Kitabı oxu: «Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares»

Chapter Three

HOTEL FRASCATI, No. 108, rue de Richelieu. This is a gaming-house, which may be considered the second in Paris in point of respectability, as the company is select. Ladies are admitted.

Galignani’s New Paris Guide, 1830

Clevedon stopped, turned back, and looked at her.

His eyes were green slits. His sensuous mouth was set. A muscle worked at his jaw near his right ear.

He was a large, powerful man.

He was an English duke, a species known for its tendency to crush any small, annoying thing that got in its way.

His stance and expression would have terrified the average person.

Marcelline was not an average person.

She knew she’d waved a red cape in front of a bull. She’d done it as deliberately as an experienced matador might. Now, like the bull, he was aware of no one else but her.

“Confound you,” he said. “Now I can’t storm away.”

“I shouldn’t blame you if you did,” she said. “You’ve been greatly provoked. But I warn you, your grace, I am the most determined woman you’ll ever meet, and I am determined to dress your duchess.”

“I’m tempted to say, ‘Over my dead body,’” he said, “but I have the harrowing suspicion that you will answer, ‘If necessary.’”

She smiled.

His countenance smoothed a degree and a wicked gleam came into his eyes. “Does this mean you’ll do whatever is necessary?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “and that will not be necessary. Pray consider, your grace. What self-respecting lady would patronize a dressmaker who specializes in seducing the lady’s menfolk?”

“Ah, it’s a specialty, is it?”

“You of all men must know that seduction is an art, and some practitioners are more skilled than others,” she said. “I’ve chosen to apply my talents to dressing ladies beautifully. Women are capricious and difficult to please, yes. Men are easy to please but far more capricious.”

To a discerning woman, his beautiful face was wonderfully expressive. She watched, fascinated, while a speculative expression gradually erased the lingering signs of temper. He was puzzling over her, revising his original estimation and, therefore, his tactics.

This was an intelligent man. She had better be very careful.

“Frascati’s,” he said. “You’re a gambler.”

“The game of chance is my favorite sport,” she said. Gambling—with money, with people, with their futures—was a way of life for her family. “Roulette, especially. Pure chance.”

“This explains the risks you take with men you don’t know,” he said.

“Dressmaking is not a trade for the faint of heart,” she said.

The humor came back into his green eyes and the corners of his mouth quirked up. On any other man that look would have been charming. On him it was devastating. The eyes, the sweet little smile—it stabbed a girl to the heart and then lower down.

“So it would seem,” he said. “A more dangerous trade than I’d supposed.”

“You’ve no idea,” she said.

“This promises to be interesting,” he said. “I’ll see you at Frascati’s.”

He made her a bow, and it was pure masculine grace, the smooth and confident movement of a man completely at ease in his powerful body.

He took his leave, and she watched him saunter away. she watched scores of elegant hats and bonnets change direction as other women watched him pass.

She’d thrown down the gauntlet and he’d taken it up, as she’d known he would.

Now all she had to do was not end up on her back with that splendid body between her legs.

That was not going to be easy.

But then, if it were easy, it wouldn’t be much fun.

London

Wednesday night

Mrs. Downes waited in a carriage a short distance from the seamstress’s lodgings. Shortly after half-past nine, the seamstress passed the carriage. She glanced up but didn’t stop walking. A moment later, Mrs. Downes stepped down from the carriage, continued down the street, and greeted the young woman as though theirs was an accidental encounter of two old acquaintances. They asked after each other’s health. Then they walked a few steps to the door of the house where the seamstress lived. After a moment of conversation, the seamstress withdrew from her pocket a folded piece of paper.

Mrs. Downes reached for it.

“The money first,” the seamstress said.

“Let me see what it is first,” Mrs. Downes said. “For all I know, it’s nothing out of the way.”

The seamstress stepped closer to the street lamp and opened the folded sheet of paper.

Mrs. Downes gave a little gasp, and hastily covered it up with a disdainful sniff. “Is that all? My girls can run up something like that in an hour. It’s hardly worth half a crown, let alone a sovereign.”

The seamstress folded up the paper. “Well, then, let them do it if they can,” she said. “I’ve made notes on the back about how it’s done, but I’m sure your clever girls don’t need any help working out how to keep those folds the way she has them, or how to make those bows. And you don’t need to know which ribbon she uses and who she gets it from. No, indeed, you don’t want any of that. So I’ll take this in with me, shall I, and throw it on the fire. I know how it’s done, and Madame knows how it’s done, and one or two of our less clumsy girls know the trick.”

This particular seamstress spoke dismissively of the others, deeming herself superior to them and not half-properly appreciated. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been standing in the street, late at night, when she was hungry for her supper. She certainly wouldn’t be talking to the competition if Some People valued her as they ought to do.

“No, madam, you don’t need a bit of it,” she said, “and I wonder at your coming out at this hour, wasting your valuable time.”

“Yes, I’ve wasted quite enough,” Mrs. Downes reached into her reticule. “Here’s your money. But if you want more, you’d better bring me something better.”

“How much more?” the seamstress said as she pocketed the money.

“One can’t do much with scraps. One dress at a time. The book of sketches, now that would be worth something.”

“It certainly would,” said the seamstress. “It would be worth my place. It’s one thing to copy a pattern. But the book of sketches? She’d miss it right away, and they’re sharp, those three, you know.”

“If she lost her book of sketches, she’d lose everything,” Mrs. Downes said. “You’d have to find another place then. And I daresay seeking new employment would be a more agreeable experience, were you to have twenty guineas to ease the way.”

A lady’s maid in a noble household might earn twenty guineas per annum. That was a great deal more than an experienced seamstress was paid.

“Fifty,” the seamstress. “It’s worth fifty to you, I know, to have her out of your way, and I won’t risk it for less.”

Mrs. Downes drew in a long, slow breath while she did some quick calculations. “Fifty, then. But it must be everything. You’d better note every last detail. I’ll know right away, and if I can’t make an exact copy, you shan’t have a penny.” She stalked away.

The seamstress watched her retreating back and said, under her breath, “As if you could make any kind of copy, you stupid hag, if I didn’t tell you every last detail.”

She chinked the coins in her pocket and went into the house.

Paris, the same night

Since the Italian Opera was closed on Wednesdays, Clevedon took himself to the Théâtre des Varieties, where he could count on being amused as well as treated to a superior performance. Perhaps, too, he might find Madame Noirot there.

When she failed to appear, he grew bored with the entertainment, and debated whether to cut his stay short and proceed directly to Frascati’s.

But Clara looked forward to his reports, and he’d failed to give her an account of Tuesday’s performance of The Barber of Seville, one of her favorites. Now he recalled that he’d come away from Longchamps with nothing as well—nothing, that is, he chose to describe to Clara.

He stayed, and dutifully made notes in his little pocket notebook.

Its pages held none of Madame Noirot’s remarks about Clara’s style—or lack thereof. At the time, he’d dismissed them from his mind. Or so he’d thought. Yet he found them waiting, as though the curst dressmaker had sewn them onto his brain.

When last he’d seen Clara, she’d been in mourning for her grandmother. Perhaps grief’s colors did not become her. The style…Confound it, she was grieving! What did she care whether she wore the latest mode? She was a beautiful girl, he told himself, and a beautiful girl could wear anything—not that it mattered to him, because he loved her for herself, and had done so for as long as he could remember.

Still, if Clara were to dress as that provoking dressmaker did…

The thought came and hung in his mind through the last scenes of the performance. He saw Clara, magnificently garbed, making men’s heads turn. He saw himself proudly in possession of this masterpiece, the envy of every other man.

Then he realized what he was thinking. “Devil take her,” he said under his breath. “She’s poisoned my mind, the witch.”

“What is it, my friend?”

Clevedon turned to find Gaspard Aronduille regarding him with concern.

“Does it truly matter what a woman wears?” Clevedon said.

The Frenchman’s eyes widened and his head went back, as though Clevedon had slapped him. “Is this a joke?” he said.

“I want to know,” Clevedon said. “Does it really matter?”

Aronduille looked about him in disbelief. “Only an Englishman would ask such a question.”

“Does it?”

“But of course.”

“Only a Frenchman would say so,” said Clevedon.

“We are right, and I will tell you why.”

The opera ended, but the debate didn’t. Aronduille called in reinforcements from their circle of acquaintance. The Frenchmen debated the subject from every possible philosophical viewpoint, all the way to the Hotel Frascati.

There the group separated, its members drifting to their favorite tables.

The roulette table was crowded, as usual, men standing three deep about it. Clevedon saw no signs of any women. But as he slowly circled it, the wall of men at the table thinned.

And the world shifted.

Revealed to his view was a ravishingly familiar back. Again, her coiffure was slightly disarranged, as though she’d been in a lover’s embrace only minutes ago. A bit was coming undone, a dark curl falling to the nape of her neck. The wayward curl drew one’s gaze there and down over the smooth slope of her shoulders and down to where her sleeves puffed out. The dress was ruby red, shockingly simple and daringly low cut. He wished, for a moment, he could have her captured like that, in a painting.

He’d title it Sin Incarnate.

He was tempted to stand beside her, close enough to inhale her scent and feel the silk of her gown brush his legs. But a roulette table was no place for dalliance—and by the looks of things, she was as engrossed in the turn of the wheel as everybody else.

He moved to a place opposite her. That was when he recognized the man standing next to her: the Marquis d’Émilien, a famous libertine.

“21—Red—Odd—Passed,” one of the bankers said.

With his rake another banker pushed a heap of coins toward her.

Émilien bent his head to say something to her.

Clevedon’s jaw tightened. He let his gaze drop to the table. Before her stood piles of gold coins.

“Gentlemen, settle your play,” the banker called. He threw in the ivory ball, and set the wheel spinning. Round and round it went, gradually slowing.

That time she lost. Though the rake took away a large amount of gold, she appeared not at all troubled. She laughed and bet again.

Next time Clevedon bet, too, on red. Round the ball went. Black—Even—Missed.

She won. He watched the rakes push his coins and others toward her.

The marquis laughed, and bent his head to say something to her, his mouth close to her ear. She answered with a smile.

Clevedon left the roulette table for Rouge et Noir. He told himself he would have come whether or not she was here. He told himself she was on the hunt for other men’s wives and mistresses and he wasn’t the only well-to-do bill payer in Paris. Émilien had deep pockets, too, not to mention a wife, a longtime mistress, and three favorite courtesans.

For about half an hour Clevedon played. He won more than he lost, and maybe that was why he became bored so quickly. He left the table, found Aronduille, and said, “This place is dull tonight. I’m going to the Palais Royal.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Aronduille. “Let’s see if the others wish to join us.”

The others had moved to the roulette table.

She was there still, in the crimson silk one could not ignore. The marquis remained at her side. In the same moment Clevedon was telling himself to look away, she looked up. Her gaze locked with his. An endless time seemed to pass before she beckoned with her fan.

He would have come whether or not he’d expected to find her here, he assured himself. He’d come, and found another man glued to her side. It was nothing to him. Paris abounded in fascinating women. He could have simply nodded or bowed or smiled an acknowledgment and left the hotel.

But there, she was, Sin Incarnate, daring him.

And there was Émilien.

The Duke of Clevedon had never yet yielded a woman he wanted to another man.

He joined them.

“Ah, Clevedon, you know Madame Noirot, I understand,” said Émilien.

“I have that honor, yes,” Clevedon said, sending her his sweetest smile.

