Scandal Wears Satin
Scandal Wears Satin
Loretta Chase
“You’ve appointed yourself my mistress!”Sophy is determined to make Maison Noirot London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it kills her. It’s been said she could sell sand to the bedouins, but waves of bad publicity after her sister’s scandalous marriage are tainting business, so she has little time for anything but work – especially not the flirtatious affections of reckless rake the Earl of Longmore.But when a disreputable admirer compromises Longmore's sister, Noirot's favourite patron, the runaway sibling must be found. There’s too much at stake for Sophy to let Longmore rush after them on his own. So together they make chase, but such close proximity can play havoc even with sworn adversaries…
She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked. She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalisingly unladylike.
‘I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,’ Clevedon was saying. ‘If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.’
‘Love,’ Longmore said. ‘Bad idea.’
Clevedon smiled. ‘One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,’ he said. ‘And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.’
‘Love will have its work cut out for it,’ Longmore said. ‘I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.’
‘Very possibly,’ Clevedon said. ‘Which will make it all the more amusing.’
LORETTA CHASE has worked in academe, retail and the visual arts, as well as on the streets—as a meter maid (aka traffic warden)—and in video, as a scriptwriter. She might have developed an excitingly chequered career had her spouse not nagged her into writing fiction. Her bestselling historical romances, set in the Regency and Romantic eras of the early nineteenth century, have won a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s RITA
.
Website: www.LorettaChase.com (http://www.LorettaChase.com).
Scandal Wears Satin
Loretta Chase
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_34fda9f4-9770-5caa-9d22-46262dc8e8e3)
This book was made possible by the support of: my insightful and inspiring editor, May Chen; my indefatigable agent, Nancy Yost; my witty and fashion-wise friend and blogging partner, Isabella Bradford, aka Susan Holloway Scott; my patient French adviser, Valerie Kerxhalli; my loyal, funny and crazy sisters, Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy; and, most especially, my brainy and brave husband, Walter, a hero every single day.
Table of Contents
Cover (#udcbc0918-6f04-5b22-a42d-f1167fde50d5)
Excerpt (#uf911357b-ae77-521f-a8d9-f8454266669c)
About the Author (#u79faa167-9fe1-53b0-a18b-e9a3f588312f)
Title Page (#uc6c39659-a351-5c0a-8466-81826e12b125)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_c7ba6544-8fba-5497-95d0-3060189cb147)
Prologue (#ulink_e114b75d-ea7e-52b0-8723-052b1c3ede03)
Chapter One (#ulink_bdeb2598-bf61-5d3d-8c2f-88029d6fa9e4)
Chapter Two (#ulink_f027f594-980e-54cf-b44f-50d27bb0afe1)
Chapter Three (#ulink_0162a3be-e6fc-527d-bb34-c3fca5c91e44)
Chapter Four (#ulink_34459944-6bb0-54e9-b80d-966284bc859a)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_aa8b68ff-fc62-5849-a51a-ff244c9f6ca7)
Observe his fierce, fighting-cock air; his coal-black gipsy curls; his aristocratic (not to call it arrogant) expression of countenance—never laid aside, whether he is smiling on a fair dame or frowning on a fawning dun.
—The Court Magazine,
“Sketches from Real Life,” 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835, early morning
The trollops knew how to throw a party.
On Wednesday nights, after dancing or playing cards with Society’s crème de la crème at Almack’s, London’s wilder set continued more eagerly to a very different assembly at the house of Carlotta O’Neill. On offer was a roulette table, along with other games of chance, as well as spicier games with the demireps who played ladies-in-waiting to London’s current queen of courtesans.
Harry Fairfax, Earl of Longmore, was on the scene, naturally.
Carlotta’s wasn’t the sort of place his father, the Marquess of Warford, would wish his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir to frequent, but heeding his parents’ wishes, Longmore had decided a long time ago, was the fast and easy route to murderous boredom.
He was nothing like his parents, on any count. He’d inherited not only his great-uncle Lord Nicholas Fairfax’s piratical looks—black hair, black eyes, and a tall, muscular physique usually associated with buccaneers—but Great-Uncle Nicholas’s talent for Doing What He Was Not Supposed To.
And so Lord Longmore was at Carlotta’s.
And she was draped over him, wafting waves of scent. And talking, unfortunately.
“But you’re intimately acquainted with them,” she was saying. “You must tell us what the new Duchess of Clevedon is really like.”
“Brunette,” he said, watching the roulette wheel spin. “Pretty. Says she’s English but acts French.”
“My dear, we could have found that out from the Spectacle.”
Foxe’s Morning Spectacle was London’s premier scandal sheet. The high-principled Marquess of Warford called it disgusting tripe, but he read it, as did everyone else, from London’s bawds and pimps on up to the Royal Family. Every detail it published regarding the Duke of Clevedon’s new bride had, Longmore knew, been artfully crafted by the bride’s fair-haired sister Sophia Noirot, evil dressmaker by day and Tom Foxe’s premier spy by night.
Longmore wondered where she was this night. He hadn’t spotted her at Almack’s. Milliners—especially slightly French ones—had as much chance of receiving vouchers to Almack’s as he had of turning invisible at will. But Sophia Noirot had her own mode of invisibility, and she was perfectly capable of inserting her elegantly curved body anywhere she pleased, in the guise of a temporary servant. That was how she dug up so much dirt for Foxe’s scandal sheet.
The roulette wheel stopped spinning, one of the fellows at the table swore, and the wench acting as croupier raked a pile of counters in Longmore’s direction.
He scooped them up and handed them to Carlotta.
“Your winnings?” she said. “Do you want me to keep them safe for you?”
He laughed. “Yes, m’dear, keep them safe. Buy yourself a bauble or some such.”
Her well-groomed eyebrows went up.
Until a moment ago, when visions of Sophy Noirot sashayed into his mind, he’d assumed what Carlotta had assumed: that he’d soon disappear with her into her bedroom. She was supposed to be in Lord Gorrell’s keeping, but he, while rich enough, wasn’t quite lively enough to keep Carlotta fully amused.
Dependent on an allowance and gambling winnings, Longmore probably wasn’t rich enough. But while he didn’t doubt he possessed the necessary stamina and inventiveness to hold her interest, it occurred to him now that she wasn’t likely to hold his for more than five minutes. Even by his careless standards, that hardly justified a large financial investment and the subsequent tedium of listening to his father rant about overspent allowances.
In other words, Longmore was tired of her already.
Not too long after abandoning his winnings, he took his leave, along with two of his friends and two of Carlotta’s maids of honor. They found a hackney and after a short discussion, set out for a gaming hell with a very bad reputation, in the neighborhood of St. James’s. There, Longmore could count on a brawl.
Bored with the conversation inside the coach, he turned to gaze out of the window at the passing scene. The sun rose early at this time of year, and though the window was dirty, he could see well enough. A drably dressed female carrying a shabby basket was hurrying along the street. Her pace and dress, along with the basket, made it clear she wasn’t one of London’s numerous streetwalkers but an ordinary female on her way to work at about the time her betters in the beau monde were going home from their parties.
She moved at a fast clip, but it wasn’t fast enough. A figure darted out of an alley, grabbed her basket, and knocked her into the street.
Longmore stood, put down the window, opened the carriage door, and jumped out of the moving carriage, deaf to his companions’ shrieks and shouts. After the first stumble, he quickly gained his balance, and charged after the thief. His prey was fast, darting this way and that. At a busier time of day, he would have soon shed any pursuer. But the hour was early, and hardly anybody stood in Longmore’s way. He wasn’t thinking, only running, in a blind fury. When the fellow sprang into a narrow court, Longmore never thought of ambush or danger—not that he’d care, had he thought about it.
The fellow was making for a door, and it opened a crack, its inhabitants expecting him, no doubt. Longmore got to him first. He grabbed the thief and dragged him backward. The door banged shut.
Longmore slammed him against the nearest wall. The man instantly crumpled and slid to the ground, dropping the basket. Though he couldn’t be much damaged—these villains didn’t break easily—he stayed where he was, eyes closed.
“I shouldn’t get up again in a hurry, if I were you,” Longmore said. “Filthy coward. Attacking women.” Longmore collected the basket and cast a glance round the court. With any luck, dangerous accomplices would hurry to their friend’s rescue.
But no luck. The area was quiet, though Longmore was well aware he was being watched. He sauntered out into Piccadilly.
He found the girl minutes later. She stood slumped against a shop front, weeping. “Never mind the bawling,” he said. “Here’s your precious goods.” He fished some coins from a pocket and thrust those and the shabby basket into her hands. “What in blazes was in your mind, rushing on blindly without minding your surroundings?”
“W-work,” she said. “I had to get to work … your lordship.”
He didn’t ask how she knew he was a lord.
Everybody knew the Earl of Longmore.
“Thieves and drunken aristocrats roaming the streets, looking for trouble, and you without a weapon,” he said. “What’s wrong with women these days?”
“I d-don’t know.”
She was shaking like a leaf. She was bruised and dirty from her fall in the street. She was lucky that none of the scores of drunken louts on their way home from their debauches had run her over.
“Come with me,” he said.
Whether too shaken to think or simply intimidated—he often had that effect, even on his peers—she followed him across the street to the hackney. His friends could have continued on: They were drunk enough. But they’d stopped to watch the fun.
“Everybody out,” Longmore said.
They made noises of protest but they staggered out of the vehicle, all staring at the drab female. “Not your type, Longmore,” Hempton said.
Crawford shook his head. “Standards dropping, I’m afraid to say.”
Longmore ignored them. “Where were you going?” he said to the girl.
She stared at him, then at his friends, then at the tarts.
“Never mind them,” he said. “Nobody’s interested in your doings. We only want to get on to the next party. Where do you want the driver to take you?”
She swallowed. “Please, your lordship, I was on my way to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females,” she said.
“There’s a mouthful,” Crawford said.
“I work there,” the girl said. “I’m going to be late.”
She gave Longmore the direction, which he relayed to the driver, with strict orders to take the girl to her destination in half the usual time, or Longmore would find him and give him an excellent excuse for moving slowly.
He helped the girl up into the coach, slammed the door on her, and waved the driver away.
He thought about milliners.
One milliner, actually, a blonde one.
Leaving his companions to find another hackney, he continued on foot, on his own, the short distance to St. James’s Street. To get to Crockford’s, he had to pass White’s Club on one side of the street, and a very little way farther down, Maison Noirot, lair of French dressmakers.
He passed the dressmakers’ shop, walking slowly. Then he paused and looked back, up at the upper storeys where, for reasons that eluded him, two of the three Noirot sisters still lived.
He continued to Crockford’s, where he proceeded to lose large sums for quite an interesting while before he started to win large sums.
When, after an hour or so of increasing boredom, he left Crockford’s, it was still prodigious early by Fashionable Society’s standards. Nonetheless, London was coming to life. People going up and down St. James’s Street: a few vehicles but mainly pedestrians. The shops hadn’t yet opened.
Maison Noirot, he knew, did not open until ten o’clock, though the seamstresses—a great parade of them these days—all marched in at nine.
Still, over the past few weeks he had acquired a general notion of Sophia Noirot’s habits.
He waited.
Chapter One (#ulink_19815f07-b174-59dd-bfd7-be828a8d0546)
For the last week, the whole of the fashionable world has been in a state of ferment, on account of the elopement of Sir Colquhoun Grant’s daughter with Mr. Brinsley Sheridan … On Friday afternoon, about five o’clock, the young couple borrowed the carriage of a friend; and … set off full speed for the North.
—The Court Journal, Saturday 23 May 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835
Waving a copy of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle, Sophy Noirot burst in upon the Duke and Duchess of Clevedon while they were breakfasting in, appropriately enough, the breakfast room of Clevedon House.
“Have you seen this?” she said, throwing down the paper on the table between her sister and new brother-in-law. “The ton is in a frenzy—and isn’t it hilarious? They’re blaming Sheridan’s three sisters. Three sisters plotting wicked plots—and it isn’t us! Oh, my love, when I saw this, I thought I’d die laughing.”
Certain members of Society had more than once in recent days compared the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot—which Sophy would make London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it killed her—to the three witches in Macbeth. Had they not bewitched the Duke of Clevedon, rumor said, he would never have married a shopkeeper.
Their Graces’ dark heads bent over the barely dry newspaper.
Rumors about the Sheridan-Grant elopement were already traveling the beau monde grapevine, but the Spectacle, as usual, was the first to put confirmation in print.
Marcelline looked up. “They say Miss Grant’s papa will bring a suit against Sheridan in Chancery,” she said. “Exciting stuff, indeed.”
At that moment, a footman entered. “Lord Longmore, Your Grace,” he said.
Not now, dammit, Sophy thought. Her sister had the beau monde in an uproar, she’d made a deadly enemy of one of its most powerful women—who happened to be Longmore’s mother—customers were deserting in droves, and Sophy had no idea how to repair the damage.
Now him.
The Earl of Longmore strolled into the breakfast room, a newspaper under his arm.
Sophy’s pulse rate accelerated. It couldn’t help itself.
Black hair and glittering black eyes … the noble nose that ought to have been broken a dozen times yet remained stubbornly straight and arrogant … the hard, cynical mouth … the six-foot-plus frame.
All that manly beauty.
If only he had a brain.
No, better not. In the first place, brains in a man were inconvenient. In the second, and far more important, she didn’t have time for him or any man. She had a shop to rescue from Impending Doom.
“I brought you the latest Spectacle,” he said to the pair at the table. “But I wasn’t quick enough off the mark, I see.”
“Sophy brought it,” said Marcelline.
Longmore’s dark gaze came to Sophy. She gave him a cool nod and sauntered to the sideboard. She looked into the chafing dishes and concentrated on filling her plate.
“Miss Noirot,” he said. “Up and about early, I see. You weren’t at Almack’s last night.”
“Certainly not,” Sophy said. “The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t make the patronesses give me a voucher.”
“Since when do you wait for permission? I was so disappointed. I was on pins and needles to see what disguise you’d adopt. My favorite so far is the Lancashire maidservant.”
That was Sophy’s favorite, too.
However, her intrusions at fashionable events to collect gossip for Foxe were supposed to be a deep, dark secret. No one noticed servant girls, and she was a Noirot, as skilled at making herself invisible as she was at getting attention.
But he noticed.
He must have developed unusually keen powers of hearing and vision to make up for his very small brain.
She carried her plate to the table and sat next to her sister. “I’m devastated to have spoiled your fun,” she said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I found something to do later.”
“So it seems,” Clevedon said, looking him over. “It must have been quite a party. Since you’re never up and about this early, I can only conclude you stopped here on your way home.”
Like most of his kind, Lord Longmore rarely rose before noon. His rumpled black hair, limp neckcloth, and wrinkled coat, waistcoat, and trousers told Sophy he hadn’t yet been to bed—not his own, at any rate.
Her imagination promptly set about picturing his big body naked among tangled sheets. She had never seen him naked, and had better not; but along with owning a superior imagination, she’d seen statues, pictures, and—years ago—certain boastful Parisian boys’ personal possessions.
She firmly wiped her mind clean.
One day, she’d marry a respectable man who would not get in the way of her work.
Not only was Longmore far from respectable, but he was a great thickhead who constantly got in one’s way—and who happened to be the eldest son of a woman who wanted the Noirot sisters wiped off the face of the earth.
Only a self-destructive moron would get involved with him.
Sophy directed her attention to his clothes. As far as tailoring went, his attire was flawless, the snug fit outlining every muscled inch from his big shoulders and broad chest and his lean waist and narrow hips down, down, down his long, powerful legs …
She scrubbed her mind again, reminded herself that clothing was her life, and regarded his attire objectively, as one professional considering the work of another.
She knew that he usually started an evening elegantly turned out. His valet, Olney, saw to it. But Longmore did not always behave elegantly, and what happened after he left the house Olney could not control.
By the looks of him, a great deal had happened after Olney released his master yesterday.
“You always were the intellectual giant of the family,” Longmore said to the duke. “You’ve deduced correctly. I stopped at Crockford’s. And elsewhere. I needed something to drive out the memory of those dreary hours at Almack’s.”
“You loathe those assemblies,” Clevedon said. “One can only assume that a woman lured you there.”
“My sister,” Longmore said. “She’s an idiot about men. My parents complain about it endlessly. Even I noticed what a sorry lot they are, her beaux. A pack of lechers and bankrupts. To discourage them, I hang about Clara and look threatening.”
Sophy could easily picture it. No one could loom as menacingly as he, gazing down on the world through half-closed eyes like a great, dark bird of prey.
“How unusually brotherly of you,” said Clevedon.
“That numskull Adderley was trying to press his suit with her.” Longmore helped himself to coffee and sat down next to Clevedon, opposite Marcelline. “She thinks he’s charming. I think he’s charmed by her dowry.”
“Rumor says he’s traveling up the River Tick on a fast current,” Clevedon said.
“I don’t like his smirk,” Longmore said. “And I don’t think he even likes Clara much. My parents loathe him on a dozen counts.” He waved his coffee cup at the newspaper. “They won’t find this coup of Sheridan’s reassuring. Still, it’s deuced convenient for you, I daresay. An excellent way to divert attention from your exciting nuptials.”
His dark gaze moved lazily to Sophy. “The timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t suppose you had anything to do with this, Miss Noirot?”
“If I had, I should be demanding a bottle of the duke’s best champagne and a toast to myself,” said Sophy. “I only wish I could have managed something so perfect.”
Though the three Noirot sisters were equally talented dressmakers, each had special skills. Dark-haired Marcelline, the eldest, was a gifted artist and designer. Redheaded Leonie, the youngest, was the financial genius. Sophy, the blonde, was the saleswoman. She could soften stony hearts and pry large sums from tight fists. She could make people believe black was white. Her sisters often said that Sophy could sell sand to Bedouins.
Had she been able to manufacture a scandal that would get Society’s shallow little mind off Marcelline and onto somebody else, Sophy would have done it. As much as she loved Marcelline and was happy she’d married a man who adored her, Sophy was still reeling from the disruption to their world, which had always revolved around their little family and their business. She wasn’t sure Marcelline and Clevedon truly understood the difficulties their recent marriage had created for Maison Noirot, or how much danger the shop was in.
But then, they were newlyweds, and love seemed to muddle the mind even worse than lust did. At present, Sophy couldn’t bear to mar their happiness by sharing her and Leonie’s anxieties.
The newlyweds exchanged looks. “What do you think?” Clevedon said. “Do you want to take advantage of the diversion and go back to work?”
“I must go back to work, diversion or not,” Marcelline said. She looked at Sophy. “Do let’s make a speedy departure, ma chère sœur. The aunts will be down to breakfast in the next hour or so.”
“The aunts,” Longmore said. “Still here?”
Clevedon House was large enough to accommodate several families comfortably. When the duke’s aunts came to Town on visits too short to warrant opening their own townhouses, they didn’t stay in hotels, but in the north wing.
Most recently they’d come to stop the marriage.
Originally, Marcelline and Clevedon had planned to wed the day after he’d talked—or seduced—her into marrying him. But Sophy and Leonie’s cooler heads had prevailed.
The wedding, they’d pointed out, was going to cause a spectacular uproar, very possibly fatal to business. But if some of Clevedon’s relatives were to attend the ceremony, signaling acceptance of the bride, it would subdue, to some extent, the outrage.
And so Clevedon had invited his aunts, who’d descended en masse to prevent the shocking misalliance. But no great lady, not even the Queen, was a match for three Noirot sisters and their secret weapon, Marcelline’s six-year-old daughter, Lucie Cordelia. The aunts had surrendered in a matter of hours.
Now they were trying to find a way to make Marcelline respectable. They actually believed they could present her to the Queen.
Sophy wasn’t at all sure that would do Maison Noirot any good. On the contrary, she suspected it would only fan the flames of Lady Warford’s hatred.
“Still here,” Clevedon said. “They can’t seem to tear themselves away.”
Marcelline rose, and the others did, too. “I’d better go before they come down,” she said. “They’re not at all reconciled to my continuing to work.”
“Meaning there’s a good deal more jawing than you like,” Longmore said. “How well I understand.” He gave her a wry smile, and bowed.
He was a man who could fill a doorway, and seemed to take over a room. He was disheveled, and disreputable besides, but he bowed with the easy grace of a dandy.
It was annoying of him to be so completely and gracefully at ease in that big brawler’s body of his. It was really annoying of him to ooze virility.
Sophy was a Noirot, a breed keenly tuned to animal excitement—and not possessing much in the way of moral principles.
If he ever found out how weak she was in this regard, she was doomed.
She sketched a curtsey and took her sister’s arm. “Yes, well, we’d better not dawdle, in any event. I promised Leonie I wouldn’t stay above half an hour.”
She hurried her sister out of the room.
Longmore watched them go. Actually, he watched Sophy go, a fetching bundle of energy and guile.
“The shop,” he said when they were out of earshot. “Meaning no disrespect to your duchess, but—are they insane?”
“That depends on one’s point of view,” Clevedon said.
“Apparently, I’m not unbalanced enough in the upper storey to understand it,” Longmore said. “They might close it and live here. It isn’t as though you’re short of room. Or money. Why should they want to go on bowing and scraping to women?”
“Passion,” Clevedon said. “Their work is their passion.”
Longmore wasn’t sure what, exactly, passion was. He was reasonably certain he’d never experienced it.
He hadn’t even had an infatuation since he was eighteen.
Since Clevedon, his nearest friend, would know this, Longmore said nothing. He only shook his head, and moved to the sideboard. He heaped his plate with eggs, great slabs of bacon and bread, and a thick glob of butter to make it all slide down smoothly. He carried it to the table and began to eat.
He’d always regarded Clevedon’s home as his own, and had been told he was to continue regarding it in the same way. The duchess seemed to like him well enough. Her blonde sister, on the other hand would just as soon shoot him, he knew—which made her much more interesting and entertaining.
That was why he’d waited and watched for her. That was why he’d followed her from Maison Noirot to Charing Cross. He’d spotted the newspaper in her hand, and deduced what it was.
By some feat of printing legerdemain—a pact with the devil, most likely—Foxe’s Morning Spectacle usually slunk onto the streets of London and into the newspaper sellers’ grubby hands not only well in advance of its competitors, but containing fresher scandal. Though many of the beau monde’s entertainments didn’t start until eleven at night or end before dawn, Foxe contrived to stuff the pages of his titillating rag with details of what everyone had done mere hours earlier.
This was no small achievement, even bearing in mind that “morning,” especially among the upper classes, was a flexible unit of time, extending well beyond noonday.
Curious about what was taking her to Clevedon House at this early hour, he’d bought a copy from the urchin hawking it on the next corner, and had dawdled for a time to look it over. By now familiar with Sophy’s writing, Longmore knew it wasn’t the sort of thing to take on an empty stomach. He’d persevered nonetheless. Though he couldn’t see how she could have had a hand in the Sheridan scandal, that was nothing new. She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked: She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalizingly unladylike.
“I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,” Clevedon was saying. “If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.”
“Love,” Longmore said. “Bad idea.”
Clevedon smiled. “One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,” he said. “And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.”
“Love will have its work cut out for it,” Longmore said. “I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.”
“Very possibly,” Clevedon said. “Which will make it all the more amusing.”
“You’ll have a wait,” Longmore said. “For the moment, Clara’s love life is the problem.”
“I daresay matters at home haven’t been pleasant for either of you, since the wedding,” Clevedon said.
Clevedon would know better than most. Lord Warford had been his guardian. Clevedon and Longmore had grown up together. They were more like brothers than friends. And Clevedon had doted on Clara since she was a small child. It had always been assumed they’d marry. Then the duke had met his dressmaker—and Clara had reacted with “Good riddance”—much to the shock of her parents, brothers, and sisters—not to mention the entire beau monde.
“My father has resigned himself,” Longmore said. “My mother hasn’t.”
A profound understatement, that.
His mother was beside herself. The slightest reference to the duke or his new wife set her screaming. She quarreled with Clara incessantly. She was driving Clara to distraction, and they constantly dragged Longmore into it. Every day or so a message arrived from his sister, begging him to come and Do Something.
Longmore and Clara had both attended Clevedon’s wedding—in effect, giving their blessing to the union. This fact, which had been promptly reported in the Spectacle, had turned Warford House into a battlefield.
“I could well understand Clara rejecting me,” Clevedon said.
“Don’t see how you could fail to understand,” Longmore said. “She explained it in detail, in ringing tones, in front of half the ton.”
“What I don’t understand is why she doesn’t send Adderley about his business,” Clevedon said.
“Tall, fair, poetic-looking,” Longmore said. “He knows what to say to women. Men see him for what he is. Women don’t.”
“I’ve no idea what’s in Clara’s mind,” Clevedon said. “My wife and her sisters will want to get to the bottom of it, though. It’s their business to understand their clients, and Clara’s special. She’s their best customer, and she shows Marcelline’s designs to stunning advantage. They won’t want her to marry a man with pockets to let.”
“Are they in the matchmaking line as well, then?” Longmore said. “If so, I wish they’d find her someone suitable, and spare me these dreary nights at Almack’s.”
“Leave it to Sophy,” Clevedon said. “She’s the one who goes to the parties. She’ll see what’s going on, better than anybody.”
“Including a great deal that people would rather she didn’t see,” Longmore said.
“Hers is an exceptionally keen eye for detail,” Clevedon said.
