Chapter 12
At the end of the first week of the house party, the guest head count at Huntington had climbed to forty. The house existed in a state of permanent bustle, its occupants consuming caviar by the stone and guzzling fifty-year-old claret as if it were so much lemonade.
Bread was brought in by the cartload from the village. Crates of crabs, sturgeon, and whitebait arrived packed in straw and ice. Hens, ducklings, and guinea fowls came in latticed cages, emerging from the kitchen only after having been roasted, stuffed, and stewed.
Temporary cookmaids and scullery maids chopped and washed alongside frantic sous chefs. Footmen were permanently out of breath. The laundry department operated six days a week, bravely attacking mountains of napkins and undershirts.
During the day, Louisa rarely had a moment to herself, and she was glad for it. Every servant who approached her with a question or a problem was a welcome distraction, each guest who wanted her attention likewise.
At night, well, it actually wasn’t too difficult to fall asleep, given that she now woke up at four o’clock each morning to spend time with her telescope, which she’d had moved to the balcony outside the sitting room of her apartment.
She started with the much bombarded face of the moon, dear old friend to those lovers of astronomy who could observe only with the naked eye, or a pair of binoculars at best. Then she moved on to the planets.
She still remembered her star map, memorized during long-ago childhood summers, so she needed only look for heavenly bodies that were out of place.
Mars’s moons, Jupiter’s spot, Saturn’s rings—celestial entities she’d never before seen with her own eyes bowed before the powerful magnification of her telescope.
Only once did she turn the telescope toward the hillock on which the Roman folly sat. The sun had just risen, the belvedere was bathed in a lovely, champagne-colored light, and the dress dummies were nowhere in sight. Vanished, like her husband’s interest in her.
She joined other early risers on daily hikes across the breadth of the estate. Her husband never did, though he was always there to lead interested parties on grouse-terminating expeditions.
His friends were people of boundless energy.
Groups of cycle enthusiasts regularly charged down country lanes, to the bemusement of nearby cattle.
The gentlemen played cricket and association football.
Ladies thwacked away on the tennis courts set up on the west lawn.
And almost every afternoon, rowing parties and impromptu races took place on the lake.
And since one could not come by the appellation of The Ideal Gentleman without also being a superlative sportsman, Lord Wrenworth rarely idled, taking part in everything, as graceful and surefooted running across a grassy field as he was turning about a ballroom.
He was the best tennis player among the gentlemen, it was commonly acknowledged, and also the best shot. As for who was the fastest swimmer, that particular question was settled with a contest.
Louisa was on a different side of the house, ensconced among the half dozen or so guests who preferred painting, reading, and gossiping to the more vigorous pastimes.
But at the news that at least a dozen gentlemen had waded out into the lake, these supposedly sedentary guests leaped up into a sprint, leaving Louisa no choice but to follow in their wake.
A crowd had already gathered at the edge of the water. She would have been glad to remain at the back of the spectators. But once her guests realized that she had come, they stepped aside and waved her through to the front.
A dense pack of men were in the waters off the far shore. She couldn’t see their faces, but from the rapidly forming wagers, it became apparent that her husband was among the contestants.
Near the middle of the lake, the three or four strongest swimmers separated themselves from the pack.
“Mr. Dunlop is in the lead, Mr. Weston behind him, and Lord Wrenworth in third,” a sharp-eyed matron beside Louisa reported.
A man snorted behind her. “Dunlop’ll fade soon enough—fellow doesn’t know how to pace himself. But that should be an interesting contest between Weston and Wrenworth. Weston’s a bit heavy, but he swims like a fish.”
As he predicted, Dunlop soon dropped out of the lead, and it came down to a spirited sprint between the two others.
Louisa held her breath, not so much invested in the result of the race—what did it matter who came in first?
—as unhappily gnawing over the prospect of being seen as riveted by his doings, when he couldn’t bother to reciprocate that interest.
Lord Wrenworth won by a full body length. He and Mr. Weston came ashore, laughing, shaking hands, and congratulating each other in easy camaraderie.
They were both minimally clad. Her husband had stripped down to his shirtsleeves.
And what garments still remained on him were plastered to his person, limning the strong, lithe form his more formal attires only hinted at.
He rolled up his sleeves as he emerged from the lake, exposing long, sinewy arms to the afternoon sun and much avid feminine scrutiny.