“She has emptied my pockets,” said Émilien.

“The roulette wheel emptied your pockets,” she said.

“No, it is you. You look at the wheel, and it stops where you choose.”

She dismissed this with a wave of her fan. “It’s no use arguing with him,” she said to Clevedon. “I’ve promised to give him a chance to win back his money. We go to play cards.”

“Perhaps you will be so good as to join us,” said Émilien. “And your friends as well?”

They went to one of Paris’s more discreet and exclusive card salons, in a private house. When Clevedon arrived with the marquis’s party, several games were in progress in the large room.

By three o’clock in the morning, the greater part of the company had departed. In the small but luxurious antechamber to which the marquis eventually retired with a select group of friends, the players had dwindled to Émilien, a handsome blonde named Madame Jolivel, Madame Noirot, and Clevedon.

About them lay the bodies of those who’d succumbed to drink and fatigue. Some had been playing for days and nights on end.

At roulette, where skill and experience meant nothing, Noirot had won more often than not. At cards, where skill made a difference, her luck, oddly enough, was not nearly as good. The marquis’s luck had run out in the last half hour, and he was sinking in his chair. Clevedon was on a winning streak.

“This is enough for me,” said Madame Jolivel. She rose, and the men did as well.

“For me, too,” Émilien muttered. He pushed his cards to the center of the table and dragged himself out of the room after the blonde.

Clevedon remained standing, waiting for the dressmaker to rise. He had her to himself at last, and he was looking forward to escorting her elsewhere. Any elsewhere.

“It seems the party is over,” he said.

Noirot gazed up at him, dark eyes gleaming. “I thought it was only beginning,” she said. She took up the cards and shuffled.

He sat down again.

They played the basic game of Vingt et Un, without variations.

It was one of his favorite card games. He liked its simplicity. With two people, he found, it was a good deal more interesting than with several.

For one thing, he could no longer read her. No wry curve of her mouth when her cards displeased her. No agitated tap of her fingers when she’d drawn a strong card. When they’d played with the others, she’d exhibited all these little cues, and her play had struck him as reckless besides. This time was altogether different. By the time they’d played through the deck twice, he felt as though he played with another woman entirely.

He won the first deal and the second and the third.

After that, she won steadily, the pile of coins in front of her growing while his diminished.

As she passed the cards to him to deal, he said, “My luck seems to be turning.”

“So it does,” she said.

“Or perhaps you’ve been playing with me, madame, in more ways than one.”

“I’m paying closer attention to the game,” she said. “You won a great deal from me before. My resources, unlike yours, are limited. I only want to win my money back.”

He dealt. She looked at her card and pushed a stack of coins to one side of it.

He looked at his card. Nine of hearts. “Double,” he said.

She nodded for another card, glanced at it.

Nothing. No visible sign of whether the card was good or bad. He’d had to practice to conceal his small giveaway signs. How had she learned to reveal or conceal them at will? Or had Dame Fortune simply smiled on her this night? She’d won at roulette, a game, as she’d said, of pure chance, though men never gave up trying to devise systems for winning.

She won again.

And again.

This time, when they’d gone through the pack, she swept her coins toward her. “I’m not used to such late hours,” she said. “It’s time for me to go.”

“You play differently with me than you did with the others,” he said.

“Do I?” She brushed a stray curl back from her eyebrow.

“I can’t decide whether you’ve the devil’s own luck or there’s something more to you than meets the eye,” he said.

She settled back in her chair and smiled at him. “I’m observant,” she said. “I watched you play before.”

“Yet you lost.”

“Your beauty must have distracted me,” she said. “Now I’ve grown used to it. Now I can discern the ways you signal whether it’s going well or badly for you.”

“I thought I gave no signals,” he said.

She waved a hand. “You nearly don’t. It was very hard for me to decipher you—and I’ve been playing cards since I was a child.”

“Have you, indeed?” he said. “I’ve always thought of shopkeepers as respectable citizens, not much given to vices, especially gambling.”

“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “Frascati’s teemed with ordinary citizen-clerks and tradesmen. But to men like you and Émilien, they’re invisible.”

“The one thing you are not is invisible.”

“There you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve passed within a few yards of you, on more than one occasion, and you didn’t look twice.”

He sat up straighter. “That’s impossible.”

She took up the cards and shuffled them, her hands quick, smooth, expert. “Let me see. On Sunday at about four o’clock, you were riding with a handsome lady in the Bois de Boulogne. On Monday at seven o’clock, you were in one of the latticed boxes at the Académie Royale de Musique. On Tuesday shortly after noon, you were strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.”

“You said I wasn’t your sole purpose for coming to Paris,” he said. “Yet you’ve been following me. Or should I say stalking me?”

“I’ve been stalking fashionable people. They all go to the same places. And you’re hard to miss.”

“So are you.”

“That depends on whether I wish to be noticed or not,” she said. “When I don’t wish to be noticed, I don’t dress this way.” One graceful hand indicated the low bodice of the crimson gown. His diamond stickpin twinkled at him from the center of the V to which the bodice dipped. She lay the cards, precisely stacked now, on the table in front of her, and folded her hands.

“A good dressmaker can dress anybody,” she said. “Sometimes we’re required to dress women who prefer not to call attention to themselves, for one reason or another.” She brought her folded hands up and rested her elbows on the table and her chin on her entwined fingers. “That you failed to notice me in any of those places ought to prove to you that I’m the greatest dressmaker in the world.”

“Is it always business with you?” he said.

“I work for a living,” she said. She turned her head, and he watched her gaze sweep over the various bodies draped over furniture and sprawled on the floor. The look spoke the volumes she left unsaid.

He was nettled, more than he ought to be. Otherwise he would have pretended not to understand. But these were the people with whom he customarily associated, and her mocking half smile was extremely irritating. Provoked, he said it for her before he could catch himself: “Unlike me and these other dissolute aristocrats, you mean. The bourgeoisie is so tediously self-righteous.”

She shrugged, calling his attention to her smooth shoulders, and unfolded her hands. “Yes, we’re great bores, always thinking about money and success.” She took out her purse and scooped her winnings into it, a clear signal that the evening was over for her.

He rose and came round the table to move her chair. He gathered up her shawl, which had slid down her arm. As he did so, he let his fingers graze her bare shoulder.

He heard the faint hitch in her breath, and a bolt of pleasure wiped out his irritation. The feeling was fierce—fiercer than it ought to have been after so slight a touch and so obvious a ploy. But then, she gave so little away that to achieve this much was a great deal.

Though no one about them was conscious, he bent his head close to her ear and said, in a low voice, “You haven’t told me when I’ll see you again. Longchamp, the first time. Frascati’s this night. Where next?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, moving a little away. “Tomorrow—tonight, rather—I must attend the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball. I suspect that gathering will be too staid for you.”

For a moment he could only stare at her, his eyes wide and his mouth open. Then he realized he was gaping at her like a yokel watching a circus. But he’d no sooner erased all signs of surprise than he wondered why he bothered. What was the use, with her, of pretending that nothing surprised him when everything did? She was the least predictable woman he’d ever met. And at this moment he felt like one of the men who’d walked into a lamp post.

He said, slowly and carefully, because surely he’d misunderstood, “You’ve been invited to Madame de Chirac’s ball?”

She made a small adjustment to her shawl. “I did not say I was invited.”

“But you’re going. Uninvited.”

She looked up at him, and the dark eyes flashed. “How else?”

“How about not going where you’re not invited?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s the most important event of the social season.”

“It’s also the most exclusive event of the social season,” he said. “The king will be there. People negotiate and plot and blackmail each other for months in advance to get an invitation. Did it not occur to you that an uninvited guest is very liable to be noticed?”

“Didn’t I pass by you a dozen times undetected?” she said. “Do you think I can’t attend a ball without calling attention to myself?”

“Not this ball,” he said. “Unless you were planning to go disguised as a servant?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” she said.

“You’ll never get through the door,” he said. “If you do, you’ll be discovered immediately thereafter. If you’re lucky, they’ll merely throw you into the street. Madame de Chirac is not a woman to trifle with. If she’s not amused—and she rarely is—she’ll claim you’re an assassin.” The accusation might well be taken seriously, for France was unsettled, and one heard rumblings of another revolution. “At best you’ll end up in jail, and she’ll make sure no one remembers you’re there. At worst, you’ll make the personal acquaintance of Madame Guillotine. I don’t see the fun in that.”

“I won’t be discovered,” she said.

“You’re mad,” he said.

“The richest women in Paris will be there,” she said. “They’ll be wearing creations by Paris’s greatest modistes. It’s the greatest fashion competition of the year—a notch above Longchamp. I must see those dresses.”

“You can’t stand outside with the rest of the crowd and watch them go in?”

Her chin went up and her eyes narrowed. Emotion flashed in those dark depths, but when she spoke, her voice was as cool and as haughty as the comtesse’s. “Like the child with her nose pressed to the bakery shop window? I think not. I mean to examine those gowns closely as well as study the jewelry and coiffures. Such opportunities do not come along every day. I’ve been planning for it for weeks.”

She’d said she was a determined woman. He’d under-stood—to a point—her wishing to dress Clara. Dressing a duchess would be highly profitable. But to run this risk—she, an English nobody—with the Comtesse de Chirac, stupendously high in the instep and one of the most formidable women in Paris? And to do so at a time like this, when the city was in a state of ferment on account of an impending trial of some alleged traitors, and nobles like the comtesse saw assassins lurking in every shadowy corner?

It was a mad chance to take, merely for a little shop.

Yet Madame Noirot had announced her lunatic intention as cool as you please, with a gleam in her eye. And why should this surprise him? She was a gambler. This gamble, clearly, was of vast importance to her.

“You may have slipped into other parties unnoticed but you won’t get into this one,” he said.

“You think they’ll know I’m a nobody shopkeeper?” she said. “You think I can’t fool them? You think I can’t make them see what I want them to see?”

“Others, perhaps. Not Madame de Chirac. You haven’t a prayer.”

He thought perhaps she did have a prayer, but he was goading her, wanting to know what else she’d reveal of herself.

“Then I reckon you’ll simply have to see for yourself,” she said. “That is, I presume you’ve been invited?”

He glanced down at his diamond stickpin, winking up at him from the deep neckline of her red dress. Her bosom was rising and falling more rapidly than before.

“Oddly enough, I have,” he said. “In her view, we English are an inferior species, but for some reason, she makes an exception of me. It must be all my deceitful French names.”

“Then I’ll see you there.” She started to turn away.

“I hope not,” he said. “It would pain me to see you manhandled by the gendarmes, even if that would enliven an exceedingly dull evening.”

“You have a dramatic imagination,” she said. “In the unlikely event they don’t let me inside, they’ll merely send me away. They won’t want to make a scene with a mob outside. The mob, after all, might take my side.”

“It’s a silly risk to take,” he said. “All for your little shop.”

“Silly,” she repeated quietly. “My little shop.” She looked up at the leering demigods and satyrs cavorting on the ceiling. When her gaze returned to him it was cool and steady, belying the swift in-and-out of her breathing. She was angry but she controlled it wonderfully.

He wondered what that anger would be like, let loose.