“And an exceptionally busy pen,” Longmore said. “It’s easy to recognize her work in the Spectacle. Streams of words about ribbons and bows and lace and pleats here and gathers there. No thread goes unmentioned.”
“She notices gestures and looks as well,” Clevedon said. “She listens. No one’s stories are like hers.”
“No question about that,” Longmore said. “She’s never met an adjective or adverb she didn’t like.”
Clevedon smiled. “That’s what brings in the customers: the combination of gossip and the intricate detail about the dresses, all related as drama. It has the same effect on women, I’m told, as looking at naked women has on men.” He tapped a finger on the Spectacle. “I’ll ask her to keep an eye on Clara. With two of you on watch, you ought to be able to keep her out of trouble.”
Longmore had no objections to any activity involving Sophy Noirot.
On the contrary, he had a number of activities in mind, and joining her in keeping an eye on his sister would give him a fine excuse to be underfoot—and with any luck, under other parts as well.
“Can’t think of a better woman for the job,” Longmore said. “Miss Noirot misses nothing.”
In his mind she was Sophy. But she’d never invited him to call her by the name all her family used. And so, even with Clevedon, good manners dictated that Longmore use the correct form of address for the senior unmarried lady of a family.
“With you and Sophy standing guard, the lechers and bankrupts won’t stand a chance,” Clevedon said. “Argus himself couldn’t do better.”
Longmore racked his brain. “The dog, you mean?”
“The giant with extra eyes,” Clevedon said. “ ‘And set a watcher upon her, great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way,’ “ he quoted from somewhere. “ ‘And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.’ “
“That strikes me as excessive,” Longmore said. “But then, you always were romantic.”
A week later
Warford, how could you?”
“My dear, you know I cannot command his majesty—”
“It is not to be borne! That creature he married—presented at Court!—at the King’s Birthday Drawing Room!—as though she were visiting royalty!”
Longmore was trapped in a carriage with his mother, father, and Clara, departing St. James’s Palace. Though court events bored him witless, he’d attended the Drawing Room, hoping to spot a certain uninvited attendee. But he’d seen only Sophy’s sister—the “creature” his mother was in a snit about. Then he’d debated whether to sneak out or to hunt for an equally bored wife or widow. The palace was well supplied with dark corners conducive to a quick bout of fun.
No luck with the females. The sea of plumes and diamonds held an overabundance of sanctimonious matrons and virgins. Virgins were what one married. They weren’t candidates for fun under a staircase.
“Odd, I agree,” Lord Warford said carefully. Though he’d given up being outraged about Clevedon’s marriage, he’d also long ago given up trying to reason with his wife.
“Didn’t seem odd to me,” Longmore said.
“Not odd!” his mother cried. “Not odd! No one is presented at the King’s Birthday Drawing Room.”
“No one but foreign dignitaries,” Lord Warford said.
“It was a shocking breach of etiquette even to request an exception,” Lady Warford said, conveniently forgetting that she’d told her husband to commit a shocking breach of etiquette by telling the King not to recognize the Duchess of Clevedon.
But it was up to the husband, not the son, to point this out, and years of marriage had taught Lord Warford cowardice.
“I could not believe Her Majesty would do such a thing, even for Lady Adelaide,” Mother went on. “But it seems I’m obliged to believe it,” she added bitterly. “The Queen dotes on Clevedon’s youngest aunt.” She glared at her daughter. “Lady Adelaide Ludley might have used her influence on your and your family’s behalf. But no, you must be the most ungrateful, undutiful daughter who ever lived. You must jilt the Duke of Clevedon!”
“I didn’t jilt him, Mama,” Clara said. “One cannot jilt someone to whom one is not engaged.”
Longmore had heard this argument too many times to want to be boxed in a closed carriage, hearing it again, his mother’s voice going higher and higher, and Clara’s climbing along with it. Normally, he would call the carriage to a halt and get out, and leave everybody fuming behind him.
Clara could defend herself, he knew. The trouble was, that would only lead to more quarreling and screaming and messages for him to come to Warford House before she committed matricide.
He thought very hard and very fast and said, “It was clear as clear to me that they did it behind the scenes, so to speak, to spare your feelings, ma’am.”
There followed the kind of furiously intense silence that typically ensued when his parents were deciding whether he might, against all reason and evidence, have said something worth listening to.
“What with the aunts and all, the Queen would be in a fix,” he went on. “She could hardly snub Clevedon’s whole family—which is what she’d be doing, since the aunts had accepted his bride.”
“His bride,” his mother said bitterly. “His bride.” She threw Clara the sort of look Caesar must have given Brutus when the knife went in.
“This way at least, the deed was done behind the scenes,” Longmore went on, “not in front of the whole blasted ton.”
While his mother stirred this idea around in her seething mind, the carriage reached the front of Warford House. The footmen opened the carriage door, and the family emerged, the ladies shaking out their skirts as they stepped out onto the pavement.
Longmore said nothing and Clara said nothing but she shot him a grateful look before she hurried inside after their mother.
His father, however, lingered at the front step with Longmore. “Not coming in?”
“I think not,” Longmore said. “Did my best. Tried to pour oil and all that.”
“It won’t end,” his father said in a low voice. “Not for your mother. Shattered dreams and wounded pride and outraged sensibilities and whatnot. You see how it is. We can expect no peace in this family until Clara finds a suitable replacement for Clevedon. That’s not going to happen while she keeps encouraging that pack of loose screws.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Make them go away, will you, dammit?”
Countess of Igby’s ball
Saturday 30 May 1835
One o’clock in the morning
Longmore had been looking for Lord Adderley for some time. The fellow having proven too thick to take a hint, Longmore had decided that the simplest approach was to hit him until he understood that he was to keep off Clara.
The trouble was, Sophy Noirot was at Lady Igby’s party, too, and Longmore, unlike Argus, owned only the usual number of eyes.
He’d become distracted, watching Sophy flit hither and yon, no one paying her the slightest heed—except for the usual assortment of dolts who thought maidservants existed for their sport. Since he’d marked her as his sport, Longmore had started to move in, more than once, only to find that she didn’t need any help with would-be swains.
She’d “accidentally” spilled hot tea on the waistcoat of one gentleman who’d ventured too close. Another had followed her into an antechamber and tripped over something, landing on his face. A third had followed her down a passage and into a room. He’d come out limping a moment later.
Preoccupied with her adventures, Longmore not only failed to locate Adderley, but lost track of the sister he was supposed to be guarding from lechers and bankrupts. This would have been less of a problem had Sophy been watching her more closely. But Sophy had her own lechers to fend off.
Longmore wasn’t thinking about this. Thinking wasn’t his favorite thing to do, and thinking about more than one thing at a time upset his equilibrium. At the moment, his mind was on the men trespassing on what he’d decided was his property. Unfortunately, this meant he wasn’t aware of his mother losing sight of Clara at the same time. This happened because Lady Warford was carrying on a politely poisonous conversation with her best friend and worst enemy Lady Bartham.
In short, nobody who should have been paying attention was paying attention while Lord Adderley was steering Clara, as they waltzed, toward the other end of the ballroom, toward the doors leading to the terrace. None of those who should have been keeping a sharp eye out saw the wink Adderley sent his friends or the accompanying smirk.
It was the crowd’s movement that brought Longmore back to his surroundings and his main reason for being here.
The movement wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t meant to be. Men like Longmore were attuned to it, though. He had no trouble recognizing the sense of something in the air, the shift in the attention in some parts of the room, and the drifting toward a common destination. It was the change in the atmosphere one felt when a fight was about to happen.
The current was sweeping toward the terrace.
His gut told him something was amiss. It didn’t say what, but the warning was vehement, and he was a man who acted on instinct. He moved, and quickly.
He didn’t have to push his way through the crowd. Those who knew him knew they’d better get out of the way or be thrust out of the way.
He stormed out onto the terrace. A small audience had gathered. They got out of his way, too.
Nothing and nobody obstructed his view.
Chapter Two (#ulink_378738ca-a34f-5e9e-b5e9-34f98973c8f3)
NEW STYLE.— DRESS-MAKING.—Madame and Mrs Follett beg to solicit the favours of those Ladies who have not (and to return thanks to those Ladies who have) given them a trial; the decided superiority of their style and fit blended with most moderate charges never fails to give satisfaction even to the most particular. —53 New Bond street London and Rue Richelieu à Paris.
Mem the Address.
—The Court Journal, Advertisements,
Saturday 28 March 1835
Adderley.
And Clara.
In a dark corner of the terrace.
Not so dark that Longmore couldn’t see Adderley clumsily trying to help his sister get her bodice back in place.
Her dressmakers had cut the neckline of her white gown indecently low, which had already allowed every gaping hound at the ball to see a bit of the lacy thing she wore underneath. In the process of groping her, however, Lord Adderley had pushed her dress sleeves and corset straps well down over her shoulders, practically to her elbows. By the looks of things, he’d contrived to loosen her corset as well.
When she slapped his fumbling hands away, Adderley moved in front of her to shield her, but he wasn’t big enough. A fair-haired, blue-eyed beauty Lady Clara Fairfax might be. Petite she was not. As a result, her expensive underwear—not to mention a good deal of skin not usually on public view—was on display for any gawker who happened to be in the vicinity.
That included the dozen or so who’d drifted out to the terrace and were now circling like vultures over the carcass of Lady Clara Fairfax’s reputation.
“Her maid will never get the creases out of those pleats,” muttered the maidservant standing beside Longmore.
In a distant corner of his mind he marveled at anybody’s noticing at such a moment something as trivial as wrinkles in Clara’s attire. In the same distant corner he knew there was nothing to marvel at, given the speaker: Sophy Noirot.
That was only a distant awareness, though. The main part of his mind heeded only the scene in front of him, one he saw through a curtain of red flames. “I’ll take the wrinkles out of him, the cur,” he growled.
“Don’t be an id—”
But he was already storming across the terrace, knocking aside any guests who got in his way—though most of them, seeing him coming, moved out of the way, and quickly.
He marched up to Adderley and punched him in the face.
* * *
“—iot,” Sophy finished.
She swallowed a sigh.
She should have held her tongue. She was supposed to be a maidservant, and menials did not call their betters idiots. Not audibly, at any rate.
But that was the trouble with Longmore. He got in the way of everything, especially clear thinking.
She pushed away the first, emotional reaction and summoned her practical side, the one Cousin Emma had cultivated. A cousin by marriage, Emma was nothing like Sophy’s vagabond parents. Emma was not a charming wastrel like her in-laws. She was a hardheaded, practical Parisian.
Practically speaking, this was a disaster.
Lady Clara was Maison Noirot’s most important customer. She bought their most expensive creations and she bought lavishly, in spite of her mother’s hostility. It was Lord Warford’s man of business who paid the bills, and his orders were to pay promptly and in full, not to make fine distinctions among milliners.
Lord Adderley was bankrupt, or very nearly so, thanks to the gaming tables.
If Lady Clara had to misbehave with somebody, Adderley wasn’t Sophy’s first choice. Of the Upper Ten Thousand, he came in at nine thousand nine hundred fifty six.
Had Longmore been more intelligent, less impetuous, and several degrees less arrogant, she would have counseled him not to go barging in and kill his sister’s lover. Since Lord Longmore qualified in none of those categories, she didn’t waste her breath pointing out that murder would only complicate the situation and leave Lady Clara’s reputation in ruins forever.
He was furious, and he needed to hit somebody, and Adderley deserved to be hit. Sophy was tempted to hit him herself.
This wasn’t the only reason she didn’t close her eyes or turn away.
She’d seen Longmore fight before, and it was a sight to make a woman’s pulse race, if she wasn’t squeamish, which Sophy most certainly wasn’t.
The blow should have dropped Lord Adderley, but he only staggered backward a few steps.
Tougher than he looked, then. Yet all he did was hold his ground. He offered no sign of fighting back. She couldn’t decide whether he was following some obscure gentlemanly code or he held strong opinions about keeping the general shape of his pretty face as it was and all his teeth in his head.
Longmore, meanwhile, was too het up to notice or care whether Lord Adderley meant to defend himself.
Once more he advanced, fists upraised.
“Don’t you dare, Harry!” Lady Clara cried. She pushed in front of her lover to shield him. “Don’t you touch him.”
Then she burst into tears—and very good tears they were. Sophy herself couldn’t have done better, and she was an expert. Crooning over her injured lover—who was on his way to a magnificent black eye, if Sophy was any judge—tears streaming down her perfect face, her creamy, amply-displayed bosom heaving, Lady Clara played her part to perfection.
Her ladyship would awaken, along with their baser urges, the sympathies of all the gentlemen present. The ladies, satisfied to have witnessed the downfall of London’s most beautiful woman, would allow themselves to feel sorry for her. “She might have had a duke,” they’d say. “And now she’ll have to settle for a penniless lord.”
Fashionable London still wasn’t tired of repeating bits of Lady Clara’s speech rejecting the Duke of Clevedon. One of the favorite bits was the concluding remark: Why should I settle for you?
For a moment, Lord Longmore looked as though he’d push his sister out of the way. Then he must have realized it was pointless. He rolled his eyes and sighed, and Sophy watched his big chest rise and fall.
Then he threw up his hands and turned away.
The crowd closed in, blocking Sophy’s view.
No matter. Any minute now, the Marchioness of Warford would get wind of her daughter’s lapse from virtue, and Sophy owed it to the Spectacle to be there when it happened. And at some point, she’d need to look more closely into a disturbing rumor she’d heard in the ladies’ retiring room.
It was going to be a long night.
She turned away to look for a discreet route to the other end of the ballroom. Unlike the men-servants, the maids were expected to remain inconspicuous. They were to keep out of the main entertainment rooms, and travel in the serving passages as much as possible or attend the ladies in the retiring rooms, where they repaired hems and stockings, ran back and forth for shawls and wraps, applied sal volatile to the swooners, and cleaned up after the excessively intoxicated.
She was deciding which of two doorways offered the best eavesdropping vantage point when Longmore stepped into her path.
“You,” he said.
“Me, your lordship?” she said, her tongue curling round the broad Lancashire vowels. She was aware she’d forgotten herself a moment ago and spoken to him as she normally did, but Sophy was nothing if not a brazen liar, like the rest of her family. She looked up at him, her great blue eyes as wide as she could make them, and as innocent of comprehension and intelligence as the cows she prided herself on imitating so well.
“Yes, you,” he said. “I’d know you from a mile away, Miss—”
“Oh, no, your lordship, it’s no miss but only me, Norton. Can I get you something or other?”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for playacting.”
“You’re going to get me into trouble, sir,” she said. She didn’t add, you great ox. She kept in character, and smiled brightly, opening her eyes wide and hoping he’d read the message there. “No dallying with the guests.”
“How the devil did he do it?” he said. “Why did she do it? Is she mad?”
Sophy scanned the area nearby. The guests were busy spreading the news of Lady Clara’s lapse from virtue. Lord Longmore, apparently, was not so interesting—or, more likely, he was alarming enough to discourage anybody from even looking at him in a way that he might not like. Since he’d made his state of mind perfectly clear to the company, no one owning a modicum of sanity would care to try his temper further at present. Everybody would take the greatest care to see nothing whatsoever of where he went or what he did.
She grabbed his arm. “This way,” she said.
If he’d balked, she would have had as much luck leading his great carcass along as she would a stopped locomotive.
But very likely the last thing he expected was to be hauled about by a slip of a female. Whether bemused or merely amused, he went along tamely enough. She led him into one of the serving passages. Since most of the servants were finding excuses to get near the principals of the scandal, she doubted anybody would wander through for a while.
Still, she looked up and down the passage.
Certain the coast was clear, she let go of his arm. “Now, listen to me,” she said.
He glanced down in a puzzled way at his arm, then at her. “Here’s one positive note. We’ve abandoned the Lancashire cow performance.”
“Have you any idea what would happen to me if I’m found out?” she said.
“What do you care?” he said. “Your sister married a duke.”
“I care, you—you great ox.”
His head went back a degree and his black eyebrows went up. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Yes,” she said between her teeth. “So don’t say anything more. Just listen.”
“Gad, we’re not going to discuss this, are we?”
“Yes, we are, if you want to help your sister.”
His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
“Believe me, I’m no happier about this recent turn of events than you are,” she said. “Have you any idea how bad this is for our business?”
“Your business,” he said.
He spoke quietly, but she knew he wasn’t calm. The violence he held in check vibrated in the atmosphere about him. She understood why people scrambled out of his way when he bore down on somebody or something.
Violence wouldn’t be useful at the moment. She needed to distract him—and for once, the truth would do well enough.
“Adderley is up to his neck in mortgages, and the moneylenders will own his first-, second-, and third-born,” she said. “Leonie can tell you to the farthing how much he’s worth, and if he’s worth a farthing, I’ll be amazed.”
“I know that,” he said. “What I want to know is how my sister ended up on the terrace with him. I know she’s naïve, but I never thought she was stupid.”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Sophy said. “I could have sworn she was only honing her flirting skills on him—on all of them. She’s never shown signs of favoring anybody.”
“You’re sure of this?” he said.
She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It boded trouble for Adderley. Much as she wished Adderley trouble, she couldn’t let Longmore break him into small pieces, as he so clearly wished to.
“I’ve heard he can be very winning,” she said. “And I know she’s been feeling—”
“Oh, good. We’re going to talk about feelings.”
If she’d had a heavy object near to hand, she would have hit him with it. He wouldn’t feel it, but the gesture would make her feel better.
“Yes, we are,” she said. “I’ll spare you all the complicated whys and wherefores and come to the point. Lady Clara is feeling a little rebellious, and I daresay she was waiting for a chance to do something naughty when her mother wasn’t looking. Apparently, Adderley saw his chance and turned a minor naughty into a major one. Apparently.” She frowned. There was something wrong with that scene. But she’d have to work it out later.
The priority was the man standing a few inches from her. He seemed to have stopped breathing fire.
“I’ll have to call him out, the swine,” he said. “Which means going off into some dismal wood at the crack of dawn. It’s the very devil on one’s boots, morning dew, not to mention the fuss Olney makes about gunpowder on my shirt cuffs.”
Sophy grabbed his lapels. “Listen to me,” she said.
He looked down at her hands in the same puzzled way he’d looked at his arm before.
But his lordship was not the world’s deepest thinker, and a great deal could be counted on to puzzle him. She gave his lapels a shake. “Just listen,” she said. “You can’t kill him in cold blood.”
“Whyever not?”
Ye gods grant me patience. “Because he’ll be dead,” she said as patiently as she could, “and Lady Clara’s reputation will be stained forever. Do not, I pray you, do anything, Lord Longmore. Leave this to us.”
“Us.”
“My sisters and me.”
“What do you propose? Dressing him to death? Tying him up and making him listen to fashion descriptions?”
“If necessary,” she said. “But pray, don’t trouble yourself about it.”
He stared at her.
“Whatever you do, do not injure, maim, or kill him,” she said, in case she hadn’t made everything perfectly clear. “The right uppercut was excellent. It expressed magnificently a brother’s outrage—”
“Did it, by Jove. You wouldn’t by any chance be composing your eulogy on my sister’s reputation? The one to appear in tomorrow’s Spectacle?”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will,” she said. “Better the devil you know, my lord. Only let me do what I can—and you go out and be all manly and protective of your womenfolk.”
“Ah.” His black eyes widened theatrically. “So that’s what I’m to do.”
“Yes. Can you manage it?”
“With one hand tied behind my back.”
“I beg you to do it the usual way,” she said. “Don’t show off.”
“Right.” He stood looking at her.
“Yes,” she said. “Time to go. Your mother will be getting the news any minute now if she hasn’t already.” She made a shooing motion.
He only stood, still looking at her in a very concentrated way, and she became aware of a heat and hurry within and a feeling of not being entirely clothed.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Not now.
“You need to go,” she said. She tried to give him a push.
It was like trying to push a brick wall.
She looked up at him.
“That tickles,” he said.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
He went.
Mere moments earlier, Longmore had been primed for murder.
Now he had all he could do not to laugh.
There Sophy was, in her demure housemaid’s dress, the wide-eyed, stupid look fading when she lost her patience and called him an ox.
Then the darling had grabbed his arm, trying to manhandle him. That was one of the funniest things he’d seen in a long time.
Leave this to us, she’d said.
Not likely, he thought. But if it pleased her to think so, he was happy to please.
In this agreeable state of mind he sought out his mother and sister. Finding them wasn’t difficult. All he needed to do was walk in the direction of the scream.
Only one scream before Lady Warford collected her dignity and swooned.
He arranged as graceful a departure as possible for his mother and sister. He acted all manly and protective, exactly as he’d been told to do.
He’d deal with Adderley later, he promised himself.
And then …
Why, Sophy, of course.
* * *
Warford House
Saturday afternoon
Clara, how could you!” Lady Warford cried, not for the first time. “That bankrupt!”
She lay on the chaise longue of her sitting room, a tray laden with restoratives on the table at her elbow.
Clara had far greater need for restoratives than her mother did. She wished she were a man, and could solve her problems the way men did, by getting drunk and fighting and gaming and whoring.
But she was a lady. She sat straight in her chair and said, “What sort of question is that, Mama? Do you think I humiliated myself on purpose?”
“You did what you ought not to have done on purpose,” Mama said. “Of that I have not the slightest doubt.”
It hadn’t seemed so very wicked at the time. Clara and Lord Adderley had been waltzing, and she’d felt dizzy. Too much champagne, perhaps. Or perhaps he’d steered her into too many turns. Or both. He’d suggested fresh air. And it was a thrill to slip out onto the terrace unnoticed. Then he’d said things, such sweet things, and he’d seemed so passionately in love with her.
And then …
Had she been alone at present, she would have covered her face and wept.
But that’s what Mama always did. She wept and screamed and fainted.
Clara sat straighter, hands folded, and wished she could climb out of the window and go far, far away.
The door opened and Harry came in.
She wanted to leap up and run at him the way she used to do when they were children and she was frightened or brokenhearted about this or that: A robin’s nest on the ground and the eggs broken. A sick puppy. An injured horse put down.
But they weren’t children, and Mama was already using all the hysteria in the room. Harry had enough to cope with.
“There you are, at last!” Mama cried. “You must fight Adderley, Harry. You must kill him.”
“That’s a bit sticky,” he said. “I saw Father as I came in. He told me the blackguard’s offered for Clara.” He walked to Mama and dropped a light kiss on her forehead. He straightened and said, “I should have killed him when I had the chance. But Clara got in the way.”
What choice had she? She’d been afraid Harry would kill Adderley—a man who hadn’t tried to fight back. It would be murder, and Harry would hang or have to run away and live in another country forever—all because she’d been silly.
It seemed more than likely she’d ruined her own life. She wasn’t about to destroy her brother’s as well.
“Mama, if Harry kills Lord Adderley, my reputation will be ruined forever,” Clara said steadily. “The only way to mend this is marriage. Lord Adderley’s offered and I’ve accepted and that is that.”
Harry looked at her. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Since Mama is too upset to stir, and I’m sure she isn’t ready to go out in public, in any event, I wish you would take me to buy my bride clothes.”
“Bride clothes!” Mama cried. “You think entirely too much about your clothes—and all the world knows too much about them. In my day, young ladies did not make public spectacles of themselves, advertising every stitch they wore. To have your chemisette described—in detail!—in a public journal, as though you were a courtesan or a banker’s wife! You ought to be sick with shame. But nothing shames you. Small wonder you behaved last night like a common trollop. I blame those French milliners. If you set foot in their shop again, I’ll disown you!”
“Gad, what difference does it make?” Harry said. “Unless Adderley meets with a fatal accident, she’ll have to marry him, like it or not. She might as well have some frocks she likes now, since she’s not likely to have many after the wedding.”
“Adderley may take her in her shift,” Mother said. “He’s no better than a fortune hunter, and a vile seducer in the bargain. Oh, that ever I should see this day! A fresh-minted baron—swimming in debt, thanks to the gaming tables—and his mother an Irish innkeeper’s daughter! When I think that she might have had the Duke of Clevedon!”
“I strongly advise you not to think about it,” Harry said. “They’d have made each other wretched.”
“And Adderley will make her happy?” Mama sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes.
“Clara will break him to bridle,” Longmore said. “And if she can’t cure his wild ways, who knows? Maybe he’ll ride into a ditch or get run over by a post chaise, and she’ll be a young widow. Do try to look on the bright side.”
He ought to know this wasn’t the best tack to take with Mama. She wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not, and that would only add irritation to the emotional stew.
Clara took a more effective route. “I wonder what Lady Bartham will say when she hears I’m to be sent away without a trousseau, without so much as a wedding dress,” she said.
Lady Bartham and Mama were ferocious social rivals. They pretended to be the dearest of friends.
A short, sharp silence followed.
After a moment, Mama sat up again. She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and said, “My own wishes cannot signify. We must consider your father’s position. I shall persuade him to let you have bride clothes.” She waved the handkerchief. “But not from those French strumpets! You’ll go to Mrs. Downes.”
“Downes’s!” Clara cried. “Are you delirious, Mama? She’s closed her shop.”
She caught her breath. She was supposed to be the calm one. She had to be, with a hothead brother and a hysterical mother. Luckily, her mother was too taken up with her own emotions to notice anybody else’s.
“That was only temporary,” Mama said. “She sent me a note yesterday, telling me she’s reopened, thank heaven. You’ll go to her. Your morals may be all to pieces, but you shall be clothed respectably.”
