Vixen In Velvet
Vixen In Velvet
Loretta Chase
A dangerous wager… A seductive nobleman…When Leonie Noirot first meets devastatingly handsome Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne, she literally falls into his strong arms!However, Leonie simply has no time for his wickedly charming lordship. The pretty redhead is obsessed with her business – turning the ladies of society into beautifully dressed swans. Until the bet…Logical Leonie has to agree; if Lisburne’s cousin, Lady Gladys, is not transformed, Leonie must spend two weeks at Lisburne’s pleasure…
She straightened and came around to face him, making a pretty flurry of white muslin and lace.
She was a dressmaker, he told himself. She knew how to wield clothes as a weapon. And it worked all too well, like a club to the head.
She gave him the enigmatic smile, so like the one Botticelli’s Venus wore. ‘A wager,’ she said.
‘Everybody else is doing it,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t we?’
“Because you’ll lose?” she said.
‘Oh, but I’m sure you’ll lose,’ he said. ‘And my mind is wandering over an interesting range of forfeits.’
‘Mine, too,’ she said. ‘Money means nothing to you, so I must use my powers of imagination.’
‘I had higher stakes in mind,’ he said. ‘Nothing so ordinary as money. Something significant.’
She set her hands on the edge of the desk and leaned back.
He couldn’t exactly see her calculating. She was too good at not showing what she was about. Yet he knew she was weighing and measuring, and so he calculated, too.
He sensed the moment when she’d worked out her answer. Yet she waited one moment. Another.
Playing with him, the vixen.
THE DRESSMAKERS SERIES
Silk is for Seduction
Scandal Wears Satin
Vixen in Velvet
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).
Vixen in Velvet
Loretta Chase
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
In memory of my mother
Acknowledgements (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
Thanks to:
May Chen: funny, wise and understanding editor, whose patience surpasseth all understanding;
Nancy Yost: brilliant, hard-working, witty and inspiring agent;
Isabella Bradford: kindred spirit and nerdy history co-enabler;
Paul and Carol: providers of the perfect writer’s refuge on Cape Cod;
Valerie Kerxhalli: advisor in French Colonial matters;
Williamsburg milliners, mantua makers and tailors: experts in historic dress, who continue to unlock the mysteries of clothing from the past;
Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy: sisters, cheerleaders, confidantes, friends;
Walter: spouse, producer, cinematographer and knight in shining armour,
Table of Contents
Cover (#u47646b9f-9e3a-5dbc-842a-b95b2257680f)
Excerpt (#ub78e2f7e-fa44-5b30-a304-b6af2b0d50fa)
About the Author (#ud63bba45-8039-597e-94ee-dba294500320)
Title Page (#u4834a586-b3dc-5d73-942f-0de60b78beae)
Dedication (#u4dae620d-2934-5bd7-b558-b308e02c5689)
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
BRITISH INSTITUTION.—ANCIENT MASTERS. This annual Exhibition is the best set-off to the illiberality with which our grand signors shut up their pictures from the public—making, in fact, close boroughs of their collections.
—The Athenaeum, 30 May 1835
British Institution, Pall Mall, London
Wednesday 8 July
He lay naked but for a cloth draped over his manly parts. Head fallen back, eyes closed, mouth partly open, he slept too deeply to notice the imps playing with his armor and weapons, or the one blowing through a shell into his ear. The woman reclined nearby, her elbow resting on a red cushion. Unlike him, she was fully dressed, in gold-trimmed linen, and fully awake. She watched him with an unreadable expression. Did her lips hint at a smile or a frown, or was her mind elsewhere entirely?
Leonie Noirot’s mind offered sixteen different answers, none satisfactory. What wasn’t in doubt was what this pair had been doing before the male—the Roman god Mars, according to the exhibition catalog—fell asleep.
If anything else was in Leonie’s mind—her reason for coming here this day, for instance, or where “here” was or who she was—it had by now drifted to a distant corner of her skull. Nothing but the painting mattered or even existed.
She stood before the Botticelli work titled Venus and Mars, and might have been standing on another planet or in another time, so completely did it absorb her. She stood and stared, and could have counted every brushstroke, trying to get to the bottom of it. What she couldn’t do was escape it.
If anybody had stood in her way, she might have throttled that person. Oddly enough, nobody did. The British Institution’s Annual Summer Exhibition continued to attract visitors. It drew as well numerous artists, who set up their easels in the galleries, in order to copy the work of old masters. These artists made annoying obstacles of themselves while they desperately exercised what might be their only opportunity to copy works from private collections.
Nobody stood in Leonie’s way. Nobody pontificated over her shoulder. She didn’t notice this, let alone wonder why. She hadn’t come for the art but for one specific reason.
A most important reason … which she’d forgotten the instant her gaze landed on the painting.
She might have stood transfixed until Doomsday, or until one of the caretakers pitched her out. But—
A crash, sudden as a thunderclap, broke the room’s peace.
She jumped, and stumbled backward.
And hit a wall that oughtn’t to have been there.
No, not a wall.
It was big, warm, and alive.
It smelled like a man: shaving soap and starch and wool. Two man-sized gloved hands, which lightly grasped her shoulders and smoothly restored her to an upright position, confirmed the impression.
She turned quickly and looked up—a good ways up—at him.
Ye gods.
Or, more accurately, ye god Mars.
Perhaps he wasn’t precisely like the image in the painting. For one thing, the living man was fully clothed, and most expensively, too. But the nose and forehead and mouth were so like. And the shape of the eyes especially. His, unlike the war god’s, were open.
They were green, with gold flecks, like the gold streaks in his dark blond hair. And that was curly like Mars’s, and appealingly unruly. Something less easily definable in the eyes and mouth hinted at other kinds of unruliness: the mouth on the brink of a smile and the eyes open a degree too wide and innocent. Or was that stupidity?
“In all the excitement, I seem to have put my foot under yours,” he said. “I do beg your pardon.”
Not stupid.
More important, he’d been standing too close, and she hadn’t noticed. Leonie never allowed anybody to sneak up on her. In Paris that could have been fatal. Even in London it was risky.
She kept all her misgivings on the inside, as she’d learned to do eons ago.
“I hope I did you no permanent injury,” she said. She let her gaze drift downward. His boots were immaculate. His valet had polished them to such a fearsome brilliance, the dust of London’s streets could only stagger away, blinded.
His green gaze slid downward, too, to her footwear. “A small foot wrapped in a bit of satin and a sliver of leather doing damage? Odds against, don’t you think?”
“The bits of satin and leather are half-boots called brodequins,” she said. “And my feet are not small. But it’s gallant of you to say so.”
“In the circumstances, I ought to say something agreeable,” he said. “I ought as well to produce a clever reason for creeping up on you. Or a chivalrous reason, like intent to shield you from falling easels. But then you’d only decide I was an idiot. As anybody can see, the offending object is some yards away.”
She was aware of somebody swearing, about three paintings to her left. From the same direction came the sound of wood scraped over wood and the rustling of a heavy fabric. She didn’t look that way. Girls who didn’t keep their wits about them when gods wandered their way got into trouble. Ask Daphne or Leda or Danaë.
Today’s fitful sun had decided to stream through the skylight at this moment. Its rays fell upon the gold-streaked head.
“Perhaps you were captivated by the painting,” she said. “And lost track of your surroundings.”
“That’s a fine excuse,” he said. “But as it’s my painting, and I’ve had ample time to stare at the thing, it won’t do.”
“Yours,” she said. She hadn’t looked up the lender’s name at the back of the catalog. She’d assumed the masterpiece must belong to the King or one of the royal dukes.
“That is to say, I’m not Botticelli, you know, the fellow being dead some centuries. I’m Lisburne.”
Leonie collected her wits, brought business to the front of her mind, and flipped through the pages of her mental ledger, wherein she kept her private compendium of Great Britain’s aristocracy as well as important tidbits from the gossip sheets and her gossipy customers.
She found the entry easily, because she’d updated it not many days ago: Lisburne meant Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne. Age seven and twenty, he constituted the sole issue of the greatly lamented third Marquess of Lisburne, whose very recently remarried widow resided in Italy.
Lord Lisburne, who’d lived abroad, too, for these last five or six years, had arrived from the Continent a fortnight ago with his first cousin and close friend Lord Swanton.
The Viscount Swanton was Leonie’s reason for being in a Pall Mall gallery on a workday.
She looked back at the painting. Then she looked about her, for the first time, really. It dawned on her, then, why nobody else had stood in her way. Elsewhere on the gallery walls hung landscapes, mythological and historical deaths and battles and such, and madonnas and other religious subjects. The Botticelli had nothing to do with any of them. No preaching, no violence, and definitely no bucolic innocence.
“Interesting choice,” she said.
“It stands out, rather, now you mention it,” he said. “No one seems to care much for Botticelli these days. My friends urged me to put in a battle scene.”
“Instead you chose the aftermath,” she said.
His green gaze shifted briefly to the painting, then back to her. “I could have sworn they’d been making love.”
“And I could swear she’s vanquished him.”
“Ah, but he’ll rise again to—er—fight another day,” he said.
“I daresay.” She turned fully toward the painting and moved a step closer, though she knew she risked drowning in it. Again. Surely she’d seen equally beautiful works—in the Louvre, for instance. But this …
Its owner moved to stand beside her. For a moment they regarded it in silence, an acute physically conscious one on her part.
“Venus’s expression intrigues me,” she said. “I wonder what she’s thinking.”
“There’s one difference between men and women,” he said. “He’s sleeping and she’s thinking.”
“Somebody must think,” she said. “And it does so often seem to be the women.”
“I always wonder why they don’t go to sleep, too,” he said.
“I couldn’t say,” Leonie said. She truly couldn’t. Her understanding of the physical act between men and women, while as detailed and precise as her eldest sister could make it, was in no way based on personal experience—and this was not the time to imagine the experience, she reminded herself. Business came first, last, and always. Especially now. “What occupies me is a lady’s outward appearance.”
She opened her reticule, withdrew a small card, and gave it to him. It was a beautiful card, as of course it must be, hers being the foremost establishment of its kind in London. The size of a lady’s calling card and elegantly engraved and colored, it was nonetheless a trade card for Maison Noirot, Dressmakers to Ladies of Fashion, No. 56 St. James’s Street.
He studied it for a time.
“I’m one of the proprietresses,” she said.
He looked up from the card to meet her gaze. “You’re not the one married to my cousin Longmore?”
She couldn’t be surprised he was a cousin of her newest brother-in-law. All the Great World seemed to be related to one another, and the Fairfax family, to which the Earl of Longmore belonged, was large in its main branch and prolific in its associated twigs and vines.
“That’s my sister Sophy,” she said. “For future reference, she’s the blonde one.” That was the way Society thought of the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot, she knew: the Three Sisters—sometimes the Three Witches or French Tarts—the brunette, the blonde, and the redhead.
“Right. And one of you is married to the Duke of Clevedon.”
“My sister Marcelline. She’s the brunette.”
“How good of your parents to make you easy to tell apart,” he said. “And how kind of you to explain. Were I to mistake, say, the Countess of Longmore for you, and make a stab at flirtation, her brute of a spouse would try to do me a violence, to the detriment of my neckcloth. I spent fully half an hour arranging it.”
Leonie was an experienced businesswoman of one and twenty, not a sheltered young lady. She examined the neckcloth in a businesslike manner—or tried to. This proved a great deal more difficult than it ought to be.
Below the finely chiseled angle of his jaw, his neckcloth was not only immaculate but so flawlessly folded and creased that it might have been carved of marble.
The rest of his dress was inhumanly perfect, too. So were his face and physique.
The inner woman felt light-headed, and thought this would be a good time to swoon. The dressmaker regarded the neckcloth with a critical eye. “You employed your time to excellent effect,” she said.
“Not that it makes the least difference,” he said. “No one looks at the other fellows when he’s about.”
“He,” she said.
“My poetical cousin. I’m overburdened with cousins. Oh, there they are now, blast it.”
She became aware of voices coming from the central staircase.
She turned that way as hats and heads rose into view. Torsos soon followed. After a moment’s apparent confusion about which way to go, the group, mainly young women, surged toward the archway of the gallery in which she stood. There they came to a halt, with only a moderate degree of unladylike pushing and elbowing. The clump of women opened up to make way for a tall, slender, ethereal-looking gentleman. He wore his flaxen hair overlong and his clothing with theatrical flair.
“Him,” Lord Lisburne said.
“Lord Swanton,” she said.
“Who else could it be, with two dozen girls looking up at him, every one of them wearing the same besotted expression.”
Leonie’s gaze took in the women, all about her age or younger, except for a handful of mamas or aunts obliged to chaperon. Near the outer edge of Lord Swanton’s worshippers and their reluctant attendants she spied Sophy’s new sister-in-law, Lady Clara Fairfax, looking bored. Her ladyship stood with a plain young woman who was dressed stupendously wrong.
Leonie’s spirits soared. She’d come intending to add to her clientele. This was more than she’d dared to hope for.
For a moment she almost forgot ye god Mars and even the painting. Almost. She beat down her excitement and turned her attention back to Lord Lisburne.
“Thank you, my lord, for stopping me from toppling like the unfortunate artist’s easel,” she said. “Thank you for choosing that particular painting to lend to the exhibition. I don’t care for scenes of violence, which seem to be so popular. And saintly beings are so trying. But this experience was sublime.”
“Which experience, exactly?” he said. “Our acquaintance has been short but eventful.”
She was tempted to linger and continue flirting. He was so good at it. Moreover, in addition to being beautiful he was a nobleman who owned a painting that, popular or not, was probably priceless. Beyond a doubt he owned several hundred other priceless or at least stunningly costly objects, along with two or three immense houses set upon large expanses of Great Britain. If—or more likely, when—he took a wife and/or set up a mistress, he’d pay for her housing, servants, carriage, horses, etc. etc.—and, most important of et ceteras, her clothing.
But the girl, Clara’s friend, looked out of sorts and seemed ready to bolt. A prize like that didn’t turn up every day. Leonie had already obtained Lord Lisburne’s attention, in any event. He’d saunter into the shop one of these days, if she was any judge of men.
“It has, indeed,” Leonie said. “However, I came on business.”
“Business,” he said.
“Ladies,” she said. “Dresses.” She made a brisk gesture, indicating her ensemble, which she’d spent well more than half an hour arranging for this event. “Advertising.”
Then she made a quick curtsey and started toward Lord Swanton and his acolytes. She heard a muffled sound behind her, but she couldn’t take the time to look back. The ill-dressed girl was tugging on Lady Clara’s arm.
Leonie walked more quickly.
Eyes on Lady Clara’s companion, she didn’t see the canvas cloth in her way.
The toe of her brodequin caught on it and she pitched forward.
She was aware of a collective gasp, interspersed with titters, as she went down, arms flailing ungracefully.
Lisburne hadn’t noticed the artist’s cloth, either.
He was too busy taking in the rear view of Miss Noirot, though he’d already fully employed the opportunity to study that at length—at a distance as well as at improperly close quarters—while she stood before the Botticelli, oblivious to him and everybody and everything else. When she’d turned to look up at him, he’d nearly staggered, thinking Botticelli’s Venus had come to life: the same—or very like—heart-shaped face and alluringly imperfect nose … the ripe mouth with its hint of a smile or deep thought or troublesome recollection … the surprisingly determined chin.
His mind might have wandered into indecorous fantasies but his reflexes were in sharp working order. He moved forward, caught her, and swept her up into his arms in one smooth movement.
Ladies’ dress had only grown more extravagantly fanciful since he was last in England, nearly six years ago. It was hard to tell which parts of a girl were real and which were created for artistic effect. While he appreciated artistic effect, he was happy to discover that what seemed to be a gloriously shapely form was artificial only in the most superficial way. Judging by the warm parts with which he was in contact, her body was as lavishly rounded as he’d supposed. She smelled good, too.
He saw her eyes widen—eyes of a vivid blue that put sapphires and Tuscan skies to shame—and her plump mouth fall open slightly.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said under his breath. “Everybody’s staring.”
No exaggeration. Everybody in view had stopped whatever they were doing or saying to gape. Who could blame them? Gorgeous redheads didn’t drop into a fellow’s arms every day.
The commotion was drawing in people from the other rooms.
This day was turning out infinitely less boring than he’d expected.
“Miss Noirot!”
Swanton thrust through his crowd of worshippers—treading on a few toes in the process—to hurry toward them. The worshippers followed. Even Lisburne’s cousins, Clara and Gladys Fairfax, tagged along, though neither looked especially worshipful or even enthusiastic.
“Great Zeus, what’s happened?” Swanton demanded.
“The lady fainted,” Lisburne said.
He knew that a number of people had seen the dressmaker trip—those, that is, who could tear their gazes from Swanton. Lisburne glanced about, lazily inviting any witnesses to contradict him. None did so. Even those blackguards Meffat and Theaker held their tongues for once.
True, Lady Gladys Fairfax did harrumph, but no one ever paid attention to her—not, that is, unless they wanted to work themselves into a murderous rage. Though she, too, had only very recently returned to London after some years’ absence, no one could have forgotten her, much in the way that no one forgot the plague, for instance, or the Great Fire, or a bout of hydrophobia.
“Merci,” Miss Noirot said in an undertone. Lisburne didn’t so much hear it as feel it, in the general environs of his chest.
“Je vous en prie,” he replied.
“It was only a momentary dizziness,” she said more audibly. “You may put me down now, my lord.”
“Are you quite sure, madame?” Swanton said. “You’re flushed, and no wonder. This infernal heat. Not a breath of a breeze this day.” He looked up at the skylight. Everybody else did, too. “And here’s the sun, blasting down on us, as though it made a wrong turn on its way to the Sahara Desert. Would somebody be so good as to fetch Madame a glass of water?”
Madame? Then Lisburne remembered the elegant trade card. One generally referred to a modiste, especially the expensive sort, as Madame, regardless of her marital status.
And Swanton knew this particular Madame. He’d never said a word, the sneak. But no, sneakiness wasn’t in character. More than likely, some poetic ecstasy had taken possession of him and he simply forgot until he saw her again. Typical.
Swanton’s father had died young at Waterloo, and Lisburne’s father had taken over the paternal role. That made Lisburne the protective elder brother, a position he retained on account of Swanton being Swanton.
“My lord, you’re too kind,” she said. “But I don’t require water. I’m quite well. It was only a moment’s faintness. Lord Lisburne, if you’d be so good as to let me down.”
She squirmed a little in Lisburne’s arms. That was fun.
Being a male in rude good health, all parts in prime working order, he wasn’t eager to let go of her. Still, since it had to be done, he made the most of it, easing her down with the greatest care, letting her body inch down along his, and not releasing her until a long, pulsing moment after her feet touched the floor.
She closed her eyes and said something under her breath, then opened them again and produced a smile, which she aimed straight at him. The smile was as dazzling as her eyes. The combined effect made him feel a little dizzy.
“Madame, if you feel strong enough, would you allow me to present my friends?” Swanton said. “I know they’re all clamoring to meet you.”
The gentlemen, beyond a doubt. They’d be wild to be made known to any attractive woman, especially in the present circumstances, when it was nigh impossible to get any attention from the lot swarming about Swanton.
But the ladies? Wishing to be introduced to a shopkeeper?
Perhaps not out of the question in this case, Lisburne decided. The three Noirot sisters had made themselves famous. He’d heard of them on the Continent recently. Their work, it was said, rivaled that of the celebrated Victorine of Paris, who required even queens to make appointments and attend her at her place of business.
Lisburne watched the dazzling gaze and smile sweep over the assembled audience.
“You’re too kind, my lord,” she said. “But I’ve disturbed everybody sufficiently today. The ladies will know where to find me: around the corner, at No. 56 St. James’s Street. And the ladies, as you know, are my primary concern.”
At the end of the speech, she shot a glance at somebody in the crowd. Cousin Clara? Then Madame curtseyed and started away.
The others turned away, the women first. Swanton resumed poeticizing or romanticizing or whatever he was doing, and they all moved on to Veronese’s Between Virtue and Vice.
Lisburne, however, watched Miss Noirot’s departure. She seemed not altogether steady on her feet, not quite so effortlessly graceful as before. At the top of the stairs, she took hold of the railing and winced.
Leonie was not allowed to make a quiet escape.
She heard the Marquess of Lisburne coming behind her. She knew who it was without looking. This was probably because he’d made her so keenly attuned to him, thanks to the extremely improper way he’d set her on her feet a moment ago. She was still vibrating.
Or perhaps he sent some sort of pulsation across the room, in the way certain gods had been believed to herald their arrival with strange lights or magical sounds or divine scent.
“You seem to be in pain,” he said. “May I assist you?”
“I was hoping to slink off quietly,” she said.
“No difficulty there. Everybody else is hovering about my cousin. He’s spouting about Virtue and Vice, and they all believe he’s saying something.” While he spoke, he took possession of her left arm and arranged it around his neck. He brought his arm round her waist.
She caught her breath.
“It must hurt like the devil,” he said. “On second thought, I’d better check your ankle before we proceed. It might be more damaged than we think.”
If he touched her ankle she would faint, and not necessarily for medical reasons.
“I only turned it,” she said. “If I’d done worse, I’d be sitting on the step, sobbing with as much mortification as pain.”
“I can carry you,” he said.
“No,” she said, and added belatedly, “thank you.”
They proceeded down the stairs slowly. She did sums in her head to distract her from the warmth of the big body supporting hers. It wasn’t easy. She had stared too long at the Botticelli, and her mind was making pictures of the muscular arms and torso with no elegant covering whatsoever.
By the time they reached the first landing, her usually well-ordered brain was wandering into strange byways and taking excessive notice of physical sensations.
She made herself speak. “I can only hope that people assume I was dazzled by my brief encounter with Lord Swanton,” she said.
“That’s what I’ll tell them, if you like,” he said. “But I received the impression you knew each other.”
“Paris,” she said. “Ages ago.”
“It can’t be a very long age,” he said. “You’re somewhat damaged but not quite decrepit.”
“It was his first visit to Paris,” she said.
“More than five years ago, then,” he said.
When Leonie was nearly sixteen, happy in her work and her family and especially her beautiful infant niece, and reveling in the success of Emmeline, Cousin Emma’s splendid dressmaking shop.
Before the world fell apart.
“Lord Swanton came to my cousin’s shop to buy a gift for his mother,” she said. “He was sweet-tempered and courteous. In Paris, gentlemen often mistook a dressmaker’s shop for a brothel.”
Those who persisted in the mistake tended to have unfortunate accidents.
One of the first rules Leonie had ever learned was, Men only want one thing. Cousin Emma had taught her young charges as much about defending themselves against encroaching men as she had about dressmaking. She had not, however, taught her girls anything about dealing with Roman gods. It was trickier than one would think to maintain a businesslike attitude, even though Leonie was the most businesslike of the three sisters. That wasn’t saying much, when you came down to it. Marcelline and Sophy had always had their heads in the clouds: dreamers and schemers and typical Noirots, typical DeLuceys.
He smelled so clean, like the air after rain. How did he do that? Was it scent? A miraculous new soap?
By the time they reached the ground floor, the throbbing in her ankle seemed to have lessened somewhat.
“I think I can make do with your arm,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“My ankle is better,” she said. “I needn’t lean on you quite so much.”
The fact was, she didn’t have to lean at all, because he held her so firmly against him. She was aware of every inch of his muscled arm and—through all the layers of chemise, corset, dress, and pelerine—exactly where his fingers rested at the bottom of her rib cage.
She let go of his neck. He let go of her waist and offered his arm. She placed her gloved hand on his, and he grasped it as firmly as he’d grasped her waist.
She told herself this was hardly intimacy, compared to his holding her along the length of his body, but the fact was, no man had got this close to her in years. Still, that didn’t explain why she wanted to run away. She knew how to defend herself, did she not? She knew better than to let herself fall under the spell of a handsome face and form and low, seductive voice.
She couldn’t allow panic to rule. Her ankle was only marginally better. Without help, she’d have to limp back to the shop on a hot day. Though she had only a short distance to travel, the last bit was uphill. By the time she got there, she’d have worsened the injury and wouldn’t be fit for anything.
Business first, last, and always. As they passed through the door and out into Pall Mall, she set her mind to calculating his net worth, reminded herself of imminent wives and/or mistresses, and beat down unwanted emotions with numbers, as she so often did. Her clumsiness might well have put off Lady Clara’s companion. This might be the only new business Leonie would attract today.
“You said something about business,” he said.
“I did?” Her heart raced. Was she speaking her thoughts aloud without realizing? Had she suffered a concussion without noticing?
“Before, when you hurried away to my cousin.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yes. Where Lord Swanton goes, one usually finds a large supply of young ladies. He’d mentioned to one of our customers his intention of visiting the British Institution this afternoon. It seemed a good opportunity to make the shop’s work known to those unfamiliar with it.”
“Nothing to do with his poetry, then.”
She shrugged, and paid for it with a twinge in her ankle. “I run a shop, my lord,” she said. “I lack the romantic sensibility.” She’d worked since childhood. The young women who worshipped Lord Swanton hadn’t lived in Paris during the chaos, misery, and destruction of the cholera. Grief, suffering, and death weren’t romantic to her.
“It stumps me, I’ll admit,” he said. “I don’t see what’s romantic about it. But then, neither do most men. The ailment seems to strike young women, with a few exceptions. Though she’s at the vulnerable age, Cousin Clara looked bored, I thought. My cousin Gladys looked sour-tempered, but that’s the way she usually looks, so it’s hard to tell whether she’s an idolater or not.”
“Cousin Gladys,” she said. “The young lady with Lady Clara?”
“Lady Gladys Fairfax,” he said. “Lord Boulsworth’s daughter. Clara’s great uncle, you know. The military hero. I’m not sure what’s lured Gladys back to London, though I do have an unnerving suspicion. I say, you’re not well, Miss Noirot.”
They’d reached the bottom of St. James’s Street, and the day’s extreme warmth, already prodigious in Pall Mall, now blasted at them on a hot wind, which carried as well the dust of vehicles, riders, and pedestrians. Leonie’s head ached at least as much as her ankle did. She was trying to remember when last she’d heard Lady Gladys Fairfax mentioned, but pain, heat, and confusion overwhelmed her brain.
“That does it,” he said. “I’m carrying you.”
He simply swooped down and did it, before she got the protest out, and then it was muffled against his neckcloth.
“Yes, everyone will stare,” he said. “Good advertising, don’t you think? Do you know, I do believe I’m getting the hang of this business thing.”
Meanwhile, back at the British Institution
Sir Roger Theaker and Mr. John Meffat, Esquire, were among the few who’d paid attention to Lord Lisburne’s departure with Miss Noirot. The pair had arrived with Lord Swanton’s coterie, but were not exactly part of it, even though they were former schoolmates of the poet.
They were not Lord Swanton’s favorite old schoolmates, having bullied him mercilessly for nearly a year until his cousin got wind of it and thrashed them. Repeatedly. Because they were slow to catch on. They were even slower to forget.
They’d withdrawn some paces from the crowd following Lord Swanton, partly in order to maintain a safe distance from the dangerous cousin.
Theaker’s gaze lingered on the stairwell. Once Lisburne and the ladybird were out of sight he said, “Lisburne’s done for, I see.”
“If anyone’s a goner, it’s the French milliner,” said Meffat. “Ten pounds says so.”
“You haven’t got ten pounds,” said Theaker.
“Neither do you.”
Theaker’s attention reverted to the poet. They watched for a time the young women not-so-surreptitiously pushing to get closer to their idol, while he held forth about the Veronese.
