Miss von Schweppenburg hesitated. “I don't know. Mama would never speak to me again if I don't marry well. But strangers make me . . . uncomfortable. I only wish Mr. Saybrook were more eligible.”
Gigi's opinion of the girl deteriorated rapidly. She respected a woman out to marry to her best advantage. And she respected a woman who sacrificed worldly comforts for love, though she personally disagreed with such decisions. But she could not tolerate wishy-washiness. Miss von Schweppenburg would neither commit to this Camden Saybrook, because he was too poor, nor commit to her husband-hunting, because she enjoyed too much being loved by him.
“He's very handsome, very sweet and kind,” Miss von Schweppenburg was saying, her voice reduced to a whisper, almost as if she were talking to herself. “He writes me letters and sends lovely presents, things he'd made himself.”
Gigi wanted to roll her eyes but somehow couldn't. Someone loved this girl, this utterly useless girl, loved her enough to go on wooing her, even though she was being paraded before all of Europe for takers.
A moment of stark despair descended upon her that she would never know such love, that she would go through life sustained only by her facade of invincibility. Then she came to her senses. Love was for fools. Gigi Rowland was many things, but she was never a fool.
“How fortunate for you, Fr?ulein.”
“Yes, I suppose I am. I only wish . . .” Miss von Schweppenburg shook her head. “Perhaps you might meet him at your wedding.”
Gigi nodded and smiled absently, preoccupied once again with the structural elegance of the cake to be served at her imminent wedding.
But no wedding ever took place between Philippa Gilberte Rowland and Carrington Vincent Hanslow Saybrook. Two weeks before the wedding day, His Grace the Duke of Fairford, the Marquess of Tremaine, Viscount Hanslow, and Baron Wolvinton, after six hours of solid drinking in honor of his upcoming nuptials, climbed up to the roof of his friend's town house and attempted to moon all of London. All he accomplished was a broken neck and his own demise by tumbling four stories to the ground.
Chapter Three
9 May 1893
Victoria Rowland was not quite herself.
She knew this because she had just decapitated all the orchids in her beloved greenhouse. Their heads rolled on the ground in beautiful, grotesque carnage, as if she were enacting a floral version of the French Revolution.
Not for the first or even the one thousandth time, she wished that the seventh Duke of Fairford had lived two weeks longer. Two measly weeks. Afterward he could have swilled poison, tied himself to a railroad track, and, while he was waiting for the train, shot himself in the head.
All she wanted was for Gigi to be a duchess. Was that too much?
Duchess—everyone had called Victoria that when she was a young girl. She'd been beautiful, well-mannered, serene, and regal; they were all convinced she was going to marry a duke. But then her father was defrauded out of almost everything they had, and her mother's long, lingering illness plunged the family finances from merely precarious to catastrophic. She'd ended up marrying a man twice her age, a rich industrialist looking to infuse some gentility into his bloodline.
But John Rowland's money had been deemed too new, too uncouth. Suddenly Victoria found herself shut out of drawing rooms where she had once been welcome. Swallowing her humiliation, she swore that she would never let the same happen to her own daughter. The girl would have Victoria's polish and her father's fortune, she would take London by storm, and she would be a duchess if it killed Victoria.
Gigi had almost done it. In fact, she had done it. The fault there lay entirely with Carrington. And then, to Victoria's amazement, she had done it again, marrying Carrington's cousin, heir to the title. How happy and proud Victoria had been on the day of Gigi's wedding, how resolutely giddy.
And then everything went wrong. Camden left the day after the wedding, with no explanations to anyone. And no matter how much she begged, cried, and wheedled, Victoria could not get a word as to what had happened out of Gigi.
What do you care? Gigi had said icily. We have decided to lead separate lives. When he inherits I'm still going to become a duchess. Isn't that all you've ever wanted?