Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?
The letters blurred and she couldn’t finish. As her control shattered completely Angela ripped the page through and crumpled it in her fist. She wept for herself and the agony of Scott, who had waited in vain for only one true uncomplicated sign of her affection. It had been beyond her giving and was even now.
“Scott! Scott! You were right to leave me,” she sobbed into her hands. “The way I am now, I could never make you happy. And I want you to be happy, more than I want you here, more than I want to remember! I want you to find peace more than I want your love!”
The candle went out after a long time and Angela lay crumpled, brittle, and sleepless on Scott’s bed. She had to pull herself together but not tonight. Tonight she needed only oblivion so that the words would stop echoing in her mind, so that the pain would stop for at least a little while. Tomorrow she would be strong and cheerful and resolute; tomorrow she would let Scott go. He would have his divorce and be free. That was the only thing she could give him—his freedom.
Smoothing out the crumpled page Angela put it back in the book without looking at it and then put it in the top drawer of the chest. She straightened the rumpled velvet on the bed, picked up the candlestick and went back to her own room closing and locking the door behind her. With an economy of movement she washed her face, put on a robe and slippers, lit another candle, and went downstairs.
The huge, cold library had a well-stocked liquor cabinet and she chose several decanters of wine without hesitation or even caring what they contained. It didn’t matter. In a dark corner Angela curled up small and lost in a big chair and began drinking her way to oblivion. Her vision blurred and her cramped legs became numb, and when she reached for the other decanter the empty one fell crashing on the floor. She found that quite amusing. When she went to get some more wine from the cabinet she found negotiating the short distance the height of hilarity. Lord! At least she had stopped crying and she couldn’t even feel the ache in her side anymore.
The half-open door opened wider and another candle advanced into the room. In the faint glow his hair was very bright, glistening gold.
“Mr. Garamond.” Her soft laughter drew his attention farther into the library and then he stopped, realizing the state she was in.
“Excuse me, milady. I think, perhaps, I should go.”
“Then why did you come, if only to go?”
“I heard a noise and came to investigate.”
“And now your investigation is complete. Bon soir, Mr. Garamond.” Angela raised her newly filled glass and said with red, curved lips, "À votre santé!”
“Goodnight, milady,” he said with stern disapproval before he turned to go.
“Bravo! Very strict and tutorlike. Excellent English too. Why is it that I can’t ever recall hearing you speak French? Do you do it only at lessons?”
“Perhaps,” came the vitriolic reply, “milady had another memory lapse.”
“Perhaps,” she mimicked, “milady wishes for another memory lapse!”
“Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas."
Angela slammed down the goblet and wine sloshed over her fingers. “Don’t speak to me of hearts,” she screamed, “reasoning or otherwise! I have had my fill of hearts—broken and whole!”
He put down his candle and stood looking solemnly down at her, tall and young and magnificent. There was concern and a certain sadness in his large expressive eyes, and he looked very untutorlike at the moment with his hair falling over his forehead and dressed in his nightclothes. He did not apologize for upsetting her but watched silently as she gulped down the rest of the wine with her eyes closed and lashes still wet against her cheeks from crying.
“You need a friend,” Louis Garamond finally stated. “And you are tipsy.”
“Only tipsy?” Angela asked opening her eyes with a hollow laugh. “Then I must have another bottle, because I mean to get quite drunk.”
“You are already quite drunk. I was only being kind.”
“Kind and cruel—kind and cruel,” she said in a singsong tone. “Another friend is the last thing I need. People who are kind to me always end by being cruel. Now, how will you be cruel? But you couldn’t be, because I don’t care a fig for you, and only people I care about can hurt me.”
“Quite drunk,” he repeated taking the empty goblet from her hand.
“I mean to get drunker still, till I can’t think or move or hurt anymore. What do you think of that, Mr. Garamond?”
“I think you should go to bed.”
“But I don’t think I can walk to that door, never mind climb the stairs.”
“I’ll help you.”
“And what else will you help me do? Help me into bed and help me out of my robe? I know men, Mr. Garamond. Yes, I know—”
“Ma foi! You may know men but you don’t know me! I think you do need another bottle of wine. Shall I fetch it for you?”
“Yes, do. And have some yourself, Mr.—”
“Mon Dieu! Stop repeating my name over and over again.”
“But I’ve made you angry, Monsieur Tutor. This is an interesting conversation. Too bad I won’t remember it tomorrow.”
He handed her a full glass and refrained from replying. Pulling another chair into the circle of light Louis Garamond sat down with a smile on his angelic face and mockingly lifted his glass toward her. “To you, milady. Drunk or not I think you are extraordinary. And your husband must be insane to leave you alone—and you must be also to let him go.”
“And if I wasn’t so dizzy I would slap your face!”
“I am only trying to be diverting and what harm will it do when you have told me yourself you won’t remember this conversation in the morning? You are badly in need of diversion.”
Angela’s head was spinning and Louis Garamond was laughing with a pleased and somewhat endearing expression on his face. And she wasn’t even sure if he was making advances to her or only teasing her. Whatever he was doing, gone was the prim and proper attitude of the past, replaced by a disarming and rather caustic individual that was much more interesting than his former counterpart.