“Very well, Mama,” Clara said meekly.
Harry gave her a sharp look.
She gave him a warning one back.
Meanwhile, at No. 56 St. James’s Street, the sisters Noirot were staring in disbelief at a tiny advertisement.
Today’s Spectacle hadn’t arrived until some time after the shop opened. The morning being unusually busy, they hadn’t had time to do more than skim the papers.
At present, though, their more-than-competent forewoman, Selina Jeffreys, was on duty in Maison Noirot’s showroom.
Having adjourned upstairs to Marcelline’s studio, the three dressmakers huddled over her drawing table, gazes fixed on twelve lines of print in one of the Spectacle’s advertising pages.
Therein Mrs. Downes proclaimed herself delighted to announce that, having completed a short period of “refurbishment,” she had reopened her dressmaking establishment.
Sophy had got wind of it last night at the party. She’d mentioned it to her sisters. They’d all hoped it was merely the usual idle rumor.
They had quite enough trouble as it was.
“Curse her,” Marcelline said. “We should have been finished with her. She closed her shop. She said it was for repairs, but she dismissed her staff. I was sure she’d slither out of London like the viper she is.”
The viper was Hortense Downes, proprietress of the shop known at Maison Noirot as Dowdy’s. A few weeks earlier, she and one of her minions had brought them to the brink of ruin. But the sisters had played her own trick against her, thus exposing her to the world as a fake and a cheat.
Or so they’d thought.
Marcelline shook her head. “That business of stealing my designs ought to have finished her.”
“She’s blamed it on her seamstresses,” Sophy said. “She’s told her patrons she’s dismissed the lot and hired all new staff.”
“Plague take her,” Marcelline said. “Who knew that Hortense the Horrible was clever enough to recover her reputation?”
“It’s what I’d have done in her place,” Sophy said. “Blamed the help. Cleaned house. And made sure to tell my clients the ‘truth’ of how I’d been a victim of ungrateful employees. Then I’d send my customers personal notes in advance of the public advertisement.”
“This is very bad,” Marcelline said. She looked at her sisters. “How much business have we lost because of me?”
Sophy and Leonie looked at each other.
“I see,” Marcelline said. “Worse than I thought.”
“Lady Warford is a formidable social power,” Leonie said. “No one wants to shop at a place she’s blackballed.”
“But she dresses so ill!” Marcelline said.
“She doesn’t think so and nobody has the courage to tell her,” Sophy said. “Not that most of them are any more discerning than she is. They’re like sheep, as we all know. She’s a leader, and they follow the leader.”
“And she hates me,” Marcelline said.
“With a pure, white-hot hatred, the sort of feeling her kind more usually reserve for anarchists and republicans,” Sophy said.
Marcelline began to pace.
“It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if Lady Clara had got herself into trouble with the right man,” Leonie said. “She could become a fashion leader in her own right, and she’d help us build a clientele with the younger generation.”
“But she picked the wrong man,” Marcelline said. She returned to her drawing table, pushed the newspaper aside, took up her notebook, and began sketching, in strong, angry lines. “Tell me the truth, Leonie.”
“We’re facing ruin,” Leonie said simply.
No one said a word about Marcelline’s husband, who could buy and sell the shop many times over out of his pocket change.
They didn’t want to be bought.
This was their shop. Three years ago they’d come from Paris, having lost everything. They’d come with a sick child, a few coins, and their talents. Marcelline had won money at the gaming tables. That gave them their start.
Now she must feel as though she’d destroyed everything they’d worked for. All for love.
But Marcelline had a right to love and be loved. She’d worked so hard. She’d endured so much. She’d looked after them all. She deserved happiness.
“We’ve faced ruin before,” Sophy said. “This isn’t worse than Paris and the cholera.”
“We’ve survived a catastrophe here as well,” Leonie said.
“With Clevedon’s help,” Marcelline said. “Which we didn’t like accepting. But we agreed because we hadn’t any choice.”
“And we made sure it was a loan,” Leonie said.
“Which it now seems we can’t repay,” Marcelline said, her pencil still moving angrily. “We’re so far from repaying it that we’ll have to ask for another one. Or accept failure. Leonie was right, after all. We bit off more than we could chew.”
Weeks ago, when the Duke of Clevedon had found them these new quarters, Leonie had warned that they hadn’t enough customers to support a large shop on St. James’s Street.
“We always bite off more than we can chew,” Sophy said. “We came from Paris with nothing, and built a business in only three years. We set out to capture Lady Clara and we succeeded—although not quite in the way we intended. We wouldn’t be who we are if we acted like normal women. I don’t see why we should start acting normal now, just because our best customer made a mistake with a man, as most women do, or because her mother holds grudges. I for one am not going to lie down and surrender merely on account of a little setback.”
Marcelline looked up from her sketching and smiled, finally. “Only you would call impending ruin ‘a little setback.’ “
“The trouble with you is, you’re in love, and you feel guilty about it, which is perfectly ridiculous in a Noirot,” Sophy said.
“She’s right,” Leonie said. “You married a duke. You’re supposed to be thoroughly pleased with yourself. It’s a great coup. No one else, on either side of the family, has done it, to my knowledge.”
“Not only a duke, but stupendously rich,” Sophy said. “Your daughter has actual, genuine castles to play in.”
“So stop brooding,” Leonie said.
“I’m facing failure,” Marcelline said. “A gigantic, catastrophic failure—which that horrid Dowdy reptile will laugh at. That entitles me to brood.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sophy said. “She isn’t going to laugh, and we’re not going to fail. We’ll think of something. We always do.”
“We merely need to think fast,” Leonie said. “Because we’ve less than a month until quarter day.”
Midsummer: 24 June. When rents were due and accounts were settled.
Someone tapped at the door.
“What is it?” Marcelline called.
The door opened a crack, revealing a narrow slice of Mary Parmenter, one of their seamstresses. “If you please, Your Grace, mesdames. Lady Clara Fairfax is here. And Lord Longmore.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_cba7ad69-37f0-5dfe-b22f-614609730db6)
There is certainly some connexion between the dress and the mind, an accurate observer can trace some correspondencies; and the weak as well as the strong-minded never cease to be influenced by a good or bad dress.
—Lady’s Magazine & Museum, June 1835
It was sort of a brothel for women, Longmore decided.
The shop even had a discreet back entrance, reserved, no doubt, for high-priced harlots and the men who kept them.
A few minutes earlier, a modestly but handsomely dressed female had let them in that way and led them up a flight of carpeted and gently lit back stairs. Small landscape paintings and fashion plates from earlier times adorned the pale green walls.
He’d been in Maison Noirot’s showroom, but this was another world altogether.
The room into which the female had taken them looked like a sitting room. More little paintings on the pale pink walls. Pretty bits of porcelain. Lacy things adorning tables and chair backs. The very air smelled of women, but it was subtle. His nostrils caught only a hint of scent, as though a bouquet of flowers and herbs had recently passed through. Everything about him was soft and luxurious and inviting. It conjured harem slaves in paintings. Odalisques.
He was tempted to stretch out on the carpet and call for the hashish and dancing girls.
The door opened. All his senses went on the alert.
But it was only the elegantly dressed female carrying a tray. She set it upon a handsome tea table. Longmore noticed the tray held a plate of biscuits. A decanter stood where the teapot ought to be.
When the female went out, he said, “So this is how they do it. They ply you with drink.”
“No, they ply you with drink, knowing you’ll be bored,” Clara said. “Although I shouldn’t mind a restorative.” She flung herself into a chair. “Oh, Harry, what on earth am I going to do?”
Her face took on a crumpled look.
He knew that look. It augured tears.
He was taken completely unawares. She’d seemed perfectly well on the way here. Chin aloft and eyes blazing. He hadn’t been surprised when she told him to take her to Maison Noirot. The meek act with their mother hadn’t fooled him.
Clara was so angelically beautiful that people thought she was sweet and yielding. They mistook indifference for docility. She was the sort of girl who generally didn’t care one way or another about all sorts of things. But when she did care, she could be as obstinate as a pig.
Since the Noirot sisters had got their hooks in her, she’d become extremely obstinate about her clothes.
He beat down panic. “Dash it, Clara,” he said. “No waterworks. Say what’s the matter and have done.”
She found a handkerchief and hastily wiped her eyes. “Oh, it’s Mama. She wears on my nerves.”
“That’s all?” he said.
“Isn’t it enough?” she said. “I’m Society’s big joke and I’m about to marry in haste and my mother does nothing but tell me every single thing I’ve done wrong.”
“And this”—he swept his hand, indicating their surroundings—”will be one more thing.”
“What’s one more thing?” Clara said. “This, at least, will lift my spirits. Unlike a visit to that incompetent in Bedford Square Mama’s so irrationally devoted to.”
He’d taken her here because this was where she wanted to go … and it was where he preferred to go.
Maison Noirot was stupendously expensive, the proprietresses were seductresses (in the way of clothes) of the first order, it was extremely French, and, above all, it was Sophy Noirot’s lair.
If a man had to hang about a dressmakers’ shop, this was the place.
But there would be trouble at home for Clara. More trouble. “Our mother’s going to kick up a fuss,” he said. “And you’ll bear the brunt of it.”
“The clothes will be worth it,” she said.
And this would be her last chance for extravagance in that regard, unless he found a way to dispose of Adderley and restore Clara’s reputation at the same time.
He wasn’t sure Clara wanted Adderley disposed of, but if she didn’t she was either stupid or mad, which meant her wishes didn’t signify.
He must have frowned without realizing, because she said, “It’ll be fun for me, but I know you’ll be bored to death. You needn’t stay. I’ll take a hackney home.”
“A hackney?” he said. “Are you mad? I’d never hear the end of it.” He laid a limp wrist against his temple, pitched his voice an octave higher, and in the put-upon tone his mother had perfected said, “How could you, Harry? Your own sister, left to a dirty public conveyance? Heaven only knows who’s seen her, traveling the London streets like a shop clerk. I shall be ashamed to look my friends in the eye.”
From behind him came the rustling of petticoats—and a stifled giggle?
He turned, his pulse accelerating.
Three young women—one brunette, one blonde, one redhead—regarded him with expressions of polite interest. The two latter had large, shockingly blue eyes. Only in the eyes did he detect any sign of the amusement he’d thought he’d heard, and it wasn’t much of a sign.
It would be more accurate to say he detected it only in her eyes, since Sophy Noirot’s sisters might as well have been shadows or a Greek chorus—or window curtains, for that matter.
They were all very well, each entertaining in her own way, and all quite good-looking, if not great beauties.
But she cast the others into the shade.
Why, only look at her. Pale gold curling hair under the frothy lace cap. Enormous, speaking eyes of deepest sapphire. A haughty little nose. A plump invitation of a mouth. A sharp, obstinate little chin. Below the neck … ah, that was even better. Delicious, in fact, despite the lunatic clothing style deemed the height of fashion.
“Duchess,” Clara said, rising from her chair and curtseying.
“Pray don’t ‘Duchess’ me,” said Her Grace. “This is business. While on the premises, why do we not pretend we’re in France, where you’d address a duchess as madame, much as one addresses a modiste. Meanwhile, think of me simply as your dressmaker.”
“The world’s greatest dressmaker,” Sophy said.
“And that would make you …?” Longmore said.
“The other greatest dressmaker in the world,” Sophy said.
“Someone ought to explain superlatives to you,” he said. “But then, I’m aware that English isn’t your first language.”
“It isn’t my only first language, my lord,” she said. “Lefrançais est l’autre.”
“Perhaps someone ought as well to explain the meanings of only and first,” he said.
“Oh, yes, please do enlighten me, my lord,” she said, opening her extremely blue eyes very wide. “I never had a head for figures. Leonie always complains about it. ‘Will you never learn to count?’ she says.”
“And yet,” he began.
It was then he realized she’d drawn him away from his sister—who was moving with the other two toward another door.
“Where are you slipping off to?” he said.
“To look at patterns,” said Clara. “You’ll find it exceedingly tedious.”
“That depends,” he said.
“On what?” Sophy said.
“On how bored I feel.” He looked around. “Not much entertainment hereabouts.”
“Your club is only a few steps up the street,” Sophy said. “Perhaps you’d rather wait there. We can send to you when Lady Clara is done.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel I ought to hang about and exert a calming influence.”
“You,” Sophy said. “A calming influence.”
“Excitable women. Clothes. The possible rape and pillage of our father’s bank account. A man’s cool head seems to be needed.”
“Harry, you know Papa doesn’t care how much I spend on clothes,” Clara said. “He likes us to look well. And I know you don’t care what I buy. It was kind of you to take me here, but you needn’t watch over me. I’m perfectly safe.”
His gaze traveled over the three sisters, and lingered on Sophy. He thought hard and fast and picked his words carefully. “Very well. A man can think more clearly when he isn’t surrounded by women, and I need to create an alibi.”
She took the bait, her gaze sharpening. “Why?” she said. “Are you planning to murder somebody?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You won’t let me murder the bridegroom. No, I want an alibi for Clara, who isn’t supposed to be here.”
“Mama said I must go to Downes’s,” Clara said, “but Harry took pity on me.”
“I took pity on me,” he said. His gaze returned to Sophy. “I brought her here to prevent scolding, ranting, and sobbing, that’s all.”
“Then the least I can do in gratitude is give you an alibi,” Sophy said.
He could think of any number of pleasing acts of gratitude, but this would do for a start.
“Not too complicated,” he said.
She rolled her great blue eyes. “I know that.”
“I’m a simple man.”
“This is so simple, even a dolt could remember it,” she said. “When Lady Clara returns home, she’ll say that you were intoxicated and drove her here instead of to Downes’s, drunkenly insisting this was the place.”
“Oh, that’s perfect!” Clara said.
“That will do admirably,” he said. “She can say I stood over her and made her order sixty or seventy dresses, and a gross of chemises and …”
His mind went hazy then, and images of muslin and lace underwear strewed themselves about his brain, and somewhere in that dishevelment was a blue-eyed angelic devil, mostly unclothed. He waved a hand, waving the images away. Now wasn’t the time. He was only beginning his siege, and he knew—he could always tell—he faced a very tricky fortress. All sorts of hidden passages and diversions and booby traps.
But then, if it were easy, it would be boring.
He continued, “ … and all those other sorts of trousseau things. And when our mother regains consciousness, and demands that Clara cancel the order, Clara will appeal to our overly conscientious sire, who’ll say one can’t simply cancel immense orders on a whim.”
Sophy folded her arms. Something flickered in her blue eyes. Otherwise, her expression was unreadable. “Good,” she said. “Keep with that. Don’t embellish.”
“No danger of that,” he said. “At any rate, it’s easy enough to make it partly true. I’ve only to toddle into my club and drink steadily until you’ve finished bankrupting my father. Then, when I return Clara to Warford House, no one will have any trouble believing in my inebriated obstinacy.”
He sauntered out of the sitting room.
He walked to the stairs and started down.
He heard hurried footsteps and rustling petticoats behind him.
“Lord Longmore.”
She said his name as everybody else did, not precisely as spelled but in the way of so many ancient names, with vowels shifted and consonants elided. Yet it wasn’t quite the same, either, because it carried the faintest whisper of French.
He looked up.
She stood at the top of the stairs, leaning over the handrail.
The view was excellent: He could see her silk shoes and the crisscrossing ribbons that called attention to the fine arch of her instep and her neat ankles. He saw the delicate silk stockings outlining the bit of foot and leg on view. His mind easily conjured what wasn’t on view: the place above her knees where her garters were tied—garters that, in his imagination, were red, embroidered with lascivious French phrases.
For a moment he said nothing, simply drank it in.
“That was a beautiful exit,” she said.
“I thought so,” he said.
“I hated to spoil it,” she said. “But I had an idea.”
“You’re a prodigy,” he said. “First an alibi, then an idea. All in the same day.”
“I thought you could help me,” she said.
“I daresay I could,” he said, contemplating her ankles.
“With your mother.”
He lifted his gaze to her face. “What do you want to do to her?”
“Ideally, I should like to dress her.”
“That would be difficult, considering that she hates you,” he said. “That is, not you, particularly. But you as a near connection to the Duchess of Clevedon, and your shop as harboring same.”
“I know, but I’m sure we can bring her round. That is, I can bring her round. With a little help.”
“What do you propose, Miss Noirot? Shall I drug her ladyship and carry her, senseless, to your lair, where you’ll force her into dashing gowns?”
“Only as a last resort,” she said. “What I have in mind for you at present is quite simple—and no one will ever know you aided and abetted the Enemy.”
“This is London,” he said. “There’s no such thing as ‘no one will ever know.’ “
“No, really, I promise you—”
“Not that I care what anybody knows,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “I forgot. But I must not be recognized.”
“Does that mean a disguise?” he said.
“Only for me,” she said. “I need to visit Dowdy’s, you see, and—”
“And Dowdy’s is …?”
“The lair of the reptile, Horrible Hortense Downes, the monster who puts your mother into those dreary clothes. I need to get into her shop.”
In her world, he knew, clothes were the beginning and the end of everything, and worlds were lost on the wrong placement of a bow.
“You’re proposing a spying expedition behind enemy lines,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it exactly.”
“Are you going to blow up the place?”
“Only as a last resort,” she said.
He was quite happy to take her, even if she didn’t blow the place up. He’d be happy to take her anywhere. But his promptly agreeing meant her prompt departure and he wasn’t yet tired of looking at her ankles.
He pretended to ponder.
“It’s only for an hour or so,” she said. “That shouldn’t disrupt your busy schedule.”
“Ordinarily, no,” he said. “But I’ve got this Adderley problem to work on, and that wants deep and lengthy cogitation.”
“You do not have the Adderley problem to work on,” she said. “Did I not tell you my sisters and I would deal with it?”
“It’s not the sort of thing I want to leave to women,” he said. “It could get messy, and I’d hate to see your pretty frocks spoiled.”
“Believe me, Lord Longmore, my sisters and I have dealt with extremely messy situations before.”
He met her gaze. In those blue eyes he caught a glimpse of something, unexpected and hard. It was gone in an instant, but it set off a sharp recollection of the men who’d pursued her and emerged from the experience damaged.
There was more to her than met the eye: that much he’d recognized early on.
“Let me think it over,” he said. “Let me think it over in the cool depths of my club.”
He continued down the stairs.
Two hours later
From the environs of White’s famous bow window, where Beau Brummell had presided some decades earlier, a sudden buzz of excitement broke in upon a dull, drizzly afternoon. The noise gradually increased in volume sufficiently to obtain Lord Longmore’s attention.
He’d settled in the morning room with Foxe’s Morning Spectacle to review Sophy’s story about last night’s debacle. As regarded breathlessly dramatic style and fanatical attention to every boring inch of Clara’s dress, Sophy had outdone herself. Clara had been “innocence cruelly misled,” Longmore had appeared as a paragon among avenging brothers, and the dress description—dripping with an arcane French known only to women—took up nearly two of the front page’s three columns. Her account had routed from said page virtually all the other gossip Foxe called news.
Longmore had read it this morning after breakfast. He saw no more in it now than he had then. It was unclear what good the piece would do Clara—unless it was simply the first step in a campaign. If so, he looked forward to seeing where it would lead.
After chuckling over Sophy’s world’s-greatest-collection of adjectives and adverbs, he moved on to the other gossip and sporting news. Thence he proceeded to the advertising pages at the back.
There Maison Noirot had taken over prime real estate, squeezing into obscure corners the notices for pocket toilets, artificial teeth, and salad cream.
That was when he discovered Mrs. Downes’s announcement.
He was wondering about the connection between Sophy’s need to be taken to her rival’s shop and the advertisement when someone at the bow window said, “Who is she?”
“You’re joking,” someone else said. “You don’t know?”
“Would I ask if I knew?”
Other voices joined in.
“Hempton, you innocent. Have you been in a coma during the last month?”
“How could you not have heard about the Misalliance of the Century? They talk of it in Siberia and Tierra del Fuego.”
“But that can’t be Sheridan’s new bride.”
“Not the elopement, you slow-top.”
“You mean Clevedon?” said Hempton. “But he married a brunette. This one’s a blonde.”
Longmore flung down the Spectacle, left his chair, and stalked to the bow window.
“What now?” he said, though he could guess.
The men crowding the window hastily made room for him.
Sophy Noirot stood on the other side of St. James’s Street. A gust of wind blew the back of her pale yellow dress against her legs and made a billowing froth of skirt and petticoats in front. The wind made a complete joke of the lacy nothing of an umbrella she held against the rain. The previous downpour had diminished to a light drizzle, and the misty figure glimpsed between the clumps of vehicles, riders, and pedestrians seemed like something in a dream.
The commentary at the bow window, however, made it clear she was not a dream, except in the sense that she was, at the moment, the starring player in every man’s lewd fantasy.
Ah, she was real enough, wearing a scarf sort of thing that dangled to her knees—or where one assumed her knees must be, under all those yards of lace and muslin. Atop the golden hair perched a silly hat, dripping lace and ribbons and feathers. Longmore could see a sort of Dutch windmill arrangement of lace and feathers at the back of the hat when she bent to talk to a scruffy little boy. She gave him something, and he dashed across the street, dodging riders and vehicles.
Then she looked up, straight at the bow window and straight at Longmore.
And smiled.
Then all the men at the bow window looked at him.
And smiled.
And he smiled right back.
Longmore took his time. He finished his glass of wine, reread the advertisement, then called for his things.
He donned his hat and gloves, grasped his walking stick, and went out. The drizzle had dwindled to a fine mist and the wind had died down somewhat.
She had walked a little way up the street. She was watching the passing scene on Piccadilly. Every passing male was watching her.
He coolly descended the steps and strolled across the street to her.
“I should have thought you’d find an urchin nearer the shop to carry the message that my sister was ready to go home,” he said. “Or why not send a servant or a seamstress? You had to come yourself? In the rain?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I collect you had something particular to say to me, then,” he said.
“I daresay I could have said it elsewhere,” she said. “But this was a fine opportunity to show off my hat, which is my own design. I’m not a genius with dresses, like Marcelline, but my hats are quite good.”
He eyed the hat, with its lace and windmill and whatnot. “It strikes me as demented,” he said. “But fetching.”
She dimpled, and his heart gave a lurch that astonished him.
“I sincerely hope it’s fetching enough to weaken your resistance,” she said.
“What resistance?” he said.
“To my scheme.”
“Oh, that. Taking you to Dowdy’s.”
“I need to find out what they’re up to.”
“I should think that was obvious,” he said. “They’re out to crush the competition, as any self-respecting rival would do.”
He started walking down St. James’s Street, wondering what devious means she’d contrived to persuade him to do what he was going to do anyway.
She walked alongside him. “I know that,” she said. “But I need to see exactly what we’re up against: the old Dowdy’s or something new, something we hadn’t reckoned on. I need to see whether the place is the same and the clothes are the same.”
“I suppose you’ll be shocked if I say that all women’s clothes look the same to me,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be shocked at all,” she said. “You’re a man. And that’s the point of my asking you. I need a big, strong man in case I’m discovered, and run into difficulties with Dowdy’s bullies.” She paused briefly. “While we were fitting your sister, she happened to mention Lady Gladys Fairfax, and what a pity it was that we couldn’t take her in hand,” she said.
“Cousin Gladys,” he said. “Don’t tell me she’s coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t know who’ll be invited,” she said. “But when Lady Clara spoke of her, I got the idea for a way to manage this.”
They’d reached the corner of Bennet Street. He paused to check for carriages and riders turning off St. James’s Street.
When the way seemed clear, he took her elbow and hurried her across. As soon as they reached the pavement on the opposite side, he let go of her. He still felt the warmth of her arm under his palm, and the warmth raced straight to his groin so suddenly that it made him dizzy.
The rear entrance to the shop was through a narrow court off Bennet Street. She waited until they’d turned into the court. Then she said, “Lady Clara says your mother will go to Dowdy’s early in the week to order a dress for the wedding. Leonie can spare me from the shop most easily on Friday morning. Would you take me then?”
After the bustle of St. James’s Street, the tiny court seemed eerily quiet. He was aware of a scent, vaguely familiar, drifting about him. He drew a fraction closer and stared at the discreet door, pretending to think hard while he drank in the scent. Woman, of course, and … lavender … and what else?
He realized his head was sinking toward her neck. He straightened. “Bullies,” he said. “In a dressmaking shop.”
“Two great brutes,” she said. “To deal with the drunks and thieves. Or so Dowdy claims. Personally, I believe she’s hired the men to intimidate the seamstresses. You know, the way they keep them in brothels to—”
“That sounds like fun,” he said. “And you’ll be in disguise, of course.”
“Yes.”
“As a serving maid, I suppose.”
“Certainly not,” she said. “What would a serving maid be doing buying expensive dresses? I’m going to be your cousin Gladys.”
Lord Adderley wasted no time in putting the notice of his engagement in the papers, but the news traveled through London in a matter of hours—faster even than the Spectacle could get it into print. By Monday his tailor, boot maker, hatter, vintner, tobacconist, and others who provided for his comfort and entertainment had once again opened their account books and allowed him credit.
He’d had a narrow escape.
Another week and he would have had to flee abroad. While peers could not be arrested for debt, they weren’t immune to other unpleasantness, like having their credit shut off. All of his creditors seemed to have joined a cabal, because every single one, including all the shopkeepers, cut him off at the same time, two days before Lady Igby’s ball.
