She lay on the chaise longue of her sitting room, a tray laden with restoratives on the table at her elbow.
Clara had far greater need for restoratives than her mother did. She wished she were a man, and could solve her problems the way men did, by getting drunk and fighting and gaming and whoring.
But she was a lady. She sat straight in her chair and said, “What sort of question is that, Mama? Do you think I humiliated myself on purpose?”
“You did what you ought not to have done on purpose,” Mama said. “Of that I have not the slightest doubt.”
It hadn’t seemed so very wicked at the time. Clara and Lord Adderley had been waltzing, and she’d felt dizzy. Too much champagne, perhaps. Or perhaps he’d steered her into too many turns. Or both. He’d suggested fresh air. And it was a thrill to slip out onto the terrace unnoticed. Then he’d said things, such sweet things, and he’d seemed so passionately in love with her.
And then . . .
Had she been alone at present, she would have covered her face and wept.
But that’s what Mama always did. She wept and screamed and fainted.
Clara sat straighter, hands folded, and wished she could climb out of the window and go far, far away.
The door opened and Harry came in.
She wanted to leap up and run at him the way she used to do when they were children and she was frightened or brokenhearted about this or that: A robin’s nest on the ground and the eggs broken. A sick puppy. An injured horse put down.
But they weren’t children, and Mama was already using all the hysteria in the room. Harry had enough to cope with.
“There you are, at last!” Mama cried. “You must fight Adderley, Harry. You must kill him.”
“That’s a bit sticky,” he said. “I saw Father as I came in. He told me the blackguard’s offered for Clara.” He walked to Mama and dropped a light kiss on her forehead. He straightened and said, “I should have killed him when I had the chance. But Clara got in the way.”
What choice had she? She’d been afraid Harry would kill Adderley—a man who hadn’t tried to fight back. It would be murder, and Harry would hang or have to run away and live in another country forever—all because she’d been silly.
It seemed more than likely she’d ruined her own life. She wasn’t about to destroy her brother’s as well.
“Mama, if Harry kills Lord Adderley, my reputation will be ruined forever,” Clara said steadily. “The only way to mend this is marriage. Lord Adderley’s offered and I’ve accepted and that is that.”
Harry looked at her. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Since Mama is too upset to stir, and I’m sure she isn’t ready to go out in public, in any event, I wish you would take me to buy my bride clothes.”
“Bride clothes!” Mama cried. “You think entirely too much about your clothes—and all the world knows too much about them. In my day, young ladies did not make public spectacles of themselves, advertising every stitch they wore. To have your chemisette described—in detail!—in a public journal, as though you were a courtesan or a banker’s wife! You ought to be sick with shame. But nothing shames you. Small wonder you behaved last night like a common trollop. I blame those French milliners. If you set foot in their shop again, I’ll disown you!”
“Gad, what difference does it make?” Harry said. “Unless Adderley meets with a fatal accident, she’ll have to marry him, like it or not. She might as well have some frocks she likes now, since she’s not likely to have many after the wedding.”
“Adderley may take her in her shift,” Mother said. “He’s no better than a fortune hunter, and a vile seducer in the bargain. Oh, that ever I should see this day! A fresh-minted baron—swimming in debt, thanks to the gaming tables—and his mother an Irish innkeeper’s daughter! When I think that she might have had the Duke of Clevedon!”
“I strongly advise you not to think about it,” Harry said. “They’d have made each other wretched.”
“And Adderley will make her happy?” Mama sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes.
“Clara will break him to bridle,” Longmore said. “And if she can’t cure his wild ways, who knows? Maybe he’ll ride into a ditch or get run over by a post chaise, and she’ll be a young widow. Do try to look on the bright side.”
He ought to know this wasn’t the best tack to take with Mama. She wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not, and that would only add irritation to the emotional stew.
Clara took a more effective route. “I wonder what Lady Bartham will say when she hears I’m to be sent away without a trousseau, without so much as a wedding dress,” she said.