“And how would you divert me?” she wondered aloud with her eyes half closed and her head flung back against the chair.
“You seem to think I have designs on you. Banish the thought, milady. I prefer young, uncomplicated diversions who are unpreoccupied with broken hearts, disloyal friends, precocious children and faithless husbands. Who do not have to get drunk alone to forget what little they can remember. Who are not slightly, but charmingly, deranged and who are not completely, and without a doubt—frigid!”
Angela’s mouth dropped open but she was beyond speaking now. Louis Garamond laughed at her astonished look and continued.
“Entertaining? Wondering how I know so much in such a short time? Rumors, madame, rumors. But it seems I am right, n'est-ce pas?"
“You—you—”
“But I am only saying to your face what everyone else whispers behind your back. Shouldn’t it all be out in the open if we are to be friends? Now, there are no secrets between us and you know for a certainty that I have no devious designs toward you.
“And now,” Garamond continued with sparkling eyes and a guileless smile, “you will stop being angry with me for those rather intimate disclosures, because in spite of everything you must admit it was amusing and that I have thoroughly distracted you. Oui, you are beginning to smile again, and that is good. Finish your wine, for that is your last glass—”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“No, I will not tell you.” Taking the glass from her nerveless fingers he placed the candlestick in her hand and picked her up easily. “You are dripping wax on your robe. Hold it straight or I will not make it upstairs. I charge extra for putting employers to bed and even more for dealing with drunken mothers—”
Angela laughed helplessly against his shoulder and gasped, “Oh, you are very amusing and I
am quite drunk!”
“I thought we had already established both those facts. If you aren’t quiet you will wake the whole house and then the servants will really have something to gossip about. And I shall pretend to be walking in my sleep—”
She giggled even harder spattering wax on both them and the floor, the stairs, and the banister.
“Voilà!” Louis Garamond whispered, depositing her quietly outside her bedroom. She swayed unsteadily and he opened the door and pushed her inside. “You also owe me a new dressing gown for you have ruined this one.”
“Shh! The servants!”
He smiled indulgently for she was the one causing the disturbance with her muffled laughter. “You see, I have not put you to bed or removed your robe. So much for your knowledge of men. You should not try and make accurate characterizations of people while you are quite drunk.”
The door closed firmly between them and somehow Angela found herself in bed, without her robe and with the dripping candle flickering on the table. He had been verbally brutal, totally honest, and vastly amusing; and had at least chased the resounding poetry from her weary head.
“But I don’t want another friend!” she reminded herself emphatically.
A thin, sheer crimson curtain wavered, billowed and expanded in the draft from a slightly open window. It grew, crackling, edged with gold, and Angela tossed uncomfortably, coughed and flung a hand toward the edge of the bed. She woke instantly from a sound sleep dazed and gasping with pain. Clouds of black and gray smoke choked her scream and blinded her eyes as she threw herself to the opposite side of the bed to escape.
Heat like a blast from an oven sent her back to the center as the bed hangings flamed around her on all sides. Yellow, glowing sparks flew as thick as gnats, lighting on her nightgown and making tiny black-edged holes before going out. An army of flames charged up the counterpane licking and dancing in a wild frenzy, and she curled her feet beneath her, away from the advancing inferno.
“Oh lord!” she whispered, barely able to breathe from the smoke and the heat. “Maggie! Maggie!”
Her heart raced and stopped, jerked in panic and raced again as she cast desperately around for a way out. There was no way out except right through the flames. I’m going to die, she thought, just as the whole bed collapsed toward her.
But there were hands pulling the burning draperies away from her, blackened hands that ripped away one sheet of flame and dragged her from the conflagration by the hem of her nightgown. She clung blinded, coughing as someone lifted her and delivered her to safety, calling hoarsely for help.
She was shivering on the floor of the hallway lying across someone’s lap. “She won’t let go of me,” he said and then convulsed with a fit of coughing.
“Mama! Mama!”
“Can’t you carry her downstairs?”
“My hands are burned—someone else will have to—”
“Kate, take Robert and Clare away. Someone send for the doctor!”
“The fire is out and the doctor has been sent for.” The jumble of unidentified voices went on without ceasing making Angela’s head pound. She opened her eyes and Louis Garamond gave her a jaunty, if somewhat pained smile. His face was scorched and his beautiful golden hair singed, the tips of his lashes were charred.
“You can let go of me now,” he told her in his lightly accented English. “I charge exorbitantly for rescuing employers from infernos. And please, don’t ever get drunk again.”
fourteen
“That is no billet-doux.”
“Mind your own business!” Angela said putting down her pen and concealing her letter with a hastily drawn sheet of blank paper.
“I am finding it extremely difficult to mind my own business since I cannot even turn the pages of a book.” Bandaged from fingertips to elbows Mr. Garamond gazed with serene, questioning eyes from beneath his delicately cocked singed eyebrows. His blistered nose, chin, and forehead were peeling and he had fared worse than Angela.