The forthcoming nuptials put everybody in a more forgiving frame of mind.
He celebrated on Monday night with Mr. Meffat and Sir Roger Theaker in a private dining parlor of the Brunswick Hotel. They toasted one another throughout the meal. By the time the table had been cleared, wine had loosened their tongues—no matter, since there was nobody nearby to hear.
“A close-run thing it was,” said Sir Roger.
“Perilously close,” said Lord Adderley.
“Wasn’t sure you’d manage it,” said Mr. Meffat. “Watching like hawks, they were.”
Lord Adderley shrugged. “As soon as I saw Lady Bartham settle in to gossip with the mama, I knew there wouldn’t be trouble from that quarter for a while.”
“It was Longmore who worried me,” said Mr. Meffat.
Adderley resisted the urge to feel his bruised jaw. He’d had more reason than anybody to worry. He’d broken into a sweat, which he’d explained away to Lady Clara as excitement, to be so close to her, to hold her in her arms—all the usual rubbish, in other words.
He said, “I only needed a few minutes, and he was on the other side of the room. Still, it was your quick acting that saved the day.”
It was Meffat’s and Theaker’s job to attract attention to the terrace without attracting too much attention. Not the most difficult job in the world. One only had to say, “Wonder what Adderley’s about on the terrace? Who’s the female with him?”
One didn’t have to say it to too many people. One or two would do. The drift terrace-wards would begin, and some others would notice, and follow, curious to see what was attracting attention.
Clara had been easiest of all to manage. Though no schoolroom miss—she was one and twenty, older than Adderley would have preferred—she was as ignorant about lovemaking as a child. All he had to do was keep her wineglass filled and whirl her about the floor until she was dizzy and whisper poetry in her ear. Still, one had to be careful. Too much wine and too much spinning and she’d be sick—on his last good coat.
“At least you got yourself a beauty,” Theaker said. “Mostly, when their pa sets a big dowry on them, it’s on account of being squinty or spotty or bowlegged.”
“What he means is, mostly, they’re dogs,” Meffat said.
“I’m fortunate,” Adderley said. “I know that. I might have done so much worse.”
She was a beauty, and that would make the bedding and getting of heirs more agreeable. Still, she wasn’t to his taste, a great cow of a girl. He liked daintier women, and he would have preferred a brunette.
But her dowry was enormous, she’d been vulnerable, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Bless her innocence,” said Theaker. “She went just like a lamb.”
“There’s one won’t give you any trouble,” said Meffat.
* * *
Warford House
Wednesday 3 June
Clara kept her composure until she’d closed her bedroom door behind her.
She swallowed, walked quickly across the room, and sat at her dressing table.
“My lady?” said her maid, Davis.
A sob escaped Clara. And another.
“Oh, my lady,” said Davis.
“I don’t know what to do!” Clara buried her face in her hands.
“Now, now, my lady. I’ll make you a good, hot cup of tea and whatever it is, you’ll feel better.”
“I need more than tea,” Clara said. She looked up to meet Davis’s gaze in the mirror.
“I’ll put a drop of brandy in it,” said Davis.
“More than a drop,” Clara said.
“Yes, my lady.”
Davis hurried out.
Clara took out the note Lord Adderley had sent her.
A love note, filled with beautiful words, the kinds of words sure to melt the heart of a romantic girl.
Of course the words were beautiful. They’d been written by poets: Keats and Lovelace and Marvell and scores of others. Even Shakespeare! He thought she wouldn’t recognize lines from a Shakespeare sonnet! Either he was a complete idiot or he thought she was.
“The latter, most likely,” she muttered. She crumpled the note and threw it across the room. “Liar,” she said. “It was all lies. I knew it. How could I be such a fool?”
Because Mr. Bates had not asked her to dance, and she’d watched him whirl Lady Susan Morris, Lady Bartham’s daughter, about the floor. Lady Susan was petite and dark and pretty, and next to her Clara always felt ungainly and awkward.
Then what?
A moment’s hurt. Then Lord Adderley was at her elbow, with a glass of champagne, and a perfect remark, sure to make her smile.
Irish blarney, Mama would have said.
Maybe that’s what it was. Or maybe it was like the beautiful words he wrote, stolen from gifted writers. False, either way.
Champagne and waltzing and flattery, and Clara had taken the bait.
And now …
What to do?
She rose and walked to the window and looked out. In the garden below, the rain was beating the shrubs and flowers into submission. If she’d been a man—if she’d been Harry—she’d have climbed out and run away, as far as she could go.
But she wasn’t a man, and she had no idea how to run away.
Time, she thought. Her only hope was time. If they could drag out the engagement for months and months, a new scandal would come along, and everybody would forget this one.
Davis entered with the tea. “I put in a few extra drops, but you’ll need to drink it quickly,” she said. “Lady Bartham’s called, and Lady Warford said you’re to come straightaway.”
“Lady Bartham,” Clara said. “That wants more than a few drops. That wants a bottle.”
She swallowed her brandy-laced tea, put on her company face, and went down to the drawing room.
The visit was even worse than anticipated. Lady Bartham was so sympathetically venomous that she left Clara half blind with rage and Mama with a sick headache.
The next morning, Mama announced that she was sick to death of this ghastly engagement and everybody’s insinuations. They would consult the calendar and fix a date for the wedding.
“Yes, of course, Mama,” Clara said. “In the autumn, perhaps. Town won’t be so busy then.”
“Autumn?” Mama cried. “Are you mad? We’ve not a moment to lose. You must be married before the end of the Season—before the Queen’s last Drawing Room at the latest.”
“Mama, that’s only three weeks!”
“It’s sufficient time to arrange a wedding, even a large one—and a small one is out of the question. You know what people will say. And if those wicked French dressmakers Harry took you to can’t finish your bride clothes on time, it is too bad. It is not my fault if my children disobey me at every turn.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_10235203-9b21-5113-a563-44f0be26e0d4)
Now, thanks to steam-presses, steam-vessels, and steam-coaches, the prolific brain of a French dress-maker or milliner has hardly given a new cap of trimming to the Parisian élégantes, before it is also in possession of the London belles.
—La Belle Assemblée, March 1830
Friday 5 June
Longmore transferred the reins to one hand and with his other took out his pocket watch. He flicked it open.
Eleven o’clock, she’d said. In the morning—because the fashionable aristocrats shopped in the afternoon, and she had to get there before they did.
“It’s important to arrive before Dowdy’s favorite customers do,” Sophy had told him. “Shopkeepers like that will fawn over the great ladies with the heavy purses and pass off dull rustic misses to lowly assistants. It would be truly useful to see the pattern for your mother’s dress, since she’s one of their most important customers. That means I can’t be passed off to an assistant. It has to be Horrible Hortense herself or her forewoman.”
It was exactly eleven o’clock. Longmore looked up at the sky. Cloudy, but not threatening rain as his tiger, Reade, had insisted. Reade had not been happy about having to remain behind. If it rained—as he assured his lordship it would surely do—his lordship would need help raising the curricle’s hood.
Well, then, they’d simply have to get wet, Longmore decided. While convenient for minding horses and helping one wrestle temperamental hoods, on the present occasion a groom would be very much in the way.
Longmore put the watch away and reverted to staring at the shop door. She’d told him to collect her, not at Maison Noirot, but at the ribbon shop farther down St. James’s Street, near St. James’s Palace. To Allay Suspicion.
She was hilarious.
“Cousin?” said a familiar female voice.
He blinked. It was Sophy’s voice and it wasn’t. He knew this had to be her but his eyes denied it. The woman standing on the pavement next to his carriage was so nondescript that he’d probably been looking straight at her without actually seeing her.
The murky brown cloak concealed her shape. The muddy green bonnet and lace cap underneath concealed most of her hair. What was visible was limp, dull, and stringy. She’d sprouted a mole to one side of her perfect nose. And on that nose she’d planted a pair of tinted spectacles, which dulled her brilliant blue eyes to cloudy grey.
He was aware of his jaw dropping. He quickly collected himself. “There you are,” he said.
“You’d have seen me sooner if you hadn’t been woolgathering,” she said, as shrewish as Gladys—and in the same graceless accents. She climbed up into the vehicle as clumsily as his cousin would have done.
If he didn’t know better, he’d have been sure this was his cousin, playing a trick on him.
But Cousin Gladys didn’t play tricks. She had no imagination.
“How did you do it?” he said. “You can’t have met her. She hasn’t left Lancashire in ages.”
“Lady Clara is a fair mimic,” she said, “and it was easy enough to classify the type. We do that, you know: We size up a woman when she walks into the shop. Broadly speaking, they tend to fall into certain categories.”
“Gladys is a type? I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always thought her one of a kind, and that one more than sufficient.”
He gave his horses leave to walk on, then he had to keep his attention on them. Though he’d driven them through Hyde Park to work off their morning high spirits, they were still excitable. Apparently they were as little used as he was to traveling the shopping streets in the early hours with ordinary folk. Whatever the reason, they were looking for trouble: They tried to lunge at other vehicles, run onto the pavement, take aim at passing pedestrians, and bite any other horses who looked at them the wrong way.
Normally, he’d find this entertaining.
Today it was inconvenient. He had a campaign to conduct with the woman beside him, and she was tricky and he needed his wits about him. At present, however, he had to concentrate his wits on getting them to Piccadilly alive. Then he had to wrestle his way through the great knot of traffic approaching the quadrant into Regent Street.
“What the devil are all these people doing out in the streets at the crack of dawn?” he said.
“They heard the Earl of Longmore would be up and about before noon,” she said. “I believe they mean to mark the event with illuminations and fireworks.”
He’d been driving since childhood, and he couldn’t remember when last he’d had to work so hard at it.
“I think you’re frightening the horses,” he said.
“I think they’re not used to busy streets in daylight,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the mole that’s bothering them,” he said. Or maybe it was her scent. It wasn’t Gladys’s. This was so faint as to be more of an awareness than a fragrance: Woman and jasmine and something else. Some kind of herb or greenery.
No, the scent wasn’t bothering the horses. It was getting him into a lather he couldn’t do anything about at the moment. That wasn’t the only disturbance. He was extremely aware of her swollen skirts brushing against his trouser leg, and he could hear the petticoats rustle under the skirts. It was as clear as clear to him, above the street’s cacophony of animals, vehicles, people.
He was primed for tackling her and he couldn’t, and the horses sensed the agitation.
It was so ridiculous he laughed.
“What is it?” she said.
He glanced at her. “You,” he said. “And me, up at this hour to drive to a dressmaker’s shop.”
“I know you rise before noon on occasion,” she said.
“Not to shop,” he said.
“No. For a race. A boxing match. A wrestling match. A horse auction. I’m not sure I can offer equal excitement.”
“I expect it’ll be exciting enough when they find you out,” he said. “Which they’re bound to do. You’ll need to get undressed to get measured. What if the mole falls off while you’re taking off your clothes? What if your spectacles get tangled in your wig?”
“I’ve put on several extra layers of clothing,” she said. “I don’t plan to allow them to get beyond the first one or two. And it isn’t a wig, by the way. I put an egg mixture in my hair. People say it leaves a shine after you wash it out, but it does the opposite.”
It would be quite a job, washing her hair. It was thick and curly, and unless she added false pieces to it, as some women did, it must be long. To her waist? He saw long, golden hair streaming down a bare, silken back.
There was something to look forward to.
“You promised me bullies,” he said. “I was looking forward to the fight. It’s the only thing that got me out of bed. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anybody did me the courtesy of hitting back?”
“If I were a gentleman, and I saw you coming at me with fists up, I’d run in the other direction,” she said.
“Bullies aren’t gentlemen,” he said. “They won’t run.”
“If you get desperately bored, you can always pick a fight,” she said.
“If they exist,” he said. “I’ve never heard of hired ruffians in a dressmaking shop.”
“You’ve never noticed because you never think about how a shop is run,” she said. “You only notice whether the service is good or bad. But they can be useful in an all-woman shop. One has to deal with drunken men knocking over things or pawing the seamstresses. But the worst for us is a pack of thieves. They’ll come in small groups of twos and threes, all dressed respectably and seeming not to be together. One or two will keep the shopkeepers busy while the others fill their pockets. They’ve special pockets sewn into their clothes. They’re very quick. You’d be amazed at how much they can make off with if you look away, even for a second.”
“Where do you hide the muscled fellows who work for you, then?” he said.
“We don’t need ruffians,” she said. “We started in Paris, you know, and it was a family business, so we started young. Let me see. I think Marcelline was nine, so I was about seven or eight, and Leonie was six. When you’re absorbed in a trade from childhood, every aspect of it becomes instinctive. Drunks, thieves, men who think milliners’ shops are brothels—we’re perfectly capable of dealing with such matters ourselves.”
He remembered the hard look that had flashed across her face so briefly, when she’d told him she’d dealt with messy situations. He hadn’t time to pursue that train of thought, though. As they were turning into Oxford Street, two boys ran out in front of the curricle. Swearing violently, Longmore turned his pair aside an instant before they could trample the children.
His heart pounded. A moment’s delay or distraction, and the brats could have been killed. “Look where you’re going, you confounded idiots!” he roared above the neighing horses and the other drivers’ shouted comments.
“Ow, you ugly bitch!” a voice shrieked close to his ear. “Let go of me, you sodding sow!”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Sophy said.
Longmore glanced that way.
A ragged boy half hung over the back of the seat. Sophy had him by the arm, and she was regarding him with amusement.
Longmore could spare them only a glance. His team and the traffic wanted all his attention. “What the devil?” he said. “Where did he come from?”
“Nowhere!” the boy snarled. He wriggled furiously, to no avail. “I wasn’t doing nothing, only getting a free ride in back here, and the goggle-eyed mort tried to take my arm off.”
This, at least, was what Longmore presumed he said. The Cockney accent was almost impenetrable. Nothing was “nuffin,” and aitches were dropped from and attached to the wrong words, and some of the vowels seemed to have arrived from another planet.
“And you were trying to keep your hand warm in the gentleman’s pocket?” she said.
Longmore choked back laughter.
“I never went near his pocket! Do I look like I’m dicked in the nob?”
“Far from it,” Sophy said. “You’re a clever one, and quick, too.”
“Not quick enough,” the boy muttered.
“I wish you could have seen it, Cousin,” she said. “The two who ran in front were meant to distract you while this one jumped on and did his job. The little devil almost got by me. It took him two seconds to leap onto the groom’s place. Probably he would have wanted only another two to get your pocket watch—perhaps your seals and handkerchief as well—while you had both hands busy with the horses. I daresay he thought I was a gently bred female who’d only stare or scream helplessly while he collected his booty and got away.”
She reverted to the boy. “Next time, my lad, I advise you to make sure there’s only one person in the vehicle.”
Next time?
Longmore nearly ran down a pie seller.
“What next time?” he said. “We’re making a detour to the nearest police office, and leaving him to them.”
The boy let loose a stream of stunning oaths and struggled wildly. But Sophy must have tightened her hold or done something painful, because he stopped abruptly, and started whimpering that his arm was broken.
“As soon as I get out of this infernal tangle, I’ll give you a cuff you won’t soon forget,” Longmore said. “Cousin, will you give him a firm thump or something to stifle him in the meantime?”
“I don’t think we should take him to the police,” she said. “I think we should take him with us.”
Longmore and the boy reacted simultaneously.
The boy: “Nooooo!”
Longmore: “Are you drunk?”
“No, you don’t,” the boy said. “I ain’t going nowhere with you. I got friends, and they’ll come any minute now. Then you’ll be sorry. And I think my chest’s got a rib broke from being bent like this.”
“Stifle it,” Longmore told the boy. He needed a clear head to find his way through Sophy’s rabbit warren of a mind. He couldn’t do that and translate the boy’s deranged version of English at the same time.
To Sophy he said, “What exactly do you propose to do with him?”
“He’s wonderfully quick,” she said. “He could be useful. For our mission.”
Occupied with horses and traffic, Longmore could give the urchin no more than a swift survey. He looked to be about ten or eleven years old, though it was hard to tell with children of the lowest classes. Some of them looked eons older than they were, while others, small from malnourishment, seemed younger. This boy was fair-haired under his shabby cap, and while his neck was none too clean, he wasn’t an inch thick with filth as so many of them were. His clothes were worn and ill-fitting but mended and only moderately grimy.
“I don’t see what use he’d be to anybody, unless someone was wanted to pick pockets,” he said.
“He could hold the horses,” she said.
“Could he, indeed?” he said. “You suggest I put my cattle in charge of a sneaking little thief?”
The boy went very still.
“Who better to keep a sharp eye out, to watch who comes and goes, to give the alarm if trouble comes?” she said.
The mad thing was, she had a point.
“You don’t know the brat from Adam,” he said. “For all we know, he’s a desperado wanted by the police, and due to be transported on Monday. He tried to steal my watch. And climbed up behind the carriage to do it! That wants brass, that does—or something gravely amiss in the attic—and if you think I’m leaving a prime pair of horseflesh in the grubby hands of Mad Dick Turpin here, I suggest you think again. And take something for that brain injury while you’re about it.”
“Oy!” the boy said indignantly. “I ain’t no horse thief.”
“Merely a pickpocket,” Longmore said, egging him on.
“What’s your name?” Sophy said.
“Ain’t got one,” the boy said. “Saves trouble, don’t it?”
“Then I shall call you Fenwick,” she said.
“What?”
“Fenwick,” she said. “If you don’t have a name, I’ll give you one, gratis.”
“Not that,” the boy said. “That’s a ‘orrible name.”
“Better than nothing,” she said.
“I say, mister,” the boy appealed to Longmore. “Make her stop.”
Longmore couldn’t answer. He was working too hard on not laughing.
“That is not a mister,” she said. “That’s an actual lord whose pocket you tried to pick.”
“Yer lordship, make her stop. Make her stop breaking my arm, too. Which this is a monstrous female like nothing I ever seen before.”
Longmore glanced at Sophy. She was regarding the ghastly little foul-mouthed urchin, her expression speculative—or so it seemed. He couldn’t be sure. For one thing, he could spare only a glance. For another, the spectacles dimmed the brilliance of her eyes.
But he saw enough: the smile playing at the corner of her mouth, and the angle at which she held her head as she regarded the boy, like a bird eyeing a worm.
“Now you’re really in trouble, Fenwick,” he said. “She’s thinking.”
Sophy’s father had been a Noirot and her mother a DeLucey. Neither family could be bothered with charity, being too busy keeping one step ahead of the authorities.
Although Cousin Emma had taken in Sophy and her sisters and taught them a trade, they’d bounced back and forth for a time between parents and cousin. Their early life had not been sheltered. They’d learned how to survive on the streets. Among other skills, they’d learned to size up others quickly.
Sophy had seen and heard enough in a few minutes to understand that the lad was a rare find. With a very little training, this boy could be extremely useful. She was not going to let him be thrown into prison with ordinary criminals.
“We’re quite close to the Great Marlborough Street police office,” she said. “It would be no trouble to drop you there, Fenwick. Or, if you prefer, you could continue with us to our destination, and watch his lordship’s horses, and keep a sharp lookout.”
“And what would I be looking out for, I want to know,” the boy said.
“Trouble,” she said. “Do you think you can recognize it?”
“I haven’t the smallest doubt of his abilities in that regard,” Longmore said.
“If you do the job properly,” she went on, “I’ll see that you have a good dinner and a safe place to sleep.”
“Where, exactly, did you have in mind?” Longmore said.
“Don’t fret,” she said. “I wasn’t intending to foist him on you.”
“You certainly won’t foist him on yourself,” he said. “You don’t know a damned thing about him. He’s probably crawling with lice—”
“That’s slander, that is!” the boy cried.
“Sue me,” said Longmore.
“Don’t think I won’t,” the boy said. “There’s no more vermin on me than on you, yer majesty. I had a bath!”
“At your christening?” Longmore said. “But no, I forgot: You don’t have a name.”
“Fenwick’ll do,” the boy said. “She can call me Georgy Pudding Pie if she wants, if she gives me dinner and a bed like she says. But she won’t, will she?”
“Have you heard of the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females?” Sophy said.
The boy narrowed his eyes at her. “Yeah,” he said in wary tones.
“You know someone there, it seems,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m closely acquainted with the women in charge,” she said. She could hardly be more closely acquainted: She and her sisters had founded the organization last year. “If you know of that place, you know we don’t make empty promises.”
They’d reached Bedford Square. “Look here, Fenwick,” she said. “There’s the shop his lordship and I mean to visit.” She nodded toward Dowdy’s. “Do you know the place?”
“They makes clothes for the nobs,” he said. “A girl I know used to work there, but they was all let go for no reason.”
Sophy hoped the girl had gone to the Milliners’ Society. She and her sisters had better look into what had happened to Dowdy’s discharged seamstresses.
But one thing at a time.
“While his lordship and I visit the shop, you’ll mind the horses as well as the business of everybody about you,” she said briskly. “Give a long, sharp whistle to let us know if we’re about to be interrupted. Do the job satisfactorily, and I’ll do as I promised. Have we a bargain, Fenwick?”
“No tricks?” the boy said.
“No tricks?” Longmore echoed. “The brass of the brat!”
“Do I look like the tricky sort to you?” Sophy said.
The boy gave her a long, searching look. He spent some time peering into the tinted lenses. “Yes,” he said. “Not to mention you got a grip like a manacle.”
She smiled. “There, I knew you were a sharp one. But no tricks.”
She released his arm. He made a great show of massaging it, and checking for broken bones. He muttered about “mad gentry morts” and “bruiser lordships.”
“Never mind the grumbling,” Longmore said.
“I don’t mean to spend all day shopping with a female. Either you’ll do it or you won’t. Make up your mind. I don’t have time to dawdle here, palavering about it, all day.”
“Be yourself,” Sophy told Longmore when he joined her on the pavement after a lengthy conversation with Fenwick—about the horses, she supposed, and what would happen to the boy if he failed his assignment.
“Myself?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“I need you to be you,” she said. “Lord Longmore, Lady Warford’s eldest son. The son of Dowdy’s favorite customer.” That was why she’d had to pursue and enlist him. She had to save her shop, and that meant going into enemy territory, to find out what Maison Noirot was up against. The easiest and most effective way was to use him as part of her disguise. “No pretending required. Simply be you.”
“I need to pretend you’re Gladys.”
“I’ll seem so like her, you won’t have to pretend. Leave everything to me.”
“And if they chuck you out?”
“Be yourself,” she said. “Laugh.”
“If you were you, yes,” he said. “But Gladys is another story.” He frowned. “This is going to be confusing.”
“Not at all,” she said. “All you have to do is be you. Don’t think about it. It doesn’t need thinking.”
She marched toward the door in the determined way certain gauche misses did.
He moved smoothly ahead and opened it for her.
In her mind she became Cousin Gladys—plain and awkward and sensitive to slights. She marched inside. Mouth set, she looked about her, making it plain that she wouldn’t be easy to please. At the same time, though, she was still Sophy Noirot, evaluating her surroundings with an expert eye, and more than a little surprised … and troubled … at what she discovered.
Though no one could match Maison Noirot’s flair, someone had tried. The walls had been freshly painted pale peach, the trim a creamy yellow, and someone had given thought to a variety of colorful accents. That someone had taken the trouble to arrange the fabrics artistically. Some hung on large rings near the display windows. Others lay on counters, looking as though they’d only a moment ago been unfolded for a customer. A book of fashion plates lay open on a table, inviting perusal. Comfortable chairs stood in small clusters about the room, giving it the snug air of a private parlor. Tables next to them held men’s as well as ladies’ magazines.
The showroom, while not as obsessively clean as Maison Noirot’s, was much neater and less dingy than it used to be.
The explanation, Sophy saw, stood behind the counter.
Dowdy had hired a Frenchwoman. She was pretty and elegant and graceful. Her fair hair was arranged becomingly under a splendid lace cap.
Her poise didn’t falter although her welcoming smile did, a little, as she took in Sophy/Gladys. The woman’s light brown gaze turned with obvious relief to Longmore.
Subtle as the rebuff was, it wouldn’t be too subtle for a sensitive soul, as Sophy imagined Gladys to be. The Frenchwoman shouldn’t have given any sign of dismay. She should have looked as delighted to see her as she would be to see Queen Adelaide.
Many specimens as unpromising as the faux Gladys came into dressmakers’ shops. How one served them made all the difference in the world. The Frenchwoman seemed to see Lady Gladys Fairfax as an ordeal to endure, rather than as an exciting challenge, as Sophy and her sisters would view her. Their faces would have lit up when she stepped through the door.
“Mrs. Downes?” Sophy said.
“I am Madame Ecrivier, mademoiselle,” the Frenchwoman said. “Madame Downes is occupied at the moment, but I—”
“Occupied!” Longmore said, startling Sophy as well as Ecrivier. “Where in blazes would she be occupied if not in her own shop? This is her shop, I presume? It had better be. I had the devil’s own time getting here. Accident on Oxford Street and everybody stopping to gawk and slowing travel in three directions.”