“Annoying little snot, isn’t he?” Theaker said.
“Always was.”
“Writes pure rot.”
“Always did.”
No one could accuse them of not doing all they could to enlighten the reading public. Before Swanton had returned to England, they’d contributed to various journals half a dozen anonymous lampoons of his poetry, as well as two scurrilous limericks. Most of the critics had agreed with them.
But one fashionable young woman had ignored the critics and bought Alcinthus and Other Poems, Swanton’s book of lugubrious verse, and cried her eyes out, apparently. She told all her friends he was the new Lord Byron or some such. The next anybody knew, the printers couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Since watching the little snot wasn’t much fun, Theaker and Meffat turned their attention to the unhappy artist who, having righted his easel, was trying to repair his damaged painting.
They drew nearer to offer jocular advice and accidentally on purpose knock over items he’d carefully restored to their proper places. They suggested their own favorite subjects and argued about whether a corner of the painting more closely resembled a bonnet or a woman’s privates. Being preoccupied with tormenting somebody too weak, poor, or intimidated to fight back—their usual modus operandi—they never noticed the woman approach until she’d cornered them.
And when she said, “I must have your help,” they didn’t laugh, as was also more usual when a person of no importance sought their aid or protection. They didn’t even make lewd suggestions, which was odd, considering she was extremely pretty—fair and slender and young. John Meffat looked at her once, then twice, then seemed very puzzled indeed. He turned an inquiring look upon his friend, who frowned briefly, seeming to be struck by something.
Theaker shot him a warning look, and Meffat held his tongue.
Then Theaker broke out in a kindly smile—it must have hurt his face a little—and said, “Why certainly, my dear. Let’s find us a place a bit less public, and you can tell us all about it.”
Chapter Two (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
Although the Toilet should never be suffered to engross so much of the attention as to interfere with the higher duties of life, yet, as a young lady’s dress, however simple, is considered a criterion of her taste, it is, certainly, worthy of her attention.
—The Young Lady’s Book, 1829
Lord Lisburne carried Leonie up St. James’s Street in the sweltering heat, past a stream of gaping faces. A couple of vehicles got their wheels tangled, and a gentleman crossing the street walked into a curb post.
Sophy would have seen this as a golden opportunity, Leonie reminded herself. She ignored the headache and throbbing ankle and made her face serene, as though this were an everyday occurrence, being carried to the shop. By a Roman god. Who didn’t even breathe hard.
Darting a glance upward, she discerned a hint of a smile on his perfectly sculpted mouth.
“This is fun,” he said. “Which number did you say? Right, fifty-six. Oh, look. Charming. So French. Does that boy in the breathtaking lilac and gold livery belong to you?”
“Yes,” Leonie said without looking. “That’s Fenwick, our general factotum.”
“Does he open the door or simply stand there looking excessively decorative?”
“One of his jobs is to open the door,” she said.
A stray Sophy had picked up on one of her excursions, Fenwick had been an apprentice pickpocket. Once scrubbed of layers of accumulated street grime, his exterior had proved surprisingly angelic-looking. He was a great success with the ladies. He …
That was when Leonie remembered. Sophy had found Fenwick on the day she’d gone to spy on a business rival. To get into Mrs. Downes’s shop, Sophy had disguised herself as Lady Gladys Fairfax. Or what she imagined Lady Gladys looked like, given Lady Clara’s description and Sophy’s lurid powers of invention.
But Leonie hadn’t time to think further about Lady Gladys. Fenwick had opened the door, Lord Lisburne carried Leonie in, and all the shopgirls promptly went to pieces.
There were cries of “Madame!” and little shrieks, and they ran out from behind counters and crowded about her and Lord Lisburne, then cried, “No, no, give her air!” and dashed off the other way, then came back again. They told one another to fetch water and doctors and smelling salts, and argued about it. Meanwhile, no one was paying attention to the customers, who might have walked away with half the shop, including the mannequins, while everybody else was having hysterics.
Luckily, Selina Jeffreys, their forewoman, hurried out into the showroom, sparing Leonie the need to discipline the troops through an aching head. Jeffreys briskly called them to order and directed Lord Lisburne through the door into the back of the shop. Thence Leonie directed him to her office.
He set her down in a chair. He found a footstool and, ignoring her assurance that she was capable of moving her own foot, knelt, and gently lifted the injured limb onto it. The touch of his hands traveled like a magnetic current up her leg and spread everywhere, including parts some women didn’t even expose to themselves.
“I believe a restorative is in order,” he said as he rose.
He looked perfectly cool. She needed an ice bath.
“Have you any objections to brandy?” she said.
“I meant for you,” he said. “You’re looking peakish.”
“I made a cake of myself in front of London’s latest craze in poets,” she said. “I tripped twice in the same room, and everybody will say I was drunk. The second time, I tripped so clumsily that I turned my ankle. The Marquess of Lisburne has been carrying me about St. James’s, to the entertainment of the multitudes and the mental derangement of my employees. I ache at top and bottom, and I’m in a sweat despite not having done anything but let myself be carried. Of course I look peakish. And I’m cross besides, or I should have said thank you before launching into the complaints.”
“No thanks required, I assure you. It was the most fun I’ve had since Swanton and I came back to London.” He pulled off his gloves. “Where do you keep the brandy?”
She told him. He poured out a drink for her and a drink for him. Then he walked about the office as though he owned the place. Nothing odd in that. Aristocrats always owned the place, whether, technically, they did or didn’t, since they owned England.
But then he started touching her things.
Lisburne was fascinated.
Along one wall, ledgers stood perfectly straight and exactly aligned on three gleaming shelves. Likewise polished to within an inch of its life, the desk held, in addition to an inkstand, a tray of pencils, all sharpened to lethal points. On the other walls, French fashion prints and a few Parisian scenes hung precisely straight and equidistant from one another. Whatever else the office contained must be secreted in the firmly closed drawers and cupboards.
He tipped his head to read the spines of the ledgers, then pulled one out to look at the front. He flipped through the pages. Scrupulously ruled columns held concise descriptions of transactions. Alongside them marched, in the same rigorous order, columns of numbers.
“Not a blot anywhere,” he said. “Do you do this? How do you write all these numbers and such and never blot?”
“My lord, that is private financial information.” The faintly accented voice climbed a degree in pitch.
“Your secrets couldn’t be safer,” he said. “It’s all hieroglyphs to me. I could read it for days and come away none the wiser. No, that’s not quite true. I do know what the red ink signifies. My agent has pointed it out often enough. That is to say, he did, until I left such matters to Uttridge, my secretary. He warns me when I’m stumbling into red ink territory.”
“Your secretary manages your funds?” she said, her horror plainly audible. “You don’t look at the books at all?”
What entertaining handwriting she had! So precise and orderly yet purely feminine.
“The trouble with looking into the books is, it throws a fellow’s inadequacies in his face,” he said, adroitly sidestepping the boring truth. “I note very little in the way of red here, Miss Noirot. And do you do all this yourself, without any Uttridges or agents or such? Simply write down every accursed item and what it costs, and what somebody pays and what the total is and somehow make everything come out right at the end?”
“That’s my job,” she said. “The Duchess of Clevedon specializes in designing clothes. Lady Longmore is in charge of keeping Maison Noirot in the public eye. I manage the business.”
“You keep track of the money, you mean.”
“That’s part of it. I hire and dismiss the seamstresses, attend to their various crises and hysterias, pay everybody’s wages, and oversee all purchasing.”
He closed the book and looked at her for a time. It was a great deal to take in. Her extraordinary face, for one thing. The immense blue eyes and soft mouth and uncompromising chin.
The chin went with the columns of neat numbers and no blots.
The dress belonged to some fairyland.
White ruffles and lace cascading to her waist like ocean foam. Below the lace swelled sleeves as plump as bed pillows. From her dainty waist a skirt billowed: white embroidered with what seemed like thousands of tiny blue flowers. It was deliciously, madly feminine and it made a man want to rumple her, just to hear the rustling.
Well, not only for that reason.
What a treat to carry all that up St. James’s Street!
He looked at the face and the dress and thought about the neat numbers in their precisely ruled columns.
He put the ledger back.
She made a little sound.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Your foot is paining you? More brandy?”
“No, no, thank you,” she said. “My lord, I must detain you no longer. You’ve been so kind, so chivalrous.”
“It was my pleasure, I assure you.” He moved on to inspect her desk. “I had expected another dull afternoon of listening to Swanton being emotional.”
He picked up one of the alarmingly sharp pencils and stuck it into the end of his index finger. It made a tiny indentation. Probably not lethal, unless one stabbed ferociously, which he felt certain she was capable of doing. He examined her meticulously sharpened pens. As he put each object back, he was aware of her breathing erratically, in little huffs.
“Are you feeling overwarm, Miss Noirot?” he said. “Shall I open a window? Or will that only let in more of the day’s heat?”
She made a small strangled sound and said, “If you must pry, my lord—and I realize that noblemen must do as they please—can you not at least put my belongings back in the same order in which you found them?”
He stepped back from the desk and folded his hands behind his back. Not because he was abashed but because he was so sorely tempted to disarrange everything, including, most especially, her.
He looked down at the pencil and the pen, then at the ledgers once more. “Er, no. That is, I could try, but it mightn’t turn out as we hope. That’s the reason Uttridge intervenes, you see. I grow bored very quickly, and things go awry.” That wasn’t entirely untrue. Once he’d fully mastered a thing, he grew bored.
“Your dress is immaculate,” she said.
He glanced down at himself. “Odd, isn’t it? Don’t know how I do it. Well, there’s Polcaire, of course, my valet. Couldn’t do it without him.”
He contemplated his waistcoat for a moment. It was one of his favorites, and he was fairly sure he looked well in it. Some perspicacious genie must have whispered in his ear this day.
No, that was Polcaire.
Polcaire: But milord cannot wear the maroon waistcoat to this occasion.
Lisburne: Swanton is the occasion, which means all the girls will look at him. No one cares what I look like.
Polcaire: One never knows whom one will meet, milord.
Which proved that Polcaire was not only a genius among valets, but an oracle, too.
Lisburne looked up from his waistcoat at Miss Noirot.
The palest pink washed over her cheekbones like a little tide, coming and going. It was delicious.
“Shall I risk trying to get it all straight again?” he said. “My work may not be up to your standards—and I have a strong suspicion that you’re going to leap up from the chair, and …” He thought. “Stab me with the penknife?”
He was aware of her forcing herself to be calm. It wasn’t easy to discern. Her face ought to be in a dictionary, under inscrutable. Though she was a redhead, her complexion was strangely parsimonious about blushing. Still, whatever other faults he had, he wasn’t unobservant, especially of women. In her case, he was paying hawklike attention. The way she relaxed her pose wasn’t unconscious at all. He watched her arrange her features and bring her shoulders down.
“The thought crossed my mind,” she said. “But corpses are the very devil to get rid of, especially aristocratic ones. People notice when noblemen disappear.”
The door having been left partly open, he became aware of the approaching footsteps an instant after he saw her posture grow more alert.
Following a quick tap and Miss Noirot’s “Entrez,” one of the young females who’d thronged the showroom entered.
“Oh, madame, I am so sorry to interrupt you,” the girl said, or at least, that was what he made of her excessively mangled French, before she gave up on a bad job and went on in English, “But it’s Lady Clara Fairfax and … another lady.”
“Another lady?”
Miss Noirot’s face lit, and she bounded up from the chair, momentarily forgetting the injured ankle. She winced and swore softly in French, but her eyes sparkled and her face glowed. “Send them up to the consulting room, and bring them refreshments. I’ll be there in a moment.”
The girl went out.
“Up to the consulting room?” he said. “Are you meaning to mount stairs in your condition?”
“Lady Clara has brought Lady Gladys Fairfax,” she said. “Did you not see her?”
“Of course I saw Gladys. One can no more fail to notice her than one could overlook a toppling building or a forty-day flood. I pointed her out to you.”
“I meant her dress,” she said.
“I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”
What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.
“It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”
Blast.
And this afternoon had been going so well, too.
Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.
“What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”
He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.
“I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”
“Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”
“And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”
He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.
He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.
“Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”
Forty-five minutes later
Are you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”
She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.
She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult. Normal client behavior, in other words.
At present, Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, stripped to corset and chemise, thanks to Jeffreys’s able assistance and Lady Clara’s moral support. Even so, reaching this point had been a battle. Meanwhile, Leonie’s ankle hurt, and so did her head, and neither of these things mattered, any more than Lady Gladys’s obnoxious behavior did.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime.
“My lady, one of the basic principles of dress is to emphasize one’s assets,” Leonie said. “Where men are concerned, your bosom is your greatest asset.”
“Greatest I can’t quarrel with, if you mean immense,” Lady Gladys said. “I know I’m not the sylph here.” She shot an angry glance at Lady Clara, who was too statuesque to qualify as a sylph. She did qualify as impossibly beautiful, though: blonde and blue-eyed, gifted with a pearly complexion and a shapely body. And brains. And a beautiful nature.
Nature had not gifted Lady Gladys with any form of classical beauty. Dull brown hair. Eyes an equally unmemorable brown, and like her mouth too small for her round face. A figure by no means ideal. She had little in the way of a waist. But she had a fine bosom, and acceptable hips, though at the moment, this wasn’t obvious to any but the most expert observer.
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a shape,” Leonie said.
“Do you hear her, Gladys?” Lady Clara said. “Did I not tell you that you were hiding your good parts?”
“I don’t have good parts!” Lady Gladys said. “Don’t patronize me, Clara. I can see perfectly well what’s in the mirror.”
“I beg to differ,” Leonie said. “If you could see perfectly well, you’d see that your corset is wrong for your ladyship’s figure.”
“What figure?” Lady Gladys said.
“Well, let’s see what happens when we take off the corset.”
“No! I’m quite undressed enough. My dressmaker at home—”
“Seems to have a problem with drink,” Leonie said. “I cannot imagine any sober modiste stuffing her client into this—this sausage arrangement.”
“Sausage?” Lady Gladys shrieked. “Clara, I’ve had quite enough of this creature’s insolence.”
“Jeffreys, kindly assist Lady Gladys with her corset,” Leonie said firmly. The modiste who let the client take charge might as well close up shop and earn her living by taking in mending.
“You will not, girl,” Lady Gladys snapped. “You most certainly will not. I refuse to be manhandled by a consumptive child who speaks the most disgusting excuse for French to assault my ears in a city grossly oversupplied with ignoramuses.”
Jeffreys had grown up in a harsh world. This was motherly affection compared to her childhood experience. Undaunted, she moved to the customer, but when she tried to touch the corset strings, Lady Gladys twisted about and waved her arms, practically snarling.
Like a cornered animal.
“Come, come, your ladyship is not afraid of my forewoman,” Leonie said.
“Jeffreys can’t possibly be consumptive,” Lady Clara said. “If she were, she’d be dead, after the ordeal of wrestling you out of your frock and petticoats.”
“I told you this would be a waste of time!”
“And I told you I was tired of a certain person’s sly remarks about remembering your dresses from your first Season. And you said—”
“I don’t care what anybody says!”
“Ça suffit,” Leonie said. “Everybody go away. Lady Gladys and I need to talk privately.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Lady Gladys said. “You are the most encroaching—no, Clara, you are not to go!”
But Lady Clara went out, and Jeffreys followed her, and gently closed the door behind them.
Lady Gladys couldn’t run after them in her underclothes. She couldn’t dress herself, because, like most ladies, she had no idea how. She was trapped.
Leonie drew out from a cupboard an excessively French dressing gown. The color of cream and richly embroidered with pink buds and pale green vines and leaves, it was not made of muslin, as ladies’ night-dresses usually were. This was silk. A very fine, nearly transparent silk.
She held it up. Lady Gladys sniffed and scowled, but she didn’t turn away. Her gaze settled on the risqué piece of silk, and her expression became hunted.
“You can’t mean that for me,” she said. “That is suitable for a harlot.”
Leonie advanced and draped it over her ladyship’s stiff shoulders.
She turned her to face the looking glass. Lady Gladys’s mutinous expression softened. She blinked hard. “I-I could never wear such a thing, and you’re wicked to suggest it.”
Leonie heard the longing in her voice, and her hard little dressmaker’s heart ached.
Lady Gladys wasn’t a beauty. She’d never been and never would be, no matter how much of the dressmaker’s art one applied.
Yet she could be more.
“I’m not suggesting you purchase it,” Leonie said. “Not yet. It will be more suitable for your trousseau.”
“Trousseau! What a joke!”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Leonie said. “We’re going to rid you of that monstrosity of a corset.”
“You are the most managing, impudent—”
“I’ll provide you with something more suitable until I can make up exactly what you need.” Corsets were Leonie’s specialty.
“I will not … You will not …” Lady Gladys blinked hard and swallowed.
“Your ladyship is never to wear ready-made stays again,” Leonie went on briskly. It never did to become emotional with clients. They could manage that sort of thing more than adequately themselves. “They don’t provide proper support and they make you shapeless.”
“I am shapeless. Or rather, I have a fine shape if you like b-barrels.”
“You do have a figure,” Leonie said. “It isn’t classical, but that isn’t important to men. They’re not as discriminating as young women think. You’re generously endowed in the bosom, and once we get that ghastly thing off, you’ll see that your hips and bottom are in neat proportion.”
Lady Gladys looked into the mirror. Her face crumpled. She walked away and sank onto a chair.
“Let us review your assets,” Leonie said.
“Assets!” Lady Gladys’s voice was choked.
“In addition to what I’ve enumerated, you own a clear complexion, an elegant nose, and pretty hands,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.
“Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”
Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.
Leonie gave her a handkerchief.
“Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.
Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”
“Yet here you are,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”
“A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”
Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”
“I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly dressed.”
“Oh, yes, that explains everything. If you’d had the managing of things, I’d have been the belle of the ball.”
Leonie stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and eyed her new client critically. After a long, busy moment while her mind performed complicated calculations, she said, “Yes, my lady. Yes, you would have been. And yes, you can be.”
Early evening of Friday 10 July
You hateful little sneak! I always attend her!”
“Always? Once, two months ago.”
“It was only last week I waited on Miss Renfrew, while you was flirting with Mr. Burns.”
“I never was!”
“Maybe he wasn’t flirting with you, but you was trying hard enough.”
Leonie had heard the raised voices, and was hurrying from her office into the workroom at the same time as Jeffreys, on the same errand, was running that way from the showroom.
By the time they burst through the door, Glinda Simmons had got hold of Joanie Barker. They scratched and kicked and slapped and pulled each other’s hair, screeching the while. The other girls shrieked, too. In a matter of minutes, they’d tumbled bolts of costly fabric, boxes of ribbons, flowers, feathers, and other articles hither and yon.
Leonie clapped her hands, but no one was paying attention. She and Jeffreys had to move in and forcibly separate the two girls. This didn’t stop the screaming. The combatants called for witnesses to various crimes perpetrated by the opposing party, and the noncombatants took that as an invitation to express their own grievances against this one or that one.
It took nearly an hour to restore full order. Having warned the girls that they’d all be dismissed without notice or a character if they indulged in another outburst, Leonie hurried upstairs to change out of her workday dress. Jeffreys followed her.
“You’d better send Mary Parmenter to help me dress,” Leonie said. Mary had been left in charge of the showroom when Jeffreys came to stop the war. “You keep an eye on the seamstresses. You’re the best at managing these battles.”
This was only one of the reasons Selina Jeffreys, despite her youth and apparent frailty, was their forewoman.
Jeffreys ignored her, and started unfastening Leonie’s pelerine. “You’re going to be late, madame,” she said. “And you know Parmenter gets nervous and clumsy when she feels rushed. I don’t.”
Late wasn’t good enough, in Leonie’s opinion. Never would be preferable. She was not looking forward to this evening’s engagement.
Lord Swanton was hosting a poetry lecture to raise funds for the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. This was the sort of activity at which Sophy shone. She would put in an appearance, then slip away and write all about it for London’s favorite gossip sheet, Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The account would include detailed descriptions of what every Maison Noirot customer was wearing.
Leonie looked forward to the writing much in the way a French ancestor had looked forward to making the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.
Misinterpreting her frown, Jeffreys said, “Please don’t worry about the girls, madame. They’ll be all right now. It’s that time of the month, and you know how it is with girls who’re always together.”
They all had That Time of the Month at the same time.
“It’s worse this month, and we both know why,” Leonie said. Marcelline had married a duke and Sophy had married a future marquess. Though any other women would jump at the chance to quit working, Marcelline and Sophy weren’t like other women. They might give it up eventually, but not without a fight.
The girls didn’t understand this, and it wasn’t easy to prove, since neither sister was much in evidence at present. Marcelline, who was having a miserable time with morning sickness, was abed a good deal, on her doctor’s orders. Sophy had had to go away to give Fashionable Society time to forget what the French widow she’d recently impersonated had looked like.
That left Leonie, who could do what the other two did, but not with their brilliance and flair. Each sister had her special skills, and Leonie was missing her sisters’ talents acutely. And their company.
And she was more worried than anybody about what would become of Maison Noirot. She’d put everything she had into the shop—mind, body, soul. The cholera had killed Cousin Emma and wiped out their old life in Paris. Emma had died too young, but here in London her spirit and genius lived on in their hearts and in the new life they’d so painstakingly built.
“The girls will be better when my sisters are in the shop more regularly,” Leonie said. “Routine and habit, Jeffreys. You know our girls need not merely to be kept busy, but to have order in their lives.” Many had ended up in charitable institutions. Their lives before had been hard and chaotic. “But matters are bound to change, and everybody needs to adapt.” For these girls, adapting wasn’t easy. Change upset them. She understood. It upset her, too. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, getting them used to a new routine.”
“You don’t need any more work,” Jeffreys said. “You need more rest, madame. You can’t be three people.”
Leonie smiled. “No, but with your help, I might be nearly that. But do let us make haste. I must get there before it’s over.”
Later that evening
Leonie hurried into the conversation room adjoining the New Western Athenaeum’s lecture hall—
—and stopped short as a tall, black-garbed figure emerged from the shadows of a window embrasure.
“I thought you’d never come,” Lord Lisburne said.
He was not, she saw, dressed entirely in black. In addition to the pristine white shirt and neckcloth, he wore a green silk waistcoat, exquisitely embroidered in gold. It called attention to his narrow waist … thence her gaze wandered lower, to the evening trousers that lovingly followed the muscled contours of his long legs.
Leonie took a moment to settle her breathing. “Did we have an appointment?” she said. “If so, I must have made it while concussed, because I don’t recall.”
“Oh, I was sure you’d be here.” He waved a gloved hand at the door to the lecture hall. “Swanton. Young ladies in droves.” He waved at her dress. “Advertising.”
For this event, she’d chosen a green silk. Though a dress for evening, exposing more neck than day attire did, it was simple enough to suit a public lecture. No blond lace or ruffles and only minimal embroidery, of a darker green, above the deep skirt flounce and along the hem. The immense sleeves provided the main excitement, slashed to reveal what would appear to be chemise sleeves underneath—a glimpse of underwear, in other words. Over it she’d thrown, with apparent carelessness, a fine silk shawl, a wine red and gold floral pattern on a creamy white ground that called attention to the white enticingly visible through the slashing.
“I meant to arrive earlier,” she said. “But we had a busy day at the shop, and the heat makes everybody cross and impatient. The customers are sharp with the girls in the shop, who then go into the workroom and quarrel with the seamstresses. We had a little crisis. It took longer to settle than it ought to have done.”
“Lucky you,” he said. “You missed ‘Poor Robin.’”
“ ‘Poor Robin’?” she said.
He set his hat over his heart, bowed his head, and in a sepulchral voice intoned:
When last I heard that peaceful lay
In all its sweetness swell,
I little thought so soon to say—
Farewell, sweet bird, farewell!
All cloudy comes the snowy morn,
Poor Robin is not here!
I miss him on the fleecy thorn,
And feel a falling tear.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“It continued,” he said, “for what seemed to be an infinite number of stanzas.”
Her heart sank. One must give Lord Swanton credit for using his influence to raise funds for a worthwhile organization. All the same, if she had to listen to “Poor Robins” for another two hours or even more, she might throw herself into the Thames.
“Lord Swanton seems to take life’s little sorrows very much to heart,” she said.
“He can’t help himself,” Lord Lisburne said. “He tries, he says, to be more like Byron when he wrote Don Juan, but it always comes out more like an exceedingly weepy version of Childe Harold. At best. But happily for you, there’s no more room.”
No room. Relief wafted through her like a cooling breeze. She wouldn’t have to sit through hours of dismal poetry—
But she hadn’t come for her own entertainment, she reminded herself. This was business. Where Lord Swanton appeared, Maison Noirot’s prime potential clientele would be. Equally important, Lady Gladys would be here.
“All the better if it’s a crush,” Leonie said. “And a late entrance will draw attention.”
“Even if you deflated the sleeves and skirt, you couldn’t squeeze in,” he said. “I gave up my place and two women took it. The lecture hall is packed to the walls. That, by the way, is where most of the men have retreated to. Since they’re bored and you’re young and pretty, you might expect to encounter a lot of sweaty hands trying to go where they’ve no business to be.”
Leonie’s skin crawled. She’d been pawed before. Being able to defend herself did not make the experience any less disgusting. “I told Lady Gladys I’d be here,” she said.
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“It’s business,” she said.
“None of mine, in other words,” he said.
She had no intention of explaining about Paris and the night she’d been hurrying home, to warn her sisters of the danger, and found herself in a mob of men, being groped and narrowly escaping rape.
This wasn’t Paris, she told herself. This was London, and the place did not contain a mob. It was merely crowded, like so many other social gatherings. She walked to the lecture hall door.
He followed her. “A hot, stuffy room, crammed with excitable young women and irritated men, and Swanton and his poetic friends sobbing over fallen leaves and dead birds and wilted flowers,” he said. “Yes, I can understand why you can’t bear to be left out.”
“It’s business,” she said.
She cracked open the door and peered inside.
She had a limited view, through a narrow space the doorkeepers had managed to maintain in front of the door. Primarily women occupied the seats on the ground floor, and they were so tightly squeezed together, they were half in one another’s laps. They and a few men—fathers and brothers, most likely—thronged the mezzanine and upper gallery as well. The latter seemed to sag under the weight. Men filled every square inch of the standing room. The space was stifling hot, and the aroma of tightly packed bodies assaulted her nostrils.
Meanwhile somebody who wasn’t Lord Swanton was reading, in throbbing tones, an ode to a dying rose.
She retreated a step. Her back came up against a warm, solid mass. Silk whispered against silk.
Lord Lisburne leaned in to look over her shoulder, and the mingled scents of freshly pressed linen and shaving soap and male wiped out the smell of the crowd and swamped her senses.
“Aren’t you glad you were late?” he said. “You might be sitting in there.” His breath tickled her ear. “And you wouldn’t be able to get out until it was over.”
She’d be trapped, listening to poetic dirges, for hours. She closed her eyes and told herself it was business, then took a steadying breath and opened them again. She would go through this door. She—
His large, gloved hand settled on the door inches from her shoulder. He closed the door.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the circus.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_5344ef37-0168-50dd-a487-4bce867270b1)
Never warn me, my dear, to take care of my heart,
When I dance with yon Lancer, so fickle and smart;
What phantoms the mind of eighteen can create,
That boast not a charm at discreet twenty-eight.
—Mrs. Abdy, “A Marrying Man,” 1835
Miss Noirot turned quickly. Since Lisburne hadn’t moved, she came up against him, her bosom touching his waistcoat for one delicious instant. She smelled delicious, too.
