

  Her caterpillar-like eyebrows almost joined in the middle, so intense was her frown. “That isn’t good enough for Papa,” she said. “I wouldn’t have Devane Hall, you see. Roger would have that.”

  What kind of pressure was this to put upon a pregnant woman? I thought indignantly. My Anne Boleyn comparison was appearing more and more accurate.

  “I could write to my aunt and ask if she has a recipe to help you sleep,” I said tentatively. “I am quite certain that she would be able to recommend a few soothing herbs.”

  Harriet’s dark eyes regarded me with a mixture of hope and suspicion. “Why should you want to help me? You hated me for marrying George. I always knew that.”

  I sighed. I didn’t know the answer to her question myself. I only knew that suddenly I felt sorry for Harriet and that it was hard to continue to hate someone you felt sorry for.

  “I don’t know why I should offer to help you,” I said. I pushed away my scarcely touched muffin. “Perhaps I really mean to poison you.”

  Her heavy gaze held my face. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “You don’t care
about George anymore now that you’ve got your hooks into Savile.”

  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.