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Loretta Chase
“You’ve appointed yourself my mistress!”Sophy is determined to make Maison Noirot London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it kills her. It’s been said she could sell sand to the bedouins, but waves of bad publicity after her sister’s scandalous marriage are tainting business, so she has little time for anything but work – especially not the flirtatious affections of reckless rake the Earl of Longmore.But when a disreputable admirer compromises Longmore's sister, Noirot's favourite patron, the runaway sibling must be found. There’s too much at stake for Sophy to let Longmore rush after them on his own. So together they make chase, but such close proximity can play havoc even with sworn adversaries…
She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked. She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalisingly unladylike.
‘I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,’ Clevedon was saying. ‘If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.’
‘Love,’ Longmore said. ‘Bad idea.’
Clevedon smiled. ‘One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,’ he said. ‘And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.’
‘Love will have its work cut out for it,’ Longmore said. ‘I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.’
‘Very possibly,’ Clevedon said. ‘Which will make it all the more amusing.’
LORETTA CHASE has worked in academe, retail and the visual arts, as well as on the streets—as a meter maid (aka traffic warden)—and in video, as a scriptwriter. She might have developed an excitingly chequered career had her spouse not nagged her into writing fiction. Her bestselling historical romances, set in the Regency and Romantic eras of the early nineteenth century, have won a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s RITA
.
Website: www.LorettaChase.com (http://www.LorettaChase.com).
Scandal Wears Satin
Loretta Chase
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_34fda9f4-9770-5caa-9d22-46262dc8e8e3)
This book was made possible by the support of: my insightful and inspiring editor, May Chen; my indefatigable agent, Nancy Yost; my witty and fashion-wise friend and blogging partner, Isabella Bradford, aka Susan Holloway Scott; my patient French adviser, Valerie Kerxhalli; my loyal, funny and crazy sisters, Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy; and, most especially, my brainy and brave husband, Walter, a hero every single day.
Table of Contents
Cover (#udcbc0918-6f04-5b22-a42d-f1167fde50d5)
Excerpt (#uf911357b-ae77-521f-a8d9-f8454266669c)
About the Author (#u79faa167-9fe1-53b0-a18b-e9a3f588312f)
Title Page (#uc6c39659-a351-5c0a-8466-81826e12b125)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_c7ba6544-8fba-5497-95d0-3060189cb147)
Prologue (#ulink_e114b75d-ea7e-52b0-8723-052b1c3ede03)
Chapter One (#ulink_bdeb2598-bf61-5d3d-8c2f-88029d6fa9e4)
Chapter Two (#ulink_f027f594-980e-54cf-b44f-50d27bb0afe1)
Chapter Three (#ulink_0162a3be-e6fc-527d-bb34-c3fca5c91e44)
Chapter Four (#ulink_34459944-6bb0-54e9-b80d-966284bc859a)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_aa8b68ff-fc62-5849-a51a-ff244c9f6ca7)
Observe his fierce, fighting-cock air; his coal-black gipsy curls; his aristocratic (not to call it arrogant) expression of countenance—never laid aside, whether he is smiling on a fair dame or frowning on a fawning dun.
—The Court Magazine,
“Sketches from Real Life,” 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835, early morning
The trollops knew how to throw a party.
On Wednesday nights, after dancing or playing cards with Society’s crème de la crème at Almack’s, London’s wilder set continued more eagerly to a very different assembly at the house of Carlotta O’Neill. On offer was a roulette table, along with other games of chance, as well as spicier games with the demireps who played ladies-in-waiting to London’s current queen of courtesans.
Harry Fairfax, Earl of Longmore, was on the scene, naturally.
Carlotta’s wasn’t the sort of place his father, the Marquess of Warford, would wish his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir to frequent, but heeding his parents’ wishes, Longmore had decided a long time ago, was the fast and easy route to murderous boredom.
He was nothing like his parents, on any count. He’d inherited not only his great-uncle Lord Nicholas Fairfax’s piratical looks—black hair, black eyes, and a tall, muscular physique usually associated with buccaneers—but Great-Uncle Nicholas’s talent for Doing What He Was Not Supposed To.
And so Lord Longmore was at Carlotta’s.
And she was draped over him, wafting waves of scent. And talking, unfortunately.
“But you’re intimately acquainted with them,” she was saying. “You must tell us what the new Duchess of Clevedon is really like.”
“Brunette,” he said, watching the roulette wheel spin. “Pretty. Says she’s English but acts French.”
“My dear, we could have found that out from the Spectacle.”
Foxe’s Morning Spectacle was London’s premier scandal sheet. The high-principled Marquess of Warford called it disgusting tripe, but he read it, as did everyone else, from London’s bawds and pimps on up to the Royal Family. Every detail it published regarding the Duke of Clevedon’s new bride had, Longmore knew, been artfully crafted by the bride’s fair-haired sister Sophia Noirot, evil dressmaker by day and Tom Foxe’s premier spy by night.
Longmore wondered where she was this night. He hadn’t spotted her at Almack’s. Milliners—especially slightly French ones—had as much chance of receiving vouchers to Almack’s as he had of turning invisible at will. But Sophia Noirot had her own mode of invisibility, and she was perfectly capable of inserting her elegantly curved body anywhere she pleased, in the guise of a temporary servant. That was how she dug up so much dirt for Foxe’s scandal sheet.
The roulette wheel stopped spinning, one of the fellows at the table swore, and the wench acting as croupier raked a pile of counters in Longmore’s direction.
He scooped them up and handed them to Carlotta.
“Your winnings?” she said. “Do you want me to keep them safe for you?”
He laughed. “Yes, m’dear, keep them safe. Buy yourself a bauble or some such.”
Her well-groomed eyebrows went up.
Until a moment ago, when visions of Sophy Noirot sashayed into his mind, he’d assumed what Carlotta had assumed: that he’d soon disappear with her into her bedroom. She was supposed to be in Lord Gorrell’s keeping, but he, while rich enough, wasn’t quite lively enough to keep Carlotta fully amused.
Dependent on an allowance and gambling winnings, Longmore probably wasn’t rich enough. But while he didn’t doubt he possessed the necessary stamina and inventiveness to hold her interest, it occurred to him now that she wasn’t likely to hold his for more than five minutes. Even by his careless standards, that hardly justified a large financial investment and the subsequent tedium of listening to his father rant about overspent allowances.
In other words, Longmore was tired of her already.
Not too long after abandoning his winnings, he took his leave, along with two of his friends and two of Carlotta’s maids of honor. They found a hackney and after a short discussion, set out for a gaming hell with a very bad reputation, in the neighborhood of St. James’s. There, Longmore could count on a brawl.
Bored with the conversation inside the coach, he turned to gaze out of the window at the passing scene. The sun rose early at this time of year, and though the window was dirty, he could see well enough. A drably dressed female carrying a shabby basket was hurrying along the street. Her pace and dress, along with the basket, made it clear she wasn’t one of London’s numerous streetwalkers but an ordinary female on her way to work at about the time her betters in the beau monde were going home from their parties.
She moved at a fast clip, but it wasn’t fast enough. A figure darted out of an alley, grabbed her basket, and knocked her into the street.
Longmore stood, put down the window, opened the carriage door, and jumped out of the moving carriage, deaf to his companions’ shrieks and shouts. After the first stumble, he quickly gained his balance, and charged after the thief. His prey was fast, darting this way and that. At a busier time of day, he would have soon shed any pursuer. But the hour was early, and hardly anybody stood in Longmore’s way. He wasn’t thinking, only running, in a blind fury. When the fellow sprang into a narrow court, Longmore never thought of ambush or danger—not that he’d care, had he thought about it.
The fellow was making for a door, and it opened a crack, its inhabitants expecting him, no doubt. Longmore got to him first. He grabbed the thief and dragged him backward. The door banged shut.
Longmore slammed him against the nearest wall. The man instantly crumpled and slid to the ground, dropping the basket. Though he couldn’t be much damaged—these villains didn’t break easily—he stayed where he was, eyes closed.
“I shouldn’t get up again in a hurry, if I were you,” Longmore said. “Filthy coward. Attacking women.” Longmore collected the basket and cast a glance round the court. With any luck, dangerous accomplices would hurry to their friend’s rescue.
But no luck. The area was quiet, though Longmore was well aware he was being watched. He sauntered out into Piccadilly.
He found the girl minutes later. She stood slumped against a shop front, weeping. “Never mind the bawling,” he said. “Here’s your precious goods.” He fished some coins from a pocket and thrust those and the shabby basket into her hands. “What in blazes was in your mind, rushing on blindly without minding your surroundings?”
“W-work,” she said. “I had to get to work … your lordship.”
He didn’t ask how she knew he was a lord.
Everybody knew the Earl of Longmore.
“Thieves and drunken aristocrats roaming the streets, looking for trouble, and you without a weapon,” he said. “What’s wrong with women these days?”
“I d-don’t know.”
She was shaking like a leaf. She was bruised and dirty from her fall in the street. She was lucky that none of the scores of drunken louts on their way home from their debauches had run her over.
“Come with me,” he said.
Whether too shaken to think or simply intimidated—he often had that effect, even on his peers—she followed him across the street to the hackney. His friends could have continued on: They were drunk enough. But they’d stopped to watch the fun.
“Everybody out,” Longmore said.
They made noises of protest but they staggered out of the vehicle, all staring at the drab female. “Not your type, Longmore,” Hempton said.
Crawford shook his head. “Standards dropping, I’m afraid to say.”
Longmore ignored them. “Where were you going?” he said to the girl.
She stared at him, then at his friends, then at the tarts.
“Never mind them,” he said. “Nobody’s interested in your doings. We only want to get on to the next party. Where do you want the driver to take you?”
She swallowed. “Please, your lordship, I was on my way to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females,” she said.
“There’s a mouthful,” Crawford said.
“I work there,” the girl said. “I’m going to be late.”
She gave Longmore the direction, which he relayed to the driver, with strict orders to take the girl to her destination in half the usual time, or Longmore would find him and give him an excellent excuse for moving slowly.
He helped the girl up into the coach, slammed the door on her, and waved the driver away.
He thought about milliners.
One milliner, actually, a blonde one.
Leaving his companions to find another hackney, he continued on foot, on his own, the short distance to St. James’s Street. To get to Crockford’s, he had to pass White’s Club on one side of the street, and a very little way farther down, Maison Noirot, lair of French dressmakers.
He passed the dressmakers’ shop, walking slowly. Then he paused and looked back, up at the upper storeys where, for reasons that eluded him, two of the three Noirot sisters still lived.
He continued to Crockford’s, where he proceeded to lose large sums for quite an interesting while before he started to win large sums.
When, after an hour or so of increasing boredom, he left Crockford’s, it was still prodigious early by Fashionable Society’s standards. Nonetheless, London was coming to life. People going up and down St. James’s Street: a few vehicles but mainly pedestrians. The shops hadn’t yet opened.
Maison Noirot, he knew, did not open until ten o’clock, though the seamstresses—a great parade of them these days—all marched in at nine.
Still, over the past few weeks he had acquired a general notion of Sophia Noirot’s habits.
He waited.
Chapter One (#ulink_19815f07-b174-59dd-bfd7-be828a8d0546)
For the last week, the whole of the fashionable world has been in a state of ferment, on account of the elopement of Sir Colquhoun Grant’s daughter with Mr. Brinsley Sheridan … On Friday afternoon, about five o’clock, the young couple borrowed the carriage of a friend; and … set off full speed for the North.
—The Court Journal, Saturday 23 May 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835
Waving a copy of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle, Sophy Noirot burst in upon the Duke and Duchess of Clevedon while they were breakfasting in, appropriately enough, the breakfast room of Clevedon House.
“Have you seen this?” she said, throwing down the paper on the table between her sister and new brother-in-law. “The ton is in a frenzy—and isn’t it hilarious? They’re blaming Sheridan’s three sisters. Three sisters plotting wicked plots—and it isn’t us! Oh, my love, when I saw this, I thought I’d die laughing.”
Certain members of Society had more than once in recent days compared the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot—which Sophy would make London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it killed her—to the three witches in Macbeth. Had they not bewitched the Duke of Clevedon, rumor said, he would never have married a shopkeeper.
Their Graces’ dark heads bent over the barely dry newspaper.
Rumors about the Sheridan-Grant elopement were already traveling the beau monde grapevine, but the Spectacle, as usual, was the first to put confirmation in print.
Marcelline looked up. “They say Miss Grant’s papa will bring a suit against Sheridan in Chancery,” she said. “Exciting stuff, indeed.”
At that moment, a footman entered. “Lord Longmore, Your Grace,” he said.
Not now, dammit, Sophy thought. Her sister had the beau monde in an uproar, she’d made a deadly enemy of one of its most powerful women—who happened to be Longmore’s mother—customers were deserting in droves, and Sophy had no idea how to repair the damage.
Now him.
The Earl of Longmore strolled into the breakfast room, a newspaper under his arm.
Sophy’s pulse rate accelerated. It couldn’t help itself.
Black hair and glittering black eyes … the noble nose that ought to have been broken a dozen times yet remained stubbornly straight and arrogant … the hard, cynical mouth … the six-foot-plus frame.
All that manly beauty.
If only he had a brain.
No, better not. In the first place, brains in a man were inconvenient. In the second, and far more important, she didn’t have time for him or any man. She had a shop to rescue from Impending Doom.
“I brought you the latest Spectacle,” he said to the pair at the table. “But I wasn’t quick enough off the mark, I see.”
“Sophy brought it,” said Marcelline.
Longmore’s dark gaze came to Sophy. She gave him a cool nod and sauntered to the sideboard. She looked into the chafing dishes and concentrated on filling her plate.
“Miss Noirot,” he said. “Up and about early, I see. You weren’t at Almack’s last night.”
“Certainly not,” Sophy said. “The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t make the patronesses give me a voucher.”
“Since when do you wait for permission? I was so disappointed. I was on pins and needles to see what disguise you’d adopt. My favorite so far is the Lancashire maidservant.”
That was Sophy’s favorite, too.
However, her intrusions at fashionable events to collect gossip for Foxe were supposed to be a deep, dark secret. No one noticed servant girls, and she was a Noirot, as skilled at making herself invisible as she was at getting attention.
But he noticed.
He must have developed unusually keen powers of hearing and vision to make up for his very small brain.
She carried her plate to the table and sat next to her sister. “I’m devastated to have spoiled your fun,” she said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I found something to do later.”
“So it seems,” Clevedon said, looking him over. “It must have been quite a party. Since you’re never up and about this early, I can only conclude you stopped here on your way home.”
Like most of his kind, Lord Longmore rarely rose before noon. His rumpled black hair, limp neckcloth, and wrinkled coat, waistcoat, and trousers told Sophy he hadn’t yet been to bed—not his own, at any rate.
Her imagination promptly set about picturing his big body naked among tangled sheets. She had never seen him naked, and had better not; but along with owning a superior imagination, she’d seen statues, pictures, and—years ago—certain boastful Parisian boys’ personal possessions.
She firmly wiped her mind clean.
One day, she’d marry a respectable man who would not get in the way of her work.
Not only was Longmore far from respectable, but he was a great thickhead who constantly got in one’s way—and who happened to be the eldest son of a woman who wanted the Noirot sisters wiped off the face of the earth.
Only a self-destructive moron would get involved with him.
Sophy directed her attention to his clothes. As far as tailoring went, his attire was flawless, the snug fit outlining every muscled inch from his big shoulders and broad chest and his lean waist and narrow hips down, down, down his long, powerful legs …
She scrubbed her mind again, reminded herself that clothing was her life, and regarded his attire objectively, as one professional considering the work of another.
She knew that he usually started an evening elegantly turned out. His valet, Olney, saw to it. But Longmore did not always behave elegantly, and what happened after he left the house Olney could not control.
By the looks of him, a great deal had happened after Olney released his master yesterday.
“You always were the intellectual giant of the family,” Longmore said to the duke. “You’ve deduced correctly. I stopped at Crockford’s. And elsewhere. I needed something to drive out the memory of those dreary hours at Almack’s.”
“You loathe those assemblies,” Clevedon said. “One can only assume that a woman lured you there.”
“My sister,” Longmore said. “She’s an idiot about men. My parents complain about it endlessly. Even I noticed what a sorry lot they are, her beaux. A pack of lechers and bankrupts. To discourage them, I hang about Clara and look threatening.”
Sophy could easily picture it. No one could loom as menacingly as he, gazing down on the world through half-closed eyes like a great, dark bird of prey.
“How unusually brotherly of you,” said Clevedon.
“That numskull Adderley was trying to press his suit with her.” Longmore helped himself to coffee and sat down next to Clevedon, opposite Marcelline. “She thinks he’s charming. I think he’s charmed by her dowry.”
“Rumor says he’s traveling up the River Tick on a fast current,” Clevedon said.
“I don’t like his smirk,” Longmore said. “And I don’t think he even likes Clara much. My parents loathe him on a dozen counts.” He waved his coffee cup at the newspaper. “They won’t find this coup of Sheridan’s reassuring. Still, it’s deuced convenient for you, I daresay. An excellent way to divert attention from your exciting nuptials.”
His dark gaze moved lazily to Sophy. “The timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t suppose you had anything to do with this, Miss Noirot?”
“If I had, I should be demanding a bottle of the duke’s best champagne and a toast to myself,” said Sophy. “I only wish I could have managed something so perfect.”
Though the three Noirot sisters were equally talented dressmakers, each had special skills. Dark-haired Marcelline, the eldest, was a gifted artist and designer. Redheaded Leonie, the youngest, was the financial genius. Sophy, the blonde, was the saleswoman. She could soften stony hearts and pry large sums from tight fists. She could make people believe black was white. Her sisters often said that Sophy could sell sand to Bedouins.
Had she been able to manufacture a scandal that would get Society’s shallow little mind off Marcelline and onto somebody else, Sophy would have done it. As much as she loved Marcelline and was happy she’d married a man who adored her, Sophy was still reeling from the disruption to their world, which had always revolved around their little family and their business. She wasn’t sure Marcelline and Clevedon truly understood the difficulties their recent marriage had created for Maison Noirot, or how much danger the shop was in.
But then, they were newlyweds, and love seemed to muddle the mind even worse than lust did. At present, Sophy couldn’t bear to mar their happiness by sharing her and Leonie’s anxieties.
The newlyweds exchanged looks. “What do you think?” Clevedon said. “Do you want to take advantage of the diversion and go back to work?”
“I must go back to work, diversion or not,” Marcelline said. She looked at Sophy. “Do let’s make a speedy departure, ma chère sœur. The aunts will be down to breakfast in the next hour or so.”
“The aunts,” Longmore said. “Still here?”
Clevedon House was large enough to accommodate several families comfortably. When the duke’s aunts came to Town on visits too short to warrant opening their own townhouses, they didn’t stay in hotels, but in the north wing.
Most recently they’d come to stop the marriage.
Originally, Marcelline and Clevedon had planned to wed the day after he’d talked—or seduced—her into marrying him. But Sophy and Leonie’s cooler heads had prevailed.
The wedding, they’d pointed out, was going to cause a spectacular uproar, very possibly fatal to business. But if some of Clevedon’s relatives were to attend the ceremony, signaling acceptance of the bride, it would subdue, to some extent, the outrage.
And so Clevedon had invited his aunts, who’d descended en masse to prevent the shocking misalliance. But no great lady, not even the Queen, was a match for three Noirot sisters and their secret weapon, Marcelline’s six-year-old daughter, Lucie Cordelia. The aunts had surrendered in a matter of hours.
Now they were trying to find a way to make Marcelline respectable. They actually believed they could present her to the Queen.
Sophy wasn’t at all sure that would do Maison Noirot any good. On the contrary, she suspected it would only fan the flames of Lady Warford’s hatred.
“Still here,” Clevedon said. “They can’t seem to tear themselves away.”
Marcelline rose, and the others did, too. “I’d better go before they come down,” she said. “They’re not at all reconciled to my continuing to work.”
“Meaning there’s a good deal more jawing than you like,” Longmore said. “How well I understand.” He gave her a wry smile, and bowed.
He was a man who could fill a doorway, and seemed to take over a room. He was disheveled, and disreputable besides, but he bowed with the easy grace of a dandy.
It was annoying of him to be so completely and gracefully at ease in that big brawler’s body of his. It was really annoying of him to ooze virility.
Sophy was a Noirot, a breed keenly tuned to animal excitement—and not possessing much in the way of moral principles.
If he ever found out how weak she was in this regard, she was doomed.
She sketched a curtsey and took her sister’s arm. “Yes, well, we’d better not dawdle, in any event. I promised Leonie I wouldn’t stay above half an hour.”
She hurried her sister out of the room.
Longmore watched them go. Actually, he watched Sophy go, a fetching bundle of energy and guile.
“The shop,” he said when they were out of earshot. “Meaning no disrespect to your duchess, but—are they insane?”
“That depends on one’s point of view,” Clevedon said.
“Apparently, I’m not unbalanced enough in the upper storey to understand it,” Longmore said. “They might close it and live here. It isn’t as though you’re short of room. Or money. Why should they want to go on bowing and scraping to women?”
“Passion,” Clevedon said. “Their work is their passion.”
Longmore wasn’t sure what, exactly, passion was. He was reasonably certain he’d never experienced it.
He hadn’t even had an infatuation since he was eighteen.
Since Clevedon, his nearest friend, would know this, Longmore said nothing. He only shook his head, and moved to the sideboard. He heaped his plate with eggs, great slabs of bacon and bread, and a thick glob of butter to make it all slide down smoothly. He carried it to the table and began to eat.
He’d always regarded Clevedon’s home as his own, and had been told he was to continue regarding it in the same way. The duchess seemed to like him well enough. Her blonde sister, on the other hand would just as soon shoot him, he knew—which made her much more interesting and entertaining.
That was why he’d waited and watched for her. That was why he’d followed her from Maison Noirot to Charing Cross. He’d spotted the newspaper in her hand, and deduced what it was.
By some feat of printing legerdemain—a pact with the devil, most likely—Foxe’s Morning Spectacle usually slunk onto the streets of London and into the newspaper sellers’ grubby hands not only well in advance of its competitors, but containing fresher scandal. Though many of the beau monde’s entertainments didn’t start until eleven at night or end before dawn, Foxe contrived to stuff the pages of his titillating rag with details of what everyone had done mere hours earlier.
This was no small achievement, even bearing in mind that “morning,” especially among the upper classes, was a flexible unit of time, extending well beyond noonday.
Curious about what was taking her to Clevedon House at this early hour, he’d bought a copy from the urchin hawking it on the next corner, and had dawdled for a time to look it over. By now familiar with Sophy’s writing, Longmore knew it wasn’t the sort of thing to take on an empty stomach. He’d persevered nonetheless. Though he couldn’t see how she could have had a hand in the Sheridan scandal, that was nothing new. She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked: She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalizingly unladylike.
“I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,” Clevedon was saying. “If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.”
“Love,” Longmore said. “Bad idea.”
Clevedon smiled. “One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,” he said. “And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.”
“Love will have its work cut out for it,” Longmore said. “I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.”
“Very possibly,” Clevedon said. “Which will make it all the more amusing.”
“You’ll have a wait,” Longmore said. “For the moment, Clara’s love life is the problem.”
“I daresay matters at home haven’t been pleasant for either of you, since the wedding,” Clevedon said.
Clevedon would know better than most. Lord Warford had been his guardian. Clevedon and Longmore had grown up together. They were more like brothers than friends. And Clevedon had doted on Clara since she was a small child. It had always been assumed they’d marry. Then the duke had met his dressmaker—and Clara had reacted with “Good riddance”—much to the shock of her parents, brothers, and sisters—not to mention the entire beau monde.
“My father has resigned himself,” Longmore said. “My mother hasn’t.”
A profound understatement, that.
His mother was beside herself. The slightest reference to the duke or his new wife set her screaming. She quarreled with Clara incessantly. She was driving Clara to distraction, and they constantly dragged Longmore into it. Every day or so a message arrived from his sister, begging him to come and Do Something.
Longmore and Clara had both attended Clevedon’s wedding—in effect, giving their blessing to the union. This fact, which had been promptly reported in the Spectacle, had turned Warford House into a battlefield.
“I could well understand Clara rejecting me,” Clevedon said.
“Don’t see how you could fail to understand,” Longmore said. “She explained it in detail, in ringing tones, in front of half the ton.”
“What I don’t understand is why she doesn’t send Adderley about his business,” Clevedon said.
“Tall, fair, poetic-looking,” Longmore said. “He knows what to say to women. Men see him for what he is. Women don’t.”
“I’ve no idea what’s in Clara’s mind,” Clevedon said. “My wife and her sisters will want to get to the bottom of it, though. It’s their business to understand their clients, and Clara’s special. She’s their best customer, and she shows Marcelline’s designs to stunning advantage. They won’t want her to marry a man with pockets to let.”
“Are they in the matchmaking line as well, then?” Longmore said. “If so, I wish they’d find her someone suitable, and spare me these dreary nights at Almack’s.”
“Leave it to Sophy,” Clevedon said. “She’s the one who goes to the parties. She’ll see what’s going on, better than anybody.”
“Including a great deal that people would rather she didn’t see,” Longmore said.
“Hers is an exceptionally keen eye for detail,” Clevedon said.
“And an exceptionally busy pen,” Longmore said. “It’s easy to recognize her work in the Spectacle. Streams of words about ribbons and bows and lace and pleats here and gathers there. No thread goes unmentioned.”
“She notices gestures and looks as well,” Clevedon said. “She listens. No one’s stories are like hers.”