She brought up her hand and gave him a push, and not, as you’d think, a little-girlish or flirtatious sort of push. It was a firm shove. While not strong enough to move him, it was a clear enough signal that she wasn’t playing coquette.
He took the message and retreated a pace.
“The circus,” she said, much as she might have said, “The moon.”
“Astley’s,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun,” she said.
“For one thing, no melancholy verse,” he said. “For another, no melancholy verse. And for a third—”
“It’s on the other side of the river!” she said, as though that were, indeed, the moon.
“Yes,” he said. “That puts the full width of the Thames between us and the melancholy verse.”
“Us,” she said.
“You got all dressed up,” he said. “What a shocking waste of effort if you don’t go out to an entertainment.”
“The circus,” she said.
“It’s truly entertaining,” he said. “I promise. Actors and acrobats and clowns. But best of all are the feats of horsemanship. Ducrow, the manager, is a brilliant equestrian.”
For all his careless manner, Lisburne rarely left much to chance. In her case, he’d done his research. Her given name was Leonie and she was, as she’d said, the businesswoman of Maison Noirot. One sister had married a duke, the other the heir to a marquessate, yet she went to the shop every day, as though their move into the highest ranks of the aristocracy made no difference whatsoever. This was an odd and illuminating circumstance.
The seamstresses, he’d learned, worked six days a week, from nine in the morning until nine at night, and her own hours seemed to be the same or longer. This, he’d concluded, greatly increased the odds against her having time to spend at Astley’s or any other place of entertainment.
She gave a little shake of her head, and waved her hand in an adorably imperious manner, signaling him to get out of her way.
He knew he stood too close—that was to say, as close as one could get without treading on her hem, women taking up a deal of space these days, in the arm and shoulder area as well as below the waist. In her case, he tested the boundary more than usual. Still, he was a man of considerable, and successful, experience with women.
He obediently moved out of the way to walk alongside.
“Here’s the thing,” he said as he accompanied her across the conversation room. “We can take a hackney to Astley’s, watch the show for an hour or so, and still get back before this funeral is over. By that time, the crowd’s bound to have thinned out. The girls are all here with chaperons. A good many girls, I promise you, will be dragged home earlier than they like, because there’s a limit, you know, to how much a brother, say, will sacrifice for his sister. Same for Papa and Mama and Great Aunt Philomena.”
They’d reached the door to the lobby. He opened it.
She sailed through, in a thrilling swish of silk.
“I know you’re unlikely to find the sort of clientele you prefer in a place like Astley’s,” he said. “But I thought you might enjoy the women’s costumes.”
“Not half so much as you will, I daresay,” she said. “Skimpy, are they?”
“Yes, of course, like a ballerina or nymph or whatever it is Miss Woolford will be playing,” he said. “She’s a treat. But the whole show is wonderful. The performers stand on the horses’ backs, and go round and round the ring. And the horses perform the cleverest tricks. As good as the acrobats.”
She looked up, her blue gaze searching.
He bore the scrutiny easily. A boy born beautiful becomes a target for other boys, and the schools he’d attended never ran short of bullies. He’d learned very young to keep his feelings out of sight and out of reach unless he needed to use them.
You are like a diamond, one of his mistresses had told him. So beautiful, so much light and fire. But when one tries to find the man inside, it’s all reflections and sparkling surfaces.
Why need anybody see more?
True, he wasn’t the shattered young man he’d been nearly six years ago, when his father died. The loss had devastated all the members of the tight-knit little family Father had created. That family, comprising not only Lisburne and his mother but her sister—Swanton’s mother—as well as Swanton, had fled England together. Still, it had taken a good while, far away from London and the fashionable world, to recover.
Few, including the many who’d respected and loved his father, understood the magnitude of the loss. Not that Lisburne wanted their understanding. His feelings were nobody’s business but his own.
All the same, he knew what true grief was, and mawkish sentiment made him want to punch somebody.
He couldn’t punch Swanton or his worshippers.
Much more sensible to set about what promised to be a challenging game: seducing a fascinating redhead.
“You’ll like it,” he said. “I promise. And I promise to get you back here before the lecture is over.”
She looked away. “I’ve never seen an equestrian,” she said.
And his heart leapt, startling him.
Astley’s was crowded, as always, but the multitude seemed not to trouble Miss Noirot as much as the crowd at Swanton’s lecture had done. Perhaps this was because the space was so much larger and more open. In any event, Lisburne took her to a private box, where she wouldn’t be jostled, and from which she’d have a prime view of both the stage and arena.
They arrived too late for the play, which was a pity, since it usually featured fine horses and horsemanship and stirring battle scenes. They were in good time for the entertainment in the arena, though. He and Miss Noirot settled into their seats as the crew members were shaking sawdust into the ring.
It had been an age since he’d entered the premises, and Lisburne had thought it would seem shabby, now that he was older and had lived abroad and watched spectacles on the Continent.
Perhaps the place awoke the boy in him, who’d somehow survived life’s shocks and lessons and had never entirely grown up or become fully civilized. He must be seeing it through a boy’s eyes because Astley’s seemed as grand as ever. The lights came up round the ring, and the chandeliers seem as dazzling, the orchestra as glamorous as he remembered.
Or maybe he saw it fresh through her great blue eyes.
He’d observed the small signs of apprehension when they’d first entered and the way the uneasiness dissolved, once she’d settled into her place and started to take in her surroundings. She sat back, a little stiff, as a clown came out and joked with the audience. She watched expressionlessly when the ringmaster appeared, carrying his long whip. Her gaze gave away nothing as he strode about the ring and engaged in the usual badinage with the clown.
Then the ringmaster asked for Miss Woolford. The crowd erupted.
And Miss Noirot leaned forward, grasping the rail.
The famous equestrienne walked out into the arena, the audience went into ecstasies, and Miss Noirot the Inscrutable drank it all in, as wide-eyed and eager as any child, from the time the ringmaster helped Miss Woolford into the saddle, through every circuit of the ring. When the performer stood on the horse’s back, Miss Noirot gasped.
“So marvelous!” she said. “I don’t even know how to ride one, and she stands on the creature’s back—while it runs!”
When, after numerous circuits, Miss Woolford paused to rest herself and her horse, Miss Noirot clapped and clapped, and cried, “Brava! Bravissima!”
The pause allowed for more play between the clown and ringmaster, but Miss Noirot turned away from the clown’s antics—and caught Lisburne staring at her.
For a moment she stared back. Then she laughed, a full-throated, easy laugh.
And his breath caught.
The sound. The way she looked at this moment, eyes sparkling, countenance aglow.
“How right you were,” she said. “Much more fun than dismal verse. How clever she is! Can you imagine the hours she’s spent to learn that art? How old do you think she was when she first began? Was she bred to it, the way actors often are—and dressmakers, too, for that matter.”
The eagerness in her voice. She was so young, so vibrantly alive.
“I reckon, even if they’re bred to it, they fall on their heads a number of times before they get the hang of it,” he said. “But they must start young, when they’re less breakable.”
“Not like dressmaking,” she said. “Sooner or later would-be equestrians have to get on the horse. But we mayn’t cut a piece of silk until we’ve been sewing seams for an eternity and made a thousand handkerchiefs and aprons. What a pleasure it is to see a woman who’s mastered such an art! The equestrians are mostly men, aren’t they?”
“That does account in part for Miss Woolford’s popularity.”
“But she’s very good—or does my total ignorance of horsemanship show?”
“She’s immensely talented,” he said. “A ballerina equestrienne.”
“This is wonderful,” she said. “My sisters are always telling me I need to get away from the shop, but Sunday comes round only once a week, and then I like to spend time with my niece, or outdoors, preferably both. Sometimes we go to the theater, but this is entirely different. It smells different, certainly.”
“That would be the horses,” he said.
“Beautiful creatures,” she said.
He caught the note of wistfulness. He considered it, along with her reactions to Miss Woolford, and filed it away for future reference.
The second part of the equestrian performance began then, and she turned back to the stage.
He looked that way, too, outwardly composed, inwardly unsettled. She’d changed before his eyes from a sophisticated Parisian to an excited girl, and for a moment she’d seemed so vulnerable that he felt … what? Ashamed? But of what? He was a man. She was a woman. They were attracted to each other and they played a game, a very old game. Yet along with the thrill of the chase he felt a twinge of something like heartache.
And why should he not? Hadn’t he endured an hour of death and dying in rhyme? And was he not obliged to go back to it?
It seemed to Leonie a very short time before she and Lord Lisburne were in a hackney again, traveling along Westminster Bridge Street, back to the “obsequies,” as he had put it a moment ago.
He’d been true to his word.
But then, she’d felt certain he would be, else she wouldn’t have come with him.
Yes, she’d been aware of his watching her during the performance when he thought she wasn’t paying attention to him. As though one could sit beside the man and not be aware of him, even if a host of heavenly angels floated down to the stage or a herd of elephants burst into the arena. And when she’d turned and caught him at it, he’d looked so like a boy caught in mischief—a boy she wanted to know—that her logic faltered for a moment, and something inside her gave way.
But only for a moment.
Now he was the charming man of the world again, and she was Leonie Noirot, logical and businesslike and able to put two and two together.
“You don’t care for his poetry, yet you came back with Lord Swanton to London for the release of his book,” she said. “That’s prodigious loyalty.”
He laughed. “A man ought to stick by his friend in hours of trial.”
“To protect him from excited young women?”
“That wasn’t the original plan, no. We’d prepared for a humiliating return. The reviewers were savage. Didn’t you know?”
“I’m not very literary,” she said. “I look at the reviews of plays and concerts and such, but mainly we’re interested in what the ladies are wearing. I rarely have time for the book reviews.”
“He’d had a few of the poems published in magazines before Alcinthus and Other Poems came out,” he said. “The reviewers loathed his work, unanimously and unconditionally. They lacerated him. They parodied him. It was a massacre. Until he saw the reviews, Swanton had been on the fence about coming back to London when his book was unleashed on the general public. After that, the choice was clear: Return and face the music or stay away and be labeled a coward.”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I was aware that his lordship had returned to London when the book came out because everybody was talking about it. Certainly our ladies were. I haven’t heard that much excitement since the last big scandal.” The one Sophy had precipitated.
“We’re still not sure what happened, exactly,” he said. “We arrived in London the day before it was to appear in the shops. We had a small party, and Swanton was a good sport about the rotten reviews—he doesn’t have a high opinion of himself to start with, so he wasn’t as desolated as another fellow might have been. We made jokes about it at White’s club. Then, a few days after we arrived, we had to order more copies printed, and quickly. Mobs of young women were storming the bookshop doors. The booksellers said they hadn’t seen anything like it since Harriette Wilson published her memoirs.”
Harriette Wilson had been a famous courtesan. Ten years ago, men had paid her not to mention them in her memoirs.
“Lord Swanton seems to have struck a chord in young women’s hearts,” she said.
“And he’s as bewildered as the critics.” Lord Lisburne looked out of the window.
At this time of year, darkness came late, and even then it seemed not a full darkness, but a deep twilight. Tonight, a full moon brightened it further, and Leonie saw that they must have crossed Westminster Bridge some while ago. She saw, too, the muscle jump in his jaw.
“Sudden leaps to fame can be dangerous,” he said. “Especially when young women are involved. I should like to get him back to the Continent before …” He trailed off and shrugged. “That crowd tonight troubled you. The one at the lecture.”
“When I see so many people crowded together,” she said slowly, “I tend to see a mob.”
A moment’s pause, then, “That’s what I see, too, Miss Noirot. I should have remained and stood guard. But …” He paused for a very long time.
“But,” she said.
“I had a chance to steal a pretty girl from the crowd, and I took it.”
Leonie and Lord Lisburne arrived in time for the concluding event of the poetic evening when, according to the program, Lord Swanton would debut one of his recent compositions.
As Lord Lisburne had predicted, the crowd had thinned. Though the hall remained full, the men had moved out of their cramped quarters along the walls and into seats in the back rows. The galleries no longer seemed in danger of collapsing.
While she and Lord Lisburne paused in the doorway, looking for a place to sit, what looked like a family group bore down on them. He drew her back and, either out of courtesy or because he wasn’t in a hurry to join the audience, made way for the departing family. When the other gentleman thanked him, Lord Lisburne smiled commiseratingly and murmured some answer that made the other man smile.
That was charm at work, charm of the most insidious kind: humorous, self-deprecating, and disarmingly frank and confiding.
Leonie well understood that type of charm. Her family specialized in it.
She of all people knew better than to let it work on her. The trouble was, it truly was insidious. One was drawn closer without realizing. One believed one had found a true intimacy when what was there was only a masterful imitation.
She lectured herself while he led her in the direction the group had come from, to the recently vacated seats at the far end of the rearmost row.
Though she’d prefer to sit closer to a door, for an easy escape, this was preferable to any place she’d have found for herself earlier. With reduced crowding, air could circulate, and when the doors opened for departing audience members, cooler night air drifted in.
Having a large, strong male nearby—even the kind who was dangerous to a woman’s peace of mind—helped keep her calm, too.
Since she truly didn’t want to listen to the poetry, and it was unintelligent to dwell too much on the large, strong male, she let her attention drift about the room. She counted twenty-two Maison Noirot creations. That was a good showing. Maybe writing the article for Foxe’s Morning Spectacle wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
Among the ladies in Maison Noirot dresses were Lady Clara and— Oh, yes! Lady Gladys Fairfax had worn her new wine-colored dress! A victory!
Leonie smiled.
Her companion leaned nearer. “What is it?” he whispered.
She felt the whisper on her ear and on her neck. Thence it seemed to travel under her skin and arrow straight to the bottom of her belly.
“An excess of emotion from the poetry,” she murmured.
“You haven’t heard a word Swanton’s uttered,” he said. “You’ve been surveying the audience. Who’s made you smile? Have I a rival?”
Like who, exactly? Apollo? Adonis?
“Dozens,” she said.
“Can’t say I’m surprised.” But his green gaze was moving over the crowd. She watched his survey continue round the hall, then pause and go back to the group sitting in the last row, as they were, but to their right, nearer to the doors.
“Clara,” he said. “And Gladys with her. I never saw them when we came in, thanks to the gentleman desperate to drag his family away. But there’s no more room on that side, in any event, and so we’re not obliged to join them—oh, ye beneficent gods and spirits of the place! Well, then …” He tilted his head to one side and frowned. “Not that I should have known Gladys straightaway.”
He turned back to Leonie, his green eyes glinting. “She isn’t in rancid colors for once. Is that your doing?”
Leonie nodded proudly.
He turned back again to look. “And there’s Valentine, roped in for escort duty, poor fellow.”
Lord Valentine Fairfax was one of Lady Clara’s brothers. Unlike Lord Longmore, who was dark, Lord Valentine was a typical Fairfax: blond, blue-eyed, and unreasonably good-looking.
“He’s been here the whole time, unfortunate mortal,” Lord Lisburne said. “Whiling away the hours weaving luscious fantasies of killing himself, I don’t doubt. Or, more likely, Val being a practical fellow, his dreamy thoughts are of ways to kill Swanton without getting caught.”
“If the men dislike the poetry so much, why do they come?” she said.
“To make the girls think they’re sensitive.”
She smothered a laugh, but not altogether successfully or quickly enough. A young woman in front of her turned round to glare.
Leonie pulled out a handkerchief and pretended to wipe a tear from her eye. The girl turned away.
The audience wasn’t as hushed as it had been earlier in the evening, when Leonie had peeked through the door. Though many occupying the prime seats on the floor sat rapt—or asleep, in the men’s case—others were whispering, and from the galleries came the low hum of background conversation that normally prevailed at public recitations.
The increased noise level didn’t seem to trouble Lord Swanton. Someone had taught him how to make himself heard in a public venue, and he was employing the training, his every aching word clearly audible:
… Aye, deep and full its wayward torrents gush, Strong as the earliest joys of youth, as hope’s first radiant flush;
For, oh! When soul meets soul above, as man on earth meets man,
Its deepest, worst, intensity ne’er gains its earthly ban!
“No, dash it, I won’t hush!” a male voice boomed over the buzz of the audience.
Leonie looked toward the sound. Not far from the Fairfaxes, a well-fed, middle-aged gentleman was shooing his family toward the door.
“A precious waste of time,” he continued. “For charity, indeed. If I’d known, I’d have sent in twice the tickets’ cost and stayed at home, and judged it cheap at the price.”
His wife tried to shush him, again in vain.
“Give me Tom Moore any day,” he boomed. “Or Robbie Burns. Poetry, you call this! I call it gasbagging.”
Lord Lisburne made a choked sound.
Other men in the vicinity didn’t trouble to hide their laughter.
“It’s a joke, it surely is,” the critic went on. “I could have gone to Vauxhall, instead of wasting a Friday night listening to this lot maunder on about nothing. Bowel stoppage, I shouldn’t wonder. That’s their trouble. What they want is a good physicking.”
Gasps now, from the ladies nearby.
“I never heard anybody ask your opinion, sir,” came Lady Gladys’s musical voice. “None of us prevented your going to Vauxhall. Certainly none of us paid for a ticket to hear you. I don’t recollect seeing anything on the program about ill-educated and discourteous men supplying critiques.”
“Glad to supply it gratis, madam,” came the quick answer. “As to uneducated—at least some of us have wit enough to notice that the emperor’s wearing no clothes.”
Lord Valentine stood up. “Sir, I’ll thank you not to address the lady in that tone,” he said.
“She addressed me first, sir!”
“Blast,” Lord Lisburne said. He rose, too. “Leave it to Gladys. Valentine will be obliged to call out the fellow, thanks to her.”
Men were starting up from their seats. Lord Swanton became aware of something amiss. He attempted to go on reading his poem, but the audience’s attention was turning away from him to the dispute, and the noise level was rising, drowning him out.
Leonie became aware of movement in the galleries. She looked up. Men were leaving their seats and moving toward the doors. A duel would be bad enough, but this looked like a riot in the making.
Images flashed in her mind of the Parisian mob storming through the streets, setting fire to houses where cholera victims lived … her little niece Lucie so sick … the tramp of hundreds of feet, growing louder as they neared …
Panic swamped her.
She closed her eyes, opened them again, and shook her head, shaking away the past. She counted the rows in the hall and estimated the audience size, and her mind quieted.
This was London, an altogether different place. And this was a different time and circumstance. These people were dying of boredom, not a rampaging disease.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if I might have your attention,” Lord Swanton said.
“You’ve had it these three hours and more!” someone called out. “Not enough?”
Other hecklers contributed their observations.
By this time Lord Lisburne had reached his cousins and the irate gentleman, who was growing more irate by the second, if the deepening red of his face was any clue.
Meanwhile, the audience grew more boisterous.
Leonie reminded herself she was a Noirot and a DeLucey. Not nearly as many of her French ancestors had got their heads cut off as deserved it. Hardly any relatives on either side had ever been stupid or incompetent enough to get themselves hanged. Or even jailed.
Marcelline or Sophy could have handled this lot blindfolded, she told herself.
She swallowed and rose. “Thank you, my lord, for your kind invitation,” she said, pitching her voice to carry. “I should like to recite a poem by Mrs. Abdy.”
“More poetry!” someone cried. “Somebody hang me.”
“Hold your tongue, you bacon brain! It’s a girl!”
Lord Swanton cut through the commentary. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Noirot—that is to say, Madame, of Maison Noirot—has kindly agreed to contribute to our poetic mélange.”
Leonie had dressed for the occasion. She knew she’d get the men’s attention because she was young and not unattractive, and the women’s because her dress was beautiful.
She was aware of the argument continuing to her right, and more aware of how hard her heart pounded, and how she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. She told herself not to be ridiculous: She performed every day, for extremely difficult women, and she got them under control.
She began, “‘I’m weary of a single life—’ ”
“Why didn’t you say so?” someone called out. “Come sit by me, my poppet.”
“Oh, stifle it!” somebody else said. “Let the lady say her piece.”
Leonie started again:
I’m weary of a single life,
The clubs of town I hate;
I smile at tales of wedded strife,
I sigh to win a mate;
Yet no kind fair will crown my bliss,
But all my homage shun—
Alas! my grief and shame is this,
I’m but a Second Son!
A burst of laughter.
That first sign of glee was all the encouragement she needed. Anxiety and self-consciousness washed away, and the DeLucey in her took over.
She went on, this time with dramatic gestures:
My profile, all the world allows,
With Byron’s e’en may vie,
[—she turned her head this way and that]
My chestnut curls half shade my brow,
[—she toyed with the curls at her ears]
I’m almost six feet high;
[—she stretched her neck, to laughter]
And by my attitudes of grace,
Ducrow is quite undone,
[—she mimicked one of the equestrian’s elegant poses]
Yet what avail the form and face
Of a poor Second Son?
Amid the men’s laughter she heard women giggling.
She had them.
She continued.
For an instant, while the angry gentleman grew more incensed, his complexion darkening from brick red to purple, Lisburne had felt sure the only outcome would be pistols at dawn. The only hope he had was for a riot. Once men started knocking one another about and women commenced screaming, Valentine and the other fellow might stop making asses of themselves.
When he heard Miss Noirot call out to Swanton, Lisburne had wanted to shake her. Was she mad? To offer more of the poetry that was driving every rational man in the hall to distraction? And to taunt them now, when he hadn’t a prayer of getting to her fast enough?
All hell should have broken loose.
But he’d reckoned without …
… whatever it was about her: the quality, so obvious, and so hard to put a satisfactory name to. The same power of personality that had attracted and held captive his attention at the British Institution seemed to work on a general audience.
Add that compelling quality to her appearance, and the men could hardly help responding. She was exceedingly pretty and a redhead besides, and the green silk dress, insane as it was, was voluptuous.
But the women, too?
Ah, yes, of course. The green silk dress.
Furthermore, Mrs. Abdy had written, along with the usual sentimental claptrap, a number of comic poems, which Swanton would give a vital organ to replicate.
London’s favorite poet was smiling. He gently prompted Miss Noirot as she faltered for a stanza. It was a longish poem—not half so long as some of Swanton’s, but still a good bit to get by heart.
And she’d said she wasn’t literary, the minx.
Even the irate gentleman was smiling. “That’s more like it,” he said.
“It isn’t,” Gladys said. “It’s an amusing bit of doggerel, no more.”
“We must allow for differences of taste,” Lisburne said. “Is that a new dress, Cousin? Most elegant.”
To his amazement, she colored, almost prettily. “I could hardly wear last year’s dress on such an occasion.”
“There, that explains,” Lisburne said to the irate gentleman. “She wore her new dress and you mentioned the emperor’s new clothes. A bit of confusion, that’s all.”
Gladys huffed. “Lisburne, how can you be so thick? But why do I ask? You know perfectly well—”
“I know you’re eager to leave before the crush,” Lisburne told the irate gentleman. “Bon voyage.”
The man’s wife took hold of her spouse’s arm and said something under her breath. After a moment’s hesitation—and another moment of glaring at Valentine—the man let himself be led away.
From the lectern came Swanton’s voice. “Thank you, Miss Noirot, for your delightful contribution. Perhaps somebody else would like to participate?”
Crawford, one of Longmore’s longtime cronies, stood up. “I’ve got a limerick,” he said.
“If it brings a blush to any lady’s cheek, I’ll gladly throttle you,” Swanton said with a smile.
“Lord Swanton is so good,” Gladys said, her voice soft for once. “A perfect gentleman.”
“Who likes a ribald limerick as well as the next fellow,” Lisburne said. “If Crawford contrives to keep it clean, he’ll be the last one to do so. Fairfax, I suggest you take the ladies home while everybody’s still on good behavior.”
“You ever were high-handed,” Gladys said, in a magnificent example of pot calling kettle black. “The lecture isn’t over, and I’m sure we’re not ready to leave.”
“I’m sure we are,” Clara said. “My head is aching, not to mention my bottom. Val, do let us go.”
“Finally, after hours of misery and tragedy, we get a little good humor, and you want to leave,” Valentine said.
“Yes, before you’re tempted to challenge anybody else over a poem,” his sister said.
Meaning, before Gladys could cause more trouble, Lisburne thought. Leave it to her to turn a poetry lecture into a riot.
A riot the redheaded dressmaker had simply stood up and stopped with a handful of verses.
He left his cousins without ceremony. More of the families and groups of women were leaving now, delaying his progress to the place where he’d last seen Miss Noirot standing in all her swelling waves of green silk, reciting her amusing poem as cleverly as any comic actress.
When he got there, she was gone.
Lisburne pushed through the departing throng out into the street. Nary a glimpse of the green silk dress or cream-colored shawl did he get. By now, hackneys and private carriages had converged outside the entrance. Drivers swore, horses whinnied, harnesses jangled. The audience jabbered about the poetry and the near riot and the modiste in the dashing green dress.
And she’d slipped away. By now she was well on her way to St. James’s Street, Lisburne calculated.
He debated whether to go in that direction or let her be. It was late, and she would be working tomorrow. He would like to keep her up very late, but that wasn’t going to happen tonight. He’d made progress, but not enough. Pursuit this night would seem inconsiderate, and would undo what he’d achieved.
He returned to the hall and eventually ran Swanton to ground in one of the study rooms.
The poet was packing papers into a portfolio in a desperate fashion Lisburne recognized all too well.
“I see you made good your escape,” Lisburne said. “No girls clinging to your lapels or coattails.”
Swanton shoved a fistful of verse into the portfolio. “The damnable thing is, that fellow who was shouting? I couldn’t have agreed more. It’s rubbish!”
“It isn’t genius, but—”
“I should give it up tomorrow, but it’s like a cursed juggernaut,” Swanton went on. “And the devil of it is, we raised more money in this one evening than the Deaf and Dumb Asylum sponsors have raised in six months, according to Lady Gorrell.” He paused and looked up from crushing the poetry so many girls deemed so precious. “I saw you come in. With Miss Noirot.”
“She tried to get in earlier, but there wasn’t room. And so I took her to the circus instead.”
“The circus,” Swanton said.
“Astley’s,” Lisburne said. “She liked it. And as a consequence of her brain not being awash in grief and sorrow when we returned, she had the presence of mind to save your bacon.”
Swanton’s harassed expression smoothed into a smile. Then he laughed outright. “I remembered Miss Leonie, of course. From Paris. Who could forget those eyes? And the mysterious smile. But I’d forgotten how quick-witted she was. That was no small kindness she did, turning the audience’s mood.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Lisburne said. “Your poetical event wasn’t the only thing she saved. My cousin Gladys almost got Valentine in a duel.”
“Was your cousin Gladys the girl who gave the noisy fellow what for?” Swanton said. “I couldn’t see her. Men were standing up, and she was behind a pillar. And I couldn’t hear exactly what she said. But her voice is splendid! So melodious. A beautiful tone.”
Lisburne had never thought about Gladys’s voice. What she said was so provoking that one never noticed the vocal quality.
“Gladys is best heard at a distance,” he said. Lancashire, he thought, would be an acceptable distance at present.
Swanton closed the portfolio, his brow furrowed. “I’ll have to thank Miss Noirot. No, that’s insufficient. I need to find a way to return the favor. Without her, we should have had a debacle. That will teach me to let these things run on for so long. An hour, no more, in future.”
“But the girls want you to wax poetic all day and all night,” Lisburne said. “Half of them had to be dragged out of the lecture hall. If you give them only an hour, they’ll feel cheated.”
Swanton was still frowning. “Something to do with girls,” he said. “They take in charity cases or some such.”
“Who does?”
“Mesdames Noirot,” Swanton said. “Somebody told me. Did Miss Noirot mention it? Or was it Clevedon?”
“I know they took in a boy they found on the street,” Lisburne said.