“That little shop is my livelihood,” she said. “And not only mine. You haven’t the remotest idea what it took to gain a foothold in London. You haven’t the least notion what it’s taken to make headway against the established shops. You’ve no inkling of what we contend with: not merely other dressmakers—and they’re a treacherous lot—but the conservatism of your class. French grandmothers dress with more taste than do your countrywomen. It’s like a war, sometimes—and so, yes, that’s all I think about, and yes, I’ll do whatever is necessary to raise the reputation of my shop. And if I’m thrown into the street or into jail, all I’ll think about is how to take advantage of the publicity.”

“For clothes,” he said. “Does it not strike you as absurd, to go to such lengths, when English women, as you say, are oblivious to style? Why not give them what they want?”

“Because I can make them more than what they want,” she said. “I can make them unforgettable. Have you drifted so far beyond the everyday concerns of life that you can’t understand? Is nothing in this world truly important to you, important enough to make you stick to it, in spite of obstacles? But what a silly question. If you had a purpose in life, you would give yourself to it, instead of frittering away your days in Paris.”

He should have realized she’d strike back, but he’d been so caught up in her passion for her dreary work that she took him unawares. An image flashed in his mind of the world he’d fled—the little, dull world and his empty days and nights and the pointless amusements he’d tried to fill them with. He recalled Lord Warford telling him, You seem determined to fritter away your life.

He felt an instant’s shame, then anger, because she’d stung him.

Reacting unthinkingly to the sting, he said, “Indeed, it’s all sport to me. So much so that I’ll make you a wager. Another round of cards, madame. Vingt et Un—with or without variations, as you choose. This time, if you win, I shall take you myself to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball.”

Her eyes sparked—with anger or pride or perhaps simple dislike. He couldn’t tell and, at the moment, didn’t care.

“Sport, indeed,” she said. “One rash wager after another. I wonder what you think you’ll prove. But you don’t think, do you? Certainly you haven’t stopped to ask yourself what your friends will think.”

He hardly heard what she was saying. He was drinking in the signs of emotion—the color coming and going in her face, and the sparks in her eyes, and the rise and fall of her bosom. And all the while he was keenly aware of the place where her sharp little needle had stabbed him.

“Nothing to prove,” he said. “I only want you to lose. And when you lose, you’ll admit defeat with a kiss.”

“A kiss!” She laughed. “A mere kiss from a shopkeeper. That’s paltry stakes, indeed, compared to your dignity.”

“A proper kiss would not be mere, madame, or paltry,” he said. “You may not pay with a peck on the cheek. You’ll pay with the sort of kiss you’d give a man to whom you’ve surrendered.” And if he couldn’t make her surrender with a kiss, he might as well go back to London this night. “Considering your precious respectability, that’s high stakes for you, I know.”

One flash from her dark eyes before her face turned into a beautiful mask, cool, impervious. But he’d had a glimpse of the turbulence within, and now he couldn’t walk away if his life depended on it.

“It’s nothing to me,” she said. “Haven’t you been paying attention, your grace? You haven’t a prayer of winning against me.”

“Then you’ve everything to gain,” he said. “Easy entrée into the most exclusive, most boring ball in Paris.”

She shook her head pityingly. “Very well. Never say I didn’t warn you.”

She returned to her chair and sat.

He sat opposite.

“Any game you like,” she said. “In any way you like. It won’t matter. I’ll win—and it will be most amusing.”

She pushed the cards toward him.

“Deal,” she said.

At the time of the French Revolution, Marcelline’s aristocratic grandfather had kept his head by keeping his head. Generations of Noirots—the name he’d taken after fleeing France—had inherited the same cool self-containment and ruthless practicality.

True, her passions ran dark and deep, as was typical of her family, on both sides. Like them, though, she was quite good at hiding what she felt. She’d had to teach her sisters the skill. She, apparently, had been born with it.

But the casually disparaging way Clevedon referred to her shop and her profession made her blood boil.

That was noble blood, too, running in her veins—no matter that hers was the most corrupt blue blood in all of Europe. But Noirot was a common name, as common as dirt, which was why Grandpapa had chosen it. Now, most of the family was gone, taking their infamy with them.

Notorious or not, her family was as old as Clevedon’s—and she doubted all his ancestors had been saints. The only difference at the moment was that he was rich without having to work for it and she had to work for every farthing.

She knew it was absurd to let him provoke her. She knew her customers looked down on her. They all behaved the way Lady Renfrew and Mrs. Sharp did, speaking as though she and her sisters were invisible. To the upper orders, shopkeepers were simply another variety of servants. She’d always found that useful, and sometimes amusing.

But he…

Never mind. The question now was whether to let him win or lose.

Her pride couldn’t let him win. She wanted to crush him, his vanity, his casual superiority.

But his losing meant a serious inconvenience. She could hardly enter a ball on the Duke of Clevedon’s arm without setting off a firestorm of gossip—exactly what she didn’t want to do.

Yet she couldn’t let him win.

“We play the deck,” he said. “We play each deal, but with one difference: We don’t show our cards until the end. Then, whoever has won the most deals wins the game.”

Not being able to see the cards as they played through would make it harder to calculate the odds.

But she could read him, and he couldn’t read her. Moreover, the game he proposed could be played quickly. Soon enough she’d be able to tell whether he was playing recklessly.

The first deal. Two cards to each. He dealt her a natural—ace of diamonds and knave of hearts. But he stood at two cards as well, which he never did if they totaled less than seventeen. Next deal she had the ace of hearts, a four, and a three. The next time she stood at seventeen, with clubs. Then another natural—ace of spades and king of hearts. And next the queen of hearts and nine of diamonds.

On it went. He often drew three cards to her two. But he was intent, as he hadn’t been previously, and by this time, she could no longer detect the flicker in his green eyes that told her he didn’t like his cards.

She was aware of her heart beating faster with every deal, though her cards were good for the most part. Twenty-one once, twice, thrice. Most of the other hands were good. But he played calmly, for all his concentration, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure his luck was worse.

Ten deals played it out.

Then they turned their cards over, slapping them down smartly, smiling coolly at each other across the table as they did so, each of them confident.

A glance at the spread-out cards told her she’d beat him all but four times, and one of those was a tie.

Not that she needed to see the cards laid out to know who’d won. She had only to observe his stillness, and the blank way he regarded the cards. He looked utterly flummoxed.

It lasted but an instant before he became the jaded man of the world again; but in that look she glimpsed the boy he used to be, and for a moment she regretted everything: that they’d met in the way they’d done, that they were worlds apart, that she hadn’t known him before he lost his innocence…

Then he looked up and met her gaze, and in his green eyes she saw awareness dawn—at last—of the problem he’d created for himself.

Once again, he recovered in an instant. If he was at a loss—as surely he must be—there was no further sign. Like her, he was used to covering up. She should have covered up, too. He ought to have second thoughts. It was no more than she expected. His consternation, however faintly evidenced, rankled all the same, and more than it ought to have done.

“You’ve been rash, your grace,” she taunted. “Again. Another silly wager. But this time a great deal more is at stake.”

His pride, a gentleman’s most tender part.

He shrugged and gathered up the cards.

But she knew what the shrug masked.

His friends had seen him at the opera in the box of an aging actress, seeking an introduction to the actress’s friend. Émilien knew she was a London dressmaker, and by tomorrow night, at least half of Paris would know she was a nobody: no exciting foreign actress or courtesan, and certainly not a lady of any nationality.

What would his friends think, when they saw him enter a party he wouldn’t normally attend, bringing a most unwelcome guest, a shopkeeper?

“What hypocrites you aristos are,” she said. “It’s all well enough to chase women who are beneath you, merely to get them beneath you—but to attempt to bring them into good company? Unthinkable. Your friends will believe you’ve taken leave of your senses. They’ll believe you’ve let me make a fool of you. Enslaved, they’ll say. The great English duke is enslaved by a showy little bourgeoise.”

He shrugged. “Will they? Well, then, watching their jaws drop should prove entertaining. Will you wear red?”

She rose, and he did, too, manners perfect, no matter what.

“You put on a brave show,” she said. “I’ll give you credit for that. But I know you’re having second thoughts. And because I’m a generous woman—and all I want, foolish man, is to dress your wife—I’ll release you from a wager you never should have made. I do this because you’re a man, and I know that there are times when men use an organ other than their brains to think with.”

She gathered her reticule, arranged her shawl—and instantly recalled the brush of his fingers upon her skin.

Crushing the recollection, she swept to the door.

“Adieu,” she said. “I hope a few hours’ sleep will restore your good sense, and you’ll let us be friends. In that case, I’ll look forward to seeing you on Friday. Perhaps we’ll meet on the Quai Voltaire.”

He followed her to the door. “You’re the most damnable female,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to having women order me about.”

“We bourgeoise are like that,” she said. “No finesse or tact. So managing.”

She walked on, into the deserted corridor. From one room she heard low murmurs. Some were still at their gaming. From elsewhere came snores.

Mainly, though, she was aware of his footsteps, behind her at first, then alongside.

“I’ve hurt your feelings,” he said.

“I’m a dressmaker,” she said. “My customers are women. If you wish to hurt my feelings, you’ll need to exert yourself to a degree you may find both mentally and physically debilitating.”

“I hurt something,” he said. “You’re determined to dress my duchess, and you’ll stop at nothing, but you’ve stopped. You’re quite prepared to give up.”

“You underestimate me,” she said. “I never give up.”

“Then why are you telling me to go to the devil?”

“I’ve done no such thing,” she said. “I’ve forgiven the wager, as it is the winner’s prerogative to do. If you’d been thinking clearly, you would never have proposed it. If I hadn’t allowed you to provoke me, I should never have agreed. There. We were both in the wrong. Now go find your friends and arrange to have them carried home. I have a long day ahead of me, and unlike you, I can’t spend most of it recovering from this night.”

“You’re afraid,” he said.

She stopped short and looked up at him. He was smiling, a self-satisfied curve of his too-sensuous mouth. “I’m what?” she said quietly.

“You’re afraid,” he said. “You’re the one who’s afraid of what people will say—of you—and how they’ll behave—toward you. You’re quite ready to sneak in like a thief, hoping nobody notices, but you’re terrified to enter with me, with everybody looking at you.”

“It distresses me to shatter you illusions, your grace,” she said, “but what you and your friends think and say is not as important to other people as it is to you. I hope no one will notice me for the same reason a spy prefers not to be noticed. And it seems to escape you that the thrill of going where one isn’t wanted and hasn’t been invited—and getting away with it—will make the party more fun for me than it will be for anyone else.”

She walked on, her breath coming and going too fast, her temper too close to the surface. Her self-control was formidable, even for her kind, yet she’d let him provoke her. She only wanted to dress his wife-to-be, but somehow she’d been drawn into the wrong game altogether. And now she wondered if she’d bollixed it up, if he’d got her into a muddle with his beautiful face and falsely innocent smiles and his fingers brushing her skin.

His voice came from behind her.

“Coward,” he said.

The word seemed to echo in the empty passage.

Coward. She, who at scarce one and twenty had gone to London with a handful of coins in her purse and overwhelming responsibilities on her shoulders: a sick child and two younger sisters—and staked everything on a dream and her courage to pursue it.

She stopped and turned and marched back to him.

“Coward,” he said softly.

She dropped her reticule, grasped his neckcloth, and pulled. He bent his head. She reached up, cupped his face, dragged his mouth to hers, and kissed him.

Chapter Four

Mrs. Clark is as usual constantly receiving Models from some of the first Milliners in Paris, which enables her to produce the earliest Fashions for each Month, and trust that her general mode of doing business will give decided approbation to those Ladies who will honour her with a preference.

La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807

It was no surrender, but a slap in the face of a kiss.