“No question about that,” Longmore said. “She’s never met an adjective or adverb she didn’t like.”
Clevedon smiled. “That’s what brings in the customers: the combination of gossip and the intricate detail about the dresses, all related as drama. It has the same effect on women, I’m told, as looking at naked women has on men.” He tapped a finger on the Spectacle. “I’ll ask her to keep an eye on Clara. With two of you on watch, you ought to be able to keep her out of trouble.”
Longmore had no objections to any activity involving Sophy Noirot.
On the contrary, he had a number of activities in mind, and joining her in keeping an eye on his sister would give him a fine excuse to be underfoot—and with any luck, under other parts as well.
“Can’t think of a better woman for the job,” Longmore said. “Miss Noirot misses nothing.”
In his mind she was Sophy. But she’d never invited him to call her by the name all her family used. And so, even with Clevedon, good manners dictated that Longmore use the correct form of address for the senior unmarried lady of a family.
“With you and Sophy standing guard, the lechers and bankrupts won’t stand a chance,” Clevedon said. “Argus himself couldn’t do better.”
Longmore racked his brain. “The dog, you mean?”
“The giant with extra eyes,” Clevedon said. “ ‘And set a watcher upon her, great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way,’ “ he quoted from somewhere. “ ‘And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.’ “
“That strikes me as excessive,” Longmore said. “But then, you always were romantic.”
A week later
Warford, how could you?”
“My dear, you know I cannot command his majesty—”
“It is not to be borne! That creature he married—presented at Court!—at the King’s Birthday Drawing Room!—as though she were visiting royalty!”
Longmore was trapped in a carriage with his mother, father, and Clara, departing St. James’s Palace. Though court events bored him witless, he’d attended the Drawing Room, hoping to spot a certain uninvited attendee. But he’d seen only Sophy’s sister—the “creature” his mother was in a snit about. Then he’d debated whether to sneak out or to hunt for an equally bored wife or widow. The palace was well supplied with dark corners conducive to a quick bout of fun.
No luck with the females. The sea of plumes and diamonds held an overabundance of sanctimonious matrons and virgins. Virgins were what one married. They weren’t candidates for fun under a staircase.
“Odd, I agree,” Lord Warford said carefully. Though he’d given up being outraged about Clevedon’s marriage, he’d also long ago given up trying to reason with his wife.
“Didn’t seem odd to me,” Longmore said.
“Not odd!” his mother cried. “Not odd! No one is presented at the King’s Birthday Drawing Room.”
“No one but foreign dignitaries,” Lord Warford said.
“It was a shocking breach of etiquette even to request an exception,” Lady Warford said, conveniently forgetting that she’d told her husband to commit a shocking breach of etiquette by telling the King not to recognize the Duchess of Clevedon.
But it was up to the husband, not the son, to point this out, and years of marriage had taught Lord Warford cowardice.
“I could not believe Her Majesty would do such a thing, even for Lady Adelaide,” Mother went on. “But it seems I’m obliged to believe it,” she added bitterly. “The Queen dotes on Clevedon’s youngest aunt.” She glared at her daughter. “Lady Adelaide Ludley might have used her influence on your and your family’s behalf. But no, you must be the most ungrateful, undutiful daughter who ever lived. You must jilt the Duke of Clevedon!”
“I didn’t jilt him, Mama,” Clara said. “One cannot jilt someone to whom one is not engaged.”
Longmore had heard this argument too many times to want to be boxed in a closed carriage, hearing it again, his mother’s voice going higher and higher, and Clara’s climbing along with it. Normally, he would call the carriage to a halt and get out, and leave everybody fuming behind him.
Clara could defend herself, he knew. The trouble was, that would only lead to more quarreling and screaming and messages for him to come to Warford House before she committed matricide.
He thought very hard and very fast and said, “It was clear as clear to me that they did it behind the scenes, so to speak, to spare your feelings, ma’am.”
There followed the kind of furiously intense silence that typically ensued when his parents were deciding whether he might, against all reason and evidence, have said something worth listening to.
“What with the aunts and all, the Queen would be in a fix,” he went on. “She could hardly snub Clevedon’s whole family—which is what she’d be doing, since the aunts had accepted his bride.”
“His bride,” his mother said bitterly. “His bride.” She threw Clara the sort of look Caesar must have given Brutus when the knife went in.
“This way at least, the deed was done behind the scenes,” Longmore went on, “not in front of the whole blasted ton.”
While his mother stirred this idea around in her seething mind, the carriage reached the front of Warford House. The footmen opened the carriage door, and the family emerged, the ladies shaking out their skirts as they stepped out onto the pavement.
Longmore said nothing and Clara said nothing but she shot him a grateful look before she hurried inside after their mother.
His father, however, lingered at the front step with Longmore. “Not coming in?”
“I think not,” Longmore said. “Did my best. Tried to pour oil and all that.”
“It won’t end,” his father said in a low voice. “Not for your mother. Shattered dreams and wounded pride and outraged sensibilities and whatnot. You see how it is. We can expect no peace in this family until Clara finds a suitable replacement for Clevedon. That’s not going to happen while she keeps encouraging that pack of loose screws.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Make them go away, will you, dammit?”
Countess of Igby’s ball
Saturday 30 May 1835
One o’clock in the morning
Longmore had been looking for Lord Adderley for some time. The fellow having proven too thick to take a hint, Longmore had decided that the simplest approach was to hit him until he understood that he was to keep off Clara.
The trouble was, Sophy Noirot was at Lady Igby’s party, too, and Longmore, unlike Argus, owned only the usual number of eyes.
He’d become distracted, watching Sophy flit hither and yon, no one paying her the slightest heed—except for the usual assortment of dolts who thought maidservants existed for their sport. Since he’d marked her as his sport, Longmore had started to move in, more than once, only to find that she didn’t need any help with would-be swains.
She’d “accidentally” spilled hot tea on the waistcoat of one gentleman who’d ventured too close. Another had followed her into an antechamber and tripped over something, landing on his face. A third had followed her down a passage and into a room. He’d come out limping a moment later.
Preoccupied with her adventures, Longmore not only failed to locate Adderley, but lost track of the sister he was supposed to be guarding from lechers and bankrupts. This would have been less of a problem had Sophy been watching her more closely. But Sophy had her own lechers to fend off.
Longmore wasn’t thinking about this. Thinking wasn’t his favorite thing to do, and thinking about more than one thing at a time upset his equilibrium. At the moment, his mind was on the men trespassing on what he’d decided was his property. Unfortunately, this meant he wasn’t aware of his mother losing sight of Clara at the same time. This happened because Lady Warford was carrying on a politely poisonous conversation with her best friend and worst enemy Lady Bartham.
In short, nobody who should have been paying attention was paying attention while Lord Adderley was steering Clara, as they waltzed, toward the other end of the ballroom, toward the doors leading to the terrace. None of those who should have been keeping a sharp eye out saw the wink Adderley sent his friends or the accompanying smirk.
It was the crowd’s movement that brought Longmore back to his surroundings and his main reason for being here.
The movement wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t meant to be. Men like Longmore were attuned to it, though. He had no trouble recognizing the sense of something in the air, the shift in the attention in some parts of the room, and the drifting toward a common destination. It was the change in the atmosphere one felt when a fight was about to happen.
The current was sweeping toward the terrace.
His gut told him something was amiss. It didn’t say what, but the warning was vehement, and he was a man who acted on instinct. He moved, and quickly.
He didn’t have to push his way through the crowd. Those who knew him knew they’d better get out of the way or be thrust out of the way.
He stormed out onto the terrace. A small audience had gathered. They got out of his way, too.
Nothing and nobody obstructed his view.
Chapter Two (#ulink_378738ca-a34f-5e9e-b5e9-34f98973c8f3)
NEW STYLE.— DRESS-MAKING.—Madame and Mrs Follett beg to solicit the favours of those Ladies who have not (and to return thanks to those Ladies who have) given them a trial; the decided superiority of their style and fit blended with most moderate charges never fails to give satisfaction even to the most particular. —53 New Bond street London and Rue Richelieu à Paris.
Mem the Address.
—The Court Journal, Advertisements,
Saturday 28 March 1835
Adderley.
And Clara.
In a dark corner of the terrace.
Not so dark that Longmore couldn’t see Adderley clumsily trying to help his sister get her bodice back in place.
Her dressmakers had cut the neckline of her white gown indecently low, which had already allowed every gaping hound at the ball to see a bit of the lacy thing she wore underneath. In the process of groping her, however, Lord Adderley had pushed her dress sleeves and corset straps well down over her shoulders, practically to her elbows. By the looks of things, he’d contrived to loosen her corset as well.
When she slapped his fumbling hands away, Adderley moved in front of her to shield her, but he wasn’t big enough. A fair-haired, blue-eyed beauty Lady Clara Fairfax might be. Petite she was not. As a result, her expensive underwear—not to mention a good deal of skin not usually on public view—was on display for any gawker who happened to be in the vicinity.
That included the dozen or so who’d drifted out to the terrace and were now circling like vultures over the carcass of Lady Clara Fairfax’s reputation.
“Her maid will never get the creases out of those pleats,” muttered the maidservant standing beside Longmore.
In a distant corner of his mind he marveled at anybody’s noticing at such a moment something as trivial as wrinkles in Clara’s attire. In the same distant corner he knew there was nothing to marvel at, given the speaker: Sophy Noirot.
That was only a distant awareness, though. The main part of his mind heeded only the scene in front of him, one he saw through a curtain of red flames. “I’ll take the wrinkles out of him, the cur,” he growled.
“Don’t be an id—”
But he was already storming across the terrace, knocking aside any guests who got in his way—though most of them, seeing him coming, moved out of the way, and quickly.
He marched up to Adderley and punched him in the face.
* * *
“—iot,” Sophy finished.
She swallowed a sigh.
She should have held her tongue. She was supposed to be a maidservant, and menials did not call their betters idiots. Not audibly, at any rate.
But that was the trouble with Longmore. He got in the way of everything, especially clear thinking.
She pushed away the first, emotional reaction and summoned her practical side, the one Cousin Emma had cultivated. A cousin by marriage, Emma was nothing like Sophy’s vagabond parents. Emma was not a charming wastrel like her in-laws. She was a hardheaded, practical Parisian.
Practically speaking, this was a disaster.
Lady Clara was Maison Noirot’s most important customer. She bought their most expensive creations and she bought lavishly, in spite of her mother’s hostility. It was Lord Warford’s man of business who paid the bills, and his orders were to pay promptly and in full, not to make fine distinctions among milliners.
Lord Adderley was bankrupt, or very nearly so, thanks to the gaming tables.
If Lady Clara had to misbehave with somebody, Adderley wasn’t Sophy’s first choice. Of the Upper Ten Thousand, he came in at nine thousand nine hundred fifty six.
Had Longmore been more intelligent, less impetuous, and several degrees less arrogant, she would have counseled him not to go barging in and kill his sister’s lover. Since Lord Longmore qualified in none of those categories, she didn’t waste her breath pointing out that murder would only complicate the situation and leave Lady Clara’s reputation in ruins forever.
He was furious, and he needed to hit somebody, and Adderley deserved to be hit. Sophy was tempted to hit him herself.
This wasn’t the only reason she didn’t close her eyes or turn away.
She’d seen Longmore fight before, and it was a sight to make a woman’s pulse race, if she wasn’t squeamish, which Sophy most certainly wasn’t.
The blow should have dropped Lord Adderley, but he only staggered backward a few steps.
Tougher than he looked, then. Yet all he did was hold his ground. He offered no sign of fighting back. She couldn’t decide whether he was following some obscure gentlemanly code or he held strong opinions about keeping the general shape of his pretty face as it was and all his teeth in his head.
Longmore, meanwhile, was too het up to notice or care whether Lord Adderley meant to defend himself.
Once more he advanced, fists upraised.
“Don’t you dare, Harry!” Lady Clara cried. She pushed in front of her lover to shield him. “Don’t you touch him.”
Then she burst into tears—and very good tears they were. Sophy herself couldn’t have done better, and she was an expert. Crooning over her injured lover—who was on his way to a magnificent black eye, if Sophy was any judge—tears streaming down her perfect face, her creamy, amply-displayed bosom heaving, Lady Clara played her part to perfection.
Her ladyship would awaken, along with their baser urges, the sympathies of all the gentlemen present. The ladies, satisfied to have witnessed the downfall of London’s most beautiful woman, would allow themselves to feel sorry for her. “She might have had a duke,” they’d say. “And now she’ll have to settle for a penniless lord.”
Fashionable London still wasn’t tired of repeating bits of Lady Clara’s speech rejecting the Duke of Clevedon. One of the favorite bits was the concluding remark: Why should I settle for you?
For a moment, Lord Longmore looked as though he’d push his sister out of the way. Then he must have realized it was pointless. He rolled his eyes and sighed, and Sophy watched his big chest rise and fall.
Then he threw up his hands and turned away.
The crowd closed in, blocking Sophy’s view.
No matter. Any minute now, the Marchioness of Warford would get wind of her daughter’s lapse from virtue, and Sophy owed it to the Spectacle to be there when it happened. And at some point, she’d need to look more closely into a disturbing rumor she’d heard in the ladies’ retiring room.
It was going to be a long night.
She turned away to look for a discreet route to the other end of the ballroom. Unlike the men-servants, the maids were expected to remain inconspicuous. They were to keep out of the main entertainment rooms, and travel in the serving passages as much as possible or attend the ladies in the retiring rooms, where they repaired hems and stockings, ran back and forth for shawls and wraps, applied sal volatile to the swooners, and cleaned up after the excessively intoxicated.
She was deciding which of two doorways offered the best eavesdropping vantage point when Longmore stepped into her path.
“You,” he said.
“Me, your lordship?” she said, her tongue curling round the broad Lancashire vowels. She was aware she’d forgotten herself a moment ago and spoken to him as she normally did, but Sophy was nothing if not a brazen liar, like the rest of her family. She looked up at him, her great blue eyes as wide as she could make them, and as innocent of comprehension and intelligence as the cows she prided herself on imitating so well.
“Yes, you,” he said. “I’d know you from a mile away, Miss—”
“Oh, no, your lordship, it’s no miss but only me, Norton. Can I get you something or other?”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for playacting.”
“You’re going to get me into trouble, sir,” she said. She didn’t add, you great ox. She kept in character, and smiled brightly, opening her eyes wide and hoping he’d read the message there. “No dallying with the guests.”
“How the devil did he do it?” he said. “Why did she do it? Is she mad?”
Sophy scanned the area nearby. The guests were busy spreading the news of Lady Clara’s lapse from virtue. Lord Longmore, apparently, was not so interesting—or, more likely, he was alarming enough to discourage anybody from even looking at him in a way that he might not like. Since he’d made his state of mind perfectly clear to the company, no one owning a modicum of sanity would care to try his temper further at present. Everybody would take the greatest care to see nothing whatsoever of where he went or what he did.
She grabbed his arm. “This way,” she said.
If he’d balked, she would have had as much luck leading his great carcass along as she would a stopped locomotive.
But very likely the last thing he expected was to be hauled about by a slip of a female. Whether bemused or merely amused, he went along tamely enough. She led him into one of the serving passages. Since most of the servants were finding excuses to get near the principals of the scandal, she doubted anybody would wander through for a while.
Still, she looked up and down the passage.
Certain the coast was clear, she let go of his arm. “Now, listen to me,” she said.
He glanced down in a puzzled way at his arm, then at her. “Here’s one positive note. We’ve abandoned the Lancashire cow performance.”
“Have you any idea what would happen to me if I’m found out?” she said.
“What do you care?” he said. “Your sister married a duke.”
“I care, you—you great ox.”
His head went back a degree and his black eyebrows went up. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Yes,” she said between her teeth. “So don’t say anything more. Just listen.”
“Gad, we’re not going to discuss this, are we?”
“Yes, we are, if you want to help your sister.”
His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
“Believe me, I’m no happier about this recent turn of events than you are,” she said. “Have you any idea how bad this is for our business?”
“Your business,” he said.
He spoke quietly, but she knew he wasn’t calm. The violence he held in check vibrated in the atmosphere about him. She understood why people scrambled out of his way when he bore down on somebody or something.
Violence wouldn’t be useful at the moment. She needed to distract him—and for once, the truth would do well enough.
“Adderley is up to his neck in mortgages, and the moneylenders will own his first-, second-, and third-born,” she said. “Leonie can tell you to the farthing how much he’s worth, and if he’s worth a farthing, I’ll be amazed.”
“I know that,” he said. “What I want to know is how my sister ended up on the terrace with him. I know she’s naïve, but I never thought she was stupid.”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Sophy said. “I could have sworn she was only honing her flirting skills on him—on all of them. She’s never shown signs of favoring anybody.”
“You’re sure of this?” he said.
She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It boded trouble for Adderley. Much as she wished Adderley trouble, she couldn’t let Longmore break him into small pieces, as he so clearly wished to.
“I’ve heard he can be very winning,” she said. “And I know she’s been feeling—”
“Oh, good. We’re going to talk about feelings.”
If she’d had a heavy object near to hand, she would have hit him with it. He wouldn’t feel it, but the gesture would make her feel better.
“Yes, we are,” she said. “I’ll spare you all the complicated whys and wherefores and come to the point. Lady Clara is feeling a little rebellious, and I daresay she was waiting for a chance to do something naughty when her mother wasn’t looking. Apparently, Adderley saw his chance and turned a minor naughty into a major one. Apparently.” She frowned. There was something wrong with that scene. But she’d have to work it out later.
The priority was the man standing a few inches from her. He seemed to have stopped breathing fire.
“I’ll have to call him out, the swine,” he said. “Which means going off into some dismal wood at the crack of dawn. It’s the very devil on one’s boots, morning dew, not to mention the fuss Olney makes about gunpowder on my shirt cuffs.”
Sophy grabbed his lapels. “Listen to me,” she said.
He looked down at her hands in the same puzzled way he’d looked at his arm before.
But his lordship was not the world’s deepest thinker, and a great deal could be counted on to puzzle him. She gave his lapels a shake. “Just listen,” she said. “You can’t kill him in cold blood.”
“Whyever not?”
Ye gods grant me patience. “Because he’ll be dead,” she said as patiently as she could, “and Lady Clara’s reputation will be stained forever. Do not, I pray you, do anything, Lord Longmore. Leave this to us.”
“Us.”
“My sisters and me.”
“What do you propose? Dressing him to death? Tying him up and making him listen to fashion descriptions?”
“If necessary,” she said. “But pray, don’t trouble yourself about it.”
He stared at her.
“Whatever you do, do not injure, maim, or kill him,” she said, in case she hadn’t made everything perfectly clear. “The right uppercut was excellent. It expressed magnificently a brother’s outrage—”
“Did it, by Jove. You wouldn’t by any chance be composing your eulogy on my sister’s reputation? The one to appear in tomorrow’s Spectacle?”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will,” she said. “Better the devil you know, my lord. Only let me do what I can—and you go out and be all manly and protective of your womenfolk.”
“Ah.” His black eyes widened theatrically. “So that’s what I’m to do.”
“Yes. Can you manage it?”
“With one hand tied behind my back.”
“I beg you to do it the usual way,” she said. “Don’t show off.”
“Right.” He stood looking at her.
“Yes,” she said. “Time to go. Your mother will be getting the news any minute now if she hasn’t already.” She made a shooing motion.
He only stood, still looking at her in a very concentrated way, and she became aware of a heat and hurry within and a feeling of not being entirely clothed.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Not now.
“You need to go,” she said. She tried to give him a push.
It was like trying to push a brick wall.
She looked up at him.
“That tickles,” he said.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
He went.
Mere moments earlier, Longmore had been primed for murder.
Now he had all he could do not to laugh.
There Sophy was, in her demure housemaid’s dress, the wide-eyed, stupid look fading when she lost her patience and called him an ox.
Then the darling had grabbed his arm, trying to manhandle him. That was one of the funniest things he’d seen in a long time.
Leave this to us, she’d said.
Not likely, he thought. But if it pleased her to think so, he was happy to please.
In this agreeable state of mind he sought out his mother and sister. Finding them wasn’t difficult. All he needed to do was walk in the direction of the scream.
Only one scream before Lady Warford collected her dignity and swooned.
He arranged as graceful a departure as possible for his mother and sister. He acted all manly and protective, exactly as he’d been told to do.
He’d deal with Adderley later, he promised himself.
And then …
Why, Sophy, of course.
* * *
Warford House
Saturday afternoon
Clara, how could you!” Lady Warford cried, not for the first time. “That bankrupt!”
She lay on the chaise longue of her sitting room, a tray laden with restoratives on the table at her elbow.
Clara had far greater need for restoratives than her mother did. She wished she were a man, and could solve her problems the way men did, by getting drunk and fighting and gaming and whoring.
But she was a lady. She sat straight in her chair and said, “What sort of question is that, Mama? Do you think I humiliated myself on purpose?”
“You did what you ought not to have done on purpose,” Mama said. “Of that I have not the slightest doubt.”
It hadn’t seemed so very wicked at the time. Clara and Lord Adderley had been waltzing, and she’d felt dizzy. Too much champagne, perhaps. Or perhaps he’d steered her into too many turns. Or both. He’d suggested fresh air. And it was a thrill to slip out onto the terrace unnoticed. Then he’d said things, such sweet things, and he’d seemed so passionately in love with her.
And then …
Had she been alone at present, she would have covered her face and wept.
But that’s what Mama always did. She wept and screamed and fainted.
Clara sat straighter, hands folded, and wished she could climb out of the window and go far, far away.
The door opened and Harry came in.
She wanted to leap up and run at him the way she used to do when they were children and she was frightened or brokenhearted about this or that: A robin’s nest on the ground and the eggs broken. A sick puppy. An injured horse put down.
But they weren’t children, and Mama was already using all the hysteria in the room. Harry had enough to cope with.
“There you are, at last!” Mama cried. “You must fight Adderley, Harry. You must kill him.”
“That’s a bit sticky,” he said. “I saw Father as I came in. He told me the blackguard’s offered for Clara.” He walked to Mama and dropped a light kiss on her forehead. He straightened and said, “I should have killed him when I had the chance. But Clara got in the way.”
What choice had she? She’d been afraid Harry would kill Adderley—a man who hadn’t tried to fight back. It would be murder, and Harry would hang or have to run away and live in another country forever—all because she’d been silly.
It seemed more than likely she’d ruined her own life. She wasn’t about to destroy her brother’s as well.
“Mama, if Harry kills Lord Adderley, my reputation will be ruined forever,” Clara said steadily. “The only way to mend this is marriage. Lord Adderley’s offered and I’ve accepted and that is that.”
Harry looked at her. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Since Mama is too upset to stir, and I’m sure she isn’t ready to go out in public, in any event, I wish you would take me to buy my bride clothes.”
“Bride clothes!” Mama cried. “You think entirely too much about your clothes—and all the world knows too much about them. In my day, young ladies did not make public spectacles of themselves, advertising every stitch they wore. To have your chemisette described—in detail!—in a public journal, as though you were a courtesan or a banker’s wife! You ought to be sick with shame. But nothing shames you. Small wonder you behaved last night like a common trollop. I blame those French milliners. If you set foot in their shop again, I’ll disown you!”
“Gad, what difference does it make?” Harry said. “Unless Adderley meets with a fatal accident, she’ll have to marry him, like it or not. She might as well have some frocks she likes now, since she’s not likely to have many after the wedding.”
“Adderley may take her in her shift,” Mother said. “He’s no better than a fortune hunter, and a vile seducer in the bargain. Oh, that ever I should see this day! A fresh-minted baron—swimming in debt, thanks to the gaming tables—and his mother an Irish innkeeper’s daughter! When I think that she might have had the Duke of Clevedon!”
“I strongly advise you not to think about it,” Harry said. “They’d have made each other wretched.”
“And Adderley will make her happy?” Mama sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes.
“Clara will break him to bridle,” Longmore said. “And if she can’t cure his wild ways, who knows? Maybe he’ll ride into a ditch or get run over by a post chaise, and she’ll be a young widow. Do try to look on the bright side.”
He ought to know this wasn’t the best tack to take with Mama. She wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not, and that would only add irritation to the emotional stew.
Clara took a more effective route. “I wonder what Lady Bartham will say when she hears I’m to be sent away without a trousseau, without so much as a wedding dress,” she said.
Lady Bartham and Mama were ferocious social rivals. They pretended to be the dearest of friends.
A short, sharp silence followed.
After a moment, Mama sat up again. She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and said, “My own wishes cannot signify. We must consider your father’s position. I shall persuade him to let you have bride clothes.” She waved the handkerchief. “But not from those French strumpets! You’ll go to Mrs. Downes.”
“Downes’s!” Clara cried. “Are you delirious, Mama? She’s closed her shop.”
She caught her breath. She was supposed to be the calm one. She had to be, with a hothead brother and a hysterical mother. Luckily, her mother was too taken up with her own emotions to notice anybody else’s.
“That was only temporary,” Mama said. “She sent me a note yesterday, telling me she’s reopened, thank heaven. You’ll go to her. Your morals may be all to pieces, but you shall be clothed respectably.”
“Very well, Mama,” Clara said meekly.
Harry gave her a sharp look.
She gave him a warning one back.
Meanwhile, at No. 56 St. James’s Street, the sisters Noirot were staring in disbelief at a tiny advertisement.