Swanton nodded. “They do that sort of thing. I’d better look into it. I might be able to arrange an event to raise funds for them.” He grimaced. “But something less boring and … funereal.”
“I’ll look into it,” Lisburne said. “You’ve got your hands full, fending off all those innocent maidens whose adulation you’re not allowed to take advantage of. I’m the one with nothing to do.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_1e4f4ff1-aa40-565f-b675-417957d82674)
SYMMETRICAL PERFECTION.—Mrs. N. GEARY, Court Stay-maker, 61 St James’s street, has the honour to announce to the Nobility and Gentry, that she has returned from the Continent, and has now (in addition to her celebrated newly-invented boned “Corset de toilette”) a STAY of the most novel and elegant shape ever manufactured … totally exterminating all that deadly pressure which has prevailed in all other Stays for the last 300 years … two guineas, ready money.
—Court Journal, 16 May 1835
Monday 13 July
A steady routine is of first importance,” Leonie heard Matron explain. “Four hours of lessons, four hours of work, two hours for exercise and chores, half an hour for meals. As your lordship will see, the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females is a modest enterprise. We can take in but a fraction of the girls who need us. But this is only the beginning. The Philanthropic Society, as you may be aware, began in a small house on Cambridge Heath and currently accommodates some two hundred children in Southwark. We, too, expect to grow, with the aid of charitable contributions as well as sales of our girls’ work, which I will be pleased to show you.”
From where Leonie stood in the corridor, no one in the workroom could see her. However, even with only a view of his back, she had no trouble recognizing the gentleman Matron was falling all over herself to accommodate.
Ah, yes, undoubtedly Lord Lisburne would like nothing better than to look at needlework.
Leonie debated for a moment. Not about what to do, because she was seldom at a loss in that regard. She did wonder, though, what had brought him here, of all places. She knew he was bored in London. He’d said he wanted to return to the Continent. In the meantime, he seemed interested merely in amusing himself, and she seemed to be one of the amusements.
Very well. Easy enough to turn that to her advantage. Business was business, he was rich, and he was here.
She swept through the open door.
“Thank you, Matron, for undertaking tour duty,” she said. “I know Monday is a busy day for you. I’ll continue Lord Lisburne’s tour, and you may return to your regular tasks.”
Matron relinquished Lord Lisburne with poorly concealed reluctance. And who could blame her? All that manly beauty. All that charm.
Unfortunately, all that manly beauty and charm must have turned Matron’s brain. Otherwise she’d have known better than to bring him into the workroom. Many of the girls in the bright, airy room stood on the brink of adolescence if not well in. Putting a stunning male aristocrat in front of them was asking for trouble.
Most sat in a stupor. Three had stuck themselves with their needles and were absently sucking the wounded fingers. Verity Sims had overturned her workbasket. Bridget Coppy was sewing to her dress sleeve the apron she was making.
They’d be useless for days, the lot of them.
Even Leonie was aware of a romantic haze enveloping her brain. Last night he’d sneaked into her dreams. And today he’d plagued her as well. Her mind made pictures of him as he’d been at Astley’s Royal Circus, the tantalizing glimpses she’d had of the openhearted boy he might have been once upon a time.
Nonetheless, she briskly led his lordship out of the workroom and into the corridor.
“We’re somewhat cramped, as you see,” she said.
“Yet what efficient use you’ve made of the quarters you have,” he said. “Given your penchant for order, I oughtn’t to be surprised. Still, it’s one thing to write numbers and such neatly in a ledger and quite another to organize a poky old building into something rather pleasant and cozy.”
Though she had her guard up, she couldn’t squelch the flutter of gratification. She and her sisters had worked hard to make the most of what they had. They hadn’t much. Their financial success was only very recent, and she knew better than to take it for granted. In the dressmaking business, failure could happen overnight, from natural catastrophes or merely the whims of fashionable women. With the Milliners’ Society, they’d proceeded cautiously, incurring no expenses they couldn’t cover with ready money.
They’d done it because of Cousin Emma, who’d given to three neglected children a real home and an education. She’d taught them how to make beautiful things and she’d saved them from the pointless, vagabond life of their parents.
And she’d died too young, with only the first taste of her own success.
Leonie thanked him calmly enough and said, “All the same, we’d prefer rather less coziness. We should like to expand into the house next door.”
“I daresay. Always room for expansion.”
By this point they’d moved out of the others’ hearing range.
“Very well, I’m stumped,” she said. “Did you merely stumble upon the place and decide to look in, or is this all part of a master plan?”
“Master plan,” he said. “Swanton charged me with finding out your charity. He wants to raise funds for you while everybody still loves him. You know how fickle the public can be, especially the female part of it.”
“He charged you,” she said.
“To be strictly accurate, I volunteered,” he said. “Eagerly. This is because I have two uses at present. One, I can watch and listen to him make poetry. Two, I can hang about him, ostensibly to shield him from poetry-maddened females, but actually to do very little and enjoy the edifying experience of being invisible to the females.”
“Despair not,” she said. “You weren’t invisible to Matron or the girls in the workroom.”
“Be that as it may, I had a good deal more fun looking into your activities,” he said.
Inside her head, a lot of panicked Leonies ran about screaming, What? What did he find? What did he see? Why?
Outwardly, not so much as a muscle twitched, and she said, “That sounds tedious.”
“It proved far more difficult than I expected,” he said. “You and your sisters are strangely quiet about your philanthropy.”
The inner Leonie settled down and said, Oh, that’s all right, then.
She said, “It isn’t much to boast about.”
“Is it not?” He glanced back toward the room they’d left. “I’ve lived a sheltered life. Don’t think I’ve ever seen, in one room, so many girls who’ve led …” He paused, then closed his eyes and appeared to think. “Let us say, unsheltered lives.” He opened his eyes, the green darkening as he studied her for one unnerving moment. “You keep getting more interesting. It’s rather a trial.”
“It’s business,” she said. “Some of the girls turn out to be more talented than others. We get to pick the crème de la crème as apprentices for Maison Noirot. Too, we’ve trained and educated them ourselves, which means that we know what we’re getting. We’re not as disinterested as your duchesses and countesses and such. It isn’t pure philanthropy.”
“The fact remains, you pluck them from the streets and orphanages and workhouses.”
She smiled. “We get them cheaply that way. Often for free.”
She led him into the small shop, where the girls’ productions were on display. “If your lordship would condescend to buy a few of their trinkets, they’ll be in raptures,” she said.
She moved to a battered counter and opened a glass display case.
He stood for a moment, gazing at the collection of watch guards and pincushions and handkerchiefs and sashes and coin purses and such.
“Miss Noirot,” he said.
She looked up. He was still staring at the display case’s contents, his expression stricken.
“The girls made these things?” he said. “The girls in that classroom?”
“Yes. Remember Matron telling you that we raise funds by selling their work?”
“I remember,” he said. “But I didn’t …” He turned away and walked to the shop’s one small window. He folded his hands behind his back and looked out.
She was baffled. She looked down into the display case then up again at his expertly tailored back.
After what seemed a long time, he turned away from the window. He returned to the counter, wearing a small smile. “I’m moved,” he said. “Perilously near to tears. I’m very glad I came on this errand instead of Swanton. He’d be sobbing all over the place and writing fifty-stanza laments about innocence lost or abused or found or some such gobbledygook. Luckily, it’s only me, and the public is in no danger of suffering verse from this quarter.”
For a moment, she was at a loss. But logic swiftly shoved astonishment aside. He might feel something on the girls’ account or he might be feigning great-heartedness and charitable inclinations, as so many aristocrats did. Philanthropy was a duty and they performed it ostentatiously but they didn’t really care. If even half of them had truly cared, London would be a different place.
But it didn’t matter what he truly felt, she told herself. The girls mattered. And money was money, whether offered in genuine compassion or for show.
“It would seem that your friend’s poetry has infected you with excessive tenderheartedness,” she said.
“That may be so, madame, yet I wonder how any man could withstand this.” He waved his hand at the contents of the display case. “Look at them. Little hearts and flowers and curlicues and lilies of the valley and lace. Made by girls who’ve known mainly deprivation and squalor and violence.”
She considered the pincushions and watch guards and mittens and handkerchiefs. “They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at,” she said. “If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.”
“Madame,” he said, “is it absolutely necessary to break my heart completely?”
She looked up into his green-gold eyes and thought how easy it would be to lose herself there. His eyes, like his low voice, seemed to promise worlds. They seemed to invite one to discover fascinating depths of character and secrets nobody else in the world knew.
She said, “Well, then, does that mean you’ll buy the lot?”
Lisburne House
Later
Swanton gazed at the objects Lisburne had arranged on one of the library tables—after he’d cleared off the heaps of letters and the foolscap covered with poetic scribbling.
After what seemed to be a very long time, Swanton finally looked up. “Did you leave anything in the shop?”
“I found it hard to choose,” Lisburne said.
“Yet you claim I’m the one who’s always letting himself be imposed on,” Swanton said.
“Miss Noirot didn’t impose,” Lisburne said. “Like a good businesswoman, she took advantage of me during a moment of weakness.”
He wasn’t sure why he’d been weak. It wasn’t as though he’d never visited a charitable establishment before. With his father, he’d attended countless philanthropic dinners and visited asylums and orphanages and charity schools. He’d watched the inmates in their distinctive uniforms and badges standing stiffly at attention or parading for their benefactors’ inspection or singing the praises of deity or monarch or benevolent rich people.
He was used to that sort of thing. Yet he had wanted to sit down and put his face in his hands and weep for those girls and their dainty little hearts and handkerchiefs embroidered with pansies and violets and forget-me-nots.
Confound Swanton for planting him in his poetic hotbed of feelings!
“I suppose you didn’t realize quite how canny she is,” Swanton said.
“I did not,” Lisburne said. “She’s the very devil of a businesswoman.”
After she’d torn his heart to pieces and cleaned out the display case as well as his purse, she’d very charmingly got rid of him.
“I’m glad you weren’t there,” he told Swanton. “It might have killed you. It nearly killed me when she said, ‘They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at. If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.’ ”
Swanton blinked hard, but that trick rarely worked for him. Emotion won, nine times out of ten, and this wasn’t the tenth time. His Adam’s apple went up and down and his eyes filled.
“Don’t you dare sob,” Lisburne said. “You’re turning into a complete watering pot, worse than any of those deranged girls who follow you about. Pull yourself together, man. You’re the one who proposed to raise funds for Maison Noirot’s favorite charity. I found out all about it for you. I’ve brought you abundant evidence of their work. Do you mean to compose a lugubrious sonnet on the occasion, or may we discuss practical plans?”
“Easy enough for you to talk about pulling oneself together.” Swanton pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “You’re not the one who’s afraid to put a foot anywhere lest he step on a young female. I have to be careful not to hurt their tender feelings, and at the same time not say anything too kind, lest it be construed as wicked seduction.”
“Yes, yes, it’s a hellish job,” Lisburne said. “If you want to go back to Florence or Venice tomorrow, I’ll go with you happily.”
He might as well. What had he to do here but try to keep Swanton out of trouble with swooning girls? Though a grown man, supposedly capable of taking care of himself, the poet tended to be oblivious at times. This made him easy prey for any of a number of unpleasant women, like Lady Bartham’s younger daughter, Alda.
As to Miss Leonie Noirot …
If Lisburne did return to Italy tomorrow, would she notice he was gone, or would she simply find another fellow to intrigue while she set about picking his pockets?
Swanton took up one of the pincushions that had stabbed Lisburne to the heart.
“That’s Bridget Coppy’s work,” Lisburne said. “Miss Noirot says the heart shape is traditional for pincushions. But instead of the usual red, the girl exercised her imagination and made it in white with a coral trim, to set off the colorful flowers. The cord attaches to the waist.”
“The flowers are charming,” Swanton said. “So delicate.”
“Bridget is becoming a skilled embroiderer,” Lisburne said.
“My mother would like this,” Swanton said.
“Then by all means let us deliver it in person. I see gifts aplenty here for my mother as well. And her new husband. They would both be enchanted.”
His mother had chosen her second husband as wisely as she’d done her first. Lord Rufford was a good, generous man, who made her happy. He’d made a friend of his stepson, too, no easy feat.
“You’re in a devil of a hurry to return,” Swanton said.
Lisburne laughed. “Perhaps I am. I’m supposed to be such a cosmopolitan fellow, yet I let a redheaded French milliner get the better of me. Perhaps I want to slink away in shame.”
“That I beg leave to doubt,” Swanton said. “I believe you’re so far from wishing to leave that you’re even now puzzling over how she did it, so that you can plan how to prevail at your next encounter.”
Lisburne looked at him.
“She’s the only woman you’ve taken any particular notice of since we came to London,” Swanton said. “And I know you. As well, that is, as anybody can know you.”
“As though there were anything of great moment to know,” Lisburne said. But Swanton was a poet. He imagined everybody had hidden depths. If Lisburne did have them, he wasn’t interested in exploring them, and he certainly wouldn’t encourage anybody else to do so. “What about you? Do you feel compelled to stay?”
“I feel I must,” Swanton said.
“Do you? I’d as soon be stalked by wolves as by a lot of gently bred maidens.”
“They’ll grow sick of me soon enough,” Swanton said. “In the meantime, I should be a coward to run away when I can do so much good. It would be unworthy of your father’s memory, in any event.”
“Yes, yes, stab me with my father, do,” Lisburne said.
“I know it isn’t fair, but it’s the only way I know to win an argument with you,” Swanton said.
“Very well,” Lisburne said. “We stay until they turn on you. Then we pray we can get away in time.”
He glanced at the piles of correspondence he’d flung onto one of the library’s sofas a short time earlier. “Meanwhile, does your secretary need a secretary? The heaps of letters have only grown higher since yesterday.” Remembering what Swanton had said moments ago, he added, “Begging letters, you said. One of the perils of rank and wealth. Everybody puts his hand out, and somebody has to decide who’s deserving and who isn’t.”
“That’s the least of it,” Swanton said. “Today alone I received two claims for child support and one extortionate note threatening a breach of promise suit.”
To anybody who knew Swanton, the claims were absurd. Yet they oughtn’t to be taken lightly.
Fame aroused envy and greed and, generally, the worst instincts of some people. Too many would be willing to believe ill of him.
“Show me the letters,” Lisburne said.
Evening of Tuesday 14 July
Had Lisburne not been so deeply engrossed in his cousin’s unpleasant correspondence, he might have got wind of the other matter sooner. Or maybe not.
Though he’d been to White’s often enough, he hadn’t looked into the betting book in days. Why bother? So many of the wagers were witless, arising from boredom. How long a fly would crawl about the window before it died or flew away, for instance.
Lisburne, for the present at least, wasn’t bored. Watching women moon about Swanton had been tiresome, and even the possible dangers of the situation hadn’t made life exciting. But then Miss Leonie Noirot had entered the picture, and London had become far more interesting.
Since she was everything but boring, Lisburne wasn’t shocked to find her at the heart of the latest gossip.
He and Swanton had attended the Countess of Jersey’s assembly, where the ladies made the usual fuss about the poet. While the younger women were fluttering about Swanton, Lisburne drifted toward the card room. As he was about to enter, Lady Alda Morris detained him, in order to whisper something behind her fan.
Maison Noirot
Wednesday 15 July
Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, her face pink.
Four women—Leonie, Marcelline, Lady Clara, and Jeffreys—watched and waited.
Today, for the first time, Lady Gladys wore the corset Leonie had designed especially for her.
Unlike the one they’d hastily adapted last week to replace the monstrosity she’d brought from home, this one employed all of Leonie’s knowledge of mathematics, physiology, and physics. Until this moment, she hadn’t been allowed to enjoy her accomplishment, because Lady Gladys had refused to come out and show herself in the corset. She said she would not cavort about in her undergarments to be gawked at.
That, however, was before she’d seen the gold evening dress.
When they’d first shown it to her, she’d made a face and said the color would make her look as though she had a liver disease. But by Lady Gladys’s standards, the protest was feeble. A moment later she said she might as well try it on. Then she’d insisted on Jeffreys—the allegedly consumptive speaker of vile French—attending her in the dressing room.
Ladies were nothing if not capricious, but this lady had apparently devoted her young life to making everybody about her want to throttle her.
“Well,” she said at last.
One word, but Leonie caught the little bubble of pleasure in it. Lady Gladys had a beautiful voice, as expressive as an opera singer’s.
“I never thought I could wear this color,” she said.
“So you made abundantly clear,” Lady Clara said. “I thought we should have to stupefy you with drink to get you to try on anything today.”
“That isn’t true. I didn’t make a fuss about trying on the corset. I only didn’t want to prance about in my underwear while everybody stared at me.”
She smoothed the front of the dress though Jeffreys, naturally, had made sure every seam lay precisely in place.
“The corset is comfortable,” Lady Gladys said. “I’m not sure what you did, but …” She trailed off, studying herself. “You did something,” she said.
Leonie had done a great deal. She’d designed the stays to support her ladyship’s generous embonpoint. The corset’s shape smoothed her waist in a way that made it seem smaller, though the compression was minimal.
Her figure remained much fuller and less shapely than the fashionable ideal. But fashionable ideals were only that. What was important was making a lady look as beautiful as it was possible for her to look. And the gold satin was as much a surprise to Leonie as it was to Lady Gladys.
As usual, Marcelline had imagined the dress entirely in her head. This time, though, she’d relied solely on Leonie’s detailed description of their new client.
Yet from her sickbed, and in spite of near-constant nausea, Marcelline had designed a miracle of a dress. Gold satin trimmed in black blond lace. Simple yet dramatic. The pointed waist created the illusion of a narrower waistline, and the black languets that fastened it in front enhanced the effect.
Pointed waists had supposedly fallen out of fashion, but Marcelline never concerned herself with what she considered petty fluctuations of taste.
This dress would bring pointed waists straight back into style, Leonie calculated. The black lace mantilla, attached to the tops of the sleeves, not only added drama but drew the eye upward, toward Lady Gladys’s ample bosom. It was, perhaps, not quite the thing for an unwed young lady, but Lady Gladys would look ridiculous in the types of dresses that suited the average maiden.
She brought her hand up to the edge of the bodice. “It’s very low-cut,” she said.
“But of course, my dear,” Marcelline said. “You have a beautiful bosom. We want to draw the eye to it.”
“I’ll feel naked,” Lady Gladys said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Lady Clara said. “You’ll feel naked and still look perfectly respectable.”
“Hardly perfectly respectable,” said her cousin.
“It’s all right to look tempting,” Lady Clara said.
“Will you stop it!” Lady Gladys snapped, her vehemence startling everybody. “Stop being kind. I can’t tell you how provoking it is. No, wait, yes I can. You’ve only to crook a finger to have any man you want. You have no idea what it’s like to be—to be—not to be beautiful and sweet-natured!”
“I’m not sweet at all,” Lady Clara said. “People only think that because of my looks.”
“That’s the point! You can say anything!”
“No, I can’t,” Lady Clara said sharply. “I can’t be myself. There’s Mama, looming over me all the time. You don’t know how suffocating it is.”
“Oh, yes, all those men crowding about you, clamoring for a smile.”
“They only see the outside. They don’t know who I am, or care particularly. You know me—or you ought to know. And you know I’m on your side and always have been, in spite of how difficult you make it.”
Lady Gladys went scarlet and her eyes filled. “I don’t know how to behave!” she cried. “I don’t know how to do anything! You complain because your mother is always at you. But at least you have one. You’ve had women about to teach you how to be womanly. Look at me! My father’s a soldier, and I might as well have been raised in an army camp. He treats me like a regiment. He gives orders and then off he goes, to smash some Foe of England.” She flung away and stormed back to the dressing room. “Jeffreys! Get this thing off me!”
With a panicked look at Leonie, Jeffreys trotted after her.
Lady Clara stomped to a chair and flung herself onto it.
Marcelline looked at Leonie.
Leonie lifted her shoulders and mouthed, I have no idea.
“What on earth is the matter?” Marcelline said to Lady Clara.
“I don’t know,” Lady Clara said.
“I can tell you what’s the matter,” Lady Gladys said from behind the curtain. “I’m not going to Almack’s tonight, no matter how they cajole. I told them I wouldn’t do that sort of thing ever again, yet Clara won’t stop plaguing me about it. And now you’ve given her this curst dress for ammunition!”
“You look very well in it, but you’re too obstinate to admit it!” Lady Clara cried.
“I don’t care if I look well. They should never have made it, because I’ll have no occasion to wear it. I don’t want it! I wish I’d never come to London!”
Lady Clara sighed, braced her forehead with one hand, and stared at the floor.
From behind the dressing room curtain came a choked sob.
Other than that, the consulting rooms were silent, apparently peaceful.
That was when Mary Parmenter came in, all flustered, to report that Lord Lisburne and Lord Swanton had arrived. They had business with Miss Noirot, they said. Should Mary ask them to wait in the showroom or in the office?
“We’re busy,” Leonie said. “You may tell them to make an appointment.”
She heard a gasp from behind the curtain. Then, “You can’t make Lord Swanton wait,” Lady Gladys called out shakily. “You’re not busy with me anymore. You might as well see what the gentlemen want.”
“Tell them to make an appointment,” Leonie told Parmenter.
Then she sent the others away and walked behind the curtain.
Leonie found Lady Gladys sitting on the edge of the dressmaking platform, head in her hands.
“I’m not talking to you,” her ladyship muttered. “You’re like a human thumbscrew.”
“One of the secrets of our success is knowing our ladies’ minds,” Leonie said. “We squeeze it out of you one way or another. You might as well tell me and save us both energy we can employ more happily elsewhere.”
“Happy!”
Leonie dropped onto the platform beside her.
Lady Gladys lifted her head. “You only pretend to be my friend. You only want me to order more clothes.”
“I haven’t got to pretending to be your friend yet,” Leonie said. “But I do want you to order more clothes. Why else be in business?”
“It hasn’t occurred to you that I might put you out of business? All of London knows you’ve taken me in hand. They’re already betting on the outcome.”
In truth, of all the matters that might be making Lady Gladys irrational, this hadn’t been the first to cross Leonie’s mind—probably because of the large mental distraction known as the Marquess of Lisburne.
Still, the betting didn’t surprise Leonie. Members of the ton, men and women alike, gambled, mainly because they were bored and idle. And whether they made bets or not, the women would be deeply interested in the results of Lady Gladys’s visits to the shop.
Leonie knew this. It was, in fact, part of what had propelled her toward Lady Gladys. Once Maison Noirot succeeded in showing her ladyship at her best, all the fashionable world would be pounding on Maison Noirot’s doors.
But her ladyship did have to cooperate.
“Aristocrats wager about everything,” Leonie said briskly. “Naturally, you find it galling—”
“Especially when Lady Bartham’s irritating daughter takes great pains to explain the terms,” Lady Gladys said. “As will not surprise you, the phrase ‘silk purse from sow’s ear’ came up more than once.”
Lady Bartham was a close friend and venomous social rival of Lady Clara’s mother, Lady Warford. Leonie didn’t understand why anybody would make friends—or having made them in ignorance, continue—with an adder. She was aware that one of Lady Bartham’s daughters, Lady Alda, was equally toxic.
“Some people are either so ignorant, self-centered, or deeply unhappy that hurting others makes them feel good,” Leonie said. “It’s perverse, but there it is. The best way to fight back is to find a reason to laugh or to feel pleased. It will confuse and upset them. A good revenge, I think.”
Lady Gladys scowled at her. “Tell me what’s amusing. Tell me what I ought to feel pleased about.”
“Why should she go to so much trouble to insult and hurt you unless she’s trying to undermine your self-confidence? Maybe she’s afraid you’ll turn into competition.”
Lady Gladys gave Leonie a you-need-medical-help look.
“Only imagine,” Leonie said, “if you had patted her hand reassuringly and said, ‘Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry to worry you, but I promise to try not to steal any of your beaux, if I can help it.’ Then you could laugh. You have such a pretty laugh. And she would go away a good deal more upset than you.”
“A pretty laugh?” Lady Gladys said. She turned away to stare at a French fashion print on the opposite wall.
“A beautiful voice altogether.” Leonie rose. “Please stop wishing to look like your cousin. It makes you blind to your own assets. You’ll never look like Lady Clara. But she’ll never have your voice.”
“That hardly makes us even!”
“The biggest army, even in the smartest uniforms, doesn’t always win the battle,” Leonie said. “Did his lordship your father never tell you that cleverness and luck come into it?”
Shortly thereafter
At this time of day, when ladies of fashion were dressing for the parade in Hyde Park, Lisburne had expected to find the shop relatively quiet. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let Swanton come with him. The shop was quiet enough. The showroom held a few shopgirls restoring order after their most recent customers. They were putting ribbons and trinkets into drawers, reorganizing display cases, straightening hats their clientele had tipped askew, and rearranging mannequins’ skirts. The only remaining customer was an elderly lady who couldn’t make up her mind among several shades of brown ribbon.
Swanton was pacing at one end of the showroom when the girl returned to inform them that they needed to make an appointment.
“They must be busy with an important client,” Lisburne told him. “Why don’t you toddle up to White’s? The club will be free of women, and you can compose your turbulent mind with the aid of a glass of wine or whiskey.”
Swanton had stopped pacing when the girl returned from her errand. Now he looked about him as though he’d forgotten where he was. “White’s,” he said.
“Yes. The young ladies can’t get to you there.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to wait,” Lisburne said. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying out our errand on my own. And I can do it in a more businesslike manner if you’re not mooning about.”
“I need to write half a dozen new poems in less than a week!” Swanton said. “You’d be in a state of abstraction, too.”
“All the more reason for you to go away to a quiet place, where the women are not giggling and blushing and making up excuses to get close to you.”
Naturally Swanton didn’t realize what was going on about him. The shopgirls would have to hit him on the head with a hat stand to get his full attention. Still, unlike the young ladies of the ton, they were mainly excited to have a celebrity in their midst. They probably hadn’t time to read his poetry—if they could read. Their interest wasn’t personal, in other words.
Swanton looked about him, seeing whatever hazy version of reality he saw. “Very well,” he said. “I can take a hint.”
No, you can’t, Lisburne thought.
With any luck, Swanton would manage to cross St. James’s Street without walking into the path of an on-coming carriage. If not, and if he seemed headed into danger, a sympathetic female would rush out and rescue him, even if she was one of the two people in London who didn’t know who he was. Because he looked like an angel.
In any case, Lisburne wasn’t his nursemaid. Furthermore, he’d wrestled with enough of the poet’s problems in the past two days.
He was in dire need of mental relief.
Such as Miss Leonie Noirot.
Who was too busy to see him.
He walked about the shop, studying the mannequins and the contents of the display cases. He even allowed himself to be consulted on the matter of brown ribbons.
He was solemnly examining them through his quizzing glass, trying to decide which had a yellower cast, when Gladys hurried out into the showroom, then swiftly through the street door. Clara followed close behind. Neither noticed him, and he didn’t try to attract their attention.
“I wonder if Miss Noirot will see me now,” he said to the girl who’d told him to make an appointment.
The girl went out.
She returned a quarter hour later and led him to Miss Noirot’s office.
Chapter Five (#ulink_64afe4b9-0c19-585a-b56f-eb65d050eea1)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/loretta-chase/vixen-in-velvet-39931242/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Loretta Chase
A dangerous wager… A seductive nobleman…When Leonie Noirot first meets devastatingly handsome Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne, she literally falls into his strong arms!However, Leonie simply has no time for his wickedly charming lordship. The pretty redhead is obsessed with her business – turning the ladies of society into beautifully dressed swans. Until the bet…Logical Leonie has to agree; if Lisburne’s cousin, Lady Gladys, is not transformed, Leonie must spend two weeks at Lisburne’s pleasure…
She straightened and came around to face him, making a pretty flurry of white muslin and lace.