Her mouth struck and opened boldly against his, and the collision rocked him on his heels. It was as though they’d been lovers a long time ago and hated each other now, and the two passions had melded into one: They could fight or love, and it was all the same.

She held his jaw with a powerful grip. If she’d dug her nails into his face, that would have seemed fitting: It was that kind of kiss.

Instead she damaged him with her soft mouth, the press of her lips, the play of her tongue, like a duel. She damaged him, above all with the taste of her. She tasted like brandy, rich and deep and dark. She tasted like forbidden fruit.

She tasted, in short, like trouble.

For a moment he reacted instinctively, returning the assault in the same spirit, even while his body tensed and melted at the same time, his knees giving way and his insides tightening. But she was wondrously warm and shapely, and while his mind dissolved, his physical awareness grew more ferociously acute: the taste of her mouth, the scent of her skin, the weight of her breasts on his coat, and the sound of her dress brushing his trousers.

His heart beat too fast and hard, heat flooding through his veins and racing downward. He wrapped his arms about her and splayed his hands over her back, over silk and the neckline’s lace edging and the velvety skin above.

He slid his hands lower, down the line of her back and along the curve from her waist to her bottom. Layers of clothing thwarted him there, but he pulled her hard against his groin, and she made a noise deep in her throat that sounded like pleasure.

Her hands came away from his face and slid between them, down over his neckcloth and down over his waistcoat and down further.

His breath caught and his body tensed in anticipation.

She thrust him away, and she put muscle into it. Even so, the push wouldn’t have been enough to move him, or-dinarily; but its strength and suddenness startled him, and he loosened his hold. She jerked out of his arms and he stumbled backward, into the wall.

She gave a short laugh, then bent and collected her reticule. She brushed a stray curl back from her face, and with an easy, careless grace, rearranged her shawl.

“This is going to be so much fun,” she said. “I can hardly wait. Yes, now that I think about it, I should like nothing better, your grace, than to have your escort to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball. You may collect me at the Hotel Fontaine at nine o’clock sharp. Adieu.”

She strolled away, as cool as you please, down the passage and through the door.

He didn’t follow her.

It was a splendid exit, and he didn’t want to spoil it.

So he told himself.

Yet he stood for a moment, collecting his mind and his poise, and trying to ignore the shakiness within, as though he’d run to the edge of a precipice and stopped only inches short of stepping into midair.

But of course there was no precipice, no void to fall into. That was absurd. She was merely a woman, the tempestuous type, and he was a trifle…puzzled…because it had been a while since he’d encountered her kind.

He went the other way, to find his friends—or the bodies of the fallen, rather. While he arranged for their transport to their respective lodgings and domiciles, he was aware, in a corner of his mind, of a derisive voice pointing out that he had nothing more important to do at present than collect and sort a lot of dead-drunk aristocrats.

Later, though, when he was alone in his hotel and starting a letter to Clara because he couldn’t sleep, he found he couldn’t write. He could scarcely remember the performance. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d sat in the theater, anticipating his next encounter with Madame Noirot. His notes about the performance became gibberish swimming before his eyes.

The only clear, focused thought he had was of Madame de Chirac’s ball looming mere hours away, and the fool’s bargain he’d made, and the impossible riddle he’d insisted on solving: how to get the accursed dressmaker in without sacrificing his dignity, vanity, or reputation.

When Marcelline returned to her hotel, she found Selina Jeffreys drowsing in a chair by the fire. Though the slender blonde was their youngest seamstress, recently brought in from a charitable establishment for “unfortunate females,” she was the most sensible of the lot. That was why Marcelline had chosen her to play lady’s maid on the journey. A woman traveling with a maid was treated more respectfully than one traveling alone.

Frances Pritchett, the senior of their seamstresses, was probably still sulking about being left behind. But she’d come last time, and she hadn’t taken at all to playing lady’s maid. She wouldn’t have sat up waiting for her employer to return, unless it was to complain about the French in general and the hotel staff in particular.

Jeffreys awoke with a start when Marcelline lightly tapped her shoulder. “You silly girl,” Marcelline said. “I told you not to wait up.”

“But who will help you out of your dress, madame?”

“I could sleep in it,” Marcelline said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Oh, no, madame! That beautiful dress!”

“Not so beautiful now,” Marcelline said. “Not only wrinkled, but it smells of cigar smoke and other people’s perfumes and colognes.”

“Let’s get it off, then. You must be so weary. The promenade—and then to be out all night.”

She had accompanied Marcelline on the Longchamp promenade and obligingly faded out of sight when Marcelline gave the signal. Unlike Pritchett, Selina Jeffreys never minded in the least making herself inconspicuous. She’d been happy simply to drink in the sight of so many rich people wearing fine clothes, riding their beautiful horses or driving their elegant carriages.

“One must go where the aristocrats go,” Marcelline said.

“I don’t know how they do it, night after night.”

“They’re not obliged to be at work at nine o’clock every morning.”

The girl laughed. “That’s true enough.”

While she was quick, it was efficiency rather than hurry. In a trice she had Marcelline out of the red dress. She soon had hot water ready, too. A full bath would have to wait until after she’d slept—later in the day, when the hotel’s staff were fully awake. Meanwhile Marcelline needed to scrub away the smell of the gambling houses. That was easy enough.

The taste and smell of one gentleman wouldn’t be eradicated so easily. She could wash her face and clean her teeth but her body and mind remembered: Clevedon’s surprise, his quick heat, the bold response of his mouth and tongue, and the thrumming need he’d awakened with the simple motion of his hand sliding down her back.

Kissing him had not been the wisest move a woman could make, but really, what was the alternative? Slap him? A cliché. Punch him? That hard body? That stubborn jaw? She’d only hurt her hand—and make him laugh.

She doubted he was laughing now.

He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.

She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.

It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcel-line instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.

But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. What-ever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.

“Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”

And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.

Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.

Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.

Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.

Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.

All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.

Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.

That night

It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.

But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.

He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.

Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.

She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.

And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.

He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.

No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.

He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.

As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.

When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.

But he was not slain, not by half.

“You’re prompt,” she said.

“I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.

“But I’m not a lady,” she said.

“Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”

“I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.

He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.

Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.

He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.

When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.

“What is that dreadful color?” he said.

“Poussière,” she said.

“Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”

“It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”

“How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”

“You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”

“It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”

“Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”

This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.

But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.

Last night came back in a dark surge of recollection, more feeling than thought, that sent heat pumping through him. He saw himself bending and grasping one slim ankle and bringing her foot onto his lap and sliding his gloved hand up her leg, up and up and up…

Later, he promised himself, and climbed into the carriage.

A short time later

“I hope you will do me the kindness of allowing me to present Madame Noirot, a London dressmaker of my acquaintance,” the Duke of Clevedon said to his hostess.

For a time, the noise about them continued. But about the instant the Comtesse de Chirac realized she hadn’t misunderstood the duke’s less-than-perfect French and that he had actually uttered the words London dressmaker in her presence and referring to the uninvited person beside him, the news was traveling the ballroom, and a silence spread out like ripples from the place where a large rock had landed in a small pond.

Madame de Chirac’s posture grew even tighter and stiffer—though that seemed anatomically impossible—and her chilly grey gaze hardened to steel. “I do not understand English humor,” she said. “Is this a joke?”

“By no means,” Clevedon said. “I bring you a curiosity, in the way that, once upon a time, the savants brought back remarkable objects from their travels in Egypt. I met this exotic creature the other night at the opera, and she was the talk of the promenade yesterday. I beg you will forgive me, and in the interests of scientific inquiry, overlook this so-great imposition upon your good nature. You see, madame, I feel like a naturalist who has discovered a new species of orchid, and who has carried it out of the hidden places of its native habitat and into the world, for other naturalists to observe.”

He glanced at Noirot, whose stormy eyes told him she was not amused. The tan and black she wore made her look like a tigress, and the bursts of red might have been her victims’ blood.

“Perhaps, on second thought, a flower is not the most apt analogy,” he added. “And all things considered, I might have done better to put her on a leash.”

The tigress slanted him a smile promising trouble later. Then she bowed her head to the countess and sank into a curtsey so graceful and beautiful—the lace wafting gently in the air, the butterfly bows fluttering, the fabric shimmering—that it took his breath away.

All about him, he heard people gasp. They were French, and couldn’t help but see: Here were grace and beauty and style combined in one unforgettable, tempestuous masterpiece.

The comtesse heard the onlookers’ reactions, too. She glanced about her. Everyone in the room was riveted on the tableau, all of them holding their breath. This scene would be talked about for days, her every word and gesture anatomized. It would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened at her annual ball. She knew this as well as Clevedon did.

The question was whether she would break tradition and allow excitement.

She paused, with the air of a judge about to deliver sentence.

The room was quite, quite still.

Then, “Jolie,” she said, precisely as though Clevedon had presented an orchid. With a condescending little nod, and the slightest motion of her hand, she gave the modiste leave to rise. Which Noirot did with the same dancer’s grace, eliciting another collective intake of breath.

That was all. One word—pretty—and the room began to breathe again. Clevedon and his “discovery” were permitted to move on, along the short reception line and thence into the party proper.

“A dressmaker? From London? But it is impossible. You cannot be English.”

The men had attempted to surround her, but the ladies elbowed them aside and were now interrogating her.

Marcelline’s dress had awakened both curiosity and envy. The colors were not unusual. They were fashionable colors. The style was not so very different from the latest fashions displayed at Longchamp. But the way she combined style and color and the little touches she added—all this was distinctively Noirot. Being French, these ladies noticed the touches, and were sufficiently intrigued to approach her, though she was a social anomaly—not a person but an exotic pet.

Clevedon’s exotic pet.

She was still seething over that, though a part of her couldn’t help but admire his cleverness. It was the sort of brazen nonsense members of her family typically employed when they found themselves in a tight spot.

But she’d deal with His Arrogance later.

“I am English and a dressmaker,” said Marcelline. She opened her reticule and produced a pretty silver case. From the case she withdrew her business cards: simple and elegant, like a gentleman’s calling card. “I come to Paris for inspiration.”

“But it is here you should have your shop,” said one lady.

Marcelline let her gaze move slowly over their attire. “You don’t need me,” she said. “The English ladies need me.” She paused and added in a stage whisper, “Desperately.”

The ladies smiled and went away, all of them mollified, and some of them charmed.

Then the men swarmed in.

“This is a mystery,” said Aronduille.

“All women are mysteries,” Clevedon said.

They stood at the fringes of the dance floor, watching the Marquis d’Émilien waltz with Madame Noirot.

“No, that is not what I mean,” said Aronduille. “Where does a dressmaker find time to learn to dance so beautifully? How does an English shopkeeper learn to speak French indistinguishable from that of the comtesse? And what of the curtsey she made to our hostess?” He lifted his gaze heavenward, and kissed the tips of his fingers. “I will never forget that sight.”

I’m not a lady, she’d said.

“I admit she’s a bit of a riddle,” Clevedon said. “But that’s what makes her so…amusing.”

“The ladies went to her,” said Aronduille. “Did you see?”

“I saw.” Clevedon hadn’t imagined they’d approach her. The men, yes, of course.

But the ladies? It was one thing for the hostess to admit her, politely overlooking a high-ranking guest’s bad manners or eccentricity. It was quite another matter for her lady guests to approach his “pet” and converse with her. Had Noirot been an actress or courtesan or any other dressmaker, for that matter, they would have snubbed her.