Lady Bartham and Mama were ferocious social rivals. They pretended to be the dearest of friends.
A short, sharp silence followed.
After a moment, Mama sat up again. She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and said, “My own wishes cannot signify. We must consider your father’s position. I shall persuade him to let you have bride clothes.” She waved the handkerchief. “But not from those French strumpets! You’ll go to Mrs. Downes.”
“Downes’s!” Clara cried. “Are you delirious, Mama? She’s closed her shop.”
She caught her breath. She was supposed to be the calm one. She had to be, with a hothead brother and a hysterical mother. Luckily, her mother was too taken up with her own emotions to notice anybody else’s.
“That was only temporary,” Mama said. “She sent me a note yesterday, telling me she’s reopened, thank heaven. You’ll go to her. Your morals may be all to pieces, but you shall be clothed respectably.”
“Very well, Mama,” Clara said meekly.
Harry gave her a sharp look.
She gave him a warning one back.
Meanwhile, at No. 56 St. James’s Street, the sisters Noirot were staring in disbelief at a tiny advertisement.
Today’s Spectacle hadn’t arrived until some time after the shop opened. The morning being unusually busy, they hadn’t had time to do more than skim the papers.
At present, though, their more-than-competent forewoman, Selina Jeffreys, was on duty in Maison Noirot’s showroom.
Having adjourned upstairs to Marcelline’s studio, the three dressmakers huddled over her drawing table, gazes fixed on twelve lines of print in one of the Spectacle’s advertising pages.
Therein Mrs. Downes proclaimed herself delighted to announce that, having completed a short period of “refurbishment,” she had reopened her dressmaking establishment.
Sophy had got wind of it last night at the party. She’d mentioned it to her sisters. They’d all hoped it was merely the usual idle rumor.
They had quite enough trouble as it was.
“Curse her,” Marcelline said. “We should have been finished with her. She closed her shop. She said it was for repairs, but she dismissed her staff. I was sure she’d slither out of London like the viper she is.”
The viper was Hortense Downes, proprietress of the shop known at Maison Noirot as Dowdy’s. A few weeks earlier, she and one of her minions had brought them to the brink of ruin. But the sisters had played her own trick against her, thus exposing her to the world as a fake and a cheat.
Or so they’d thought.
Marcelline shook her head. “That business of stealing my designs ought to have finished her.”
“She’s blamed it on her seamstresses,” Sophy said. “She’s told her patrons she’s dismissed the lot and hired all new staff.”
“Plague take her,” Marcelline said. “Who knew that Hortense the Horrible was clever enough to recover her reputation?”
“It’s what I’d have done in her place,” Sophy said. “Blamed the help. Cleaned house. And made sure to tell my clients the ‘truth’ of how I’d been a victim of ungrateful employees. Then I’d send my customers personal notes in advance of the public advertisement.”
“This is very bad,” Marcelline said. She looked at her sisters. “How much business have we lost because of me?”
Sophy and Leonie looked at each other.
“I see,” Marcelline said. “Worse than I thought.”
“Lady Warford is a formidable social power,” Leonie said. “No one wants to shop at a place she’s blackballed.”
“But she dresses so ill!” Marcelline said.
“She doesn’t think so and nobody has the courage to tell her,” Sophy said. “Not that most of them are any more discerning than she is. They’re like sheep, as we all know. She’s a leader, and they follow the leader.”
“And she hates me,” Marcelline said.
“With a pure, white-hot hatred, the sort of feeling her kind more usually reserve for anarchists and republicans,” Sophy said.
Marcelline began to pace.
“It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if Lady Clara had got herself into trouble with the right man,” Leonie said. “She could become a fashion leader in her own right, and she’d help us build a clientele with the younger generation.”
“But she picked the wrong man,” Marcelline said. She returned to her drawing table, pushed the newspaper aside, took up her notebook, and began sketching, in strong, angry lines. “Tell me the truth, Leonie.”
“We’re facing ruin,” Leonie said simply.