She was a dressmaker, he told himself. She knew how to wield clothes as a weapon. And it worked all too well, like a club to the head.
She gave him the enigmatic smile, so like the one Botticelli’s Venus wore. ‘A wager,’ she said.
‘Everybody else is doing it,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t we?’
“Because you’ll lose?” she said.
‘Oh, but I’m sure you’ll lose,’ he said. ‘And my mind is wandering over an interesting range of forfeits.’
‘Mine, too,’ she said. ‘Money means nothing to you, so I must use my powers of imagination.’
‘I had higher stakes in mind,’ he said. ‘Nothing so ordinary as money. Something significant.’
She set her hands on the edge of the desk and leaned back.
He couldn’t exactly see her calculating. She was too good at not showing what she was about. Yet he knew she was weighing and measuring, and so he calculated, too.
He sensed the moment when she’d worked out her answer. Yet she waited one moment. Another.
Playing with him, the vixen.
THE DRESSMAKERS SERIES
Silk is for Seduction
Scandal Wears Satin
Vixen in Velvet
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).
Vixen in Velvet
Loretta Chase
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
In memory of my mother
Acknowledgements (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
Thanks to:
May Chen: funny, wise and understanding editor, whose patience surpasseth all understanding;
Nancy Yost: brilliant, hard-working, witty and inspiring agent;
Isabella Bradford: kindred spirit and nerdy history co-enabler;
Paul and Carol: providers of the perfect writer’s refuge on Cape Cod;
Valerie Kerxhalli: advisor in French Colonial matters;
Williamsburg milliners, mantua makers and tailors: experts in historic dress, who continue to unlock the mysteries of clothing from the past;
Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy: sisters, cheerleaders, confidantes, friends;
Walter: spouse, producer, cinematographer and knight in shining armour,
Table of Contents
Cover (#u47646b9f-9e3a-5dbc-842a-b95b2257680f)
Excerpt (#ub78e2f7e-fa44-5b30-a304-b6af2b0d50fa)
About the Author (#ud63bba45-8039-597e-94ee-dba294500320)
Title Page (#u4834a586-b3dc-5d73-942f-0de60b78beae)
Dedication (#u4dae620d-2934-5bd7-b558-b308e02c5689)
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
BRITISH INSTITUTION.—ANCIENT MASTERS. This annual Exhibition is the best set-off to the illiberality with which our grand signors shut up their pictures from the public—making, in fact, close boroughs of their collections.
—The Athenaeum, 30 May 1835
British Institution, Pall Mall, London
Wednesday 8 July
He lay naked but for a cloth draped over his manly parts. Head fallen back, eyes closed, mouth partly open, he slept too deeply to notice the imps playing with his armor and weapons, or the one blowing through a shell into his ear. The woman reclined nearby, her elbow resting on a red cushion. Unlike him, she was fully dressed, in gold-trimmed linen, and fully awake. She watched him with an unreadable expression. Did her lips hint at a smile or a frown, or was her mind elsewhere entirely?
Leonie Noirot’s mind offered sixteen different answers, none satisfactory. What wasn’t in doubt was what this pair had been doing before the male—the Roman god Mars, according to the exhibition catalog—fell asleep.
If anything else was in Leonie’s mind—her reason for coming here this day, for instance, or where “here” was or who she was—it had by now drifted to a distant corner of her skull. Nothing but the painting mattered or even existed.
She stood before the Botticelli work titled Venus and Mars, and might have been standing on another planet or in another time, so completely did it absorb her. She stood and stared, and could have counted every brushstroke, trying to get to the bottom of it. What she couldn’t do was escape it.
If anybody had stood in her way, she might have throttled that person. Oddly enough, nobody did. The British Institution’s Annual Summer Exhibition continued to attract visitors. It drew as well numerous artists, who set up their easels in the galleries, in order to copy the work of old masters. These artists made annoying obstacles of themselves while they desperately exercised what might be their only opportunity to copy works from private collections.
Nobody stood in Leonie’s way. Nobody pontificated over her shoulder. She didn’t notice this, let alone wonder why. She hadn’t come for the art but for one specific reason.
A most important reason … which she’d forgotten the instant her gaze landed on the painting.
She might have stood transfixed until Doomsday, or until one of the caretakers pitched her out. But—
A crash, sudden as a thunderclap, broke the room’s peace.
She jumped, and stumbled backward.
And hit a wall that oughtn’t to have been there.
No, not a wall.
It was big, warm, and alive.
It smelled like a man: shaving soap and starch and wool. Two man-sized gloved hands, which lightly grasped her shoulders and smoothly restored her to an upright position, confirmed the impression.
She turned quickly and looked up—a good ways up—at him.
Ye gods.
Or, more accurately, ye god Mars.
Perhaps he wasn’t precisely like the image in the painting. For one thing, the living man was fully clothed, and most expensively, too. But the nose and forehead and mouth were so like. And the shape of the eyes especially. His, unlike the war god’s, were open.
They were green, with gold flecks, like the gold streaks in his dark blond hair. And that was curly like Mars’s, and appealingly unruly. Something less easily definable in the eyes and mouth hinted at other kinds of unruliness: the mouth on the brink of a smile and the eyes open a degree too wide and innocent. Or was that stupidity?
“In all the excitement, I seem to have put my foot under yours,” he said. “I do beg your pardon.”
Not stupid.
More important, he’d been standing too close, and she hadn’t noticed. Leonie never allowed anybody to sneak up on her. In Paris that could have been fatal. Even in London it was risky.
She kept all her misgivings on the inside, as she’d learned to do eons ago.
“I hope I did you no permanent injury,” she said. She let her gaze drift downward. His boots were immaculate. His valet had polished them to such a fearsome brilliance, the dust of London’s streets could only stagger away, blinded.
His green gaze slid downward, too, to her footwear. “A small foot wrapped in a bit of satin and a sliver of leather doing damage? Odds against, don’t you think?”
“The bits of satin and leather are half-boots called brodequins,” she said. “And my feet are not small. But it’s gallant of you to say so.”
“In the circumstances, I ought to say something agreeable,” he said. “I ought as well to produce a clever reason for creeping up on you. Or a chivalrous reason, like intent to shield you from falling easels. But then you’d only decide I was an idiot. As anybody can see, the offending object is some yards away.”
She was aware of somebody swearing, about three paintings to her left. From the same direction came the sound of wood scraped over wood and the rustling of a heavy fabric. She didn’t look that way. Girls who didn’t keep their wits about them when gods wandered their way got into trouble. Ask Daphne or Leda or Danaë.
Today’s fitful sun had decided to stream through the skylight at this moment. Its rays fell upon the gold-streaked head.
“Perhaps you were captivated by the painting,” she said. “And lost track of your surroundings.”
“That’s a fine excuse,” he said. “But as it’s my painting, and I’ve had ample time to stare at the thing, it won’t do.”
“Yours,” she said. She hadn’t looked up the lender’s name at the back of the catalog. She’d assumed the masterpiece must belong to the King or one of the royal dukes.
“That is to say, I’m not Botticelli, you know, the fellow being dead some centuries. I’m Lisburne.”
Leonie collected her wits, brought business to the front of her mind, and flipped through the pages of her mental ledger, wherein she kept her private compendium of Great Britain’s aristocracy as well as important tidbits from the gossip sheets and her gossipy customers.
She found the entry easily, because she’d updated it not many days ago: Lisburne meant Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne. Age seven and twenty, he constituted the sole issue of the greatly lamented third Marquess of Lisburne, whose very recently remarried widow resided in Italy.
Lord Lisburne, who’d lived abroad, too, for these last five or six years, had arrived from the Continent a fortnight ago with his first cousin and close friend Lord Swanton.
The Viscount Swanton was Leonie’s reason for being in a Pall Mall gallery on a workday.
She looked back at the painting. Then she looked about her, for the first time, really. It dawned on her, then, why nobody else had stood in her way. Elsewhere on the gallery walls hung landscapes, mythological and historical deaths and battles and such, and madonnas and other religious subjects. The Botticelli had nothing to do with any of them. No preaching, no violence, and definitely no bucolic innocence.
“Interesting choice,” she said.
“It stands out, rather, now you mention it,” he said. “No one seems to care much for Botticelli these days. My friends urged me to put in a battle scene.”
“Instead you chose the aftermath,” she said.
His green gaze shifted briefly to the painting, then back to her. “I could have sworn they’d been making love.”
“And I could swear she’s vanquished him.”
“Ah, but he’ll rise again to—er—fight another day,” he said.
“I daresay.” She turned fully toward the painting and moved a step closer, though she knew she risked drowning in it. Again. Surely she’d seen equally beautiful works—in the Louvre, for instance. But this …
Its owner moved to stand beside her. For a moment they regarded it in silence, an acute physically conscious one on her part.
“Venus’s expression intrigues me,” she said. “I wonder what she’s thinking.”
“There’s one difference between men and women,” he said. “He’s sleeping and she’s thinking.”
“Somebody must think,” she said. “And it does so often seem to be the women.”
“I always wonder why they don’t go to sleep, too,” he said.
“I couldn’t say,” Leonie said. She truly couldn’t. Her understanding of the physical act between men and women, while as detailed and precise as her eldest sister could make it, was in no way based on personal experience—and this was not the time to imagine the experience, she reminded herself. Business came first, last, and always. Especially now. “What occupies me is a lady’s outward appearance.”
She opened her reticule, withdrew a small card, and gave it to him. It was a beautiful card, as of course it must be, hers being the foremost establishment of its kind in London. The size of a lady’s calling card and elegantly engraved and colored, it was nonetheless a trade card for Maison Noirot, Dressmakers to Ladies of Fashion, No. 56 St. James’s Street.
He studied it for a time.
“I’m one of the proprietresses,” she said.
He looked up from the card to meet her gaze. “You’re not the one married to my cousin Longmore?”
She couldn’t be surprised he was a cousin of her newest brother-in-law. All the Great World seemed to be related to one another, and the Fairfax family, to which the Earl of Longmore belonged, was large in its main branch and prolific in its associated twigs and vines.
“That’s my sister Sophy,” she said. “For future reference, she’s the blonde one.” That was the way Society thought of the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot, she knew: the Three Sisters—sometimes the Three Witches or French Tarts—the brunette, the blonde, and the redhead.
“Right. And one of you is married to the Duke of Clevedon.”
“My sister Marcelline. She’s the brunette.”
“How good of your parents to make you easy to tell apart,” he said. “And how kind of you to explain. Were I to mistake, say, the Countess of Longmore for you, and make a stab at flirtation, her brute of a spouse would try to do me a violence, to the detriment of my neckcloth. I spent fully half an hour arranging it.”
Leonie was an experienced businesswoman of one and twenty, not a sheltered young lady. She examined the neckcloth in a businesslike manner—or tried to. This proved a great deal more difficult than it ought to be.
Below the finely chiseled angle of his jaw, his neckcloth was not only immaculate but so flawlessly folded and creased that it might have been carved of marble.
The rest of his dress was inhumanly perfect, too. So were his face and physique.
The inner woman felt light-headed, and thought this would be a good time to swoon. The dressmaker regarded the neckcloth with a critical eye. “You employed your time to excellent effect,” she said.
“Not that it makes the least difference,” he said. “No one looks at the other fellows when he’s about.”
“He,” she said.
“My poetical cousin. I’m overburdened with cousins. Oh, there they are now, blast it.”
She became aware of voices coming from the central staircase.
She turned that way as hats and heads rose into view. Torsos soon followed. After a moment’s apparent confusion about which way to go, the group, mainly young women, surged toward the archway of the gallery in which she stood. There they came to a halt, with only a moderate degree of unladylike pushing and elbowing. The clump of women opened up to make way for a tall, slender, ethereal-looking gentleman. He wore his flaxen hair overlong and his clothing with theatrical flair.
“Him,” Lord Lisburne said.
“Lord Swanton,” she said.
“Who else could it be, with two dozen girls looking up at him, every one of them wearing the same besotted expression.”
Leonie’s gaze took in the women, all about her age or younger, except for a handful of mamas or aunts obliged to chaperon. Near the outer edge of Lord Swanton’s worshippers and their reluctant attendants she spied Sophy’s new sister-in-law, Lady Clara Fairfax, looking bored. Her ladyship stood with a plain young woman who was dressed stupendously wrong.
Leonie’s spirits soared. She’d come intending to add to her clientele. This was more than she’d dared to hope for.
For a moment she almost forgot ye god Mars and even the painting. Almost. She beat down her excitement and turned her attention back to Lord Lisburne.
“Thank you, my lord, for stopping me from toppling like the unfortunate artist’s easel,” she said. “Thank you for choosing that particular painting to lend to the exhibition. I don’t care for scenes of violence, which seem to be so popular. And saintly beings are so trying. But this experience was sublime.”
“Which experience, exactly?” he said. “Our acquaintance has been short but eventful.”
She was tempted to linger and continue flirting. He was so good at it. Moreover, in addition to being beautiful he was a nobleman who owned a painting that, popular or not, was probably priceless. Beyond a doubt he owned several hundred other priceless or at least stunningly costly objects, along with two or three immense houses set upon large expanses of Great Britain. If—or more likely, when—he took a wife and/or set up a mistress, he’d pay for her housing, servants, carriage, horses, etc. etc.—and, most important of et ceteras, her clothing.
But the girl, Clara’s friend, looked out of sorts and seemed ready to bolt. A prize like that didn’t turn up every day. Leonie had already obtained Lord Lisburne’s attention, in any event. He’d saunter into the shop one of these days, if she was any judge of men.
“It has, indeed,” Leonie said. “However, I came on business.”
“Business,” he said.
“Ladies,” she said. “Dresses.” She made a brisk gesture, indicating her ensemble, which she’d spent well more than half an hour arranging for this event. “Advertising.”
Then she made a quick curtsey and started toward Lord Swanton and his acolytes. She heard a muffled sound behind her, but she couldn’t take the time to look back. The ill-dressed girl was tugging on Lady Clara’s arm.
Leonie walked more quickly.
Eyes on Lady Clara’s companion, she didn’t see the canvas cloth in her way.
The toe of her brodequin caught on it and she pitched forward.
She was aware of a collective gasp, interspersed with titters, as she went down, arms flailing ungracefully.
Lisburne hadn’t noticed the artist’s cloth, either.
He was too busy taking in the rear view of Miss Noirot, though he’d already fully employed the opportunity to study that at length—at a distance as well as at improperly close quarters—while she stood before the Botticelli, oblivious to him and everybody and everything else. When she’d turned to look up at him, he’d nearly staggered, thinking Botticelli’s Venus had come to life: the same—or very like—heart-shaped face and alluringly imperfect nose … the ripe mouth with its hint of a smile or deep thought or troublesome recollection … the surprisingly determined chin.
His mind might have wandered into indecorous fantasies but his reflexes were in sharp working order. He moved forward, caught her, and swept her up into his arms in one smooth movement.
Ladies’ dress had only grown more extravagantly fanciful since he was last in England, nearly six years ago. It was hard to tell which parts of a girl were real and which were created for artistic effect. While he appreciated artistic effect, he was happy to discover that what seemed to be a gloriously shapely form was artificial only in the most superficial way. Judging by the warm parts with which he was in contact, her body was as lavishly rounded as he’d supposed. She smelled good, too.
He saw her eyes widen—eyes of a vivid blue that put sapphires and Tuscan skies to shame—and her plump mouth fall open slightly.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said under his breath. “Everybody’s staring.”
No exaggeration. Everybody in view had stopped whatever they were doing or saying to gape. Who could blame them? Gorgeous redheads didn’t drop into a fellow’s arms every day.
The commotion was drawing in people from the other rooms.
This day was turning out infinitely less boring than he’d expected.
“Miss Noirot!”
Swanton thrust through his crowd of worshippers—treading on a few toes in the process—to hurry toward them. The worshippers followed. Even Lisburne’s cousins, Clara and Gladys Fairfax, tagged along, though neither looked especially worshipful or even enthusiastic.
“Great Zeus, what’s happened?” Swanton demanded.
“The lady fainted,” Lisburne said.
He knew that a number of people had seen the dressmaker trip—those, that is, who could tear their gazes from Swanton. Lisburne glanced about, lazily inviting any witnesses to contradict him. None did so. Even those blackguards Meffat and Theaker held their tongues for once.
True, Lady Gladys Fairfax did harrumph, but no one ever paid attention to her—not, that is, unless they wanted to work themselves into a murderous rage. Though she, too, had only very recently returned to London after some years’ absence, no one could have forgotten her, much in the way that no one forgot the plague, for instance, or the Great Fire, or a bout of hydrophobia.
“Merci,” Miss Noirot said in an undertone. Lisburne didn’t so much hear it as feel it, in the general environs of his chest.
“Je vous en prie,” he replied.
“It was only a momentary dizziness,” she said more audibly. “You may put me down now, my lord.”
“Are you quite sure, madame?” Swanton said. “You’re flushed, and no wonder. This infernal heat. Not a breath of a breeze this day.” He looked up at the skylight. Everybody else did, too. “And here’s the sun, blasting down on us, as though it made a wrong turn on its way to the Sahara Desert. Would somebody be so good as to fetch Madame a glass of water?”
Madame? Then Lisburne remembered the elegant trade card. One generally referred to a modiste, especially the expensive sort, as Madame, regardless of her marital status.
And Swanton knew this particular Madame. He’d never said a word, the sneak. But no, sneakiness wasn’t in character. More than likely, some poetic ecstasy had taken possession of him and he simply forgot until he saw her again. Typical.
Swanton’s father had died young at Waterloo, and Lisburne’s father had taken over the paternal role. That made Lisburne the protective elder brother, a position he retained on account of Swanton being Swanton.
“My lord, you’re too kind,” she said. “But I don’t require water. I’m quite well. It was only a moment’s faintness. Lord Lisburne, if you’d be so good as to let me down.”
She squirmed a little in Lisburne’s arms. That was fun.
Being a male in rude good health, all parts in prime working order, he wasn’t eager to let go of her. Still, since it had to be done, he made the most of it, easing her down with the greatest care, letting her body inch down along his, and not releasing her until a long, pulsing moment after her feet touched the floor.
She closed her eyes and said something under her breath, then opened them again and produced a smile, which she aimed straight at him. The smile was as dazzling as her eyes. The combined effect made him feel a little dizzy.
“Madame, if you feel strong enough, would you allow me to present my friends?” Swanton said. “I know they’re all clamoring to meet you.”
The gentlemen, beyond a doubt. They’d be wild to be made known to any attractive woman, especially in the present circumstances, when it was nigh impossible to get any attention from the lot swarming about Swanton.
But the ladies? Wishing to be introduced to a shopkeeper?
Perhaps not out of the question in this case, Lisburne decided. The three Noirot sisters had made themselves famous. He’d heard of them on the Continent recently. Their work, it was said, rivaled that of the celebrated Victorine of Paris, who required even queens to make appointments and attend her at her place of business.
Lisburne watched the dazzling gaze and smile sweep over the assembled audience.
“You’re too kind, my lord,” she said. “But I’ve disturbed everybody sufficiently today. The ladies will know where to find me: around the corner, at No. 56 St. James’s Street. And the ladies, as you know, are my primary concern.”
At the end of the speech, she shot a glance at somebody in the crowd. Cousin Clara? Then Madame curtseyed and started away.
The others turned away, the women first. Swanton resumed poeticizing or romanticizing or whatever he was doing, and they all moved on to Veronese’s Between Virtue and Vice.
Lisburne, however, watched Miss Noirot’s departure. She seemed not altogether steady on her feet, not quite so effortlessly graceful as before. At the top of the stairs, she took hold of the railing and winced.
Leonie was not allowed to make a quiet escape.
She heard the Marquess of Lisburne coming behind her. She knew who it was without looking. This was probably because he’d made her so keenly attuned to him, thanks to the extremely improper way he’d set her on her feet a moment ago. She was still vibrating.
Or perhaps he sent some sort of pulsation across the room, in the way certain gods had been believed to herald their arrival with strange lights or magical sounds or divine scent.
“You seem to be in pain,” he said. “May I assist you?”
“I was hoping to slink off quietly,” she said.
“No difficulty there. Everybody else is hovering about my cousin. He’s spouting about Virtue and Vice, and they all believe he’s saying something.” While he spoke, he took possession of her left arm and arranged it around his neck. He brought his arm round her waist.
She caught her breath.
“It must hurt like the devil,” he said. “On second thought, I’d better check your ankle before we proceed. It might be more damaged than we think.”
If he touched her ankle she would faint, and not necessarily for medical reasons.
“I only turned it,” she said. “If I’d done worse, I’d be sitting on the step, sobbing with as much mortification as pain.”
“I can carry you,” he said.
“No,” she said, and added belatedly, “thank you.”
They proceeded down the stairs slowly. She did sums in her head to distract her from the warmth of the big body supporting hers. It wasn’t easy. She had stared too long at the Botticelli, and her mind was making pictures of the muscular arms and torso with no elegant covering whatsoever.
By the time they reached the first landing, her usually well-ordered brain was wandering into strange byways and taking excessive notice of physical sensations.
She made herself speak. “I can only hope that people assume I was dazzled by my brief encounter with Lord Swanton,” she said.
“That’s what I’ll tell them, if you like,” he said. “But I received the impression you knew each other.”
“Paris,” she said. “Ages ago.”
“It can’t be a very long age,” he said. “You’re somewhat damaged but not quite decrepit.”
“It was his first visit to Paris,” she said.
“More than five years ago, then,” he said.
When Leonie was nearly sixteen, happy in her work and her family and especially her beautiful infant niece, and reveling in the success of Emmeline, Cousin Emma’s splendid dressmaking shop.
Before the world fell apart.
“Lord Swanton came to my cousin’s shop to buy a gift for his mother,” she said. “He was sweet-tempered and courteous. In Paris, gentlemen often mistook a dressmaker’s shop for a brothel.”
Those who persisted in the mistake tended to have unfortunate accidents.
One of the first rules Leonie had ever learned was, Men only want one thing. Cousin Emma had taught her young charges as much about defending themselves against encroaching men as she had about dressmaking. She had not, however, taught her girls anything about dealing with Roman gods. It was trickier than one would think to maintain a businesslike attitude, even though Leonie was the most businesslike of the three sisters. That wasn’t saying much, when you came down to it. Marcelline and Sophy had always had their heads in the clouds: dreamers and schemers and typical Noirots, typical DeLuceys.
He smelled so clean, like the air after rain. How did he do that? Was it scent? A miraculous new soap?
By the time they reached the ground floor, the throbbing in her ankle seemed to have lessened somewhat.
“I think I can make do with your arm,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“My ankle is better,” she said. “I needn’t lean on you quite so much.”
The fact was, she didn’t have to lean at all, because he held her so firmly against him. She was aware of every inch of his muscled arm and—through all the layers of chemise, corset, dress, and pelerine—exactly where his fingers rested at the bottom of her rib cage.
She let go of his neck. He let go of her waist and offered his arm. She placed her gloved hand on his, and he grasped it as firmly as he’d grasped her waist.
She told herself this was hardly intimacy, compared to his holding her along the length of his body, but the fact was, no man had got this close to her in years. Still, that didn’t explain why she wanted to run away. She knew how to defend herself, did she not? She knew better than to let herself fall under the spell of a handsome face and form and low, seductive voice.
She couldn’t allow panic to rule. Her ankle was only marginally better. Without help, she’d have to limp back to the shop on a hot day. Though she had only a short distance to travel, the last bit was uphill. By the time she got there, she’d have worsened the injury and wouldn’t be fit for anything.
Business first, last, and always. As they passed through the door and out into Pall Mall, she set her mind to calculating his net worth, reminded herself of imminent wives and/or mistresses, and beat down unwanted emotions with numbers, as she so often did. Her clumsiness might well have put off Lady Clara’s companion. This might be the only new business Leonie would attract today.
“You said something about business,” he said.
“I did?” Her heart raced. Was she speaking her thoughts aloud without realizing? Had she suffered a concussion without noticing?
“Before, when you hurried away to my cousin.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yes. Where Lord Swanton goes, one usually finds a large supply of young ladies. He’d mentioned to one of our customers his intention of visiting the British Institution this afternoon. It seemed a good opportunity to make the shop’s work known to those unfamiliar with it.”
“Nothing to do with his poetry, then.”
She shrugged, and paid for it with a twinge in her ankle. “I run a shop, my lord,” she said. “I lack the romantic sensibility.” She’d worked since childhood. The young women who worshipped Lord Swanton hadn’t lived in Paris during the chaos, misery, and destruction of the cholera. Grief, suffering, and death weren’t romantic to her.
“It stumps me, I’ll admit,” he said. “I don’t see what’s romantic about it. But then, neither do most men. The ailment seems to strike young women, with a few exceptions. Though she’s at the vulnerable age, Cousin Clara looked bored, I thought. My cousin Gladys looked sour-tempered, but that’s the way she usually looks, so it’s hard to tell whether she’s an idolater or not.”
“Cousin Gladys,” she said. “The young lady with Lady Clara?”
“Lady Gladys Fairfax,” he said. “Lord Boulsworth’s daughter. Clara’s great uncle, you know. The military hero. I’m not sure what’s lured Gladys back to London, though I do have an unnerving suspicion. I say, you’re not well, Miss Noirot.”
They’d reached the bottom of St. James’s Street, and the day’s extreme warmth, already prodigious in Pall Mall, now blasted at them on a hot wind, which carried as well the dust of vehicles, riders, and pedestrians. Leonie’s head ached at least as much as her ankle did. She was trying to remember when last she’d heard Lady Gladys Fairfax mentioned, but pain, heat, and confusion overwhelmed her brain.
“That does it,” he said. “I’m carrying you.”
He simply swooped down and did it, before she got the protest out, and then it was muffled against his neckcloth.
“Yes, everyone will stare,” he said. “Good advertising, don’t you think? Do you know, I do believe I’m getting the hang of this business thing.”
Meanwhile, back at the British Institution
Sir Roger Theaker and Mr. John Meffat, Esquire, were among the few who’d paid attention to Lord Lisburne’s departure with Miss Noirot. The pair had arrived with Lord Swanton’s coterie, but were not exactly part of it, even though they were former schoolmates of the poet.
They were not Lord Swanton’s favorite old schoolmates, having bullied him mercilessly for nearly a year until his cousin got wind of it and thrashed them. Repeatedly. Because they were slow to catch on. They were even slower to forget.
They’d withdrawn some paces from the crowd following Lord Swanton, partly in order to maintain a safe distance from the dangerous cousin.
Theaker’s gaze lingered on the stairwell. Once Lisburne and the ladybird were out of sight he said, “Lisburne’s done for, I see.”
“If anyone’s a goner, it’s the French milliner,” said Meffat. “Ten pounds says so.”
“You haven’t got ten pounds,” said Theaker.
“Neither do you.”
Theaker’s attention reverted to the poet. They watched for a time the young women not-so-surreptitiously pushing to get closer to their idol, while he held forth about the Veronese.
“Annoying little snot, isn’t he?” Theaker said.
“Always was.”
“Writes pure rot.”
“Always did.”
No one could accuse them of not doing all they could to enlighten the reading public. Before Swanton had returned to England, they’d contributed to various journals half a dozen anonymous lampoons of his poetry, as well as two scurrilous limericks. Most of the critics had agreed with them.