Instead, they’d pushed men aside to get to her. The encounter was brief, but when the women left, they all looked pleased with themselves.

“She’s a dressmaker,” he said. “That’s her profession: making women happy.”

But the curtsey he couldn’t explain.

He couldn’t explain the way she talked and the way she walked.

And the way she danced.

How many times had Émilien danced with her?

It was nothing to Clevedon. He’d never do anything so gauche as dance with her all night.

But considering he’d risked humiliation for her, he was entitled to one dance, certainly.

Though Marcelline appeared to heed only the partner of the moment, she always knew where Clevedon was. It was easy enough, his grace standing a head taller than most of the other men, and that head being so distinctive: the profile that would have made ancient Greece’s finest sculptors weep, the gleaming black hair with its boyish mass of tousled curls. Then there were the shoulders. No one else had such shoulders. But then, no one else had that body. Very likely he could have spouted any nonsense he pleased at their hostess, and she would have accepted whatever he said, for aesthetic reasons alone. Well, prurient ones, too, possibly. The countess was old and cold but she wasn’t dead.

For a time he’d danced, and now and again, the steps took them within inches of each other. But he always appeared as attentive to his partner as Marcelline did to hers. One might have believed he was completely indifferent to what she did. He’d got her into the party, and anything after that was her affair.

But one must be an extremely stupid or naïve woman to believe such a thing, and she was neither.

She knew he was watching her, though he excelled at seeming not to. In the last hour, though, he’d shed the pretense. He’d been prowling the ballroom, his friend trailing him like a shadow—a talkative one, by the looks of it.

Then at last the Duke of Clevedon’s seemingly casual wanderings brought him to her.

Men crowded about her, as they had from the instant she’d satisfied the ladies’ curiosity. He seemed not to notice the other men. He simply walked toward her, and it was as though a great ship sailed into port. The pack of men offered no resistance. They simply gave way, as though they were mere water under his hull.

She wondered if that was what it had been like, once upon a time, for her grandfather, when he was young and handsome, a powerful nobleman of an ancient family. Had the world given way before him, and had it likewise never occurred to him that the world would do anything else?

“Ah, there you are,” Clevedon said, as though he’d stumbled upon her by accident.

“As you see,” she said. “I have not shredded the curtains, or scratched the furniture.”

“No, I reckon you’re saving your claws for me,” he said. “Well, then, shall we dance?”

“But Madame has promised this next dance to me,” said Monsieur Tournadre.

Clevedon turned his head and looked at him.

“Or perhaps I misunderstood,” said Monsieur Tournadre. “Perhaps it was another dance.”

He backed away, as a lesser wolf would have withdrawn before the leader of the wolf pack.

Oh, she ought not to be thrilled. Only a giddy schoolgirl would thrill at a man’s snarling over her, the way a wolf snarled when another wolf dared to approach his bitch.

Still, this was the most desirable man in the ballroom, and his little show of possessiveness would have excited any woman in the room. Whatever else she was, she was still a woman, and a young one, and for all her worldly experience, she’d never had a peer of the realm warn another man away from her.

Before she could tell herself not to be a ninny, he led her out into the dancing. Then his hand clasped her waist, and hers settled on his shoulder.

And the world stopped.

Her gaze shot to his and she saw in his green eyes the same shock that made her draw in her breath and stop moving. She’d danced with a dozen other men. They’d held her in the same way.

This time, though, the touch of his hand was an awareness so keen it hummed over her skin. She felt it deep within, too, a strange stillness. Then her heart lurched into beating again, and she gathered her wits.

Her face smoothed into a social mask and his did, too. Their free hands clasped in the next same instant, and he swung her into the dance.

They danced for a time in silence.

He wasn’t ready to speak. He was still shaken by whatever it was that had happened at the start of the dance.

He knew she’d felt it, too—though he couldn’t say what it was.

At the moment, her attention was elsewhere, not on him. She was looking past his shoulder, and he could look down and study her. She was not, truly, a great beauty, yet she gave that impression. She was handsome and striking and absolutely different.

Her dark hair was modishly arranged, yet in a slightly disarranged way. Had they been elsewhere, he would have dragged his fingers through it, scattering the pins over the floor. The slight turn of her head showed a small, perfect ear from whose lower lobe dangled a garnet earring. In that other place, elsewhere, he would have bent and slid his tongue along the delicate little curve.

But they were not in another place, and so they danced, round and round, and with every turn the familiar waltz grew darker and stranger and hotter.

With every turn he grew more intensely aware of the warmth of her waist under his gloved hand, of the way the heat made her creamy skin glow a tantalizing pink under the dewy sheen, and the way the heat enhanced her scent: the fragrance of her skin mingled with the jasmine she wore so lightly. It was a mere hint of scent in a warm and crowded room thick with them, but he was aware, keenly aware, only of hers.

In the same way he was distantly cognizant of dancers moving about them, a whirl of colors set off by the blacks and greys and whites of the men’s dress. But all this glorious color faded to a blur, while below him and about him was a swirl of pale gold, pink-tinged like desert sands at dawn, dotted with red bows trembling like poppies in a summer breeze. Nearer still was the black lace, wafting in the air with every movement.

At last she looked up at him. He saw the heat glowing in her face, the throb of the pulse at her neck, and he was aware, without needing to look precisely there, of the rapid rise and fall of her bosom.

“I’ll give you credit,” she said, her husky voice slightly breathless. “Of all the ruses you might have tried, that was one I never considered. But then, I’ve never thought of myself as anybody’s pet.”

“I presented you as an exotic,” he said.

“I take exception to the part about the leash,” she said.

“It would be an elegant leash, I assure you,” he said. “Studded with diamonds.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I take exception as well to your behaving as though you won me in a wager, when in fact you lost—and not for the first time.” Her dark gaze swept up to the top of his head and down, pausing at his neckcloth, and leaving a wash of heat behind. “That’s a pretty emerald.”

“Which you shall not have,” he said. “No wagers with you this night. We may yet be cast out. The Vicomtesse de Montpellier showed me the business card you gave her. Did no one ever point out to you the difference between a social function and a business function? This is not an institutional banquet of the Merchant Taylors’ Company.”

“I noticed that. The tailors would be better dressed.”

“Are you blind?” he said. “Look about you.”

She threw a bored glance about the room. “I saw it all before.”

“We’re in Paris.”

“I’m talking about the men, not the women.” Her gaze came back to him. “Of all the men here, you are the only one a London tailor would not be ashamed to acknowledge as his client.”

“How relieved I am to have your approval,” he said.

“I did not say I approve of you altogether,” she said.

“That’s right. I forgot. I’m a useless aristocrat.”

“You have some uses,” she said. “Otherwise I should not be courting you.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“You keep forgetting,” she said. “This party. You. This is all business to me.”

He had forgotten. She’d wanted to come to this ball to observe. She would have come without him but for their wager—though that had been less a wager than a war of wills.

“How could I forget?” he said. “I could scarcely believe my eyes when my friends showed me the business cards you handed out as though they were party favors.”

“Has your exotic pet embarrassed you, monsieur le duc? Does the odor of the shop offend your nostrils? How curious. As I recall, you were the one who insisted on bringing me. You taunted me with cowardice. Yet you—”

“It would be vulgar to strangle you on the dance floor,” he said. “Yet I am sorely tempted.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You haven’t had this much fun in an age. You told me, did you not, of the machinations the high and mighty employ to be invited to this exceedingly dull ball. You’ve done what scores of Parisians would give a vital organ to accomplish. You’ve achieved the social coup of the decade. In escorting me, you’ve broken a host of ancient, unbreakable rules. You’re thumbing your nose at Society, French and English. And you’re dancing with the most exciting woman in the room.”

His heart was thudding. It was the dance, the furious dance, and talking, and trying to keep up with her, matching wits. Yet he was aware of an uneasiness inside, the same he’d felt with her before—because it was true, all true, and he hadn’t known the truth himself until she uttered it.

“You have a mighty high opinion of yourself,” he said.

“My dear duke, only look at the competition.”

“I would,” he said, “but you’re so aggravating, I can’t tear my gaze away.”

They were turning, turning, both breathless from dancing and talking at the same time. She was looking up at him, her dark eyes brilliant, her mouth—the mouth that had knocked him on his pins—hinting at laughter.

“Fascinating,” she said. “You mean fascinating.”

“You’ve certainly fascinated my friend Aronduille. He wonders where you learned to curtsey and dance and speak so well.”

There was the barest pause before she answered. “Like a lady, you mean? But I’m only aping my betters.”

“And where did you learn to ape them, I wonder?” he said. “Do you not work from dawn till dusk? Are dressmakers not apprenticed at an early age?”

“Nine years old,” she said. “How knowledgeable you are, suddenly, of my trade.”

“I asked my valet,” he said.

She laughed. “Your valet,” she said. “Oh, that’s rich. Literally.”

“But you have a maid,” he said. “A slight girl with fair hair.”

Instantly the laughter in her eyes vanished. “You noticed my maid?”

“At the promenade, yes.”

“You’re above-average observant.”

“Madame, I notice everything about you, purely in the interests of self-preservation.”

“Call me cynical, but I suspect there’s nothing pure about it,” she said.

The dance was drawing to a close. He was distantly aware of the music subsiding, but more immediately aware of her: the heat between them, physical and mental, and the turbulence she made.

“And yet you court me,” he said.

“Solely in the interests of commerce,” she said.

“Interesting,” he said. “I wonder at your methods for attracting business. You say you wish to dress my duchess—and you start by making off with my stickpin.”

“I won it fair and square,” she said.

The dance ended, but still he held her. “You tease and provoke and dare and infuriate me,” he said.

“Oh, that I do for fun,” she said.

“For fun,” he said. “You like to play with fire, madame.”

“As do you,” she said.

Tense seconds ticked by before he noticed that the music had fully stopped, and people were watching them while pretending not to. He let go of her, making a show of smoothing her lace—tidying her up, as one might a child. He smiled a patronizing little smile he knew would infuriate her, then bowed politely.

She made him an equally polite curtsey, then opened her fan and lifted it to her face, hiding all but her mocking dark eyes. “If you’d wanted a tame pet, your grace, you should have picked another woman.”

She slipped away into the crowd, the black lace and red bows fluttering about the shimmering pink-tinged gold of her gown.

Chapter Five

Masked balls are over for the season, but dress balls are as frequent as they were in the beginning of the winter. Some of the most novel dancing dresses are of gauze figured in a different colour from the ground, as jonquille and lilac, white and emerald green, or rose, écre and cherry-colour.

Costume of Paris by a Parisian correspondent,

The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée, 1835

Marcelline swiftly made her way out of the ballroom and into the corridor. She started toward the stairway.

“I picked you?” came a familiar, low voice from close behind her.

Startled, she spun around—and collided with Clevedon. She stumbled, and he caught hold of her shoulders and righted her.

“Delicious exit line,” he said. “But we’re not quite done.”

“Oh, I think we are,” she said. “I’ve looked my fill tonight. My card will be in the hands of at least one reporter by tomorrow, along with a detailed description of my dress. Several ladies will be writing to their friends and family in London about my shop. And you and I have caused more talk than is altogether desirable. At the moment, I’m not absolutely certain I can turn the talk to account. Your grasping me in this primitive fashion doesn’t improve matters. May I point out as well that you’re wrinkling my lace.”

He released her, and for one demented instant, she missed the warmth and the pressure of his hands.

