Sometimes, with chill despair, she remembered what Maddy had told her:He has a mad wife in Scotland.Those flat words represented a conundrum she had no idea how to solve. She knew that he desired her, at least for now, but a mistress was an object of lust, not love. While she had a place in his life, it was a small, dishonorable one. Was this what she had come to London for? Surely somewhere ahead there would be a solution.
Whenever her thoughts reached that point, she resolutely turned her mind to other things, laughing with her son and friends, practicing her knife throwing. She did her domestic chores, she hired a French cook who had a tale of woe, and she fought a running battle with Geoffrey about riding lessons.
The issue was an old one. Her son had always loved horses, and Phaedra’s residence in the stables caused him to redouble his pleas for a pony. Diana felt deeply ambivalent about the subject. The life she wanted for Geoffrey meant that he must someday learn to ride. A gentleman who didn’t was a freak, and that was the last thing she wanted her son to be.
But riding could be dangerous even for the best of horsemen. If Geoffrey suffered agrand malor even apetit malseizure, he might be seriously injured or killed in a fall.
For the last three years she had taken cowardly refuge from his desire for a pony by saying that she would consider it when he was older, but she knew she could not put him off much longer. To compensate for her refusal to let him ride, Diana let Geoffrey keep a scrawny kitten he had rescued from a gang of street boys. But few beings are as persistent as young children, and Diana knew that the subject of riding would surface again.
* * *
When he recalled the autumn of 1807 in later years, Gervase knew that rain must have fallen, the London skies must have grayed, a hundred minor irritations of living must have occurred, but he remembered none of them: the weeks passed in a haze of golden days and fiery nights.
The affairs of the nation, if not prospering, at least became no worse. The Portuguese were persuaded to remove their fleet to safety in Brazil. His own work went well as his network of informants grew ever wider and deeper, and government officials of all political stripes came to accept that his recommendations were untainted by self-interest.
But it was Diana that cast the enchantment over his life. Warm and welcoming, she was always there when he wanted her, sensing his moods, knowing when to talk and when to be silent; when to melt in his arms and when to take the lead with a gentle sexual aggression that was richly stimulating.
Diana was so much the perfect woman that she couldn’t possibly be real; only a paid mistress with a flair for acting could be so wholly responsive. Gervase sometimes wondered what was the real woman and what was pretense. The warmth and sensuality couldn’t be entirely false or she would not be so convincing, yet she had a maddening, elusive air of mystery that veiled the central core of her.
He seldom wasted time with such thoughts. It was easier to accept her as she appeared, and he glided through the days on a strange emotion that he neither recognized nor named. Only much later, when those perfect days were history, did he realize that the emotion was called happiness.
More than three pearls were being delivered every week. He should have bought a triple-strand necklace, not a double. Diana kept the pearls in a crystal goblet on her dressing table, and the level visibly rose as the weeks passed.
The goblet was another gift from him, one of a set of heavy Venetian cut-glass vessels. He found that he enjoyed giving things to Diana, and she took the same pleasure in the armload of flowers that he impulsively bought from a street vendor as she did in the priceless, exquisitely wrought mantel clock said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. In fact, she may have liked the flowers better, judging by the way she buried her face in them before giving him a brilliant, pollen-dusted smile.
A routine soon developed. Several nights a week Gervase came by after working late and they shared a supper, talking and laughing before making love. Sometimes they rode very early in the morning, when Rotten Row was as quiet as the viscount’s own country estate.
Gervase offered to take her to more public gatherings, such as the theater, but she always refused, and he was secretly pleased. He knew most men would flaunt the fact that they had won such a prize as Diana, but he preferred the magical bubble of privacy that they shared. Their seclusion also saved him from having to speculate on what other men present might be enjoying her matchless charms.
Then the golden age ended. The changes were subtle, though the event that triggered them was not.
Gervase had been in Kent talking to smugglers, and he’d missed Diana with a constant ache, much as a missing limb was said to haunt its former owner. He had returned a day early just to see her, and his first act had been to send a footman the short distance to her house to ascertain if she could receive him. He was not sure what he would have done if she had refused or had been otherwise occupied. Probably gone to her house and kicked her other company out of bed.
It was almost ten o’clock when he arrived and she let him in. He wasted no time before kissing her, at the same time checking that every curve was just as he remembered it. Though Diana was laughing when she emerged from his embrace, he saw that she looked tired. Beautiful, but not quite as flawless as usual.
“I shouldn’t have left you,” he said teasingly, his forefinger brushing the hint of shadow under her eyes. “You look like you missed me.”
“I did.” She accompanied her words with a long hug, her arms wrapping his waist while she laid her head against his shoulder. It was a simple request for comfort with no undertones of passion, and Gervase felt oddly touched as he held her, feeling her tension diminish as he stroked her.
After a few peaceful minutes he asked, “Is something wrong?”
She hesitated, then stepped away, shaking her head. “Not really. I’m always a little sad at this time of year. Everything is so bleak. The whole of winter lies ahead, and spring seems so far away.”
Laying his arm around her shoulders, he steered her downstairs, where they shared their late meals. He liked the hominess of her kitchen, so different from the lethal formality of the official St. Aubyn dining rooms, where sixty people could eat cold food in high state. “English winters are a dreary affair. But they don’t bother me much. I was born in winter so it’s my season.”
“Really?” Diana removed a pheasant pie from the oven, using heavy mitts to transfer it to the pine table, where two place settings, a bottle of red wine, and an assortment of homemade pickles waited. “When is your birthday? I’m ashamed of myself for not asking before.”
“Good Lord, Diana, what does it matter?” he scoffed as he poured wine into the goblets and served the steaming hot pie. “But for the record, I was born December twenty-fourth.”
“Christmas Eve! What a lovely present that was for your mother.” Ignoring her own plate, Diana sat on the bench next to Gervase, enjoying the feel of his thigh against hers.
“On the contrary, she said that being in the straw wrecked her holiday.” The dryness of Gervase’s voice did not quite conceal the remembered pain. His mother had made that statement in her characteristic manner, the barb concealed under languid honey as she beckoned and rejected at the same time.
He moved on quickly, before Diana’s thoughtful glance could become a question. “It’s interesting that our birthdays are exactly opposite, each at the end of the solstice, after the sun has paused for three days and is on the verge of turning.”
She nodded. “When I was little, I thought it rather special to have been born on Midsummer Day. The solstices were honored in all pagan cultures. What is Christmas but our own version of the Saturnalia, the celebration that the sun is returning and life will continue instead of dying in endless night?”
Gervase looked up from his pheasant pie with amusement. “Where on earth did you learn that?” Diana’s magpie assortment of knowledge never ceased to amaze him.