Today’s Spectacle hadn’t arrived until some time after the shop opened. The morning being unusually busy, they hadn’t had time to do more than skim the papers.
At present, though, their more-than-competent forewoman, Selina Jeffreys, was on duty in Maison Noirot’s showroom.
Having adjourned upstairs to Marcelline’s studio, the three dressmakers huddled over her drawing table, gazes fixed on twelve lines of print in one of the Spectacle’s advertising pages.
Therein Mrs. Downes proclaimed herself delighted to announce that, having completed a short period of “refurbishment,” she had reopened her dressmaking establishment.
Sophy had got wind of it last night at the party. She’d mentioned it to her sisters. They’d all hoped it was merely the usual idle rumor.
They had quite enough trouble as it was.
“Curse her,” Marcelline said. “We should have been finished with her. She closed her shop. She said it was for repairs, but she dismissed her staff. I was sure she’d slither out of London like the viper she is.”
The viper was Hortense Downes, proprietress of the shop known at Maison Noirot as Dowdy’s. A few weeks earlier, she and one of her minions had brought them to the brink of ruin. But the sisters had played her own trick against her, thus exposing her to the world as a fake and a cheat.
Or so they’d thought.
Marcelline shook her head. “That business of stealing my designs ought to have finished her.”
“She’s blamed it on her seamstresses,” Sophy said. “She’s told her patrons she’s dismissed the lot and hired all new staff.”
“Plague take her,” Marcelline said. “Who knew that Hortense the Horrible was clever enough to recover her reputation?”
“It’s what I’d have done in her place,” Sophy said. “Blamed the help. Cleaned house. And made sure to tell my clients the ‘truth’ of how I’d been a victim of ungrateful employees. Then I’d send my customers personal notes in advance of the public advertisement.”
“This is very bad,” Marcelline said. She looked at her sisters. “How much business have we lost because of me?”
Sophy and Leonie looked at each other.
“I see,” Marcelline said. “Worse than I thought.”
“Lady Warford is a formidable social power,” Leonie said. “No one wants to shop at a place she’s blackballed.”
“But she dresses so ill!” Marcelline said.
“She doesn’t think so and nobody has the courage to tell her,” Sophy said. “Not that most of them are any more discerning than she is. They’re like sheep, as we all know. She’s a leader, and they follow the leader.”
“And she hates me,” Marcelline said.
“With a pure, white-hot hatred, the sort of feeling her kind more usually reserve for anarchists and republicans,” Sophy said.
Marcelline began to pace.
“It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if Lady Clara had got herself into trouble with the right man,” Leonie said. “She could become a fashion leader in her own right, and she’d help us build a clientele with the younger generation.”
“But she picked the wrong man,” Marcelline said. She returned to her drawing table, pushed the newspaper aside, took up her notebook, and began sketching, in strong, angry lines. “Tell me the truth, Leonie.”
“We’re facing ruin,” Leonie said simply.
No one said a word about Marcelline’s husband, who could buy and sell the shop many times over out of his pocket change.
They didn’t want to be bought.
This was their shop. Three years ago they’d come from Paris, having lost everything. They’d come with a sick child, a few coins, and their talents. Marcelline had won money at the gaming tables. That gave them their start.
Now she must feel as though she’d destroyed everything they’d worked for. All for love.
But Marcelline had a right to love and be loved. She’d worked so hard. She’d endured so much. She’d looked after them all. She deserved happiness.
“We’ve faced ruin before,” Sophy said. “This isn’t worse than Paris and the cholera.”
“We’ve survived a catastrophe here as well,” Leonie said.
“With Clevedon’s help,” Marcelline said. “Which we didn’t like accepting. But we agreed because we hadn’t any choice.”
“And we made sure it was a loan,” Leonie said.
“Which it now seems we can’t repay,” Marcelline said, her pencil still moving angrily. “We’re so far from repaying it that we’ll have to ask for another one. Or accept failure. Leonie was right, after all. We bit off more than we could chew.”
Weeks ago, when the Duke of Clevedon had found them these new quarters, Leonie had warned that they hadn’t enough customers to support a large shop on St. James’s Street.
“We always bite off more than we can chew,” Sophy said. “We came from Paris with nothing, and built a business in only three years. We set out to capture Lady Clara and we succeeded—although not quite in the way we intended. We wouldn’t be who we are if we acted like normal women. I don’t see why we should start acting normal now, just because our best customer made a mistake with a man, as most women do, or because her mother holds grudges. I for one am not going to lie down and surrender merely on account of a little setback.”
Marcelline looked up from her sketching and smiled, finally. “Only you would call impending ruin ‘a little setback.’ “
“The trouble with you is, you’re in love, and you feel guilty about it, which is perfectly ridiculous in a Noirot,” Sophy said.
“She’s right,” Leonie said. “You married a duke. You’re supposed to be thoroughly pleased with yourself. It’s a great coup. No one else, on either side of the family, has done it, to my knowledge.”
“Not only a duke, but stupendously rich,” Sophy said. “Your daughter has actual, genuine castles to play in.”
“So stop brooding,” Leonie said.
“I’m facing failure,” Marcelline said. “A gigantic, catastrophic failure—which that horrid Dowdy reptile will laugh at. That entitles me to brood.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sophy said. “She isn’t going to laugh, and we’re not going to fail. We’ll think of something. We always do.”
“We merely need to think fast,” Leonie said. “Because we’ve less than a month until quarter day.”
Midsummer: 24 June. When rents were due and accounts were settled.
Someone tapped at the door.
“What is it?” Marcelline called.
The door opened a crack, revealing a narrow slice of Mary Parmenter, one of their seamstresses. “If you please, Your Grace, mesdames. Lady Clara Fairfax is here. And Lord Longmore.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_cba7ad69-37f0-5dfe-b22f-614609730db6)
There is certainly some connexion between the dress and the mind, an accurate observer can trace some correspondencies; and the weak as well as the strong-minded never cease to be influenced by a good or bad dress.
—Lady’s Magazine & Museum, June 1835
It was sort of a brothel for women, Longmore decided.
The shop even had a discreet back entrance, reserved, no doubt, for high-priced harlots and the men who kept them.
A few minutes earlier, a modestly but handsomely dressed female had let them in that way and led them up a flight of carpeted and gently lit back stairs. Small landscape paintings and fashion plates from earlier times adorned the pale green walls.
He’d been in Maison Noirot’s showroom, but this was another world altogether.
The room into which the female had taken them looked like a sitting room. More little paintings on the pale pink walls. Pretty bits of porcelain. Lacy things adorning tables and chair backs. The very air smelled of women, but it was subtle. His nostrils caught only a hint of scent, as though a bouquet of flowers and herbs had recently passed through. Everything about him was soft and luxurious and inviting. It conjured harem slaves in paintings. Odalisques.
He was tempted to stretch out on the carpet and call for the hashish and dancing girls.
The door opened. All his senses went on the alert.
But it was only the elegantly dressed female carrying a tray. She set it upon a handsome tea table. Longmore noticed the tray held a plate of biscuits. A decanter stood where the teapot ought to be.
When the female went out, he said, “So this is how they do it. They ply you with drink.”
“No, they ply you with drink, knowing you’ll be bored,” Clara said. “Although I shouldn’t mind a restorative.” She flung herself into a chair. “Oh, Harry, what on earth am I going to do?”
Her face took on a crumpled look.
He knew that look. It augured tears.
He was taken completely unawares. She’d seemed perfectly well on the way here. Chin aloft and eyes blazing. He hadn’t been surprised when she told him to take her to Maison Noirot. The meek act with their mother hadn’t fooled him.
Clara was so angelically beautiful that people thought she was sweet and yielding. They mistook indifference for docility. She was the sort of girl who generally didn’t care one way or another about all sorts of things. But when she did care, she could be as obstinate as a pig.
Since the Noirot sisters had got their hooks in her, she’d become extremely obstinate about her clothes.
He beat down panic. “Dash it, Clara,” he said. “No waterworks. Say what’s the matter and have done.”
She found a handkerchief and hastily wiped her eyes. “Oh, it’s Mama. She wears on my nerves.”
“That’s all?” he said.
“Isn’t it enough?” she said. “I’m Society’s big joke and I’m about to marry in haste and my mother does nothing but tell me every single thing I’ve done wrong.”
“And this”—he swept his hand, indicating their surroundings—”will be one more thing.”
“What’s one more thing?” Clara said. “This, at least, will lift my spirits. Unlike a visit to that incompetent in Bedford Square Mama’s so irrationally devoted to.”
He’d taken her here because this was where she wanted to go … and it was where he preferred to go.
Maison Noirot was stupendously expensive, the proprietresses were seductresses (in the way of clothes) of the first order, it was extremely French, and, above all, it was Sophy Noirot’s lair.
If a man had to hang about a dressmakers’ shop, this was the place.
But there would be trouble at home for Clara. More trouble. “Our mother’s going to kick up a fuss,” he said. “And you’ll bear the brunt of it.”
“The clothes will be worth it,” she said.
And this would be her last chance for extravagance in that regard, unless he found a way to dispose of Adderley and restore Clara’s reputation at the same time.
He wasn’t sure Clara wanted Adderley disposed of, but if she didn’t she was either stupid or mad, which meant her wishes didn’t signify.
He must have frowned without realizing, because she said, “It’ll be fun for me, but I know you’ll be bored to death. You needn’t stay. I’ll take a hackney home.”
“A hackney?” he said. “Are you mad? I’d never hear the end of it.” He laid a limp wrist against his temple, pitched his voice an octave higher, and in the put-upon tone his mother had perfected said, “How could you, Harry? Your own sister, left to a dirty public conveyance? Heaven only knows who’s seen her, traveling the London streets like a shop clerk. I shall be ashamed to look my friends in the eye.”
From behind him came the rustling of petticoats—and a stifled giggle?
He turned, his pulse accelerating.
Three young women—one brunette, one blonde, one redhead—regarded him with expressions of polite interest. The two latter had large, shockingly blue eyes. Only in the eyes did he detect any sign of the amusement he’d thought he’d heard, and it wasn’t much of a sign.
It would be more accurate to say he detected it only in her eyes, since Sophy Noirot’s sisters might as well have been shadows or a Greek chorus—or window curtains, for that matter.
They were all very well, each entertaining in her own way, and all quite good-looking, if not great beauties.
But she cast the others into the shade.
Why, only look at her. Pale gold curling hair under the frothy lace cap. Enormous, speaking eyes of deepest sapphire. A haughty little nose. A plump invitation of a mouth. A sharp, obstinate little chin. Below the neck … ah, that was even better. Delicious, in fact, despite the lunatic clothing style deemed the height of fashion.
“Duchess,” Clara said, rising from her chair and curtseying.
“Pray don’t ‘Duchess’ me,” said Her Grace. “This is business. While on the premises, why do we not pretend we’re in France, where you’d address a duchess as madame, much as one addresses a modiste. Meanwhile, think of me simply as your dressmaker.”
“The world’s greatest dressmaker,” Sophy said.
“And that would make you …?” Longmore said.
“The other greatest dressmaker in the world,” Sophy said.
“Someone ought to explain superlatives to you,” he said. “But then, I’m aware that English isn’t your first language.”
“It isn’t my only first language, my lord,” she said. “Lefrançais est l’autre.”
“Perhaps someone ought as well to explain the meanings of only and first,” he said.
“Oh, yes, please do enlighten me, my lord,” she said, opening her extremely blue eyes very wide. “I never had a head for figures. Leonie always complains about it. ‘Will you never learn to count?’ she says.”
“And yet,” he began.
It was then he realized she’d drawn him away from his sister—who was moving with the other two toward another door.
“Where are you slipping off to?” he said.
“To look at patterns,” said Clara. “You’ll find it exceedingly tedious.”
“That depends,” he said.
“On what?” Sophy said.
“On how bored I feel.” He looked around. “Not much entertainment hereabouts.”
“Your club is only a few steps up the street,” Sophy said. “Perhaps you’d rather wait there. We can send to you when Lady Clara is done.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel I ought to hang about and exert a calming influence.”
“You,” Sophy said. “A calming influence.”
“Excitable women. Clothes. The possible rape and pillage of our father’s bank account. A man’s cool head seems to be needed.”
“Harry, you know Papa doesn’t care how much I spend on clothes,” Clara said. “He likes us to look well. And I know you don’t care what I buy. It was kind of you to take me here, but you needn’t watch over me. I’m perfectly safe.”
His gaze traveled over the three sisters, and lingered on Sophy. He thought hard and fast and picked his words carefully. “Very well. A man can think more clearly when he isn’t surrounded by women, and I need to create an alibi.”
She took the bait, her gaze sharpening. “Why?” she said. “Are you planning to murder somebody?”
“Not yet,” he said. “You won’t let me murder the bridegroom. No, I want an alibi for Clara, who isn’t supposed to be here.”
“Mama said I must go to Downes’s,” Clara said, “but Harry took pity on me.”
“I took pity on me,” he said. His gaze returned to Sophy. “I brought her here to prevent scolding, ranting, and sobbing, that’s all.”
“Then the least I can do in gratitude is give you an alibi,” Sophy said.
He could think of any number of pleasing acts of gratitude, but this would do for a start.
“Not too complicated,” he said.
She rolled her great blue eyes. “I know that.”
“I’m a simple man.”
“This is so simple, even a dolt could remember it,” she said. “When Lady Clara returns home, she’ll say that you were intoxicated and drove her here instead of to Downes’s, drunkenly insisting this was the place.”
“Oh, that’s perfect!” Clara said.
“That will do admirably,” he said. “She can say I stood over her and made her order sixty or seventy dresses, and a gross of chemises and …”
His mind went hazy then, and images of muslin and lace underwear strewed themselves about his brain, and somewhere in that dishevelment was a blue-eyed angelic devil, mostly unclothed. He waved a hand, waving the images away. Now wasn’t the time. He was only beginning his siege, and he knew—he could always tell—he faced a very tricky fortress. All sorts of hidden passages and diversions and booby traps.
But then, if it were easy, it would be boring.
He continued, “ … and all those other sorts of trousseau things. And when our mother regains consciousness, and demands that Clara cancel the order, Clara will appeal to our overly conscientious sire, who’ll say one can’t simply cancel immense orders on a whim.”
Sophy folded her arms. Something flickered in her blue eyes. Otherwise, her expression was unreadable. “Good,” she said. “Keep with that. Don’t embellish.”
“No danger of that,” he said. “At any rate, it’s easy enough to make it partly true. I’ve only to toddle into my club and drink steadily until you’ve finished bankrupting my father. Then, when I return Clara to Warford House, no one will have any trouble believing in my inebriated obstinacy.”
He sauntered out of the sitting room.
He walked to the stairs and started down.
He heard hurried footsteps and rustling petticoats behind him.
“Lord Longmore.”
She said his name as everybody else did, not precisely as spelled but in the way of so many ancient names, with vowels shifted and consonants elided. Yet it wasn’t quite the same, either, because it carried the faintest whisper of French.
He looked up.
She stood at the top of the stairs, leaning over the handrail.
The view was excellent: He could see her silk shoes and the crisscrossing ribbons that called attention to the fine arch of her instep and her neat ankles. He saw the delicate silk stockings outlining the bit of foot and leg on view. His mind easily conjured what wasn’t on view: the place above her knees where her garters were tied—garters that, in his imagination, were red, embroidered with lascivious French phrases.
For a moment he said nothing, simply drank it in.
“That was a beautiful exit,” she said.
“I thought so,” he said.
“I hated to spoil it,” she said. “But I had an idea.”
“You’re a prodigy,” he said. “First an alibi, then an idea. All in the same day.”
“I thought you could help me,” she said.
“I daresay I could,” he said, contemplating her ankles.
“With your mother.”
He lifted his gaze to her face. “What do you want to do to her?”
“Ideally, I should like to dress her.”
“That would be difficult, considering that she hates you,” he said. “That is, not you, particularly. But you as a near connection to the Duchess of Clevedon, and your shop as harboring same.”
“I know, but I’m sure we can bring her round. That is, I can bring her round. With a little help.”
“What do you propose, Miss Noirot? Shall I drug her ladyship and carry her, senseless, to your lair, where you’ll force her into dashing gowns?”
“Only as a last resort,” she said. “What I have in mind for you at present is quite simple—and no one will ever know you aided and abetted the Enemy.”
“This is London,” he said. “There’s no such thing as ‘no one will ever know.’ “
“No, really, I promise you—”
“Not that I care what anybody knows,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “I forgot. But I must not be recognized.”
“Does that mean a disguise?” he said.
“Only for me,” she said. “I need to visit Dowdy’s, you see, and—”
“And Dowdy’s is …?”
“The lair of the reptile, Horrible Hortense Downes, the monster who puts your mother into those dreary clothes. I need to get into her shop.”
In her world, he knew, clothes were the beginning and the end of everything, and worlds were lost on the wrong placement of a bow.
“You’re proposing a spying expedition behind enemy lines,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it exactly.”
“Are you going to blow up the place?”
“Only as a last resort,” she said.
He was quite happy to take her, even if she didn’t blow the place up. He’d be happy to take her anywhere. But his promptly agreeing meant her prompt departure and he wasn’t yet tired of looking at her ankles.
He pretended to ponder.
“It’s only for an hour or so,” she said. “That shouldn’t disrupt your busy schedule.”
“Ordinarily, no,” he said. “But I’ve got this Adderley problem to work on, and that wants deep and lengthy cogitation.”
“You do not have the Adderley problem to work on,” she said. “Did I not tell you my sisters and I would deal with it?”
“It’s not the sort of thing I want to leave to women,” he said. “It could get messy, and I’d hate to see your pretty frocks spoiled.”
“Believe me, Lord Longmore, my sisters and I have dealt with extremely messy situations before.”
He met her gaze. In those blue eyes he caught a glimpse of something, unexpected and hard. It was gone in an instant, but it set off a sharp recollection of the men who’d pursued her and emerged from the experience damaged.
There was more to her than met the eye: that much he’d recognized early on.
“Let me think it over,” he said. “Let me think it over in the cool depths of my club.”
He continued down the stairs.
Two hours later
From the environs of White’s famous bow window, where Beau Brummell had presided some decades earlier, a sudden buzz of excitement broke in upon a dull, drizzly afternoon. The noise gradually increased in volume sufficiently to obtain Lord Longmore’s attention.
He’d settled in the morning room with Foxe’s Morning Spectacle to review Sophy’s story about last night’s debacle. As regarded breathlessly dramatic style and fanatical attention to every boring inch of Clara’s dress, Sophy had outdone herself. Clara had been “innocence cruelly misled,” Longmore had appeared as a paragon among avenging brothers, and the dress description—dripping with an arcane French known only to women—took up nearly two of the front page’s three columns. Her account had routed from said page virtually all the other gossip Foxe called news.
Longmore had read it this morning after breakfast. He saw no more in it now than he had then. It was unclear what good the piece would do Clara—unless it was simply the first step in a campaign. If so, he looked forward to seeing where it would lead.
After chuckling over Sophy’s world’s-greatest-collection of adjectives and adverbs, he moved on to the other gossip and sporting news. Thence he proceeded to the advertising pages at the back.
There Maison Noirot had taken over prime real estate, squeezing into obscure corners the notices for pocket toilets, artificial teeth, and salad cream.
That was when he discovered Mrs. Downes’s announcement.
He was wondering about the connection between Sophy’s need to be taken to her rival’s shop and the advertisement when someone at the bow window said, “Who is she?”
“You’re joking,” someone else said. “You don’t know?”
“Would I ask if I knew?”
Other voices joined in.
“Hempton, you innocent. Have you been in a coma during the last month?”
“How could you not have heard about the Misalliance of the Century? They talk of it in Siberia and Tierra del Fuego.”
“But that can’t be Sheridan’s new bride.”
“Not the elopement, you slow-top.”
“You mean Clevedon?” said Hempton. “But he married a brunette. This one’s a blonde.”
Longmore flung down the Spectacle, left his chair, and stalked to the bow window.
“What now?” he said, though he could guess.
The men crowding the window hastily made room for him.
Sophy Noirot stood on the other side of St. James’s Street. A gust of wind blew the back of her pale yellow dress against her legs and made a billowing froth of skirt and petticoats in front. The wind made a complete joke of the lacy nothing of an umbrella she held against the rain. The previous downpour had diminished to a light drizzle, and the misty figure glimpsed between the clumps of vehicles, riders, and pedestrians seemed like something in a dream.
The commentary at the bow window, however, made it clear she was not a dream, except in the sense that she was, at the moment, the starring player in every man’s lewd fantasy.
Ah, she was real enough, wearing a scarf sort of thing that dangled to her knees—or where one assumed her knees must be, under all those yards of lace and muslin. Atop the golden hair perched a silly hat, dripping lace and ribbons and feathers. Longmore could see a sort of Dutch windmill arrangement of lace and feathers at the back of the hat when she bent to talk to a scruffy little boy. She gave him something, and he dashed across the street, dodging riders and vehicles.
Then she looked up, straight at the bow window and straight at Longmore.
And smiled.
Then all the men at the bow window looked at him.
And smiled.
And he smiled right back.
Longmore took his time. He finished his glass of wine, reread the advertisement, then called for his things.
He donned his hat and gloves, grasped his walking stick, and went out. The drizzle had dwindled to a fine mist and the wind had died down somewhat.
She had walked a little way up the street. She was watching the passing scene on Piccadilly. Every passing male was watching her.
He coolly descended the steps and strolled across the street to her.
“I should have thought you’d find an urchin nearer the shop to carry the message that my sister was ready to go home,” he said. “Or why not send a servant or a seamstress? You had to come yourself? In the rain?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I collect you had something particular to say to me, then,” he said.
“I daresay I could have said it elsewhere,” she said. “But this was a fine opportunity to show off my hat, which is my own design. I’m not a genius with dresses, like Marcelline, but my hats are quite good.”
He eyed the hat, with its lace and windmill and whatnot. “It strikes me as demented,” he said. “But fetching.”
She dimpled, and his heart gave a lurch that astonished him.
“I sincerely hope it’s fetching enough to weaken your resistance,” she said.
“What resistance?” he said.
“To my scheme.”
“Oh, that. Taking you to Dowdy’s.”
“I need to find out what they’re up to.”
“I should think that was obvious,” he said. “They’re out to crush the competition, as any self-respecting rival would do.”
He started walking down St. James’s Street, wondering what devious means she’d contrived to persuade him to do what he was going to do anyway.
She walked alongside him. “I know that,” she said. “But I need to see exactly what we’re up against: the old Dowdy’s or something new, something we hadn’t reckoned on. I need to see whether the place is the same and the clothes are the same.”
“I suppose you’ll be shocked if I say that all women’s clothes look the same to me,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be shocked at all,” she said. “You’re a man. And that’s the point of my asking you. I need a big, strong man in case I’m discovered, and run into difficulties with Dowdy’s bullies.” She paused briefly. “While we were fitting your sister, she happened to mention Lady Gladys Fairfax, and what a pity it was that we couldn’t take her in hand,” she said.
“Cousin Gladys,” he said. “Don’t tell me she’s coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t know who’ll be invited,” she said. “But when Lady Clara spoke of her, I got the idea for a way to manage this.”
They’d reached the corner of Bennet Street. He paused to check for carriages and riders turning off St. James’s Street.
When the way seemed clear, he took her elbow and hurried her across. As soon as they reached the pavement on the opposite side, he let go of her. He still felt the warmth of her arm under his palm, and the warmth raced straight to his groin so suddenly that it made him dizzy.
The rear entrance to the shop was through a narrow court off Bennet Street. She waited until they’d turned into the court. Then she said, “Lady Clara says your mother will go to Dowdy’s early in the week to order a dress for the wedding. Leonie can spare me from the shop most easily on Friday morning. Would you take me then?”
After the bustle of St. James’s Street, the tiny court seemed eerily quiet. He was aware of a scent, vaguely familiar, drifting about him. He drew a fraction closer and stared at the discreet door, pretending to think hard while he drank in the scent. Woman, of course, and … lavender … and what else?
He realized his head was sinking toward her neck. He straightened. “Bullies,” he said. “In a dressmaking shop.”
“Two great brutes,” she said. “To deal with the drunks and thieves. Or so Dowdy claims. Personally, I believe she’s hired the men to intimidate the seamstresses. You know, the way they keep them in brothels to—”
“That sounds like fun,” he said. “And you’ll be in disguise, of course.”
“Yes.”
“As a serving maid, I suppose.”
“Certainly not,” she said. “What would a serving maid be doing buying expensive dresses? I’m going to be your cousin Gladys.”
Lord Adderley wasted no time in putting the notice of his engagement in the papers, but the news traveled through London in a matter of hours—faster even than the Spectacle could get it into print. By Monday his tailor, boot maker, hatter, vintner, tobacconist, and others who provided for his comfort and entertainment had once again opened their account books and allowed him credit.
He’d had a narrow escape.
Another week and he would have had to flee abroad. While peers could not be arrested for debt, they weren’t immune to other unpleasantness, like having their credit shut off. All of his creditors seemed to have joined a cabal, because every single one, including all the shopkeepers, cut him off at the same time, two days before Lady Igby’s ball.
The forthcoming nuptials put everybody in a more forgiving frame of mind.
He celebrated on Monday night with Mr. Meffat and Sir Roger Theaker in a private dining parlor of the Brunswick Hotel. They toasted one another throughout the meal. By the time the table had been cleared, wine had loosened their tongues—no matter, since there was nobody nearby to hear.