“I did not pick you,” he said. “You came to the theater and flaunted yourself and did your damndest to rivet my attention.”

“If you think that was my damndest, you’re sadly inexperienced,” she said.

He studied her face for a moment, his green eyes glittering.

If he took hold of her again and shook her until her teeth rattled, she wouldn’t be surprised. She was provoking him, and it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, but she was provoked, too, frustrated on any number of counts, mainly the obvious one.

“I brought you,” he said tightly. “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

“There’s no reason for you to leave the party,” she said. “I’ll find a fiacre to take me back.”

“The party is boring,” he said. “You’re the only interesting thing in it. You’d scarcely left before it deflated, audibly, like a punctured hot-air balloon. I heard the sigh of escaping excitement behind me as I stepped into the corridor.”

“It didn’t occur to you that the deflation was on account of your departure?” she said.

“No,” he said. “And don’t try flattery. It sits ill on you. In fact, it turns your face slightly green. I do wonder how you get on with your clients. Surely you’re obliged to flatter and cajole.”

“I flatter in the same way I do everything else,” she said. “Beautifully. If I turned green it was due to shock at your flattering me.”

“Then collect your wits before we descend the stairs. If you take a tumble and crack your head, suspicion will instantly fall on me.”

She needed to collect her wits, and not for fear of tumbling down the stairs. She hadn’t yet recovered from the waltz with him: the heat, the giddiness, the almost overpowering physical awareness—and most alarming, the yearning coursing through her, racing in her veins, beating in her heart, and weakening her mind as though she’d drunk some kind of poison.

She started down the stairs.

As the buzz of the party grew more distant, she became aware of his light footfall behind her, and of the deserted atmosphere of the lower part of the house.

Risk-taking was in her blood, and conventional morality had not been part of her upbringing. If this had been another man, she wouldn’t have hesitated. She would have led him to a dark corner or under the stairs and had him. She would have lifted her skirts and taken her pleasure—against a wall or a door or on a windowsill—and got it out of her system.

But this wasn’t another man, and she’d already let temper and pride get the better of her judgment.

Leonie had warned her, before she left: “We’ll never have another chance like this. Don’t bugger it up.”

The hell of it was, Marcelline wouldn’t know whether or not she’d botched it until it was too late.

He said nothing for a time, and she wondered if he, too, was pondering the stories shortly to fly about London, and deciding how best to deal with them.

But why should he fret about gossip? He was a man, and men were expected to chase women, especially in Paris. It was practically his patriotic duty. Lady Clara certainly hadn’t made any fuss about his affairs. It would have been common knowledge if she had. Since Longmore behaved much the same as his friend did, Marcelline doubted it had even dawned on the earl to mention the subject when issuing the ultimatum, whatever that was.

Still, all the duke’s other liaisons in Paris had been ladies or sought-after members of the demimonde. Those sorts of conquests were prestigious.

But a dressmaker—a common shopkeeper—wasn’t Clevedon’s usual thing, and anything unusual could set the ton on its ear.

These cogitations took her to the ground floor. They did nothing to quiet her agitation.

She waited while he told the porter to summon his carriage.

When Clevedon turned back to her, she said, “How do you propose to explain this evening to Lady Clara? Or do you never explain yourself to her?”

“Don’t speak of her,” he said.

“You’re ridiculous,” she said. “You say it as though my uttering her name will somehow contaminate her. That must be your guilty conscience speaking, because it most assuredly isn’t your intellect. You know that she’s the one I want. She’s the one I came to Paris for. ‘Don’t speak of her,’ indeed.” She imitated his haughty tone. “Is that what you do with everything uncomfortable? Pretend it isn’t there? She’s there, you stubborn man. The woman you’re going to marry by summer’s end. You ought to speak of her. You ought to be reminding me of her vast superiority to me—except as regards dress, that is.”

“I had originally planned,” he said levelly, “to write to Clara as I always do. I had planned to repeat the most fatuous conversations to which I was subjected in the course of the evening. I had planned to give my impressions of the company. I had planned to describe my sufferings from boredom—a boredom endured entirely on her account, in order provide her entertainment.”

“How noble of you.”

Something flickered in his eyes, and it was like the flash of a lighthouse, seen through a storm.

She knew she approached dangerous waters, but if she didn’t get him under control, she risked smashing her business to pieces.

“And you’d completely disregard my part in events?” Marcelline said. “Stupid question. It’s tactless to mention the women of dubious character you encounter in the course of your travels and entertainments. On the present occasion, however, I’d recommend against that approach. News of our exciting arrival at the party will soon be racing across the Channel, to arrive in London as early as Tuesday. I suggest you tackle the subject straight on. Tell her you brought me to win a wager. Or you did it for a joke.”

“By God, you’re the most managing female,” he said.

“I’m trying to manage my future,” she said. She heard the slight wobble in her voice. Alarmed, she took a calming breath. His gaze became heavy-lidded and shifted to her neckline. Her reaction to that little attention was the opposite of calming.

Devil take him! He was the one who belonged on a leash.

She started for the gate. The porter hastily opened it.

“The carriage hasn’t arrived yet,” Clevedon said. “Do you mean to wait on the street for it, like a clerk waiting for the omnibus?”

“I am not traveling in that or any other carriage with you,” she said. “We’ll go our separate ways this night.”

“I cannot allow you to travel alone,” he said. “That’s asking for trouble.”

And traveling with him in a closed carriage, in the dead of night, in her state of mind—or not mind—wasn’t? She needed to get away from him, not simply for appearances’ sake, but to think. There had to be a way to salvage this situation.

“I’m not a sheltered miss,” she said. “I’ve traveled Paris on my own for years.”

“Without a servant?”

She wished she had something heavy to throw at his thick head.

She’d grown up on the streets of Paris and London and other cities. She came from a family that lived by its wits. The stupid or naïve did not survive. The only enemy they hadn’t been able to outwit or outrun was the cholera.

“Yes, without a servant,” she said. “Shocking, I know. To do anything without servants is unthinkable to you.”

“Not true,” he said. “I can think of several things to do that do not require servants.”

“How inventive of you,” she said.

“In any event, the point is moot,” he said. “Here’s my carriage.”

While she’d been trying not to think of the several activities one might perform without servants’ assistance, the carriage had drawn up to the entrance.

“Adieu, then,” she said. “I’ll find a fiacre in the next street.”

“It’s raining,” he said.

“It is not…”

She felt a wet plop on her shoulder. Another on her head.

A footman leapt down from the back of the carriage, opened an umbrella, and hurried toward them. By the time he reached them, the occasional plop had already built to a rapid patter. She felt Clevedon’s hand at her back, nudging her under the umbrella, and guiding her to the carriage steps.

It was the touch of his hand, the possessive, protective gesture. That was what undid her.

She told herself she wasn’t made of sugar and wouldn’t melt. She told herself she’d walked in the rain many times. Her self didn’t listen.

Her self was trapped in feelings: the big hand at her back, the big body close by. The night was growing darker and colder while the rain beat down harder. She was strong and independent and she’d lived on the streets, yet she’d always craved, as any animal does, shelter and protection.

She was weak in that way. Self-denial wasn’t instinctive.

Chapter Six

Between the first week in April, and the last in November, Steam-Packets run daily, weather permitting, from their Moorings off the Tower of London to Calais, in about twelve hours; and likewise from Calais to London, in about the same time. Carriages, horses, and luggage, conveyed by Steam-Packets, are shipped and relanded free of expense.

Mariana Starke, Travels in Europe, 1833

She stood completely still, but for the feathers and lace of her bonnet shuddering in the wind. Out-wardly Clevedon was as still as she was, while his heart leapt with an excitement growing all too familiar.

He strode toward her. “Surprise,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. They were deeply shadowed, and he doubted that was merely the moonlight’s effect. She was fatigued, and no wonder. He was amazed at the speed with which she’d quit Paris. She couldn’t have slept at all after the party. Then, to reach Calais so soon, she couldn’t have stopped for more than the change of horses on the way.

He wondered how she’d done it. Getting all her papers signed in the middle of the night must have cost a fortune in bribes—paid, no doubt, from the money she’d won at roulette and cards.

Even he, for all his great rank, had not had an easy time getting through officialdom, and he’d set out hours after she did, when the bureaucrats were awake at least, though not all of the offices had been open.

Had he not been the Duke of Clevedon, and furthermore, had he not thrown his full ducal weight about, the packet would have sailed an hour ago, and he’d be in Calais watching it retreat across the Channel while he cursed himself for a fool.

He was a fool, and he was cursing himself now, but to little effect.

In any event, she was angry enough for the two of them.

“Surprise?” she said. “There’s an understatement. Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Yes.

“I was worried about you,” he said. “When you left Paris so suddenly, I thought a catastrophe had occurred. Or a murder. Have you murdered anybody, by the way? Not that I would dream of criticizing, but—”

“I left Paris to get away from you,” she said.

“Well, that didn’t work.”

“How in blazes did you do it?” she said. “How did you know? How did you—but no, I won’t ask how you got through French officialdom. You’re a duke, and they haven’t cut off any noble heads this age. Still, one would have thought they’d learned how useless aristos are, not remotely worth indulging.”

He smiled. “But you need my noble head, Madame Noirot. You need me to pay the bills.”

“How did you know I was leaving?” she said.

“You are single-minded, I notice,” he said.

“How did you know?” she demanded, hands clenched.

Though he felt his face heat, he answered carelessly, “I sent my porter to spy on you. He was loitering about your hotel in the small hours of the morning when you and your maid departed from it, in a fiacre. At first he assumed you’d merely set a shockingly early hour for meeting Mademoiselle Fontenay. Then, when he counted the number of portmanteaux being stowed in the vehicle, he grew curious. From one of the inn servants, he learned that you had quit the hotel. Your destination, he discovered, was the posting office, and you were traveling to ‘visit a relative.’ In point of fact, I should be asking how you contrived to get out of France. You left hours before any of the officials who must approve your exit were even awake.”

“It didn’t occur to you that I might have made my arrangements previously?” she said.

“Did you?” he said.

“Ah, your spying porter didn’t find that out,” she said. “What a pity, because I’m not going to satisfy your curiosity. I’ve been traveling for a day and a half over wretched French roads, and I’m tired. Good night, your grace.”

She dipped the barest of curtseys and walked away from him.

He fought the urge to follow her. He’d behaved absurdly enough as it was. For what? What did he think he’d achieve aboard a steam packet mobbed with travelers? He was lucky this was an English boat, or they would not have delayed its departure for him. As it was, he’d paid massive bribes to change places with other passengers. Even so, had he been a man of lesser rank, he’d be waiting in Calais for the next vessel.

Staying in Calais was what he ought to have done. No, he ought not to have left Paris at all. Six more weeks of freedom, and he’d thrown them away—for what?

But he’d done it, and having spent a day and a half racing over abominable roads, he was hardly likely to stand tamely on the dock, watching the packet sail away.

His behavior was lunatic—but never mind. In truth, Paris was growing wearisome, and a mad race to Calais was better excitement than anything he’d done in recent weeks, perhaps months. Certainly it had been worth it, simply to see Noirot’s shocked expression when she caught sight of him.

Surprise, indeed. He doubted anybody or anything had surprised her in a very long time.

He stayed on deck until the packet had sailed out of the harbor and out into the Channel. He noticed the clouds drifting across the heavens, dimming the starlight and moonlight, but he thought nothing of it. The sky over the English Channel was never perfectly clear.