But one fashionable young woman had ignored the critics and bought Alcinthus and Other Poems, Swanton’s book of lugubrious verse, and cried her eyes out, apparently. She told all her friends he was the new Lord Byron or some such. The next anybody knew, the printers couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Since watching the little snot wasn’t much fun, Theaker and Meffat turned their attention to the unhappy artist who, having righted his easel, was trying to repair his damaged painting.
They drew nearer to offer jocular advice and accidentally on purpose knock over items he’d carefully restored to their proper places. They suggested their own favorite subjects and argued about whether a corner of the painting more closely resembled a bonnet or a woman’s privates. Being preoccupied with tormenting somebody too weak, poor, or intimidated to fight back—their usual modus operandi—they never noticed the woman approach until she’d cornered them.
And when she said, “I must have your help,” they didn’t laugh, as was also more usual when a person of no importance sought their aid or protection. They didn’t even make lewd suggestions, which was odd, considering she was extremely pretty—fair and slender and young. John Meffat looked at her once, then twice, then seemed very puzzled indeed. He turned an inquiring look upon his friend, who frowned briefly, seeming to be struck by something.
Theaker shot him a warning look, and Meffat held his tongue.
Then Theaker broke out in a kindly smile—it must have hurt his face a little—and said, “Why certainly, my dear. Let’s find us a place a bit less public, and you can tell us all about it.”
Chapter Two (#uff4e9cd2-44a8-53a4-80ac-2549acf63e6e)
Although the Toilet should never be suffered to engross so much of the attention as to interfere with the higher duties of life, yet, as a young lady’s dress, however simple, is considered a criterion of her taste, it is, certainly, worthy of her attention.
—The Young Lady’s Book, 1829
Lord Lisburne carried Leonie up St. James’s Street in the sweltering heat, past a stream of gaping faces. A couple of vehicles got their wheels tangled, and a gentleman crossing the street walked into a curb post.
Sophy would have seen this as a golden opportunity, Leonie reminded herself. She ignored the headache and throbbing ankle and made her face serene, as though this were an everyday occurrence, being carried to the shop. By a Roman god. Who didn’t even breathe hard.
Darting a glance upward, she discerned a hint of a smile on his perfectly sculpted mouth.
“This is fun,” he said. “Which number did you say? Right, fifty-six. Oh, look. Charming. So French. Does that boy in the breathtaking lilac and gold livery belong to you?”
“Yes,” Leonie said without looking. “That’s Fenwick, our general factotum.”
“Does he open the door or simply stand there looking excessively decorative?”
“One of his jobs is to open the door,” she said.
A stray Sophy had picked up on one of her excursions, Fenwick had been an apprentice pickpocket. Once scrubbed of layers of accumulated street grime, his exterior had proved surprisingly angelic-looking. He was a great success with the ladies. He …
That was when Leonie remembered. Sophy had found Fenwick on the day she’d gone to spy on a business rival. To get into Mrs. Downes’s shop, Sophy had disguised herself as Lady Gladys Fairfax. Or what she imagined Lady Gladys looked like, given Lady Clara’s description and Sophy’s lurid powers of invention.
But Leonie hadn’t time to think further about Lady Gladys. Fenwick had opened the door, Lord Lisburne carried Leonie in, and all the shopgirls promptly went to pieces.
There were cries of “Madame!” and little shrieks, and they ran out from behind counters and crowded about her and Lord Lisburne, then cried, “No, no, give her air!” and dashed off the other way, then came back again. They told one another to fetch water and doctors and smelling salts, and argued about it. Meanwhile, no one was paying attention to the customers, who might have walked away with half the shop, including the mannequins, while everybody else was having hysterics.
Luckily, Selina Jeffreys, their forewoman, hurried out into the showroom, sparing Leonie the need to discipline the troops through an aching head. Jeffreys briskly called them to order and directed Lord Lisburne through the door into the back of the shop. Thence Leonie directed him to her office.
He set her down in a chair. He found a footstool and, ignoring her assurance that she was capable of moving her own foot, knelt, and gently lifted the injured limb onto it. The touch of his hands traveled like a magnetic current up her leg and spread everywhere, including parts some women didn’t even expose to themselves.
“I believe a restorative is in order,” he said as he rose.
He looked perfectly cool. She needed an ice bath.
“Have you any objections to brandy?” she said.
“I meant for you,” he said. “You’re looking peakish.”
“I made a cake of myself in front of London’s latest craze in poets,” she said. “I tripped twice in the same room, and everybody will say I was drunk. The second time, I tripped so clumsily that I turned my ankle. The Marquess of Lisburne has been carrying me about St. James’s, to the entertainment of the multitudes and the mental derangement of my employees. I ache at top and bottom, and I’m in a sweat despite not having done anything but let myself be carried. Of course I look peakish. And I’m cross besides, or I should have said thank you before launching into the complaints.”
“No thanks required, I assure you. It was the most fun I’ve had since Swanton and I came back to London.” He pulled off his gloves. “Where do you keep the brandy?”
She told him. He poured out a drink for her and a drink for him. Then he walked about the office as though he owned the place. Nothing odd in that. Aristocrats always owned the place, whether, technically, they did or didn’t, since they owned England.
But then he started touching her things.
Lisburne was fascinated.
Along one wall, ledgers stood perfectly straight and exactly aligned on three gleaming shelves. Likewise polished to within an inch of its life, the desk held, in addition to an inkstand, a tray of pencils, all sharpened to lethal points. On the other walls, French fashion prints and a few Parisian scenes hung precisely straight and equidistant from one another. Whatever else the office contained must be secreted in the firmly closed drawers and cupboards.
He tipped his head to read the spines of the ledgers, then pulled one out to look at the front. He flipped through the pages. Scrupulously ruled columns held concise descriptions of transactions. Alongside them marched, in the same rigorous order, columns of numbers.
“Not a blot anywhere,” he said. “Do you do this? How do you write all these numbers and such and never blot?”
“My lord, that is private financial information.” The faintly accented voice climbed a degree in pitch.
“Your secrets couldn’t be safer,” he said. “It’s all hieroglyphs to me. I could read it for days and come away none the wiser. No, that’s not quite true. I do know what the red ink signifies. My agent has pointed it out often enough. That is to say, he did, until I left such matters to Uttridge, my secretary. He warns me when I’m stumbling into red ink territory.”
“Your secretary manages your funds?” she said, her horror plainly audible. “You don’t look at the books at all?”
What entertaining handwriting she had! So precise and orderly yet purely feminine.
“The trouble with looking into the books is, it throws a fellow’s inadequacies in his face,” he said, adroitly sidestepping the boring truth. “I note very little in the way of red here, Miss Noirot. And do you do all this yourself, without any Uttridges or agents or such? Simply write down every accursed item and what it costs, and what somebody pays and what the total is and somehow make everything come out right at the end?”
“That’s my job,” she said. “The Duchess of Clevedon specializes in designing clothes. Lady Longmore is in charge of keeping Maison Noirot in the public eye. I manage the business.”
“You keep track of the money, you mean.”
“That’s part of it. I hire and dismiss the seamstresses, attend to their various crises and hysterias, pay everybody’s wages, and oversee all purchasing.”
He closed the book and looked at her for a time. It was a great deal to take in. Her extraordinary face, for one thing. The immense blue eyes and soft mouth and uncompromising chin.
The chin went with the columns of neat numbers and no blots.
The dress belonged to some fairyland.
White ruffles and lace cascading to her waist like ocean foam. Below the lace swelled sleeves as plump as bed pillows. From her dainty waist a skirt billowed: white embroidered with what seemed like thousands of tiny blue flowers. It was deliciously, madly feminine and it made a man want to rumple her, just to hear the rustling.
Well, not only for that reason.
What a treat to carry all that up St. James’s Street!
He looked at the face and the dress and thought about the neat numbers in their precisely ruled columns.
He put the ledger back.
She made a little sound.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Your foot is paining you? More brandy?”
“No, no, thank you,” she said. “My lord, I must detain you no longer. You’ve been so kind, so chivalrous.”
“It was my pleasure, I assure you.” He moved on to inspect her desk. “I had expected another dull afternoon of listening to Swanton being emotional.”
He picked up one of the alarmingly sharp pencils and stuck it into the end of his index finger. It made a tiny indentation. Probably not lethal, unless one stabbed ferociously, which he felt certain she was capable of doing. He examined her meticulously sharpened pens. As he put each object back, he was aware of her breathing erratically, in little huffs.
“Are you feeling overwarm, Miss Noirot?” he said. “Shall I open a window? Or will that only let in more of the day’s heat?”
She made a small strangled sound and said, “If you must pry, my lord—and I realize that noblemen must do as they please—can you not at least put my belongings back in the same order in which you found them?”
He stepped back from the desk and folded his hands behind his back. Not because he was abashed but because he was so sorely tempted to disarrange everything, including, most especially, her.
He looked down at the pencil and the pen, then at the ledgers once more. “Er, no. That is, I could try, but it mightn’t turn out as we hope. That’s the reason Uttridge intervenes, you see. I grow bored very quickly, and things go awry.” That wasn’t entirely untrue. Once he’d fully mastered a thing, he grew bored.
“Your dress is immaculate,” she said.
He glanced down at himself. “Odd, isn’t it? Don’t know how I do it. Well, there’s Polcaire, of course, my valet. Couldn’t do it without him.”
He contemplated his waistcoat for a moment. It was one of his favorites, and he was fairly sure he looked well in it. Some perspicacious genie must have whispered in his ear this day.
No, that was Polcaire.
Polcaire: But milord cannot wear the maroon waistcoat to this occasion.
Lisburne: Swanton is the occasion, which means all the girls will look at him. No one cares what I look like.
Polcaire: One never knows whom one will meet, milord.
Which proved that Polcaire was not only a genius among valets, but an oracle, too.
Lisburne looked up from his waistcoat at Miss Noirot.
The palest pink washed over her cheekbones like a little tide, coming and going. It was delicious.
“Shall I risk trying to get it all straight again?” he said. “My work may not be up to your standards—and I have a strong suspicion that you’re going to leap up from the chair, and …” He thought. “Stab me with the penknife?”
He was aware of her forcing herself to be calm. It wasn’t easy to discern. Her face ought to be in a dictionary, under inscrutable. Though she was a redhead, her complexion was strangely parsimonious about blushing. Still, whatever other faults he had, he wasn’t unobservant, especially of women. In her case, he was paying hawklike attention. The way she relaxed her pose wasn’t unconscious at all. He watched her arrange her features and bring her shoulders down.
“The thought crossed my mind,” she said. “But corpses are the very devil to get rid of, especially aristocratic ones. People notice when noblemen disappear.”
The door having been left partly open, he became aware of the approaching footsteps an instant after he saw her posture grow more alert.
Following a quick tap and Miss Noirot’s “Entrez,” one of the young females who’d thronged the showroom entered.
“Oh, madame, I am so sorry to interrupt you,” the girl said, or at least, that was what he made of her excessively mangled French, before she gave up on a bad job and went on in English, “But it’s Lady Clara Fairfax and … another lady.”
“Another lady?”
Miss Noirot’s face lit, and she bounded up from the chair, momentarily forgetting the injured ankle. She winced and swore softly in French, but her eyes sparkled and her face glowed. “Send them up to the consulting room, and bring them refreshments. I’ll be there in a moment.”
The girl went out.
“Up to the consulting room?” he said. “Are you meaning to mount stairs in your condition?”
“Lady Clara has brought Lady Gladys Fairfax,” she said. “Did you not see her?”
“Of course I saw Gladys. One can no more fail to notice her than one could overlook a toppling building or a forty-day flood. I pointed her out to you.”
“I meant her dress,” she said.
“I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”
What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.
“It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”
Blast.
And this afternoon had been going so well, too.
Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.
“What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”
He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.
“I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”
“Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”
“And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”
He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.
He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.
“Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”
Forty-five minutes later
Are you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”
She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.
She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult. Normal client behavior, in other words.
At present, Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, stripped to corset and chemise, thanks to Jeffreys’s able assistance and Lady Clara’s moral support. Even so, reaching this point had been a battle. Meanwhile, Leonie’s ankle hurt, and so did her head, and neither of these things mattered, any more than Lady Gladys’s obnoxious behavior did.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime.
“My lady, one of the basic principles of dress is to emphasize one’s assets,” Leonie said. “Where men are concerned, your bosom is your greatest asset.”
“Greatest I can’t quarrel with, if you mean immense,” Lady Gladys said. “I know I’m not the sylph here.” She shot an angry glance at Lady Clara, who was too statuesque to qualify as a sylph. She did qualify as impossibly beautiful, though: blonde and blue-eyed, gifted with a pearly complexion and a shapely body. And brains. And a beautiful nature.
Nature had not gifted Lady Gladys with any form of classical beauty. Dull brown hair. Eyes an equally unmemorable brown, and like her mouth too small for her round face. A figure by no means ideal. She had little in the way of a waist. But she had a fine bosom, and acceptable hips, though at the moment, this wasn’t obvious to any but the most expert observer.
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a shape,” Leonie said.
“Do you hear her, Gladys?” Lady Clara said. “Did I not tell you that you were hiding your good parts?”
“I don’t have good parts!” Lady Gladys said. “Don’t patronize me, Clara. I can see perfectly well what’s in the mirror.”
“I beg to differ,” Leonie said. “If you could see perfectly well, you’d see that your corset is wrong for your ladyship’s figure.”
“What figure?” Lady Gladys said.
“Well, let’s see what happens when we take off the corset.”
“No! I’m quite undressed enough. My dressmaker at home—”
“Seems to have a problem with drink,” Leonie said. “I cannot imagine any sober modiste stuffing her client into this—this sausage arrangement.”
“Sausage?” Lady Gladys shrieked. “Clara, I’ve had quite enough of this creature’s insolence.”
“Jeffreys, kindly assist Lady Gladys with her corset,” Leonie said firmly. The modiste who let the client take charge might as well close up shop and earn her living by taking in mending.
“You will not, girl,” Lady Gladys snapped. “You most certainly will not. I refuse to be manhandled by a consumptive child who speaks the most disgusting excuse for French to assault my ears in a city grossly oversupplied with ignoramuses.”
Jeffreys had grown up in a harsh world. This was motherly affection compared to her childhood experience. Undaunted, she moved to the customer, but when she tried to touch the corset strings, Lady Gladys twisted about and waved her arms, practically snarling.
Like a cornered animal.
“Come, come, your ladyship is not afraid of my forewoman,” Leonie said.
“Jeffreys can’t possibly be consumptive,” Lady Clara said. “If she were, she’d be dead, after the ordeal of wrestling you out of your frock and petticoats.”
“I told you this would be a waste of time!”
“And I told you I was tired of a certain person’s sly remarks about remembering your dresses from your first Season. And you said—”
“I don’t care what anybody says!”
“Ça suffit,” Leonie said. “Everybody go away. Lady Gladys and I need to talk privately.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Lady Gladys said. “You are the most encroaching—no, Clara, you are not to go!”
But Lady Clara went out, and Jeffreys followed her, and gently closed the door behind them.
Lady Gladys couldn’t run after them in her underclothes. She couldn’t dress herself, because, like most ladies, she had no idea how. She was trapped.
Leonie drew out from a cupboard an excessively French dressing gown. The color of cream and richly embroidered with pink buds and pale green vines and leaves, it was not made of muslin, as ladies’ night-dresses usually were. This was silk. A very fine, nearly transparent silk.
She held it up. Lady Gladys sniffed and scowled, but she didn’t turn away. Her gaze settled on the risqué piece of silk, and her expression became hunted.
“You can’t mean that for me,” she said. “That is suitable for a harlot.”
Leonie advanced and draped it over her ladyship’s stiff shoulders.
She turned her to face the looking glass. Lady Gladys’s mutinous expression softened. She blinked hard. “I-I could never wear such a thing, and you’re wicked to suggest it.”
Leonie heard the longing in her voice, and her hard little dressmaker’s heart ached.
Lady Gladys wasn’t a beauty. She’d never been and never would be, no matter how much of the dressmaker’s art one applied.
Yet she could be more.
“I’m not suggesting you purchase it,” Leonie said. “Not yet. It will be more suitable for your trousseau.”
“Trousseau! What a joke!”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Leonie said. “We’re going to rid you of that monstrosity of a corset.”
“You are the most managing, impudent—”
“I’ll provide you with something more suitable until I can make up exactly what you need.” Corsets were Leonie’s specialty.
“I will not … You will not …” Lady Gladys blinked hard and swallowed.
“Your ladyship is never to wear ready-made stays again,” Leonie went on briskly. It never did to become emotional with clients. They could manage that sort of thing more than adequately themselves. “They don’t provide proper support and they make you shapeless.”
“I am shapeless. Or rather, I have a fine shape if you like b-barrels.”
“You do have a figure,” Leonie said. “It isn’t classical, but that isn’t important to men. They’re not as discriminating as young women think. You’re generously endowed in the bosom, and once we get that ghastly thing off, you’ll see that your hips and bottom are in neat proportion.”
Lady Gladys looked into the mirror. Her face crumpled. She walked away and sank onto a chair.
“Let us review your assets,” Leonie said.
“Assets!” Lady Gladys’s voice was choked.
“In addition to what I’ve enumerated, you own a clear complexion, an elegant nose, and pretty hands,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.
“Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”
Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.
Leonie gave her a handkerchief.
“Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.
Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”
“Yet here you are,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”
“A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”
Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”
“I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly dressed.”
“Oh, yes, that explains everything. If you’d had the managing of things, I’d have been the belle of the ball.”
Leonie stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and eyed her new client critically. After a long, busy moment while her mind performed complicated calculations, she said, “Yes, my lady. Yes, you would have been. And yes, you can be.”
Early evening of Friday 10 July
You hateful little sneak! I always attend her!”
“Always? Once, two months ago.”
“It was only last week I waited on Miss Renfrew, while you was flirting with Mr. Burns.”
“I never was!”
“Maybe he wasn’t flirting with you, but you was trying hard enough.”
Leonie had heard the raised voices, and was hurrying from her office into the workroom at the same time as Jeffreys, on the same errand, was running that way from the showroom.
By the time they burst through the door, Glinda Simmons had got hold of Joanie Barker. They scratched and kicked and slapped and pulled each other’s hair, screeching the while. The other girls shrieked, too. In a matter of minutes, they’d tumbled bolts of costly fabric, boxes of ribbons, flowers, feathers, and other articles hither and yon.
Leonie clapped her hands, but no one was paying attention. She and Jeffreys had to move in and forcibly separate the two girls. This didn’t stop the screaming. The combatants called for witnesses to various crimes perpetrated by the opposing party, and the noncombatants took that as an invitation to express their own grievances against this one or that one.
It took nearly an hour to restore full order. Having warned the girls that they’d all be dismissed without notice or a character if they indulged in another outburst, Leonie hurried upstairs to change out of her workday dress. Jeffreys followed her.
“You’d better send Mary Parmenter to help me dress,” Leonie said. Mary had been left in charge of the showroom when Jeffreys came to stop the war. “You keep an eye on the seamstresses. You’re the best at managing these battles.”
This was only one of the reasons Selina Jeffreys, despite her youth and apparent frailty, was their forewoman.
Jeffreys ignored her, and started unfastening Leonie’s pelerine. “You’re going to be late, madame,” she said. “And you know Parmenter gets nervous and clumsy when she feels rushed. I don’t.”
Late wasn’t good enough, in Leonie’s opinion. Never would be preferable. She was not looking forward to this evening’s engagement.
Lord Swanton was hosting a poetry lecture to raise funds for the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. This was the sort of activity at which Sophy shone. She would put in an appearance, then slip away and write all about it for London’s favorite gossip sheet, Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The account would include detailed descriptions of what every Maison Noirot customer was wearing.
Leonie looked forward to the writing much in the way a French ancestor had looked forward to making the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.
Misinterpreting her frown, Jeffreys said, “Please don’t worry about the girls, madame. They’ll be all right now. It’s that time of the month, and you know how it is with girls who’re always together.”
They all had That Time of the Month at the same time.
“It’s worse this month, and we both know why,” Leonie said. Marcelline had married a duke and Sophy had married a future marquess. Though any other women would jump at the chance to quit working, Marcelline and Sophy weren’t like other women. They might give it up eventually, but not without a fight.
The girls didn’t understand this, and it wasn’t easy to prove, since neither sister was much in evidence at present. Marcelline, who was having a miserable time with morning sickness, was abed a good deal, on her doctor’s orders. Sophy had had to go away to give Fashionable Society time to forget what the French widow she’d recently impersonated had looked like.
That left Leonie, who could do what the other two did, but not with their brilliance and flair. Each sister had her special skills, and Leonie was missing her sisters’ talents acutely. And their company.
And she was more worried than anybody about what would become of Maison Noirot. She’d put everything she had into the shop—mind, body, soul. The cholera had killed Cousin Emma and wiped out their old life in Paris. Emma had died too young, but here in London her spirit and genius lived on in their hearts and in the new life they’d so painstakingly built.
“The girls will be better when my sisters are in the shop more regularly,” Leonie said. “Routine and habit, Jeffreys. You know our girls need not merely to be kept busy, but to have order in their lives.” Many had ended up in charitable institutions. Their lives before had been hard and chaotic. “But matters are bound to change, and everybody needs to adapt.” For these girls, adapting wasn’t easy. Change upset them. She understood. It upset her, too. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, getting them used to a new routine.”
“You don’t need any more work,” Jeffreys said. “You need more rest, madame. You can’t be three people.”
Leonie smiled. “No, but with your help, I might be nearly that. But do let us make haste. I must get there before it’s over.”
Later that evening
Leonie hurried into the conversation room adjoining the New Western Athenaeum’s lecture hall—
—and stopped short as a tall, black-garbed figure emerged from the shadows of a window embrasure.
“I thought you’d never come,” Lord Lisburne said.
He was not, she saw, dressed entirely in black. In addition to the pristine white shirt and neckcloth, he wore a green silk waistcoat, exquisitely embroidered in gold. It called attention to his narrow waist … thence her gaze wandered lower, to the evening trousers that lovingly followed the muscled contours of his long legs.
Leonie took a moment to settle her breathing. “Did we have an appointment?” she said. “If so, I must have made it while concussed, because I don’t recall.”
“Oh, I was sure you’d be here.” He waved a gloved hand at the door to the lecture hall. “Swanton. Young ladies in droves.” He waved at her dress. “Advertising.”
For this event, she’d chosen a green silk. Though a dress for evening, exposing more neck than day attire did, it was simple enough to suit a public lecture. No blond lace or ruffles and only minimal embroidery, of a darker green, above the deep skirt flounce and along the hem. The immense sleeves provided the main excitement, slashed to reveal what would appear to be chemise sleeves underneath—a glimpse of underwear, in other words. Over it she’d thrown, with apparent carelessness, a fine silk shawl, a wine red and gold floral pattern on a creamy white ground that called attention to the white enticingly visible through the slashing.
“I meant to arrive earlier,” she said. “But we had a busy day at the shop, and the heat makes everybody cross and impatient. The customers are sharp with the girls in the shop, who then go into the workroom and quarrel with the seamstresses. We had a little crisis. It took longer to settle than it ought to have done.”
“Lucky you,” he said. “You missed ‘Poor Robin.’”
“ ‘Poor Robin’?” she said.
He set his hat over his heart, bowed his head, and in a sepulchral voice intoned:
When last I heard that peaceful lay
In all its sweetness swell,
I little thought so soon to say—
Farewell, sweet bird, farewell!
All cloudy comes the snowy morn,
Poor Robin is not here!
I miss him on the fleecy thorn,
And feel a falling tear.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“It continued,” he said, “for what seemed to be an infinite number of stanzas.”
Her heart sank. One must give Lord Swanton credit for using his influence to raise funds for a worthwhile organization. All the same, if she had to listen to “Poor Robins” for another two hours or even more, she might throw herself into the Thames.
“Lord Swanton seems to take life’s little sorrows very much to heart,” she said.
“He can’t help himself,” Lord Lisburne said. “He tries, he says, to be more like Byron when he wrote Don Juan, but it always comes out more like an exceedingly weepy version of Childe Harold. At best. But happily for you, there’s no more room.”
No room. Relief wafted through her like a cooling breeze. She wouldn’t have to sit through hours of dismal poetry—
But she hadn’t come for her own entertainment, she reminded herself. This was business. Where Lord Swanton appeared, Maison Noirot’s prime potential clientele would be. Equally important, Lady Gladys would be here.
“All the better if it’s a crush,” Leonie said. “And a late entrance will draw attention.”
“Even if you deflated the sleeves and skirt, you couldn’t squeeze in,” he said. “I gave up my place and two women took it. The lecture hall is packed to the walls. That, by the way, is where most of the men have retreated to. Since they’re bored and you’re young and pretty, you might expect to encounter a lot of sweaty hands trying to go where they’ve no business to be.”
Leonie’s skin crawled. She’d been pawed before. Being able to defend herself did not make the experience any less disgusting. “I told Lady Gladys I’d be here,” she said.
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“It’s business,” she said.
“None of mine, in other words,” he said.
She had no intention of explaining about Paris and the night she’d been hurrying home, to warn her sisters of the danger, and found herself in a mob of men, being groped and narrowly escaping rape.
This wasn’t Paris, she told herself. This was London, and the place did not contain a mob. It was merely crowded, like so many other social gatherings. She walked to the lecture hall door.
He followed her. “A hot, stuffy room, crammed with excitable young women and irritated men, and Swanton and his poetic friends sobbing over fallen leaves and dead birds and wilted flowers,” he said. “Yes, I can understand why you can’t bear to be left out.”
“It’s business,” she said.
She cracked open the door and peered inside.
She had a limited view, through a narrow space the doorkeepers had managed to maintain in front of the door. Primarily women occupied the seats on the ground floor, and they were so tightly squeezed together, they were half in one another’s laps. They and a few men—fathers and brothers, most likely—thronged the mezzanine and upper gallery as well. The latter seemed to sag under the weight. Men filled every square inch of the standing room. The space was stifling hot, and the aroma of tightly packed bodies assaulted her nostrils.
Meanwhile somebody who wasn’t Lord Swanton was reading, in throbbing tones, an ode to a dying rose.
She retreated a step. Her back came up against a warm, solid mass. Silk whispered against silk.
Lord Lisburne leaned in to look over her shoulder, and the mingled scents of freshly pressed linen and shaving soap and male wiped out the smell of the crowd and swamped her senses.
“Aren’t you glad you were late?” he said. “You might be sitting in there.” His breath tickled her ear. “And you wouldn’t be able to get out until it was over.”
She’d be trapped, listening to poetic dirges, for hours. She closed her eyes and told herself it was business, then took a steadying breath and opened them again. She would go through this door. She—
His large, gloved hand settled on the door inches from her shoulder. He closed the door.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the circus.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_5344ef37-0168-50dd-a487-4bce867270b1)
Never warn me, my dear, to take care of my heart,
When I dance with yon Lancer, so fickle and smart;
What phantoms the mind of eighteen can create,
That boast not a charm at discreet twenty-eight.
—Mrs. Abdy, “A Marrying Man,” 1835
Miss Noirot turned quickly. Since Lisburne hadn’t moved, she came up against him, her bosom touching his waistcoat for one delicious instant. She smelled delicious, too.
She brought up her hand and gave him a push, and not, as you’d think, a little-girlish or flirtatious sort of push. It was a firm shove. While not strong enough to move him, it was a clear enough signal that she wasn’t playing coquette.
He took the message and retreated a pace.
“The circus,” she said, much as she might have said, “The moon.”