No one said a word about Marcelline’s husband, who could buy and sell the shop many times over out of his pocket change.
They didn’t want to be bought.
This was their shop. Three years ago they’d come from Paris, having lost everything. They’d come with a sick child, a few coins, and their talents. Marcelline had won money at the gaming tables. That gave them their start.
Now she must feel as though she’d destroyed everything they’d worked for. All for love.
But Marcelline had a right to love and be loved. She’d worked so hard. She’d endured so much. She’d looked after them all. She deserved happiness.
“We’ve faced ruin before,” Sophy said. “This isn’t worse than Paris and the cholera.”
“We’ve survived a catastrophe here as well,” Leonie said.
“With Clevedon’s help,” Marcelline said. “Which we didn’t like accepting. But we agreed because we hadn’t any choice.”
“And we made sure it was a loan,” Leonie said.
“Which it now seems we can’t repay,” Marcelline said, her pencil still moving angrily. “We’re so far from repaying it that we’ll have to ask for another one. Or accept failure. Leonie was right, after all. We bit off more than we could chew.”
Weeks ago, when the Duke of Clevedon had found them these new quarters, Leonie had warned that they hadn’t enough customers to support a large shop on St. James’s Street.
“We always bite off more than we can chew,” Sophy said. “We came from Paris with nothing, and built a business in only three years. We set out to capture Lady Clara and we succeeded—although not quite in the way we intended. We wouldn’t be who we are if we acted like normal women. I don’t see why we should start acting normal now, just because our best customer made a mistake with a man, as most women do, or because her mother holds grudges. I for one am not going to lie down and surrender merely on account of a little setback.”
Marcelline looked up from her sketching and smiled, finally. “Only you would call impending ruin ‘a little setback.’ ”
“The trouble with you is, you’re in love, and you feel guilty about it, which is perfectly ridiculous in a Noirot,” Sophy said.
“She’s right,” Leonie said. “You married a duke. You’re supposed to be thoroughly pleased with yourself. It’s a great coup. No one else, on either side of the family, has done it, to my knowledge.”
“Not only a duke, but stupendously rich,” Sophy said. “Your daughter has actual, genuine castles to play in.”
“So stop brooding,” Leonie said.
“I’m facing failure,” Marcelline said. “A gigantic, catastrophic failure—which that horrid Dowdy reptile will laugh at. That entitles me to brood.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sophy said. “She isn’t going to laugh, and we’re not going to fail. We’ll think of something. We always do.”
“We merely need to think fast,” Leonie said. “Because we’ve less than a month until quarter day.”
Midsummer: 24 June. When rents were due and accounts were settled.
Someone tapped at the door.
“What is it?” Marcelline called.
The door opened a crack, revealing a narrow slice of Mary Parmenter, one of their seamstresses. “If you please, Your Grace, mesdames. Lady Clara Fairfax is here. And Lord Longmore.”
Chapter Three
There is certainly some connexion between the dress and the mind, an accurate observer can trace some correspondencies; and the weak as well as the strong-minded never cease to be influenced by a good or bad dress.
—Lady’s Magazine & Museum, June 1835
It was sort of a brothel for women, Longmore decided.
The shop even had a discreet back entrance, reserved, no doubt, for high-priced harlots and the men who kept them.
A few minutes earlier, a modestly but handsomely dressed female had let them in that way and led them up a flight of carpeted and gently lit back stairs. Small landscape paintings and fashion plates from earlier times adorned the pale green walls.
He’d been in Maison Noirot’s showroom, but this was another world altogether.
The room into which the female had taken them looked like a sitting room. More little paintings on the pale pink walls. Pretty bits of porcelain. Lacy things adorning tables and chair backs. The very air smelled of women, but it was subtle. His nostrils caught only a hint of scent, as though a bouquet of flowers and herbs had recently passed through. Everything about him was soft and luxurious and inviting. It conjured harem slaves in paintings. Odalisques.
He was tempted to stretch out on the carpet and call for the hashish and dancing girls.