He went below, where he let Saunders peel off his coat and relieve him of his neckcloth, waistcoat, and boots. Then his grace fell into bed and instantly asleep.

Not an hour later, the storm struck.

Marcelline staggered out into the narrow passage. The smell was foul: scores of panicked passengers being sick. Her own stomach, usually reliable even in rough seas, heaved. She paused for a moment, breathing through her mouth, willing her insides to quiet.

The ship lurched hard to her right, and she fell against a door. From behind it came shrieks and shouts, the same she’d heard from other cabins. The vessel screamed more loudly, its timbers groaning as the waves knocked it about.

She walked on unsteadily, telling herself that this was normal, the ropes and timbers protesting the sea’s pummeling. Her heart thudded all the same, with fear. It was hard not to imagine death when every lurch threatened to overturn them, and the vessel itself seemed to be screaming.

The crew had closed the hatches, but water washed in. Under her feet, the deck was wet and slippery.

Nearby, someone was crying.

“Repent!” a man shouted. “Thy time is nigh.”

“Go to the devil,” she muttered. Yes, she was afraid, as any sane person would be. But her time was not nigh and she was not going to die. She was not going to drown. The ship was not going down. She had a daughter and sisters waiting for her in London.

She trembled all the same, and her stomach churned. She was never sick. She couldn’t be sick. She hadn’t time. Jeffreys was ill, desperately so, and needed Marcelline’s help.

But oh, she did not feel well at all.

Later. Later she could be as sick as she wanted.

One thing at a time.

She came to the door she thought was the right one, the one where she’d seen the liveried servants loitering earlier. She’d heard, on her way back to her cabin, that the Duke of Clevedon had commandeered the best cabin for himself and two lesser ones for his retinue.

She pounded on the door. It opened abruptly at the same moment the ship gave an almighty lurch. She slid, stumbled, and fell straight into the cabin. Two big hands caught her and pulled her upright.

“Dammit, Noirot. You might have broken your neck.”

The hands bracing her were warm and firm, and she wanted to lean into him. He was big and strong and so was his personality. An image rushed into her mind of medieval knights protecting their castles, their women—and for one mad moment she wanted nothing but to put herself in his hands.

But she couldn’t. She daren’t lean on him.

She certainly daren’t look up. She did not feel well at all, at all.

“Had…to…come,” she managed to say.

“I was on my way out to find you, to see if you needed—Noirot, are you all right?”

She was looking down at his feet and thinking that any minute now she was going to be sick on his costly slippers. But the sea had ruined them already. Pity. Such fine slippers. He had big feet. Funny.

“Quite well,” she said, gagging.

“Saunders, brandy! Quick!”

Yes, that was it. Brandy. Why she’d come. Brandy. Jeffreys needed it.

So, heaven help her, did she.

“My…my s-seamstress,” she began. “Sh-she—”

“Here.” He put a flask to her lips. “Drink.”

“I’m n-never sick,” she said.

“Drink,” he said.

She drank, welcoming the fire sliding down her throat. If it scoured her insides, so much the better.

For a moment she thought she’d be well again.

Then the deck tilted and she slid and stumbled. This time his arms were about her, though. “Don’t,” she said. “Going to be…going to be—”

“Saunders!”

Something was thrust in front of her. A bucket. Good.

Then she was retching, doubled over, so sick she couldn’t see straight. Her head pounded and her knees gave way.

Sick, so sick.

Someone was holding her. Men talked above her head. His voice. Another’s. She was shifted onto something soft. A bed. Oh, that felt good. To lie down. She would simply lie here for a moment while the boat rose and fell, rocked this way and that.

But no. She hadn’t time for this.

Someone slid a pillow under her head, then drew a blanket over her. That felt so good. But she wasn’t supposed to feel good. She had to get up. It was Jeffreys who needed help. But if she moved, she’d be sick again.

Must lie very quietly.

Impossible, with the ship pitching so. Slowly it tilted up, then slowly down again, and all the while, the horrible noises, ropes and timbers grinding and creaking and groaning as though all the souls of the drowned were rising to meet them. From a distance came the sounds of passengers crying and screaming. And somewhere above all the noise of the ship, she heard the storm’s fury, the wailing wind.

Hell, she thought. Dante’s Inferno. Or that other thing. Not a poem but a picture of Hell, of the damned. Curse it, what was wrong with her? She couldn’t lie here, wondering about paintings.

“No.” She could barely form the words. “Not me. My—my—s-seamstress.”

“Your maid?” His voice was so calm. So reassuring.

“Jeffreys. She’s badly ill. Brandy. I came for…brandy.”

More talking, over her, around her. She heard screaming and shouting, too, but far away. The world went up, then down, and down, and down.

Don’t let me be sick again. Don’t let me be sick again.

Something cool and wet touched her face. “Saunders will see about your maid,” the familiar voice said.

“Don’t let her die,” she said. Or did she? Her voice sounded far away, so small against the infernal clamor about them. Hell, she thought. This was like the Hell the righteous ranted about. The Hell in the pictures.

“People almost never die of seasickness,” he said.

“They only wish they might,” she said.

An odd sound. A chuckle? It was his voice, low and close. Behind it, around it, above it were horrible sounds, like death. A long, drawn-out moan, a terrible grinding, then a crack.

The ship…cracking open…

“We can’t go down,” someone said. Had she spoken?

Don’t talk. Lie quietly. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

“We won’t go down,” he said. “It’s bad, but we won’t go down. Here, swallow this.”

She moved her head from side to side. That was a mistake. Bile rose. “Can’t.”

“Only a drop,” he coaxed. “Laudanum. It will help. I promise.”

She couldn’t raise her head, couldn’t even open her eyes. The world was spinning round and round, leaping up and down, throwing itself from side to side.

Where am I?

He lifted her head, so gently. Was it he? Or was it she, spooning medicine into Lucie? Lucie, Lucie.

But she was away from this. She was safe in London with her doting aunts, who spoiled her appallingly. Lucie was safe because her mother and aunts had turned into three witches, brewing potions to keep her alive.

They had not fought so hard only to leave Lucie an orphan, because her mother had made a foolish mistake. A man-mistake. More than six feet tall and beastly arrogant and…oh, those big, beautiful hands.

“A little more,” he said. “Another drop.”

Take your medicine. Get better. Get back to Lucie.

She swallowed it. So bitter.

“Vile,” she said. “Vile.”

“I know, but it helps. Trust me. I know.”

“Trust you,” she said. “Hah.”

“Clearly you’re not dying.”

“No. Devil won’t take me.”

The low chuckle again. “Then we’re all safe.”

She wasn’t safe. The storm raged and the ship moaned and rose and fell and flung itself from wave to wave. She’d been in rough seas before. She knew this was very bad, and she wasn’t remotely safe. Yet while her mind knew this, her heart understood matters altogether differently: his voice, his surprisingly gentle touch, and the calm of his presence. Reassuring. How ironic!

“Ah, you’re smiling,” he said. “The opium is starting to take hold already.”

Already? Had she fallen asleep? She’d lost track of time.

“No, it’s you,” she said. How far away her voice sounded, as though it had traveled to London already, ahead of her. “Your ducal self-assurance. Everything will give way to you. Even Satan’s own storm.”

“You’re definitely improving,” he said. “Full, mocking sentences.”

“Yes. Better.” Her insides seemed to be quieting. But her head was so heavy. She opened her eyes, and that was hard work. He was leaning over her. The light was too dim to make out details, and nothing would stay put. His eyes were deep shadows in his face. But she knew they were green. Jade green. Or was it sea green? A color not many women could wear successfully. A color not many women could withstand…in a man’s eyes.

She closed her eyes again.

She felt the cool cloth on her forehead. So gentle. A feeling she had trouble naming washed over her. Then she realized: She was protected. Sheltered. Safe.

What a joke!

“Strange,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

The world grew heavy and dark, then everything went away.

Clevedon had no idea long the storm lasted. He’d long since lost all sense of time. He’d awoken in a room heaving this way and that, to a clamor of panicked voices, a roaring storm, and the creaking and groaning vessel. He’d been sick, a bit. But his was a strong stomach—as numerous drunken entertainments testified—and the first thing in his mind was Noirot, somewhere on this boat. He’d been about to go to her cabin, medicine box in hand, when she fell through his door.

Since then, he hadn’t time to be sick or to worry about anybody else. Her pearly skin was dull and drawn. That much one could see even in the dim light. She’d been shockingly ill, and delirious. That was so unlike her. She was strong, strong to a fault, and the change had him halfway into a panic before his frantic mind sorted it out.

This was no more than seasickness, reason told him. The delirium must be part of it—or due to her having little sleep and hurried meals, thanks to her mad haste to get away from him.

Whatever caused the alarming symptoms, she was too ill to be left on her own. He left his servants to look after themselves while he tended to her and tried to stay calm. He knew what to do, he told himself. He worried all the same.

He was no physician and he wasn’t used to playing nursemaid. He told himself that he and Longmore had lived through the cholera epidemic on the Continent, and he’d learned a few basic principles from the doctors who’d had any success with the disease. They hadn’t much success, and they argued about what worked and what didn’t, but this wasn’t the cholera. This was seasickness, and there was nothing to worry about, he told himself. When the storm passed, she’d be better.

If the ship didn’t go down.

But it wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, he knew he needed to make sure she took in nourishment, and especially liquids—not easy when she couldn’t keep anything down. The brandy might have helped a little, but the laudanum proved more effective. It took a while, and she was out of her head for part of the time, muttering about witches and Macbeth and angels and devils, but eventually she quieted. When at last she fell asleep, he let himself draw a breath of relief.

He sat on the edge of his bunk and gently bathed her face now and again with a wet cloth. He didn’t know that it did any good, but he needed to do something. Saunders undoubtedly would know what to do, but Saunders was attending the maid—or seamstress—or whatever she was.

Gad, the facts about Madame Noirot were as slippery as the deck under his feet.

Deception, thy name is Noirot.

Manipulative and elusive and not to be trusted.

If he had trusted her, he wouldn’t have set a spy on her, he wouldn’t have pursued her from Paris, and he wouldn’t be on this curst vessel in this hellish storm.

Yet not trusting was no excuse for his deranged behavior. He had no excuse. She wasn’t even beautiful, especially not now. In the murky light, she looked like a ghost. He found it hard to believe that this was the same vibrant, passionate creature who’d straddled him in the carriage and kissed him witless.

He smoothed the damp hair back from her forehead.

Dreadful, dreadful woman.

Marcelline awoke to a watery light.

At first she thought she’d died and was floating in another realm.

By degrees she realized that the ship was rocking, but not in the deranged way it had done before. The clamor had quieted.

It was over.

The storm had passed.

They’d survived.

Then she became aware of the weight and warmth pressing against her back. Her eyes flew open. In front of her was only blank wood. She remembered: her desperate visit to Clevedon’s cabin, the vicious seasickness that seized her…brandy…laudanum…his hands.

This wasn’t her cabin, her bed.

She was in his bed.

And judging by the size of the body squeezed alongside her in the narrow bunk, Clevedon was in it with her.

Oh, perfect.

She tried to turn over, but he was lying on the skirt of her dress, pinning her down.

“Clevedon,” she said.

He mumbled and moved, flinging his arm over her.

“Your grace.”

His arm tightened, pulling her closer.

How she wished she might snuggle there, her back curved against the front of his hard, warm body, his strong arm holding her safe.