“Astley’s,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun,” she said.
“For one thing, no melancholy verse,” he said. “For another, no melancholy verse. And for a third—”
“It’s on the other side of the river!” she said, as though that were, indeed, the moon.
“Yes,” he said. “That puts the full width of the Thames between us and the melancholy verse.”
“Us,” she said.
“You got all dressed up,” he said. “What a shocking waste of effort if you don’t go out to an entertainment.”
“The circus,” she said.
“It’s truly entertaining,” he said. “I promise. Actors and acrobats and clowns. But best of all are the feats of horsemanship. Ducrow, the manager, is a brilliant equestrian.”
For all his careless manner, Lisburne rarely left much to chance. In her case, he’d done his research. Her given name was Leonie and she was, as she’d said, the businesswoman of Maison Noirot. One sister had married a duke, the other the heir to a marquessate, yet she went to the shop every day, as though their move into the highest ranks of the aristocracy made no difference whatsoever. This was an odd and illuminating circumstance.
The seamstresses, he’d learned, worked six days a week, from nine in the morning until nine at night, and her own hours seemed to be the same or longer. This, he’d concluded, greatly increased the odds against her having time to spend at Astley’s or any other place of entertainment.
She gave a little shake of her head, and waved her hand in an adorably imperious manner, signaling him to get out of her way.
He knew he stood too close—that was to say, as close as one could get without treading on her hem, women taking up a deal of space these days, in the arm and shoulder area as well as below the waist. In her case, he tested the boundary more than usual. Still, he was a man of considerable, and successful, experience with women.
He obediently moved out of the way to walk alongside.
“Here’s the thing,” he said as he accompanied her across the conversation room. “We can take a hackney to Astley’s, watch the show for an hour or so, and still get back before this funeral is over. By that time, the crowd’s bound to have thinned out. The girls are all here with chaperons. A good many girls, I promise you, will be dragged home earlier than they like, because there’s a limit, you know, to how much a brother, say, will sacrifice for his sister. Same for Papa and Mama and Great Aunt Philomena.”
They’d reached the door to the lobby. He opened it.
She sailed through, in a thrilling swish of silk.
“I know you’re unlikely to find the sort of clientele you prefer in a place like Astley’s,” he said. “But I thought you might enjoy the women’s costumes.”
“Not half so much as you will, I daresay,” she said. “Skimpy, are they?”
“Yes, of course, like a ballerina or nymph or whatever it is Miss Woolford will be playing,” he said. “She’s a treat. But the whole show is wonderful. The performers stand on the horses’ backs, and go round and round the ring. And the horses perform the cleverest tricks. As good as the acrobats.”
She looked up, her blue gaze searching.
He bore the scrutiny easily. A boy born beautiful becomes a target for other boys, and the schools he’d attended never ran short of bullies. He’d learned very young to keep his feelings out of sight and out of reach unless he needed to use them.
You are like a diamond, one of his mistresses had told him. So beautiful, so much light and fire. But when one tries to find the man inside, it’s all reflections and sparkling surfaces.
Why need anybody see more?
True, he wasn’t the shattered young man he’d been nearly six years ago, when his father died. The loss had devastated all the members of the tight-knit little family Father had created. That family, comprising not only Lisburne and his mother but her sister—Swanton’s mother—as well as Swanton, had fled England together. Still, it had taken a good while, far away from London and the fashionable world, to recover.
Few, including the many who’d respected and loved his father, understood the magnitude of the loss. Not that Lisburne wanted their understanding. His feelings were nobody’s business but his own.
All the same, he knew what true grief was, and mawkish sentiment made him want to punch somebody.
He couldn’t punch Swanton or his worshippers.
Much more sensible to set about what promised to be a challenging game: seducing a fascinating redhead.
“You’ll like it,” he said. “I promise. And I promise to get you back here before the lecture is over.”
She looked away. “I’ve never seen an equestrian,” she said.
And his heart leapt, startling him.
Astley’s was crowded, as always, but the multitude seemed not to trouble Miss Noirot as much as the crowd at Swanton’s lecture had done. Perhaps this was because the space was so much larger and more open. In any event, Lisburne took her to a private box, where she wouldn’t be jostled, and from which she’d have a prime view of both the stage and arena.
They arrived too late for the play, which was a pity, since it usually featured fine horses and horsemanship and stirring battle scenes. They were in good time for the entertainment in the arena, though. He and Miss Noirot settled into their seats as the crew members were shaking sawdust into the ring.
It had been an age since he’d entered the premises, and Lisburne had thought it would seem shabby, now that he was older and had lived abroad and watched spectacles on the Continent.
Perhaps the place awoke the boy in him, who’d somehow survived life’s shocks and lessons and had never entirely grown up or become fully civilized. He must be seeing it through a boy’s eyes because Astley’s seemed as grand as ever. The lights came up round the ring, and the chandeliers seem as dazzling, the orchestra as glamorous as he remembered.
Or maybe he saw it fresh through her great blue eyes.
He’d observed the small signs of apprehension when they’d first entered and the way the uneasiness dissolved, once she’d settled into her place and started to take in her surroundings. She sat back, a little stiff, as a clown came out and joked with the audience. She watched expressionlessly when the ringmaster appeared, carrying his long whip. Her gaze gave away nothing as he strode about the ring and engaged in the usual badinage with the clown.
Then the ringmaster asked for Miss Woolford. The crowd erupted.
And Miss Noirot leaned forward, grasping the rail.
The famous equestrienne walked out into the arena, the audience went into ecstasies, and Miss Noirot the Inscrutable drank it all in, as wide-eyed and eager as any child, from the time the ringmaster helped Miss Woolford into the saddle, through every circuit of the ring. When the performer stood on the horse’s back, Miss Noirot gasped.
“So marvelous!” she said. “I don’t even know how to ride one, and she stands on the creature’s back—while it runs!”
When, after numerous circuits, Miss Woolford paused to rest herself and her horse, Miss Noirot clapped and clapped, and cried, “Brava! Bravissima!”
The pause allowed for more play between the clown and ringmaster, but Miss Noirot turned away from the clown’s antics—and caught Lisburne staring at her.
For a moment she stared back. Then she laughed, a full-throated, easy laugh.
And his breath caught.
The sound. The way she looked at this moment, eyes sparkling, countenance aglow.
“How right you were,” she said. “Much more fun than dismal verse. How clever she is! Can you imagine the hours she’s spent to learn that art? How old do you think she was when she first began? Was she bred to it, the way actors often are—and dressmakers, too, for that matter.”
The eagerness in her voice. She was so young, so vibrantly alive.
“I reckon, even if they’re bred to it, they fall on their heads a number of times before they get the hang of it,” he said. “But they must start young, when they’re less breakable.”
“Not like dressmaking,” she said. “Sooner or later would-be equestrians have to get on the horse. But we mayn’t cut a piece of silk until we’ve been sewing seams for an eternity and made a thousand handkerchiefs and aprons. What a pleasure it is to see a woman who’s mastered such an art! The equestrians are mostly men, aren’t they?”
“That does account in part for Miss Woolford’s popularity.”
“But she’s very good—or does my total ignorance of horsemanship show?”
“She’s immensely talented,” he said. “A ballerina equestrienne.”
“This is wonderful,” she said. “My sisters are always telling me I need to get away from the shop, but Sunday comes round only once a week, and then I like to spend time with my niece, or outdoors, preferably both. Sometimes we go to the theater, but this is entirely different. It smells different, certainly.”
“That would be the horses,” he said.
“Beautiful creatures,” she said.
He caught the note of wistfulness. He considered it, along with her reactions to Miss Woolford, and filed it away for future reference.
The second part of the equestrian performance began then, and she turned back to the stage.
He looked that way, too, outwardly composed, inwardly unsettled. She’d changed before his eyes from a sophisticated Parisian to an excited girl, and for a moment she’d seemed so vulnerable that he felt … what? Ashamed? But of what? He was a man. She was a woman. They were attracted to each other and they played a game, a very old game. Yet along with the thrill of the chase he felt a twinge of something like heartache.
And why should he not? Hadn’t he endured an hour of death and dying in rhyme? And was he not obliged to go back to it?
It seemed to Leonie a very short time before she and Lord Lisburne were in a hackney again, traveling along Westminster Bridge Street, back to the “obsequies,” as he had put it a moment ago.
He’d been true to his word.
But then, she’d felt certain he would be, else she wouldn’t have come with him.
Yes, she’d been aware of his watching her during the performance when he thought she wasn’t paying attention to him. As though one could sit beside the man and not be aware of him, even if a host of heavenly angels floated down to the stage or a herd of elephants burst into the arena. And when she’d turned and caught him at it, he’d looked so like a boy caught in mischief—a boy she wanted to know—that her logic faltered for a moment, and something inside her gave way.
But only for a moment.
Now he was the charming man of the world again, and she was Leonie Noirot, logical and businesslike and able to put two and two together.
“You don’t care for his poetry, yet you came back with Lord Swanton to London for the release of his book,” she said. “That’s prodigious loyalty.”
He laughed. “A man ought to stick by his friend in hours of trial.”
“To protect him from excited young women?”
“That wasn’t the original plan, no. We’d prepared for a humiliating return. The reviewers were savage. Didn’t you know?”
“I’m not very literary,” she said. “I look at the reviews of plays and concerts and such, but mainly we’re interested in what the ladies are wearing. I rarely have time for the book reviews.”
“He’d had a few of the poems published in magazines before Alcinthus and Other Poems came out,” he said. “The reviewers loathed his work, unanimously and unconditionally. They lacerated him. They parodied him. It was a massacre. Until he saw the reviews, Swanton had been on the fence about coming back to London when his book was unleashed on the general public. After that, the choice was clear: Return and face the music or stay away and be labeled a coward.”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I was aware that his lordship had returned to London when the book came out because everybody was talking about it. Certainly our ladies were. I haven’t heard that much excitement since the last big scandal.” The one Sophy had precipitated.
“We’re still not sure what happened, exactly,” he said. “We arrived in London the day before it was to appear in the shops. We had a small party, and Swanton was a good sport about the rotten reviews—he doesn’t have a high opinion of himself to start with, so he wasn’t as desolated as another fellow might have been. We made jokes about it at White’s club. Then, a few days after we arrived, we had to order more copies printed, and quickly. Mobs of young women were storming the bookshop doors. The booksellers said they hadn’t seen anything like it since Harriette Wilson published her memoirs.”
Harriette Wilson had been a famous courtesan. Ten years ago, men had paid her not to mention them in her memoirs.
“Lord Swanton seems to have struck a chord in young women’s hearts,” she said.
“And he’s as bewildered as the critics.” Lord Lisburne looked out of the window.
At this time of year, darkness came late, and even then it seemed not a full darkness, but a deep twilight. Tonight, a full moon brightened it further, and Leonie saw that they must have crossed Westminster Bridge some while ago. She saw, too, the muscle jump in his jaw.
“Sudden leaps to fame can be dangerous,” he said. “Especially when young women are involved. I should like to get him back to the Continent before …” He trailed off and shrugged. “That crowd tonight troubled you. The one at the lecture.”
“When I see so many people crowded together,” she said slowly, “I tend to see a mob.”
A moment’s pause, then, “That’s what I see, too, Miss Noirot. I should have remained and stood guard. But …” He paused for a very long time.
“But,” she said.
“I had a chance to steal a pretty girl from the crowd, and I took it.”
Leonie and Lord Lisburne arrived in time for the concluding event of the poetic evening when, according to the program, Lord Swanton would debut one of his recent compositions.
As Lord Lisburne had predicted, the crowd had thinned. Though the hall remained full, the men had moved out of their cramped quarters along the walls and into seats in the back rows. The galleries no longer seemed in danger of collapsing.
While she and Lord Lisburne paused in the doorway, looking for a place to sit, what looked like a family group bore down on them. He drew her back and, either out of courtesy or because he wasn’t in a hurry to join the audience, made way for the departing family. When the other gentleman thanked him, Lord Lisburne smiled commiseratingly and murmured some answer that made the other man smile.
That was charm at work, charm of the most insidious kind: humorous, self-deprecating, and disarmingly frank and confiding.
Leonie well understood that type of charm. Her family specialized in it.
She of all people knew better than to let it work on her. The trouble was, it truly was insidious. One was drawn closer without realizing. One believed one had found a true intimacy when what was there was only a masterful imitation.
She lectured herself while he led her in the direction the group had come from, to the recently vacated seats at the far end of the rearmost row.
Though she’d prefer to sit closer to a door, for an easy escape, this was preferable to any place she’d have found for herself earlier. With reduced crowding, air could circulate, and when the doors opened for departing audience members, cooler night air drifted in.
Having a large, strong male nearby—even the kind who was dangerous to a woman’s peace of mind—helped keep her calm, too.
Since she truly didn’t want to listen to the poetry, and it was unintelligent to dwell too much on the large, strong male, she let her attention drift about the room. She counted twenty-two Maison Noirot creations. That was a good showing. Maybe writing the article for Foxe’s Morning Spectacle wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
Among the ladies in Maison Noirot dresses were Lady Clara and— Oh, yes! Lady Gladys Fairfax had worn her new wine-colored dress! A victory!
Leonie smiled.
Her companion leaned nearer. “What is it?” he whispered.
She felt the whisper on her ear and on her neck. Thence it seemed to travel under her skin and arrow straight to the bottom of her belly.
“An excess of emotion from the poetry,” she murmured.
“You haven’t heard a word Swanton’s uttered,” he said. “You’ve been surveying the audience. Who’s made you smile? Have I a rival?”
Like who, exactly? Apollo? Adonis?
“Dozens,” she said.
“Can’t say I’m surprised.” But his green gaze was moving over the crowd. She watched his survey continue round the hall, then pause and go back to the group sitting in the last row, as they were, but to their right, nearer to the doors.
“Clara,” he said. “And Gladys with her. I never saw them when we came in, thanks to the gentleman desperate to drag his family away. But there’s no more room on that side, in any event, and so we’re not obliged to join them—oh, ye beneficent gods and spirits of the place! Well, then …” He tilted his head to one side and frowned. “Not that I should have known Gladys straightaway.”
He turned back to Leonie, his green eyes glinting. “She isn’t in rancid colors for once. Is that your doing?”
Leonie nodded proudly.
He turned back again to look. “And there’s Valentine, roped in for escort duty, poor fellow.”
Lord Valentine Fairfax was one of Lady Clara’s brothers. Unlike Lord Longmore, who was dark, Lord Valentine was a typical Fairfax: blond, blue-eyed, and unreasonably good-looking.
“He’s been here the whole time, unfortunate mortal,” Lord Lisburne said. “Whiling away the hours weaving luscious fantasies of killing himself, I don’t doubt. Or, more likely, Val being a practical fellow, his dreamy thoughts are of ways to kill Swanton without getting caught.”
“If the men dislike the poetry so much, why do they come?” she said.
“To make the girls think they’re sensitive.”
She smothered a laugh, but not altogether successfully or quickly enough. A young woman in front of her turned round to glare.
Leonie pulled out a handkerchief and pretended to wipe a tear from her eye. The girl turned away.
The audience wasn’t as hushed as it had been earlier in the evening, when Leonie had peeked through the door. Though many occupying the prime seats on the floor sat rapt—or asleep, in the men’s case—others were whispering, and from the galleries came the low hum of background conversation that normally prevailed at public recitations.
The increased noise level didn’t seem to trouble Lord Swanton. Someone had taught him how to make himself heard in a public venue, and he was employing the training, his every aching word clearly audible:
… Aye, deep and full its wayward torrents gush, Strong as the earliest joys of youth, as hope’s first radiant flush;
For, oh! When soul meets soul above, as man on earth meets man,
Its deepest, worst, intensity ne’er gains its earthly ban!
“No, dash it, I won’t hush!” a male voice boomed over the buzz of the audience.
Leonie looked toward the sound. Not far from the Fairfaxes, a well-fed, middle-aged gentleman was shooing his family toward the door.
“A precious waste of time,” he continued. “For charity, indeed. If I’d known, I’d have sent in twice the tickets’ cost and stayed at home, and judged it cheap at the price.”
His wife tried to shush him, again in vain.
“Give me Tom Moore any day,” he boomed. “Or Robbie Burns. Poetry, you call this! I call it gasbagging.”
Lord Lisburne made a choked sound.
Other men in the vicinity didn’t trouble to hide their laughter.
“It’s a joke, it surely is,” the critic went on. “I could have gone to Vauxhall, instead of wasting a Friday night listening to this lot maunder on about nothing. Bowel stoppage, I shouldn’t wonder. That’s their trouble. What they want is a good physicking.”
Gasps now, from the ladies nearby.
“I never heard anybody ask your opinion, sir,” came Lady Gladys’s musical voice. “None of us prevented your going to Vauxhall. Certainly none of us paid for a ticket to hear you. I don’t recollect seeing anything on the program about ill-educated and discourteous men supplying critiques.”
“Glad to supply it gratis, madam,” came the quick answer. “As to uneducated—at least some of us have wit enough to notice that the emperor’s wearing no clothes.”
Lord Valentine stood up. “Sir, I’ll thank you not to address the lady in that tone,” he said.
“She addressed me first, sir!”
“Blast,” Lord Lisburne said. He rose, too. “Leave it to Gladys. Valentine will be obliged to call out the fellow, thanks to her.”
Men were starting up from their seats. Lord Swanton became aware of something amiss. He attempted to go on reading his poem, but the audience’s attention was turning away from him to the dispute, and the noise level was rising, drowning him out.
Leonie became aware of movement in the galleries. She looked up. Men were leaving their seats and moving toward the doors. A duel would be bad enough, but this looked like a riot in the making.
Images flashed in her mind of the Parisian mob storming through the streets, setting fire to houses where cholera victims lived … her little niece Lucie so sick … the tramp of hundreds of feet, growing louder as they neared …
Panic swamped her.
She closed her eyes, opened them again, and shook her head, shaking away the past. She counted the rows in the hall and estimated the audience size, and her mind quieted.
This was London, an altogether different place. And this was a different time and circumstance. These people were dying of boredom, not a rampaging disease.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if I might have your attention,” Lord Swanton said.
“You’ve had it these three hours and more!” someone called out. “Not enough?”
Other hecklers contributed their observations.
By this time Lord Lisburne had reached his cousins and the irate gentleman, who was growing more irate by the second, if the deepening red of his face was any clue.
Meanwhile, the audience grew more boisterous.
Leonie reminded herself she was a Noirot and a DeLucey. Not nearly as many of her French ancestors had got their heads cut off as deserved it. Hardly any relatives on either side had ever been stupid or incompetent enough to get themselves hanged. Or even jailed.
Marcelline or Sophy could have handled this lot blindfolded, she told herself.
She swallowed and rose. “Thank you, my lord, for your kind invitation,” she said, pitching her voice to carry. “I should like to recite a poem by Mrs. Abdy.”
“More poetry!” someone cried. “Somebody hang me.”
“Hold your tongue, you bacon brain! It’s a girl!”
Lord Swanton cut through the commentary. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Noirot—that is to say, Madame, of Maison Noirot—has kindly agreed to contribute to our poetic mélange.”
Leonie had dressed for the occasion. She knew she’d get the men’s attention because she was young and not unattractive, and the women’s because her dress was beautiful.
She was aware of the argument continuing to her right, and more aware of how hard her heart pounded, and how she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. She told herself not to be ridiculous: She performed every day, for extremely difficult women, and she got them under control.
She began, “‘I’m weary of a single life—’ ”
“Why didn’t you say so?” someone called out. “Come sit by me, my poppet.”
“Oh, stifle it!” somebody else said. “Let the lady say her piece.”
Leonie started again:
I’m weary of a single life,
The clubs of town I hate;
I smile at tales of wedded strife,
I sigh to win a mate;
Yet no kind fair will crown my bliss,
But all my homage shun—
Alas! my grief and shame is this,
I’m but a Second Son!
A burst of laughter.
That first sign of glee was all the encouragement she needed. Anxiety and self-consciousness washed away, and the DeLucey in her took over.
She went on, this time with dramatic gestures:
My profile, all the world allows,
With Byron’s e’en may vie,
[—she turned her head this way and that]
My chestnut curls half shade my brow,
[—she toyed with the curls at her ears]
I’m almost six feet high;
[—she stretched her neck, to laughter]
And by my attitudes of grace,
Ducrow is quite undone,
[—she mimicked one of the equestrian’s elegant poses]
Yet what avail the form and face
Of a poor Second Son?
Amid the men’s laughter she heard women giggling.
She had them.
She continued.
For an instant, while the angry gentleman grew more incensed, his complexion darkening from brick red to purple, Lisburne had felt sure the only outcome would be pistols at dawn. The only hope he had was for a riot. Once men started knocking one another about and women commenced screaming, Valentine and the other fellow might stop making asses of themselves.
When he heard Miss Noirot call out to Swanton, Lisburne had wanted to shake her. Was she mad? To offer more of the poetry that was driving every rational man in the hall to distraction? And to taunt them now, when he hadn’t a prayer of getting to her fast enough?
All hell should have broken loose.
But he’d reckoned without …
… whatever it was about her: the quality, so obvious, and so hard to put a satisfactory name to. The same power of personality that had attracted and held captive his attention at the British Institution seemed to work on a general audience.
Add that compelling quality to her appearance, and the men could hardly help responding. She was exceedingly pretty and a redhead besides, and the green silk dress, insane as it was, was voluptuous.
But the women, too?
Ah, yes, of course. The green silk dress.
Furthermore, Mrs. Abdy had written, along with the usual sentimental claptrap, a number of comic poems, which Swanton would give a vital organ to replicate.
London’s favorite poet was smiling. He gently prompted Miss Noirot as she faltered for a stanza. It was a longish poem—not half so long as some of Swanton’s, but still a good bit to get by heart.
And she’d said she wasn’t literary, the minx.
Even the irate gentleman was smiling. “That’s more like it,” he said.
“It isn’t,” Gladys said. “It’s an amusing bit of doggerel, no more.”
“We must allow for differences of taste,” Lisburne said. “Is that a new dress, Cousin? Most elegant.”
To his amazement, she colored, almost prettily. “I could hardly wear last year’s dress on such an occasion.”
“There, that explains,” Lisburne said to the irate gentleman. “She wore her new dress and you mentioned the emperor’s new clothes. A bit of confusion, that’s all.”
Gladys huffed. “Lisburne, how can you be so thick? But why do I ask? You know perfectly well—”
“I know you’re eager to leave before the crush,” Lisburne told the irate gentleman. “Bon voyage.”
The man’s wife took hold of her spouse’s arm and said something under her breath. After a moment’s hesitation—and another moment of glaring at Valentine—the man let himself be led away.
From the lectern came Swanton’s voice. “Thank you, Miss Noirot, for your delightful contribution. Perhaps somebody else would like to participate?”
Crawford, one of Longmore’s longtime cronies, stood up. “I’ve got a limerick,” he said.
“If it brings a blush to any lady’s cheek, I’ll gladly throttle you,” Swanton said with a smile.
“Lord Swanton is so good,” Gladys said, her voice soft for once. “A perfect gentleman.”
“Who likes a ribald limerick as well as the next fellow,” Lisburne said. “If Crawford contrives to keep it clean, he’ll be the last one to do so. Fairfax, I suggest you take the ladies home while everybody’s still on good behavior.”
“You ever were high-handed,” Gladys said, in a magnificent example of pot calling kettle black. “The lecture isn’t over, and I’m sure we’re not ready to leave.”
“I’m sure we are,” Clara said. “My head is aching, not to mention my bottom. Val, do let us go.”
“Finally, after hours of misery and tragedy, we get a little good humor, and you want to leave,” Valentine said.
“Yes, before you’re tempted to challenge anybody else over a poem,” his sister said.
Meaning, before Gladys could cause more trouble, Lisburne thought. Leave it to her to turn a poetry lecture into a riot.
A riot the redheaded dressmaker had simply stood up and stopped with a handful of verses.
He left his cousins without ceremony. More of the families and groups of women were leaving now, delaying his progress to the place where he’d last seen Miss Noirot standing in all her swelling waves of green silk, reciting her amusing poem as cleverly as any comic actress.
When he got there, she was gone.
Lisburne pushed through the departing throng out into the street. Nary a glimpse of the green silk dress or cream-colored shawl did he get. By now, hackneys and private carriages had converged outside the entrance. Drivers swore, horses whinnied, harnesses jangled. The audience jabbered about the poetry and the near riot and the modiste in the dashing green dress.
And she’d slipped away. By now she was well on her way to St. James’s Street, Lisburne calculated.
He debated whether to go in that direction or let her be. It was late, and she would be working tomorrow. He would like to keep her up very late, but that wasn’t going to happen tonight. He’d made progress, but not enough. Pursuit this night would seem inconsiderate, and would undo what he’d achieved.
He returned to the hall and eventually ran Swanton to ground in one of the study rooms.
The poet was packing papers into a portfolio in a desperate fashion Lisburne recognized all too well.
“I see you made good your escape,” Lisburne said. “No girls clinging to your lapels or coattails.”
Swanton shoved a fistful of verse into the portfolio. “The damnable thing is, that fellow who was shouting? I couldn’t have agreed more. It’s rubbish!”
“It isn’t genius, but—”
“I should give it up tomorrow, but it’s like a cursed juggernaut,” Swanton went on. “And the devil of it is, we raised more money in this one evening than the Deaf and Dumb Asylum sponsors have raised in six months, according to Lady Gorrell.” He paused and looked up from crushing the poetry so many girls deemed so precious. “I saw you come in. With Miss Noirot.”
“She tried to get in earlier, but there wasn’t room. And so I took her to the circus instead.”
“The circus,” Swanton said.
“Astley’s,” Lisburne said. “She liked it. And as a consequence of her brain not being awash in grief and sorrow when we returned, she had the presence of mind to save your bacon.”
Swanton’s harassed expression smoothed into a smile. Then he laughed outright. “I remembered Miss Leonie, of course. From Paris. Who could forget those eyes? And the mysterious smile. But I’d forgotten how quick-witted she was. That was no small kindness she did, turning the audience’s mood.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Lisburne said. “Your poetical event wasn’t the only thing she saved. My cousin Gladys almost got Valentine in a duel.”
“Was your cousin Gladys the girl who gave the noisy fellow what for?” Swanton said. “I couldn’t see her. Men were standing up, and she was behind a pillar. And I couldn’t hear exactly what she said. But her voice is splendid! So melodious. A beautiful tone.”
Lisburne had never thought about Gladys’s voice. What she said was so provoking that one never noticed the vocal quality.
“Gladys is best heard at a distance,” he said. Lancashire, he thought, would be an acceptable distance at present.
Swanton closed the portfolio, his brow furrowed. “I’ll have to thank Miss Noirot. No, that’s insufficient. I need to find a way to return the favor. Without her, we should have had a debacle. That will teach me to let these things run on for so long. An hour, no more, in future.”
“But the girls want you to wax poetic all day and all night,” Lisburne said. “Half of them had to be dragged out of the lecture hall. If you give them only an hour, they’ll feel cheated.”
Swanton was still frowning. “Something to do with girls,” he said. “They take in charity cases or some such.”
“Who does?”
“Mesdames Noirot,” Swanton said. “Somebody told me. Did Miss Noirot mention it? Or was it Clevedon?”
“I know they took in a boy they found on the street,” Lisburne said.
Swanton nodded. “They do that sort of thing. I’d better look into it. I might be able to arrange an event to raise funds for them.” He grimaced. “But something less boring and … funereal.”