She had only been lightly toasted by the fire while Louis had been roasted rare. And while Angela was completely recovered with a few fast fading reminders of that most extraordinary night, he was wrapped as thickly as a mummy and was obviously becoming bored with inactivity.
Had it only been six days ago? In spite of her protestations that she would never remember their remarkable conversation it was firmly fixed in her consciousness. Perhaps the fire had seared it into her mind. Louis Garamond had saved her life at the risk of his own, and not a little pain, and then shrugged it off sardonically as a sensitive nose and an overdeveloped sense of chivalry from reading too many epic poems.
But she did not remember setting fire to her bed hangings or much of anything after her timely rescue. The doctor had come with his powders, his bag, salves, and bandages; pronounced her in shock, Louis badly burned but apt to recover, and had left very hastily when the tutor whispered to her between clenched teeth: “Mon Dieu! I should have put you to bed and blown out that damned candle!” Then she had laughed herself uproariously, hysterically to sleep and woke with a horrendous hangover.
But though she had resisted, groping through the chaos of her ruined rooms, her badly patched heart, her shattered pride, and her raw nerves, Louis had kept her intermittently laughing. She wasn’t sure how he did it only that he became, in the midst of a bland conversation, wildly outrageous. He made her furious with his intimate probing and then turned the facts of her tragic life about face into a comedy of errors. When she was about to break into fits of weeping or a tempest of execrable anger, one word, a look, a peculiar gesture renewed her equilibrium.
“I don’t want another friend,” she told him tartly. “If you can’t read then—then go practice your French!”
“My French is excellent, thank you, and not in need of any practice. If you want me to go, then dismiss me.”
Angela said nothing, her lashes secretly veiling her eyes for a moment before she looked up. He was being difficult on purpose, but to what purpose she didn’t know. Only when Louis Garamond was ready did he reveal his motives. She shivered slightly at a sudden hardening in his eyes—or had she imagined it?
“You see, madame, you do not want me to go. Diversion. We agreed that was what you needed. If you don’t want me for a friend then I would make an excellent—”
Abruptly she stood up, her letter crumpling beneath her rigid fingers. She stared at his suggestive smile with enormous frightened eyes and a quick staccato leaping of her heart. Now, he was making his move after almost a week of lulling her into a false sense of security. Now, his true motive would be revealed. Her instincts weren’t wrong, she knew men.
“. . . enemy,” he finished.
The air rushed into Angela’s lungs like a shock and only then did she realize she had been holding her breath. Garamond was laughing at her! He had turned the tables on her again and she had fallen for it.
“You look like a fish out of water, milady. Don’t you think you should close your mouth?”
“You—you—” she stammered angrily, with a smile quivering at the corners of her mouth.
“Are you disappointed? Or did I scare you silly?”
“Sir!” Violently Angela threw the object in her hand at Louis, but it was only a wad of paper and he caught it deftly against his chest with gauze-swathed fingers.
“The latter I think,” he observed astutely. “Your cheeks are as red as a tropical sunset.”
“Have you traveled in the tropics?”
“What have we here?” Garamond asked painstakingly undoing the paper. “Ah, your missive to your husband!”
“Give that back to me right now!”
“You have stopped smiling,” he said with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. “What can I do to cheer you up again?”
White with rage she flew at him trying to snatch it back but Louis held it beyond her reach.
“You have really gone too far this time!” she yelled. You are fired!”
“Then I have n
othing to lose by reading it. Shall I read it aloud? It might amuse you.”
The fine control snapped and she went for his eyes with her fingernails. Very efficiently he fended her off and held both her wrists imprisoned in one big hand. The grip was brutal and must have been excruciating for him.
“I’ll kill you!” A long string of expletives followed, but Louis only smiled and waved the letter enticingly beneath her nose.
“Will you challenge me to a duel and shoot me down in cold blood the way you did your third husband?”
“Wh—what?”
“Sit down, you look like you might faint.” Garamond tenderly lowered her into a chair and then stepped beyond her reach. “You don’t remember? No one told you? Lady Vaughn’s brother, Keith Montgomery. Why don’t you ask her for the details, she was there; her husband was your second.”
While Angela was helplessly frozen to her chair by the offhanded viciousness of his disclosure, Louis examined his bandages carefully, settled himself comfortably in another chair, gave her an innocent smile, and began reading her letter out loud.
“ ‘Scott. You are free. I release you from all your promises and your marriage vows. I am divorcing you.
“ ‘I hope you have acquired your seraglio because my solicitor informs me there will have to be blatant grounds if it is to be over quickly. You are right, a quick clean break is best.
“ ‘There is only one thing I ask of you: that you never see me again. Promise me that and forget the rest. Don’t look for the reason why, don’t look back with regrets, just accept the only gift I can give you—your freedom.
“ ‘Make yourself a new life with the peace you could never find with me. It is over. Be happy. Angela.’ ”
She was weeping silently and Louis watched her. He didn’t offer her his handkerchief or touch her or try to comfort her as any other man would have.
Finally he said, “Oui, I have gone too far this time. I am sorry. I didn’t think a love like that existed outside fantasy or books. You know, of course, that if he loves you he will be here two hours after reading that letter.”
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