“A close-run thing it was,” said Sir Roger.
“Perilously close,” said Lord Adderley.
“Wasn’t sure you’d manage it,” said Mr. Meffat. “Watching like hawks, they were.”
Lord Adderley shrugged. “As soon as I saw Lady Bartham settle in to gossip with the mama, I knew there wouldn’t be trouble from that quarter for a while.”
“It was Longmore who worried me,” said Mr. Meffat.
Adderley resisted the urge to feel his bruised jaw. He’d had more reason than anybody to worry. He’d broken into a sweat, which he’d explained away to Lady Clara as excitement, to be so close to her, to hold her in her arms—all the usual rubbish, in other words.
He said, “I only needed a few minutes, and he was on the other side of the room. Still, it was your quick acting that saved the day.”
It was Meffat’s and Theaker’s job to attract attention to the terrace without attracting too much attention. Not the most difficult job in the world. One only had to say, “Wonder what Adderley’s about on the terrace? Who’s the female with him?”
One didn’t have to say it to too many people. One or two would do. The drift terrace-wards would begin, and some others would notice, and follow, curious to see what was attracting attention.
Clara had been easiest of all to manage. Though no schoolroom miss—she was one and twenty, older than Adderley would have preferred—she was as ignorant about lovemaking as a child. All he had to do was keep her wineglass filled and whirl her about the floor until she was dizzy and whisper poetry in her ear. Still, one had to be careful. Too much wine and too much spinning and she’d be sick—on his last good coat.
“At least you got yourself a beauty,” Theaker said. “Mostly, when their pa sets a big dowry on them, it’s on account of being squinty or spotty or bowlegged.”
“What he means is, mostly, they’re dogs,” Meffat said.
“I’m fortunate,” Adderley said. “I know that. I might have done so much worse.”
She was a beauty, and that would make the bedding and getting of heirs more agreeable. Still, she wasn’t to his taste, a great cow of a girl. He liked daintier women, and he would have preferred a brunette.
But her dowry was enormous, she’d been vulnerable, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Bless her innocence,” said Theaker. “She went just like a lamb.”
“There’s one won’t give you any trouble,” said Meffat.
* * *
Warford House
Wednesday 3 June
Clara kept her composure until she’d closed her bedroom door behind her.
She swallowed, walked quickly across the room, and sat at her dressing table.
“My lady?” said her maid, Davis.
A sob escaped Clara. And another.
“Oh, my lady,” said Davis.
“I don’t know what to do!” Clara buried her face in her hands.
“Now, now, my lady. I’ll make you a good, hot cup of tea and whatever it is, you’ll feel better.”
“I need more than tea,” Clara said. She looked up to meet Davis’s gaze in the mirror.
“I’ll put a drop of brandy in it,” said Davis.
“More than a drop,” Clara said.
“Yes, my lady.”
Davis hurried out.
Clara took out the note Lord Adderley had sent her.
A love note, filled with beautiful words, the kinds of words sure to melt the heart of a romantic girl.
Of course the words were beautiful. They’d been written by poets: Keats and Lovelace and Marvell and scores of others. Even Shakespeare! He thought she wouldn’t recognize lines from a Shakespeare sonnet! Either he was a complete idiot or he thought she was.
“The latter, most likely,” she muttered. She crumpled the note and threw it across the room. “Liar,” she said. “It was all lies. I knew it. How could I be such a fool?”
Because Mr. Bates had not asked her to dance, and she’d watched him whirl Lady Susan Morris, Lady Bartham’s daughter, about the floor. Lady Susan was petite and dark and pretty, and next to her Clara always felt ungainly and awkward.
Then what?
A moment’s hurt. Then Lord Adderley was at her elbow, with a glass of champagne, and a perfect remark, sure to make her smile.
Irish blarney, Mama would have said.
Maybe that’s what it was. Or maybe it was like the beautiful words he wrote, stolen from gifted writers. False, either way.
Champagne and waltzing and flattery, and Clara had taken the bait.
And now …
What to do?
She rose and walked to the window and looked out. In the garden below, the rain was beating the shrubs and flowers into submission. If she’d been a man—if she’d been Harry—she’d have climbed out and run away, as far as she could go.
But she wasn’t a man, and she had no idea how to run away.
Time, she thought. Her only hope was time. If they could drag out the engagement for months and months, a new scandal would come along, and everybody would forget this one.
Davis entered with the tea. “I put in a few extra drops, but you’ll need to drink it quickly,” she said. “Lady Bartham’s called, and Lady Warford said you’re to come straightaway.”
“Lady Bartham,” Clara said. “That wants more than a few drops. That wants a bottle.”
She swallowed her brandy-laced tea, put on her company face, and went down to the drawing room.
The visit was even worse than anticipated. Lady Bartham was so sympathetically venomous that she left Clara half blind with rage and Mama with a sick headache.
The next morning, Mama announced that she was sick to death of this ghastly engagement and everybody’s insinuations. They would consult the calendar and fix a date for the wedding.
“Yes, of course, Mama,” Clara said. “In the autumn, perhaps. Town won’t be so busy then.”
“Autumn?” Mama cried. “Are you mad? We’ve not a moment to lose. You must be married before the end of the Season—before the Queen’s last Drawing Room at the latest.”
“Mama, that’s only three weeks!”
“It’s sufficient time to arrange a wedding, even a large one—and a small one is out of the question. You know what people will say. And if those wicked French dressmakers Harry took you to can’t finish your bride clothes on time, it is too bad. It is not my fault if my children disobey me at every turn.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_10235203-9b21-5113-a563-44f0be26e0d4)
Now, thanks to steam-presses, steam-vessels, and steam-coaches, the prolific brain of a French dress-maker or milliner has hardly given a new cap of trimming to the Parisian élégantes, before it is also in possession of the London belles.
—La Belle Assemblée, March 1830
Friday 5 June
Longmore transferred the reins to one hand and with his other took out his pocket watch. He flicked it open.
Eleven o’clock, she’d said. In the morning—because the fashionable aristocrats shopped in the afternoon, and she had to get there before they did.
“It’s important to arrive before Dowdy’s favorite customers do,” Sophy had told him. “Shopkeepers like that will fawn over the great ladies with the heavy purses and pass off dull rustic misses to lowly assistants. It would be truly useful to see the pattern for your mother’s dress, since she’s one of their most important customers. That means I can’t be passed off to an assistant. It has to be Horrible Hortense herself or her forewoman.”
It was exactly eleven o’clock. Longmore looked up at the sky. Cloudy, but not threatening rain as his tiger, Reade, had insisted. Reade had not been happy about having to remain behind. If it rained—as he assured his lordship it would surely do—his lordship would need help raising the curricle’s hood.
Well, then, they’d simply have to get wet, Longmore decided. While convenient for minding horses and helping one wrestle temperamental hoods, on the present occasion a groom would be very much in the way.
Longmore put the watch away and reverted to staring at the shop door. She’d told him to collect her, not at Maison Noirot, but at the ribbon shop farther down St. James’s Street, near St. James’s Palace. To Allay Suspicion.
She was hilarious.
“Cousin?” said a familiar female voice.
He blinked. It was Sophy’s voice and it wasn’t. He knew this had to be her but his eyes denied it. The woman standing on the pavement next to his carriage was so nondescript that he’d probably been looking straight at her without actually seeing her.
The murky brown cloak concealed her shape. The muddy green bonnet and lace cap underneath concealed most of her hair. What was visible was limp, dull, and stringy. She’d sprouted a mole to one side of her perfect nose. And on that nose she’d planted a pair of tinted spectacles, which dulled her brilliant blue eyes to cloudy grey.
He was aware of his jaw dropping. He quickly collected himself. “There you are,” he said.
“You’d have seen me sooner if you hadn’t been woolgathering,” she said, as shrewish as Gladys—and in the same graceless accents. She climbed up into the vehicle as clumsily as his cousin would have done.
If he didn’t know better, he’d have been sure this was his cousin, playing a trick on him.
But Cousin Gladys didn’t play tricks. She had no imagination.
“How did you do it?” he said. “You can’t have met her. She hasn’t left Lancashire in ages.”
“Lady Clara is a fair mimic,” she said, “and it was easy enough to classify the type. We do that, you know: We size up a woman when she walks into the shop. Broadly speaking, they tend to fall into certain categories.”
“Gladys is a type? I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always thought her one of a kind, and that one more than sufficient.”
He gave his horses leave to walk on, then he had to keep his attention on them. Though he’d driven them through Hyde Park to work off their morning high spirits, they were still excitable. Apparently they were as little used as he was to traveling the shopping streets in the early hours with ordinary folk. Whatever the reason, they were looking for trouble: They tried to lunge at other vehicles, run onto the pavement, take aim at passing pedestrians, and bite any other horses who looked at them the wrong way.
Normally, he’d find this entertaining.
Today it was inconvenient. He had a campaign to conduct with the woman beside him, and she was tricky and he needed his wits about him. At present, however, he had to concentrate his wits on getting them to Piccadilly alive. Then he had to wrestle his way through the great knot of traffic approaching the quadrant into Regent Street.
“What the devil are all these people doing out in the streets at the crack of dawn?” he said.
“They heard the Earl of Longmore would be up and about before noon,” she said. “I believe they mean to mark the event with illuminations and fireworks.”
He’d been driving since childhood, and he couldn’t remember when last he’d had to work so hard at it.
“I think you’re frightening the horses,” he said.
“I think they’re not used to busy streets in daylight,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the mole that’s bothering them,” he said. Or maybe it was her scent. It wasn’t Gladys’s. This was so faint as to be more of an awareness than a fragrance: Woman and jasmine and something else. Some kind of herb or greenery.
No, the scent wasn’t bothering the horses. It was getting him into a lather he couldn’t do anything about at the moment. That wasn’t the only disturbance. He was extremely aware of her swollen skirts brushing against his trouser leg, and he could hear the petticoats rustle under the skirts. It was as clear as clear to him, above the street’s cacophony of animals, vehicles, people.
He was primed for tackling her and he couldn’t, and the horses sensed the agitation.
It was so ridiculous he laughed.
“What is it?” she said.
He glanced at her. “You,” he said. “And me, up at this hour to drive to a dressmaker’s shop.”
“I know you rise before noon on occasion,” she said.
“Not to shop,” he said.
“No. For a race. A boxing match. A wrestling match. A horse auction. I’m not sure I can offer equal excitement.”
“I expect it’ll be exciting enough when they find you out,” he said. “Which they’re bound to do. You’ll need to get undressed to get measured. What if the mole falls off while you’re taking off your clothes? What if your spectacles get tangled in your wig?”
“I’ve put on several extra layers of clothing,” she said. “I don’t plan to allow them to get beyond the first one or two. And it isn’t a wig, by the way. I put an egg mixture in my hair. People say it leaves a shine after you wash it out, but it does the opposite.”
It would be quite a job, washing her hair. It was thick and curly, and unless she added false pieces to it, as some women did, it must be long. To her waist? He saw long, golden hair streaming down a bare, silken back.
There was something to look forward to.
“You promised me bullies,” he said. “I was looking forward to the fight. It’s the only thing that got me out of bed. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anybody did me the courtesy of hitting back?”
“If I were a gentleman, and I saw you coming at me with fists up, I’d run in the other direction,” she said.
“Bullies aren’t gentlemen,” he said. “They won’t run.”
“If you get desperately bored, you can always pick a fight,” she said.
“If they exist,” he said. “I’ve never heard of hired ruffians in a dressmaking shop.”
“You’ve never noticed because you never think about how a shop is run,” she said. “You only notice whether the service is good or bad. But they can be useful in an all-woman shop. One has to deal with drunken men knocking over things or pawing the seamstresses. But the worst for us is a pack of thieves. They’ll come in small groups of twos and threes, all dressed respectably and seeming not to be together. One or two will keep the shopkeepers busy while the others fill their pockets. They’ve special pockets sewn into their clothes. They’re very quick. You’d be amazed at how much they can make off with if you look away, even for a second.”
“Where do you hide the muscled fellows who work for you, then?” he said.
“We don’t need ruffians,” she said. “We started in Paris, you know, and it was a family business, so we started young. Let me see. I think Marcelline was nine, so I was about seven or eight, and Leonie was six. When you’re absorbed in a trade from childhood, every aspect of it becomes instinctive. Drunks, thieves, men who think milliners’ shops are brothels—we’re perfectly capable of dealing with such matters ourselves.”
He remembered the hard look that had flashed across her face so briefly, when she’d told him she’d dealt with messy situations. He hadn’t time to pursue that train of thought, though. As they were turning into Oxford Street, two boys ran out in front of the curricle. Swearing violently, Longmore turned his pair aside an instant before they could trample the children.
His heart pounded. A moment’s delay or distraction, and the brats could have been killed. “Look where you’re going, you confounded idiots!” he roared above the neighing horses and the other drivers’ shouted comments.
“Ow, you ugly bitch!” a voice shrieked close to his ear. “Let go of me, you sodding sow!”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Sophy said.
Longmore glanced that way.
A ragged boy half hung over the back of the seat. Sophy had him by the arm, and she was regarding him with amusement.
Longmore could spare them only a glance. His team and the traffic wanted all his attention. “What the devil?” he said. “Where did he come from?”
“Nowhere!” the boy snarled. He wriggled furiously, to no avail. “I wasn’t doing nothing, only getting a free ride in back here, and the goggle-eyed mort tried to take my arm off.”
This, at least, was what Longmore presumed he said. The Cockney accent was almost impenetrable. Nothing was “nuffin,” and aitches were dropped from and attached to the wrong words, and some of the vowels seemed to have arrived from another planet.
“And you were trying to keep your hand warm in the gentleman’s pocket?” she said.
Longmore choked back laughter.
“I never went near his pocket! Do I look like I’m dicked in the nob?”
“Far from it,” Sophy said. “You’re a clever one, and quick, too.”
“Not quick enough,” the boy muttered.
“I wish you could have seen it, Cousin,” she said. “The two who ran in front were meant to distract you while this one jumped on and did his job. The little devil almost got by me. It took him two seconds to leap onto the groom’s place. Probably he would have wanted only another two to get your pocket watch—perhaps your seals and handkerchief as well—while you had both hands busy with the horses. I daresay he thought I was a gently bred female who’d only stare or scream helplessly while he collected his booty and got away.”
She reverted to the boy. “Next time, my lad, I advise you to make sure there’s only one person in the vehicle.”
Next time?
Longmore nearly ran down a pie seller.
“What next time?” he said. “We’re making a detour to the nearest police office, and leaving him to them.”
The boy let loose a stream of stunning oaths and struggled wildly. But Sophy must have tightened her hold or done something painful, because he stopped abruptly, and started whimpering that his arm was broken.
“As soon as I get out of this infernal tangle, I’ll give you a cuff you won’t soon forget,” Longmore said. “Cousin, will you give him a firm thump or something to stifle him in the meantime?”
“I don’t think we should take him to the police,” she said. “I think we should take him with us.”
Longmore and the boy reacted simultaneously.
The boy: “Nooooo!”
Longmore: “Are you drunk?”
“No, you don’t,” the boy said. “I ain’t going nowhere with you. I got friends, and they’ll come any minute now. Then you’ll be sorry. And I think my chest’s got a rib broke from being bent like this.”
“Stifle it,” Longmore told the boy. He needed a clear head to find his way through Sophy’s rabbit warren of a mind. He couldn’t do that and translate the boy’s deranged version of English at the same time.
To Sophy he said, “What exactly do you propose to do with him?”
“He’s wonderfully quick,” she said. “He could be useful. For our mission.”
Occupied with horses and traffic, Longmore could give the urchin no more than a swift survey. He looked to be about ten or eleven years old, though it was hard to tell with children of the lowest classes. Some of them looked eons older than they were, while others, small from malnourishment, seemed younger. This boy was fair-haired under his shabby cap, and while his neck was none too clean, he wasn’t an inch thick with filth as so many of them were. His clothes were worn and ill-fitting but mended and only moderately grimy.
“I don’t see what use he’d be to anybody, unless someone was wanted to pick pockets,” he said.
“He could hold the horses,” she said.
“Could he, indeed?” he said. “You suggest I put my cattle in charge of a sneaking little thief?”
The boy went very still.
“Who better to keep a sharp eye out, to watch who comes and goes, to give the alarm if trouble comes?” she said.
The mad thing was, she had a point.
“You don’t know the brat from Adam,” he said. “For all we know, he’s a desperado wanted by the police, and due to be transported on Monday. He tried to steal my watch. And climbed up behind the carriage to do it! That wants brass, that does—or something gravely amiss in the attic—and if you think I’m leaving a prime pair of horseflesh in the grubby hands of Mad Dick Turpin here, I suggest you think again. And take something for that brain injury while you’re about it.”
“Oy!” the boy said indignantly. “I ain’t no horse thief.”
“Merely a pickpocket,” Longmore said, egging him on.
“What’s your name?” Sophy said.
“Ain’t got one,” the boy said. “Saves trouble, don’t it?”
“Then I shall call you Fenwick,” she said.
“What?”
“Fenwick,” she said. “If you don’t have a name, I’ll give you one, gratis.”
“Not that,” the boy said. “That’s a ‘orrible name.”
“Better than nothing,” she said.
“I say, mister,” the boy appealed to Longmore. “Make her stop.”
Longmore couldn’t answer. He was working too hard on not laughing.
“That is not a mister,” she said. “That’s an actual lord whose pocket you tried to pick.”
“Yer lordship, make her stop. Make her stop breaking my arm, too. Which this is a monstrous female like nothing I ever seen before.”
Longmore glanced at Sophy. She was regarding the ghastly little foul-mouthed urchin, her expression speculative—or so it seemed. He couldn’t be sure. For one thing, he could spare only a glance. For another, the spectacles dimmed the brilliance of her eyes.
But he saw enough: the smile playing at the corner of her mouth, and the angle at which she held her head as she regarded the boy, like a bird eyeing a worm.
“Now you’re really in trouble, Fenwick,” he said. “She’s thinking.”
Sophy’s father had been a Noirot and her mother a DeLucey. Neither family could be bothered with charity, being too busy keeping one step ahead of the authorities.
Although Cousin Emma had taken in Sophy and her sisters and taught them a trade, they’d bounced back and forth for a time between parents and cousin. Their early life had not been sheltered. They’d learned how to survive on the streets. Among other skills, they’d learned to size up others quickly.
Sophy had seen and heard enough in a few minutes to understand that the lad was a rare find. With a very little training, this boy could be extremely useful. She was not going to let him be thrown into prison with ordinary criminals.
“We’re quite close to the Great Marlborough Street police office,” she said. “It would be no trouble to drop you there, Fenwick. Or, if you prefer, you could continue with us to our destination, and watch his lordship’s horses, and keep a sharp lookout.”
“And what would I be looking out for, I want to know,” the boy said.
“Trouble,” she said. “Do you think you can recognize it?”
“I haven’t the smallest doubt of his abilities in that regard,” Longmore said.
“If you do the job properly,” she went on, “I’ll see that you have a good dinner and a safe place to sleep.”
“Where, exactly, did you have in mind?” Longmore said.
“Don’t fret,” she said. “I wasn’t intending to foist him on you.”
“You certainly won’t foist him on yourself,” he said. “You don’t know a damned thing about him. He’s probably crawling with lice—”
“That’s slander, that is!” the boy cried.
“Sue me,” said Longmore.
“Don’t think I won’t,” the boy said. “There’s no more vermin on me than on you, yer majesty. I had a bath!”
“At your christening?” Longmore said. “But no, I forgot: You don’t have a name.”
“Fenwick’ll do,” the boy said. “She can call me Georgy Pudding Pie if she wants, if she gives me dinner and a bed like she says. But she won’t, will she?”
“Have you heard of the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females?” Sophy said.
The boy narrowed his eyes at her. “Yeah,” he said in wary tones.
“You know someone there, it seems,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m closely acquainted with the women in charge,” she said. She could hardly be more closely acquainted: She and her sisters had founded the organization last year. “If you know of that place, you know we don’t make empty promises.”
They’d reached Bedford Square. “Look here, Fenwick,” she said. “There’s the shop his lordship and I mean to visit.” She nodded toward Dowdy’s. “Do you know the place?”
“They makes clothes for the nobs,” he said. “A girl I know used to work there, but they was all let go for no reason.”
Sophy hoped the girl had gone to the Milliners’ Society. She and her sisters had better look into what had happened to Dowdy’s discharged seamstresses.
But one thing at a time.
“While his lordship and I visit the shop, you’ll mind the horses as well as the business of everybody about you,” she said briskly. “Give a long, sharp whistle to let us know if we’re about to be interrupted. Do the job satisfactorily, and I’ll do as I promised. Have we a bargain, Fenwick?”
“No tricks?” the boy said.
“No tricks?” Longmore echoed. “The brass of the brat!”
“Do I look like the tricky sort to you?” Sophy said.
The boy gave her a long, searching look. He spent some time peering into the tinted lenses. “Yes,” he said. “Not to mention you got a grip like a manacle.”
She smiled. “There, I knew you were a sharp one. But no tricks.”
She released his arm. He made a great show of massaging it, and checking for broken bones. He muttered about “mad gentry morts” and “bruiser lordships.”
“Never mind the grumbling,” Longmore said.
“I don’t mean to spend all day shopping with a female. Either you’ll do it or you won’t. Make up your mind. I don’t have time to dawdle here, palavering about it, all day.”
“Be yourself,” Sophy told Longmore when he joined her on the pavement after a lengthy conversation with Fenwick—about the horses, she supposed, and what would happen to the boy if he failed his assignment.
“Myself?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“I need you to be you,” she said. “Lord Longmore, Lady Warford’s eldest son. The son of Dowdy’s favorite customer.” That was why she’d had to pursue and enlist him. She had to save her shop, and that meant going into enemy territory, to find out what Maison Noirot was up against. The easiest and most effective way was to use him as part of her disguise. “No pretending required. Simply be you.”
“I need to pretend you’re Gladys.”
“I’ll seem so like her, you won’t have to pretend. Leave everything to me.”
“And if they chuck you out?”
“Be yourself,” she said. “Laugh.”
“If you were you, yes,” he said. “But Gladys is another story.” He frowned. “This is going to be confusing.”
“Not at all,” she said. “All you have to do is be you. Don’t think about it. It doesn’t need thinking.”
She marched toward the door in the determined way certain gauche misses did.
He moved smoothly ahead and opened it for her.
In her mind she became Cousin Gladys—plain and awkward and sensitive to slights. She marched inside. Mouth set, she looked about her, making it plain that she wouldn’t be easy to please. At the same time, though, she was still Sophy Noirot, evaluating her surroundings with an expert eye, and more than a little surprised … and troubled … at what she discovered.
Though no one could match Maison Noirot’s flair, someone had tried. The walls had been freshly painted pale peach, the trim a creamy yellow, and someone had given thought to a variety of colorful accents. That someone had taken the trouble to arrange the fabrics artistically. Some hung on large rings near the display windows. Others lay on counters, looking as though they’d only a moment ago been unfolded for a customer. A book of fashion plates lay open on a table, inviting perusal. Comfortable chairs stood in small clusters about the room, giving it the snug air of a private parlor. Tables next to them held men’s as well as ladies’ magazines.
The showroom, while not as obsessively clean as Maison Noirot’s, was much neater and less dingy than it used to be.
The explanation, Sophy saw, stood behind the counter.
Dowdy had hired a Frenchwoman. She was pretty and elegant and graceful. Her fair hair was arranged becomingly under a splendid lace cap.
Her poise didn’t falter although her welcoming smile did, a little, as she took in Sophy/Gladys. The woman’s light brown gaze turned with obvious relief to Longmore.
Subtle as the rebuff was, it wouldn’t be too subtle for a sensitive soul, as Sophy imagined Gladys to be. The Frenchwoman shouldn’t have given any sign of dismay. She should have looked as delighted to see her as she would be to see Queen Adelaide.
Many specimens as unpromising as the faux Gladys came into dressmakers’ shops. How one served them made all the difference in the world. The Frenchwoman seemed to see Lady Gladys Fairfax as an ordeal to endure, rather than as an exciting challenge, as Sophy and her sisters would view her. Their faces would have lit up when she stepped through the door.
“Mrs. Downes?” Sophy said.
“I am Madame Ecrivier, mademoiselle,” the Frenchwoman said. “Madame Downes is occupied at the moment, but I—”
“Occupied!” Longmore said, startling Sophy as well as Ecrivier. “Where in blazes would she be occupied if not in her own shop? This is her shop, I presume? It had better be. I had the devil’s own time getting here. Accident on Oxford Street and everybody stopping to gawk and slowing travel in three directions.”
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Loretta Chase
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: “You’ve appointed yourself my mistress!”Sophy is determined to make Maison Noirot London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it kills her. It’s been said she could sell sand to the bedouins, but waves of bad publicity after her sister’s scandalous marriage are tainting business, so she has little time for anything but work – especially not the flirtatious affections of reckless rake the Earl of Longmore.But when a disreputable admirer compromises Longmore′s sister, Noirot′s favourite patron, the runaway sibling must be found. There’s too much at stake for Sophy to let Longmore rush after them on his own. So together they make chase, but such close proximity can play havoc even with sworn adversaries…