The door opened. All his senses went on the alert.
But it was only the elegantly dressed female carrying a tray. She set it upon a handsome tea table. Longmore noticed the tray held a plate of biscuits. A decanter stood where the teapot ought to be.
When the female went out, he said, “So this is how they do it. They ply you with drink.”
“No, they ply you with drink, knowing you’ll be bored,” Clara said. “Although I shouldn’t mind a restorative.” She flung herself into a chair. “Oh, Harry, what on earth am I going to do?”
Her face took on a crumpled look.
He knew that look. It augured tears.
He was taken completely unawares. She’d seemed perfectly well on the way here. Chin aloft and eyes blazing. He hadn’t been surprised when she told him to take her to Maison Noirot. The meek act with their mother hadn’t fooled him.
Clara was so angelically beautiful that people thought she was sweet and yielding. They mistook indifference for docility. She was the sort of girl who generally didn’t care one way or another about all sorts of things. But when she did care, she could be as obstinate as a pig.
Since the Noirot sisters had got their hooks in her, she’d become extremely obstinate about her clothes.
He beat down panic. “Dash it, Clara,” he said. “No waterworks. Say what’s the matter and have done.”
She found a handkerchief and hastily wiped her eyes. “Oh, it’s Mama. She wears on my nerves.”
“That’s all?” he said.
“Isn’t it enough?” she said. “I’m Society’s big joke and I’m about to marry in haste and my mother does nothing but tell me every single thing I’ve done wrong.”
“And this”—he swept his hand, indicating their surroundings—“will be one more thing.”
“What’s one more thing?” Clara said. “This, at least, will lift my spirits. Unlike a visit to that incompetent in Bedford Square Mama’s so irrationally devoted to.”
He’d taken her here because this was where she wanted to go . . . and it was where he preferred to go
.
Maison Noirot was stupendously expensive, the proprietresses were seductresses (in the way of clothes) of the first order, it was extremely French, and, above all, it was Sophy Noirot’s lair.
If a man had to hang about a dressmakers’ shop, this was the place.
But there would be trouble at home for Clara. More trouble. “Our mother’s going to kick up a fuss,” he said. “And you’ll bear the brunt of it.”
“The clothes will be worth it,” she said.
And this would be her last chance for extravagance in that regard, unless he found a way to dispose of Adderley and restore Clara’s reputation at the same time.
He wasn’t sure Clara wanted Adderley disposed of, but if she didn’t she was either stupid or mad, which meant her wishes didn’t signify.
He must have frowned without realizing, because she said, “It’ll be fun for me, but I know you’ll be bored to death. You needn’t stay. I’ll take a hackney home.”
“A hackney?” he said. “Are you mad? I’d never hear the end of it.” He laid a limp wrist against his temple, pitched his voice an octave higher, and in the put-upon tone his mother had perfected said, “How could you, Harry? Your own sister, left to a dirty public conveyance? Heaven only knows who’s seen her, traveling the London streets like a shop clerk. I shall be ashamed to look my friends in the eye.”
From behind him came the rustling of petticoats—and a stifled giggle?
He turned, his pulse accelerating.
Three young women—one brunette, one blonde, one redhead—regarded him with expressions of polite interest. The two latter had large, shockingly blue eyes. Only in the eyes did he detect any sign of the amusement he’d thought he’d heard, and it wasn’t much of a sign.
It would be more accurate to say he detected it only in her eyes, since Sophy Noirot’s sisters might as well have been shadows or a Greek chorus—or window curtains, for that matter.
They were all very well, each entertaining in her own way, and all quite good-looking, if not great beauties.
But she cast the others into the shade.
Why, only look at her. Pale gold curling hair under the frothy lace cap. Enormous, speaking eyes of deepest sapphire. A haughty little nose. A plump invitation of a mouth. A sharp, obstinate little chin. Below the neck . . . ah, that was even better. Delicious, in fact, despite the lunatic clothing style deemed the height of fashion.