Then Comes Seduction

“Is it?” he said.

For a moment he thought she had nothing else to say about it, that she had just been making a polite observation couched in rather lavish praise.

“It is so perfectly constructed,” she said, “with such geometrical precision. Is it exactly square? Do you know? It must be.”

“Down to the last quarter of an inch,” he said.

She laughed softly, thinking that he joked.

“Something so very man-made ought not to be beautiful too, ought it?” she said. “Such a ruthless taming of nature? But it is. Perhaps it says much about human-kind’s place in the world. We can impose order and precision upon nature, but we cannot destroy any of its loveliness or enthusiasm.”

“Enthusiasm?” he said.

“Look at the banks of wallflowers spilling down over the walls,” she said. “They are exuberant even though they have been confined to the perimeter of the garden. They give notice that they can be tamed but not destroyed, that they are in no way less powerful than the men who put them there and who see to it that they remain there without encroaching upon the parterres.”

He laughed softly, and she turned her head to look at him.

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Laugh at me. I do not mind.”

“The rest of the park,” he said, “has been laid out according to the theories of Capability Brown and his ilk. There are rolling, tree-dotted lawns and a lake, and a wilderness walk winding through the trees on the far side of it and up through the wooded hills behind the house. All carefully constructed to look artfully natural or naturally artful-I am not sure which is more appropriate. The object, of course, is to make the park look like a piece of wild, unspoiled nature when in reality it is no such thing. The lawns came almost to the very doors until a few years ago.”

“Just a few years?” She turned her head to look back outside.

“The terraces are newly constructed,” he said. “So is the parterre garden. Last year it looked better than the year before, and this year it looks better than last year.”

She was looking at him again, and this time he felt that all her attention was on him.

“Is this that first tentative step you spoke of in the carriage earlier?” she said. “The first step to making Cedarhurst your own?”

“It is one very tiny step, is it not?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “And it took so much energy that I doubt I will ever take another.”

“This is your work,” she said.

“I did not heft a shovel,” he said. “At least, I did, but my contribution to the actual manual labor was minuscule, Katherine. I might have damaged my manicure.”

“And I suppose,” she said, “the design was yours too.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I lay no claim to artistic vision-or mathematical genius for that matter.”

Though he had insisted that the square be exact, even down to the final quarter of an inch.

“Come,” he said, “I will show you something-if you have finished your tea, that is.”

She drained off the last mouthful and crossed the room to set her cup and saucer on the tray-to save a servant from having to retrieve it from the window ledge, he supposed. Another relic of the vicarage, where presumably there were no servants, or very few?

He led her from the room and into the east wing of the house, where their apartments were-the two east- facing bedchambers, large and square, the dressing rooms on the far side of each, and the private sitting room between.

He ought perhaps to have taken her to her own bedchamber first since she had not even seen it yet. Or at least to the sitting room, where she could be comfortable and quiet during the morning hours whenever she wished. But he took her straight into his own bedchamber.

He had had it completely redecorated and refurnished after his mother’s death-though it had not been used for years before that. He would have gutted the room with fire if he could, but actually the changes he had made had obliterated the presence of his mother’s second husband. Everything was dark blue and gray and silver now.

“This is my room,” he said. “Not yours too, you will be relieved to know. And there is a whole spacious sitting room between us and probably a lock on your bedchamber door to keep out the wolf.”

“You have made a wager with me,” she said. “I will trust to your honor. Even if there is a key, I will not turn it.”

“Something,” he said, “you may live to regret.”

It was going to be devilishly difficult living up to that condition of celibacy she had added to the wager last night and he had agreed to in a moment of madness-just because it had added another element of the seemingly impossible to the challenge.

“This is what I brought you here to see,” he said, indicating the large painting that hung over the mantel in its gilded, old-fashioned frame.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she moved closer to it.

“In a fit of desperate boredom a few years ago,” he said, “after it had rained steadily for days on end, I made a foray into the attic storage rooms and discovered this, its face to the wall. It is a view from the house a century or more ago. Before the parterres were destroyed in the name of modernity and the artfully natural look. I fell in love.”

She whisked around, her eyes alight with merriment.

“Did you, indeed?” she said.

He shrugged.

“As you so eloquently explained earlier,” he said, “many words merely symbolize what cannot be expressed verbally. Cliches do the same thing when one is too lazy even to try to find original words. I knew immediately when I looked at this painting that if I were ever going to live at Cedarhurst, this is what I must look out upon from the drawing room or from the front steps of the house. And so I gave the necessary orders. Sometimes it is a great advantage to have both power and wealth.”

She was looking at the painting again.

“But here,” she said, “there is only one terrace with the parterres below it. And they are not sunken. They are not surrounded by a wall and banks of flowers.”

“For very pride’s sake,” he said, “I could not just make a slavish copy. I had to add something of my own.”

“Or something of yourself,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Adding a lower terrace and sinking the garden below ground level are brilliant adaptations.”

“Are they?” he said. He felt absurdly pleased. “How kind you are, Katherine.”

She clucked her tongue and turned to face him again.

“I thought so from the sound of your voice,” she said. “You have retreated behind your usual disguise to deceive me into thinking that you do not care. This garden was not just one small, tentative step, was it? It was a bold stride to assert your personhood.”

He grinned at her-though he actually felt as far from being amused as he had ever felt. He felt rather exposed, actually. And slightly foolish. Perhaps he ought not to have brought her here.

“There must be a wonderful feeling of seclusion and peace in that garden,” she said.

“It is my hope,” he said, “that you will find both there in the coming years, Katherine. Though I hope too that your desire for seclusion will not always exclude me.” He raised his eyebrows.

She gazed at him without speaking for a few moments.

“I realize,” she said, “that I dug a deep hole for myself last night when I made that wager with you. For the next month I will not know when you speak sincerely or when you speak merely to win the wager.”

He almost fell in love with her then. Her eyes looked sad.

He smiled slowly, deliberately drooping his eyelids again just because he knew it would annoy her and make her forget to be sad.

“That,” he said, possessing himself of her right hand, “is the challenge of the