“Oh, my!” murmured a lady to the right of Louisa. “What a sight.”
“I had better send someone to collect all the clothes left on the other bank,” Louisa said, very sensibly.
“Leave them,” said another lady, entirely insensibly. “We have no need of them.”
It would have seemed odd if she didn’t join the ensuing tittering, brought on in large part by the collective admiration for her husband’s fine physique, so she did, though all she wanted was to leave, to hide places where she could not possibly be exposed to his beauty and fitness.
That was when he saw her, her hand over her mouth, in a fit of silly giggling.
She kept on giggling, she was sure—the sound echoed in her head. But a scalding mortification filled her, as if he had just wiped the hand that had touched her on a handkerchief and discarded the latter as not worthy of ever being inside his pocket again.
He came to her and kissed her on her forehead. “Aren’t you proud of me?” he murmured, just loud enough for those nearest to overhear.
He touched her like this from time to time, decorously, always before an audience, and always with just a hint of loverly familiarity: a hand on the small of her back, a nudge with his shoulder, and once, a playful tug on her hat ribbon as he passed her.
She knew why he made such gestures. Without ever consulting each other, they played a pair of secretly devoted lovers, as if they’d been colleagues in the same theatrical production for years upon years.
She peered at him from underneath her eyelashes, the pad of her index finger alighting upon a still-wet button on his shirt. “Maybe.”
Their gazes held for a moment. Twin arrows of lust and pain pierced her person. It would be so much easier if he weren’t such a good actor—if in one brief look he didn’t make her feel as if he would give up his entire fortune for one night with her.
“My, my, Felix, what delicious dishabille!”
Startled, Louisa looked toward the speaker, a striking, raven-haired woman in a gown of burgundy and gold stripes.
Lady Tremaine. Back from her man-sampling up north.
She approached Lord Wrenworth, her gloved hands outstretched. “What is this, Felix? I go off for a few weeks and come back to find you married?”
Felix. Appalling intimacy, when everyone else, even his oldest friends, thought it quite adequate to adhere to his title or some variant thereof.
He did not seem to mind at all. “My dear,” he said to Louisa, “allow me to present the Marchioness of Tremaine. Lady Tremaine, Lady Wrenworth.”
The two women shook hands.
“We are so glad you could come, Lady Tremaine,” said Louisa. “And did you find the…charms of Scandinavia as delightful as you had hoped?”
Something flickered in Lady Tremaine’s eyes, as if she hadn’t expected such a cheeky question from the country bumpkin her former lover had married.
“The salmon was certainly of exceptional quality everywhere. And may I tender my congratulations on your marriage. I am sure Lord Wrenworth is an exceedingly fortunate man to have won your hand.”
“He thanks his lucky stars every day,” Louisa said sweetly. She turned to him. “My dear, best change before you catch a chill.”
And then, to Lady Tremaine, “I’m sorry we didn’t have advance notice of your visit. But shall we get you settled?”
* * *
Later that afternoon, another guest arrived, an expected one this time, but one as unwelcome to Felix as Lady Tremaine must be to his wife.
Drummond.
The man had an uncanny nose for marital discord—and rarely hesitated to take advantage of a wife’s displeasure with her husband to present himself as everything the poor sod wasn’t.
Such tendencies had scarcely mattered to Felix when he was a bachelor.
And would have scarcely mattered to him as a married man, had he and his wife remained cocooned in erotic bliss.
But erotic bliss did not characterize the state of his marriage.
And as Drummond monopolized Louisa after dinner, Felix felt as if he were an incarcerated convict who could only rattle the bars of his prison with impotent frustration as another man circled his wife, getting ready to exploit his absence.
“Well, tell me,” said Lady Tremaine, pulling his attention back to her. “Why did this girl succeed whereas so many before her have failed?”
She had beckoned him to her earlier; they stood in a corner of the drawing room, half separated from the rest of the crowd by a Japanese screen.
He settled for a noncommittal reply. “Excellent timing?”
She appeared skeptical. “I thought you planned to marry the female equivalent of Lord Vere—tremendous looks and very little brain.”
Would that he’d adhered to that laudable plan. “And you believed me?”
“I had no reason not to. Many men like that kind of woman.”
“Obviously I decided against a dim-witted wife.”