“I’ll look into it,” Lisburne said. “You’ve got your hands full, fending off all those innocent maidens whose adulation you’re not allowed to take advantage of. I’m the one with nothing to do.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_1e4f4ff1-aa40-565f-b675-417957d82674)
SYMMETRICAL PERFECTION.—Mrs. N. GEARY, Court Stay-maker, 61 St James’s street, has the honour to announce to the Nobility and Gentry, that she has returned from the Continent, and has now (in addition to her celebrated newly-invented boned “Corset de toilette”) a STAY of the most novel and elegant shape ever manufactured … totally exterminating all that deadly pressure which has prevailed in all other Stays for the last 300 years … two guineas, ready money.
—Court Journal, 16 May 1835
Monday 13 July
A steady routine is of first importance,” Leonie heard Matron explain. “Four hours of lessons, four hours of work, two hours for exercise and chores, half an hour for meals. As your lordship will see, the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females is a modest enterprise. We can take in but a fraction of the girls who need us. But this is only the beginning. The Philanthropic Society, as you may be aware, began in a small house on Cambridge Heath and currently accommodates some two hundred children in Southwark. We, too, expect to grow, with the aid of charitable contributions as well as sales of our girls’ work, which I will be pleased to show you.”
From where Leonie stood in the corridor, no one in the workroom could see her. However, even with only a view of his back, she had no trouble recognizing the gentleman Matron was falling all over herself to accommodate.
Ah, yes, undoubtedly Lord Lisburne would like nothing better than to look at needlework.
Leonie debated for a moment. Not about what to do, because she was seldom at a loss in that regard. She did wonder, though, what had brought him here, of all places. She knew he was bored in London. He’d said he wanted to return to the Continent. In the meantime, he seemed interested merely in amusing himself, and she seemed to be one of the amusements.
Very well. Easy enough to turn that to her advantage. Business was business, he was rich, and he was here.
She swept through the open door.
“Thank you, Matron, for undertaking tour duty,” she said. “I know Monday is a busy day for you. I’ll continue Lord Lisburne’s tour, and you may return to your regular tasks.”
Matron relinquished Lord Lisburne with poorly concealed reluctance. And who could blame her? All that manly beauty. All that charm.
Unfortunately, all that manly beauty and charm must have turned Matron’s brain. Otherwise she’d have known better than to bring him into the workroom. Many of the girls in the bright, airy room stood on the brink of adolescence if not well in. Putting a stunning male aristocrat in front of them was asking for trouble.
Most sat in a stupor. Three had stuck themselves with their needles and were absently sucking the wounded fingers. Verity Sims had overturned her workbasket. Bridget Coppy was sewing to her dress sleeve the apron she was making.
They’d be useless for days, the lot of them.
Even Leonie was aware of a romantic haze enveloping her brain. Last night he’d sneaked into her dreams. And today he’d plagued her as well. Her mind made pictures of him as he’d been at Astley’s Royal Circus, the tantalizing glimpses she’d had of the openhearted boy he might have been once upon a time.
Nonetheless, she briskly led his lordship out of the workroom and into the corridor.
“We’re somewhat cramped, as you see,” she said.
“Yet what efficient use you’ve made of the quarters you have,” he said. “Given your penchant for order, I oughtn’t to be surprised. Still, it’s one thing to write numbers and such neatly in a ledger and quite another to organize a poky old building into something rather pleasant and cozy.”
Though she had her guard up, she couldn’t squelch the flutter of gratification. She and her sisters had worked hard to make the most of what they had. They hadn’t much. Their financial success was only very recent, and she knew better than to take it for granted. In the dressmaking business, failure could happen overnight, from natural catastrophes or merely the whims of fashionable women. With the Milliners’ Society, they’d proceeded cautiously, incurring no expenses they couldn’t cover with ready money.
They’d done it because of Cousin Emma, who’d given to three neglected children a real home and an education. She’d taught them how to make beautiful things and she’d saved them from the pointless, vagabond life of their parents.
And she’d died too young, with only the first taste of her own success.
Leonie thanked him calmly enough and said, “All the same, we’d prefer rather less coziness. We should like to expand into the house next door.”
“I daresay. Always room for expansion.”
By this point they’d moved out of the others’ hearing range.
“Very well, I’m stumped,” she said. “Did you merely stumble upon the place and decide to look in, or is this all part of a master plan?”
“Master plan,” he said. “Swanton charged me with finding out your charity. He wants to raise funds for you while everybody still loves him. You know how fickle the public can be, especially the female part of it.”
“He charged you,” she said.
“To be strictly accurate, I volunteered,” he said. “Eagerly. This is because I have two uses at present. One, I can watch and listen to him make poetry. Two, I can hang about him, ostensibly to shield him from poetry-maddened females, but actually to do very little and enjoy the edifying experience of being invisible to the females.”
“Despair not,” she said. “You weren’t invisible to Matron or the girls in the workroom.”
“Be that as it may, I had a good deal more fun looking into your activities,” he said.
Inside her head, a lot of panicked Leonies ran about screaming, What? What did he find? What did he see? Why?
Outwardly, not so much as a muscle twitched, and she said, “That sounds tedious.”
“It proved far more difficult than I expected,” he said. “You and your sisters are strangely quiet about your philanthropy.”
The inner Leonie settled down and said, Oh, that’s all right, then.
She said, “It isn’t much to boast about.”
“Is it not?” He glanced back toward the room they’d left. “I’ve lived a sheltered life. Don’t think I’ve ever seen, in one room, so many girls who’ve led …” He paused, then closed his eyes and appeared to think. “Let us say, unsheltered lives.” He opened his eyes, the green darkening as he studied her for one unnerving moment. “You keep getting more interesting. It’s rather a trial.”
“It’s business,” she said. “Some of the girls turn out to be more talented than others. We get to pick the crème de la crème as apprentices for Maison Noirot. Too, we’ve trained and educated them ourselves, which means that we know what we’re getting. We’re not as disinterested as your duchesses and countesses and such. It isn’t pure philanthropy.”
“The fact remains, you pluck them from the streets and orphanages and workhouses.”
She smiled. “We get them cheaply that way. Often for free.”
She led him into the small shop, where the girls’ productions were on display. “If your lordship would condescend to buy a few of their trinkets, they’ll be in raptures,” she said.
She moved to a battered counter and opened a glass display case.
He stood for a moment, gazing at the collection of watch guards and pincushions and handkerchiefs and sashes and coin purses and such.
“Miss Noirot,” he said.
She looked up. He was still staring at the display case’s contents, his expression stricken.
“The girls made these things?” he said. “The girls in that classroom?”
“Yes. Remember Matron telling you that we raise funds by selling their work?”
“I remember,” he said. “But I didn’t …” He turned away and walked to the shop’s one small window. He folded his hands behind his back and looked out.
She was baffled. She looked down into the display case then up again at his expertly tailored back.
After what seemed a long time, he turned away from the window. He returned to the counter, wearing a small smile. “I’m moved,” he said. “Perilously near to tears. I’m very glad I came on this errand instead of Swanton. He’d be sobbing all over the place and writing fifty-stanza laments about innocence lost or abused or found or some such gobbledygook. Luckily, it’s only me, and the public is in no danger of suffering verse from this quarter.”
For a moment, she was at a loss. But logic swiftly shoved astonishment aside. He might feel something on the girls’ account or he might be feigning great-heartedness and charitable inclinations, as so many aristocrats did. Philanthropy was a duty and they performed it ostentatiously but they didn’t really care. If even half of them had truly cared, London would be a different place.
But it didn’t matter what he truly felt, she told herself. The girls mattered. And money was money, whether offered in genuine compassion or for show.
“It would seem that your friend’s poetry has infected you with excessive tenderheartedness,” she said.
“That may be so, madame, yet I wonder how any man could withstand this.” He waved his hand at the contents of the display case. “Look at them. Little hearts and flowers and curlicues and lilies of the valley and lace. Made by girls who’ve known mainly deprivation and squalor and violence.”
She considered the pincushions and watch guards and mittens and handkerchiefs. “They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at,” she said. “If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.”
“Madame,” he said, “is it absolutely necessary to break my heart completely?”
She looked up into his green-gold eyes and thought how easy it would be to lose herself there. His eyes, like his low voice, seemed to promise worlds. They seemed to invite one to discover fascinating depths of character and secrets nobody else in the world knew.
She said, “Well, then, does that mean you’ll buy the lot?”
Lisburne House
Later
Swanton gazed at the objects Lisburne had arranged on one of the library tables—after he’d cleared off the heaps of letters and the foolscap covered with poetic scribbling.
After what seemed to be a very long time, Swanton finally looked up. “Did you leave anything in the shop?”
“I found it hard to choose,” Lisburne said.
“Yet you claim I’m the one who’s always letting himself be imposed on,” Swanton said.
“Miss Noirot didn’t impose,” Lisburne said. “Like a good businesswoman, she took advantage of me during a moment of weakness.”
He wasn’t sure why he’d been weak. It wasn’t as though he’d never visited a charitable establishment before. With his father, he’d attended countless philanthropic dinners and visited asylums and orphanages and charity schools. He’d watched the inmates in their distinctive uniforms and badges standing stiffly at attention or parading for their benefactors’ inspection or singing the praises of deity or monarch or benevolent rich people.
He was used to that sort of thing. Yet he had wanted to sit down and put his face in his hands and weep for those girls and their dainty little hearts and handkerchiefs embroidered with pansies and violets and forget-me-nots.
Confound Swanton for planting him in his poetic hotbed of feelings!
“I suppose you didn’t realize quite how canny she is,” Swanton said.
“I did not,” Lisburne said. “She’s the very devil of a businesswoman.”
After she’d torn his heart to pieces and cleaned out the display case as well as his purse, she’d very charmingly got rid of him.
“I’m glad you weren’t there,” he told Swanton. “It might have killed you. It nearly killed me when she said, ‘They don’t have Botticelli paintings to look at. If they want beauty in their lives, they have to make it.’ ”
Swanton blinked hard, but that trick rarely worked for him. Emotion won, nine times out of ten, and this wasn’t the tenth time. His Adam’s apple went up and down and his eyes filled.
“Don’t you dare sob,” Lisburne said. “You’re turning into a complete watering pot, worse than any of those deranged girls who follow you about. Pull yourself together, man. You’re the one who proposed to raise funds for Maison Noirot’s favorite charity. I found out all about it for you. I’ve brought you abundant evidence of their work. Do you mean to compose a lugubrious sonnet on the occasion, or may we discuss practical plans?”
“Easy enough for you to talk about pulling oneself together.” Swanton pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “You’re not the one who’s afraid to put a foot anywhere lest he step on a young female. I have to be careful not to hurt their tender feelings, and at the same time not say anything too kind, lest it be construed as wicked seduction.”
“Yes, yes, it’s a hellish job,” Lisburne said. “If you want to go back to Florence or Venice tomorrow, I’ll go with you happily.”
He might as well. What had he to do here but try to keep Swanton out of trouble with swooning girls? Though a grown man, supposedly capable of taking care of himself, the poet tended to be oblivious at times. This made him easy prey for any of a number of unpleasant women, like Lady Bartham’s younger daughter, Alda.
As to Miss Leonie Noirot …
If Lisburne did return to Italy tomorrow, would she notice he was gone, or would she simply find another fellow to intrigue while she set about picking his pockets?
Swanton took up one of the pincushions that had stabbed Lisburne to the heart.
“That’s Bridget Coppy’s work,” Lisburne said. “Miss Noirot says the heart shape is traditional for pincushions. But instead of the usual red, the girl exercised her imagination and made it in white with a coral trim, to set off the colorful flowers. The cord attaches to the waist.”
“The flowers are charming,” Swanton said. “So delicate.”
“Bridget is becoming a skilled embroiderer,” Lisburne said.
“My mother would like this,” Swanton said.
“Then by all means let us deliver it in person. I see gifts aplenty here for my mother as well. And her new husband. They would both be enchanted.”
His mother had chosen her second husband as wisely as she’d done her first. Lord Rufford was a good, generous man, who made her happy. He’d made a friend of his stepson, too, no easy feat.
“You’re in a devil of a hurry to return,” Swanton said.
Lisburne laughed. “Perhaps I am. I’m supposed to be such a cosmopolitan fellow, yet I let a redheaded French milliner get the better of me. Perhaps I want to slink away in shame.”
“That I beg leave to doubt,” Swanton said. “I believe you’re so far from wishing to leave that you’re even now puzzling over how she did it, so that you can plan how to prevail at your next encounter.”
Lisburne looked at him.
“She’s the only woman you’ve taken any particular notice of since we came to London,” Swanton said. “And I know you. As well, that is, as anybody can know you.”
“As though there were anything of great moment to know,” Lisburne said. But Swanton was a poet. He imagined everybody had hidden depths. If Lisburne did have them, he wasn’t interested in exploring them, and he certainly wouldn’t encourage anybody else to do so. “What about you? Do you feel compelled to stay?”
“I feel I must,” Swanton said.
“Do you? I’d as soon be stalked by wolves as by a lot of gently bred maidens.”
“They’ll grow sick of me soon enough,” Swanton said. “In the meantime, I should be a coward to run away when I can do so much good. It would be unworthy of your father’s memory, in any event.”
“Yes, yes, stab me with my father, do,” Lisburne said.
“I know it isn’t fair, but it’s the only way I know to win an argument with you,” Swanton said.
“Very well,” Lisburne said. “We stay until they turn on you. Then we pray we can get away in time.”
He glanced at the piles of correspondence he’d flung onto one of the library’s sofas a short time earlier. “Meanwhile, does your secretary need a secretary? The heaps of letters have only grown higher since yesterday.” Remembering what Swanton had said moments ago, he added, “Begging letters, you said. One of the perils of rank and wealth. Everybody puts his hand out, and somebody has to decide who’s deserving and who isn’t.”
“That’s the least of it,” Swanton said. “Today alone I received two claims for child support and one extortionate note threatening a breach of promise suit.”
To anybody who knew Swanton, the claims were absurd. Yet they oughtn’t to be taken lightly.
Fame aroused envy and greed and, generally, the worst instincts of some people. Too many would be willing to believe ill of him.
“Show me the letters,” Lisburne said.
Evening of Tuesday 14 July
Had Lisburne not been so deeply engrossed in his cousin’s unpleasant correspondence, he might have got wind of the other matter sooner. Or maybe not.
Though he’d been to White’s often enough, he hadn’t looked into the betting book in days. Why bother? So many of the wagers were witless, arising from boredom. How long a fly would crawl about the window before it died or flew away, for instance.
Lisburne, for the present at least, wasn’t bored. Watching women moon about Swanton had been tiresome, and even the possible dangers of the situation hadn’t made life exciting. But then Miss Leonie Noirot had entered the picture, and London had become far more interesting.
Since she was everything but boring, Lisburne wasn’t shocked to find her at the heart of the latest gossip.
He and Swanton had attended the Countess of Jersey’s assembly, where the ladies made the usual fuss about the poet. While the younger women were fluttering about Swanton, Lisburne drifted toward the card room. As he was about to enter, Lady Alda Morris detained him, in order to whisper something behind her fan.
Maison Noirot
Wednesday 15 July
Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, her face pink.
Four women—Leonie, Marcelline, Lady Clara, and Jeffreys—watched and waited.
Today, for the first time, Lady Gladys wore the corset Leonie had designed especially for her.
Unlike the one they’d hastily adapted last week to replace the monstrosity she’d brought from home, this one employed all of Leonie’s knowledge of mathematics, physiology, and physics. Until this moment, she hadn’t been allowed to enjoy her accomplishment, because Lady Gladys had refused to come out and show herself in the corset. She said she would not cavort about in her undergarments to be gawked at.
That, however, was before she’d seen the gold evening dress.
When they’d first shown it to her, she’d made a face and said the color would make her look as though she had a liver disease. But by Lady Gladys’s standards, the protest was feeble. A moment later she said she might as well try it on. Then she’d insisted on Jeffreys—the allegedly consumptive speaker of vile French—attending her in the dressing room.
Ladies were nothing if not capricious, but this lady had apparently devoted her young life to making everybody about her want to throttle her.
“Well,” she said at last.
One word, but Leonie caught the little bubble of pleasure in it. Lady Gladys had a beautiful voice, as expressive as an opera singer’s.
“I never thought I could wear this color,” she said.
“So you made abundantly clear,” Lady Clara said. “I thought we should have to stupefy you with drink to get you to try on anything today.”
“That isn’t true. I didn’t make a fuss about trying on the corset. I only didn’t want to prance about in my underwear while everybody stared at me.”
She smoothed the front of the dress though Jeffreys, naturally, had made sure every seam lay precisely in place.
“The corset is comfortable,” Lady Gladys said. “I’m not sure what you did, but …” She trailed off, studying herself. “You did something,” she said.
Leonie had done a great deal. She’d designed the stays to support her ladyship’s generous embonpoint. The corset’s shape smoothed her waist in a way that made it seem smaller, though the compression was minimal.
Her figure remained much fuller and less shapely than the fashionable ideal. But fashionable ideals were only that. What was important was making a lady look as beautiful as it was possible for her to look. And the gold satin was as much a surprise to Leonie as it was to Lady Gladys.
As usual, Marcelline had imagined the dress entirely in her head. This time, though, she’d relied solely on Leonie’s detailed description of their new client.
Yet from her sickbed, and in spite of near-constant nausea, Marcelline had designed a miracle of a dress. Gold satin trimmed in black blond lace. Simple yet dramatic. The pointed waist created the illusion of a narrower waistline, and the black languets that fastened it in front enhanced the effect.
Pointed waists had supposedly fallen out of fashion, but Marcelline never concerned herself with what she considered petty fluctuations of taste.
This dress would bring pointed waists straight back into style, Leonie calculated. The black lace mantilla, attached to the tops of the sleeves, not only added drama but drew the eye upward, toward Lady Gladys’s ample bosom. It was, perhaps, not quite the thing for an unwed young lady, but Lady Gladys would look ridiculous in the types of dresses that suited the average maiden.
She brought her hand up to the edge of the bodice. “It’s very low-cut,” she said.
“But of course, my dear,” Marcelline said. “You have a beautiful bosom. We want to draw the eye to it.”
“I’ll feel naked,” Lady Gladys said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Lady Clara said. “You’ll feel naked and still look perfectly respectable.”
“Hardly perfectly respectable,” said her cousin.
“It’s all right to look tempting,” Lady Clara said.
“Will you stop it!” Lady Gladys snapped, her vehemence startling everybody. “Stop being kind. I can’t tell you how provoking it is. No, wait, yes I can. You’ve only to crook a finger to have any man you want. You have no idea what it’s like to be—to be—not to be beautiful and sweet-natured!”
“I’m not sweet at all,” Lady Clara said. “People only think that because of my looks.”
“That’s the point! You can say anything!”
“No, I can’t,” Lady Clara said sharply. “I can’t be myself. There’s Mama, looming over me all the time. You don’t know how suffocating it is.”
“Oh, yes, all those men crowding about you, clamoring for a smile.”
“They only see the outside. They don’t know who I am, or care particularly. You know me—or you ought to know. And you know I’m on your side and always have been, in spite of how difficult you make it.”
Lady Gladys went scarlet and her eyes filled. “I don’t know how to behave!” she cried. “I don’t know how to do anything! You complain because your mother is always at you. But at least you have one. You’ve had women about to teach you how to be womanly. Look at me! My father’s a soldier, and I might as well have been raised in an army camp. He treats me like a regiment. He gives orders and then off he goes, to smash some Foe of England.” She flung away and stormed back to the dressing room. “Jeffreys! Get this thing off me!”
With a panicked look at Leonie, Jeffreys trotted after her.
Lady Clara stomped to a chair and flung herself onto it.
Marcelline looked at Leonie.
Leonie lifted her shoulders and mouthed, I have no idea.
“What on earth is the matter?” Marcelline said to Lady Clara.
“I don’t know,” Lady Clara said.
“I can tell you what’s the matter,” Lady Gladys said from behind the curtain. “I’m not going to Almack’s tonight, no matter how they cajole. I told them I wouldn’t do that sort of thing ever again, yet Clara won’t stop plaguing me about it. And now you’ve given her this curst dress for ammunition!”
“You look very well in it, but you’re too obstinate to admit it!” Lady Clara cried.
“I don’t care if I look well. They should never have made it, because I’ll have no occasion to wear it. I don’t want it! I wish I’d never come to London!”
Lady Clara sighed, braced her forehead with one hand, and stared at the floor.
From behind the dressing room curtain came a choked sob.
Other than that, the consulting rooms were silent, apparently peaceful.
That was when Mary Parmenter came in, all flustered, to report that Lord Lisburne and Lord Swanton had arrived. They had business with Miss Noirot, they said. Should Mary ask them to wait in the showroom or in the office?
“We’re busy,” Leonie said. “You may tell them to make an appointment.”
She heard a gasp from behind the curtain. Then, “You can’t make Lord Swanton wait,” Lady Gladys called out shakily. “You’re not busy with me anymore. You might as well see what the gentlemen want.”
“Tell them to make an appointment,” Leonie told Parmenter.
Then she sent the others away and walked behind the curtain.
Leonie found Lady Gladys sitting on the edge of the dressmaking platform, head in her hands.
“I’m not talking to you,” her ladyship muttered. “You’re like a human thumbscrew.”
“One of the secrets of our success is knowing our ladies’ minds,” Leonie said. “We squeeze it out of you one way or another. You might as well tell me and save us both energy we can employ more happily elsewhere.”
“Happy!”
Leonie dropped onto the platform beside her.
Lady Gladys lifted her head. “You only pretend to be my friend. You only want me to order more clothes.”
“I haven’t got to pretending to be your friend yet,” Leonie said. “But I do want you to order more clothes. Why else be in business?”
“It hasn’t occurred to you that I might put you out of business? All of London knows you’ve taken me in hand. They’re already betting on the outcome.”
In truth, of all the matters that might be making Lady Gladys irrational, this hadn’t been the first to cross Leonie’s mind—probably because of the large mental distraction known as the Marquess of Lisburne.
Still, the betting didn’t surprise Leonie. Members of the ton, men and women alike, gambled, mainly because they were bored and idle. And whether they made bets or not, the women would be deeply interested in the results of Lady Gladys’s visits to the shop.
Leonie knew this. It was, in fact, part of what had propelled her toward Lady Gladys. Once Maison Noirot succeeded in showing her ladyship at her best, all the fashionable world would be pounding on Maison Noirot’s doors.
But her ladyship did have to cooperate.
“Aristocrats wager about everything,” Leonie said briskly. “Naturally, you find it galling—”
“Especially when Lady Bartham’s irritating daughter takes great pains to explain the terms,” Lady Gladys said. “As will not surprise you, the phrase ‘silk purse from sow’s ear’ came up more than once.”
Lady Bartham was a close friend and venomous social rival of Lady Clara’s mother, Lady Warford. Leonie didn’t understand why anybody would make friends—or having made them in ignorance, continue—with an adder. She was aware that one of Lady Bartham’s daughters, Lady Alda, was equally toxic.
“Some people are either so ignorant, self-centered, or deeply unhappy that hurting others makes them feel good,” Leonie said. “It’s perverse, but there it is. The best way to fight back is to find a reason to laugh or to feel pleased. It will confuse and upset them. A good revenge, I think.”
Lady Gladys scowled at her. “Tell me what’s amusing. Tell me what I ought to feel pleased about.”
“Why should she go to so much trouble to insult and hurt you unless she’s trying to undermine your self-confidence? Maybe she’s afraid you’ll turn into competition.”
Lady Gladys gave Leonie a you-need-medical-help look.
“Only imagine,” Leonie said, “if you had patted her hand reassuringly and said, ‘Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry to worry you, but I promise to try not to steal any of your beaux, if I can help it.’ Then you could laugh. You have such a pretty laugh. And she would go away a good deal more upset than you.”
“A pretty laugh?” Lady Gladys said. She turned away to stare at a French fashion print on the opposite wall.
“A beautiful voice altogether.” Leonie rose. “Please stop wishing to look like your cousin. It makes you blind to your own assets. You’ll never look like Lady Clara. But she’ll never have your voice.”
“That hardly makes us even!”
“The biggest army, even in the smartest uniforms, doesn’t always win the battle,” Leonie said. “Did his lordship your father never tell you that cleverness and luck come into it?”
Shortly thereafter
At this time of day, when ladies of fashion were dressing for the parade in Hyde Park, Lisburne had expected to find the shop relatively quiet. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let Swanton come with him. The shop was quiet enough. The showroom held a few shopgirls restoring order after their most recent customers. They were putting ribbons and trinkets into drawers, reorganizing display cases, straightening hats their clientele had tipped askew, and rearranging mannequins’ skirts. The only remaining customer was an elderly lady who couldn’t make up her mind among several shades of brown ribbon.
Swanton was pacing at one end of the showroom when the girl returned to inform them that they needed to make an appointment.
“They must be busy with an important client,” Lisburne told him. “Why don’t you toddle up to White’s? The club will be free of women, and you can compose your turbulent mind with the aid of a glass of wine or whiskey.”
Swanton had stopped pacing when the girl returned from her errand. Now he looked about him as though he’d forgotten where he was. “White’s,” he said.
“Yes. The young ladies can’t get to you there.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to wait,” Lisburne said. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying out our errand on my own. And I can do it in a more businesslike manner if you’re not mooning about.”
“I need to write half a dozen new poems in less than a week!” Swanton said. “You’d be in a state of abstraction, too.”
“All the more reason for you to go away to a quiet place, where the women are not giggling and blushing and making up excuses to get close to you.”
Naturally Swanton didn’t realize what was going on about him. The shopgirls would have to hit him on the head with a hat stand to get his full attention. Still, unlike the young ladies of the ton, they were mainly excited to have a celebrity in their midst. They probably hadn’t time to read his poetry—if they could read. Their interest wasn’t personal, in other words.
Swanton looked about him, seeing whatever hazy version of reality he saw. “Very well,” he said. “I can take a hint.”
No, you can’t, Lisburne thought.
With any luck, Swanton would manage to cross St. James’s Street without walking into the path of an on-coming carriage. If not, and if he seemed headed into danger, a sympathetic female would rush out and rescue him, even if she was one of the two people in London who didn’t know who he was. Because he looked like an angel.
In any case, Lisburne wasn’t his nursemaid. Furthermore, he’d wrestled with enough of the poet’s problems in the past two days.
He was in dire need of mental relief.
Such as Miss Leonie Noirot.
Who was too busy to see him.
He walked about the shop, studying the mannequins and the contents of the display cases. He even allowed himself to be consulted on the matter of brown ribbons.
He was solemnly examining them through his quizzing glass, trying to decide which had a yellower cast, when Gladys hurried out into the showroom, then swiftly through the street door. Clara followed close behind. Neither noticed him, and he didn’t try to attract their attention.
“I wonder if Miss Noirot will see me now,” he said to the girl who’d told him to make an appointment.
The girl went out.
She returned a quarter hour later and led him to Miss Noirot’s office.
Chapter Five (#ulink_64afe4b9-0c19-585a-b56f-eb65d050eea1)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/loretta-chase/vixen-in-velvet-39931242/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Loretta Chase
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: A dangerous wager… A seductive nobleman…When Leonie Noirot first meets devastatingly handsome Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne, she literally falls into his strong arms!However, Leonie simply has no time for his wickedly charming lordship. The pretty redhead is obsessed with her business – turning the ladies of society into beautifully dressed swans. Until the bet…Logical Leonie has to agree; if Lisburne’s cousin, Lady Gladys, is not transformed, Leonie must spend two weeks at Lisburne’s pleasure…