But she wasn’t safe. When he woke up, he’d be in the state men usually were in when they woke, and she had no confidence in her powers to resist so much temptation.

She shoved her elbow into his ribs.

“What?” His voice was low, thick with sleep.

“You’re crushing me.”

“Yes,” he said. He nuzzled her neck.

She was desperately aware of his arousal, the great ducal phallus awake well before his brain was.

“Get off,” she said. “Get off. Now.”

Before it’s too late, and I decide to celebrate a narrow escape from death in the traditional manner of our species.

“Noirot?”

“Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t a dream.”

“No. Get off.”

He muttered something too low for her to hear, but he moved away. She turned over. Her head spun. She had to struggle to focus.

He stood at the side of the bunk, looking down at her. The shadow of a beard darkened his face, and he was scowling.

She started up from the bed.

Then fell back onto it, clutching her head.

“That wasn’t wise,” he said. “You’ve been sick. All you’ve had to eat was cold gruel and a little wine.”

“I ate?”

“You don’t remember.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t,” she said. “I’m having trouble sorting out what I dreamed and what happened. I dreamed I was in London. Then I wasn’t. I was at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the bottom of the boat.” For a moment she saw the dream clearly in her mind’s eye, and for that moment she felt the despair she’d felt then. I’ve drowned. I’ll never see Lucie again. Why did I leave London? “People hung over the rail, looking down at me. They were gesturing and seemed to be saying something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. You were there. You were very angry.” And that, strangely enough, had been the most reassuring part of the dream.

“That much was real enough,” he said. “You’ve tried my patience past all endurance. I’m not accustomed to playing nursemaid, and you didn’t make it easy, thrashing about like a lunatic.”

“Was that why you were lying on top of me?”

“I was not lying on top of you,” he said. “Not on purpose. I fell asleep. I was tired. I’d had very little sleep before the storm broke. Then you burst in and decided to be sick in my cabin.”

“I didn’t decide to be sick—though now I consider, it was a good idea,” she said. “I wish I had thought of it. But I didn’t. I came for help—for Jeffreys. I was only a bit queasy—but then…something happened.” She shook her head. “I’m never sick. I should not have been sick.”

“You’re very lucky I was here,” he said. “You’re very lucky I’m a patient man. You’re a deuced difficult patient. I would have thrown you overboard, but the crew had closed the hatches.”

She made herself sit up, but more slowly and carefully this time. Her head pounded. She clutched it.

“You’d better not get up,” he said.

She remembered his patience, his gentle touch. She remembered the feeling, so rare that she’d had trouble recognizing it: the feeling of being sheltered and protected and being looked after. When last had anybody looked after her? Not her parents, certainly. They’d never hesitated to abandon their children when the children became inconvenient. Then they’d turn up, months and months later, expecting those children to run into their open arms.

And we did, Marcelline thought. Naïve fools that we were, we did. Whether Mama and Papa were about or not, it was always Marcelline, the eldest, who looked after everybody, because one couldn’t rely on anyone else. Even after she was wed. But what could she expect when she wed her own kind? Poor, feckless Charlie!

Clevedon wasn’t her kind. He was another species altogether. She remembered his hand at her back, guiding her to the shelter of his well-appointed carriage. A woman could be spoiled so easily by a rich, privileged man. So many women were.

She couldn’t afford it.

“I…truly, I thank you for enduring the ghastliness of nursing me,” she said. ”But I must get back, before anyone realizes where I’ve been.”

“Who do you think will notice or care?” he said. “We sailed into the devil’s own storm. People have been running about screaming and puking and generally making nuisances of themselves for hours. I doubt most of them even know where they’ve been this night.” He looked about him. “Morning, rather. Since most of them were sick, they’ll be starved by now, and the only thing they’ll think about is getting something to eat. Your head is aching because you’re hungry.” He scowled again. “Or perhaps I gave you too much laudanum. I wasn’t sure what was the proper dose for a woman. You’re lucky I didn’t poison you.”

“Clevedon.” She winced. It hurt to speak.

“Don’t move,” he said. “You’ll make yourself sick again, and I’m tired of that.” He moved away from the bunk. “I’ll have one of the servants fetch you something to eat.”

“Stop taking care of me!”

He turned back to look at her. “Stop being childish,” he said. “Are you afraid I’ll ply you with food in order to seduce you? Think again. Have you looked in a mirror lately? And may I remind you that I was the one holding your head while you were sick last night. Not exactly the most arousing sight I’ve ever seen. In fact, I can’t remember what I ever saw in you. I only want to feed you so you’ll be well and get out of my cabin and out of my life.”

“I want to be out of your life, too,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Until it’s time to pay my duchess’s dressmaking bills.”

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Good,” he said. “That suits me very well.”

He went to the door, opened it, went out, and slammed it behind him.

By the time the packet docked at the Tower Stairs, Marcelline wanted to scream. The storm had blown the ship off course, and a trip that in good weather took about twelve hours had taken more than twenty. The advertised “refreshments” had run out, the ship’s servants were limp with fatigue, and the mood of the hungry passengers was vile, as was their smell. Even above deck, in the brisk sea air, it was impossible to escape the evidence of too many people confined with one another in too small an area for too long. Couples quarreled with each other and scolded their whiny children, who picked fights with their siblings.

Naturally, nobody could wait to get off the boat, and they all tried to disembark simultaneously, shoving and shouting and even kicking.

Though she longed desperately get off the vessel as well, Marcelline decided to wait. She fended off the packet’s servants, eager to help her with her belongings, telling them to come back later. While she felt a good deal better, she didn’t feel quite herself. Too, Jeffreys was still weak from her own far worse bout with sickness. It made no sense to endure the pushing and hurrying and ill temper—and above all, the whiny children.

Marcelline wanted her own child. Lucie was no angel, but she did not whine. and when her mama surprised her by returning home a week early, that mama would be smiling and happy.

She would be smiling and happy, Marcelline assured herself, once the crowd dissipated, and she could have a moment’s peace, to sort herself out.

Clevedon must be long gone by now. He wouldn’t have to shove people out of his way. His servants could do that for him—not that it would be necessary. Clevedon appeared, and people simply made way for him.

“Make way, make way!”

She looked up. A tall, burly footman was bearing down on her, another footman behind him. The livery was all too familiar.

The first one elbowed an indignant packet servant aside, strode to her, and bowed. “His grace’s compliments, Mrs. Noirot, and would you be so good as to let him see you and Miss Jeffreys home. He understands Miss Jeffreys was dire ill, and he dislikes to leave her to the public conveyances, let alone being jostled by this infern—this crowd. If you ladies would come with us, me and Joseph will take you along to the Customs officers and then in a trice we’ll have you in the carriage, which is only around the corner.”

Even as he spoke, he was collecting their things, hoisting one portmanteau under one arm and another under the other. His counterpart made easy work of the remaining bags, ignoring the protests of the packet servants they’d displaced and deprived of their tips.

It all happened so quickly that Marcelline had no time even to decide whether to object. She’d hardly taken in what they were about when Thomas and Joseph marched away with her luggage.

The drive to the shop on Fleet Street, silent for the most part, seemed interminable.

The first thing Jeffreys did when she settled into her seat, next to Marcelline and opposite the duke, was thank him for sending Saunders to look after her when she was ill.

He shrugged. “Saunders dotes on playing physician,” he said. “He likes nothing better than to make disgusting potions to cure the effects of overindulgence. It’s his subtle way of punishing us, no doubt, for getting wine stains on our linen.”

“He was very kind,” Jeffreys said.

“That would make for a change,” said Clevedon. “He isn’t, usually.”

And that was all he said, all the way from the Tower to Jeffreys’s lodgings.

From there it was an easy walk to the shop. The drive was not so easy.

Marcelline’s mind was working as always, looking for a way to turn matters to her account. He’d said…what had he said before he slammed out of his cabin?

He’d said something about paying the dressmaking bills. That it suited him very well.

But he’d been so angry, and he hadn’t come back.

His valet had appeared, though, with a bottle of wine and assorted cold meats and cheese that must have cost a king’s ransom in bribes.

A woman could, too easily, get used to such luxury.

She couldn’t afford to get used to it.

“I can’t decide,” she said, “whether you’re exercising forbearance or merely indulging your curiosity to see my lair.”

“Why should I do either?” he said. Seeming to make himself perfectly at ease, he stretched out his long legs, as he hadn’t been able to do when Jeffreys shared the seat with her. He rested one arm along the back of the richly appointed seat and looked out of the louvered panel, open at present to let him see out while shielding him from others trying to look in. Not that it was any secret who he was, when the crest emblazoned on the door shouted his identity to all the world.

The late afternoon light traced the smoothly sculpted lines of his profile.

Longing welled up. To touch his beautiful face. To feel that arm curl about her shoulders. To tuck herself into that big, warm body.

She crushed it. “Or perhaps you took pity on us,” she said.

“It was your maid or seamstress or whatever she is upon whom I took pity,” he said. “You can take care of yourself, I’ve no doubt. But Saunders told me the girl was prodigious ill. For a time, he said, he wasn’t sure she’d survive the voyage. She did not look well just now.” He paused briefly. “She doesn’t lodge with you?”

“She did, but that was only temporary. I can hardly lodge my seamstresses. For one thing, it isn’t good for them to do nothing but eat, drink, and live nothing but shop. For another, there isn’t room. Not that I should want half a dozen seamstresses about all day and all night. The working hours can be trying enough, what with their little jealousies and—”

“Half a dozen?” he said. He leaned forward. “Half a dozen?”

He was too astonished to pretend he wasn’t.

Yes, of course she’d babbled that advertisement for the corner of Fleet Street at Chancery Lane, and it was the direction she’d given the coachman. That didn’t mean her shop wasn’t squeezed into a passage or a cellar.

“Half a dozen girls at present,” she said. “But I’ll certainly be hiring more in the near future. As it is, we’re shorthanded.”

“Half a—Devil take you, what is wrong with you?”

“You’ve already pointed out any number of my character flaws,” she said. “To which do you now refer?”

“I thought…Noirot, you’re the damndest woman. Your dogged pursuit of me led me to believe you were in desperate straits.”

“How on earth did you come by that idea?” she said. “I told you I was the greatest modiste in the world. You’ve seen my work.”

“I imagined a dark little shop in a basement, drat you,” he said. “I did wonder how you contrived to make such extravagant-looking dresses in such a place.”

“I’m sure you didn’t wonder about it overlong,” she said. “You were mainly occupied with bedding me.”

“Yes, but I’m done with that now.”

He was. He truly was. He’d had enough of her. He’d had enough of himself, chasing her. Like a puppy, like the veriest schoolboy.

“I’m very glad to hear it,” she said.

“It’s only Clara I’m thinking of,” he said. “Much as it pains me to contribute to your vainglory, it was clear, even to me, that the women of Paris were besotted with your work. You’re the most aggravating woman I’ve ever met, but you make yourself agreeable to women, I noticed, and that and beautiful, fashionable clothes are what matter, I daresay. I should not hold a grudge, merely because I long to shake you until your teeth rattle.”

Her weary face lit up, her eyes most brilliantly of all. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew you’d see.”

“Still, I don’t trust you.”

Something flickered in her eyes, but she said nothing, only waited, her attention riveted.

She was riveted on him—for her business. He was merely the means to an end.

But he scorned to hold grudges, especially on such a petty account—his vanity, of all things!

“I wanted to see the place for myself,” he said. “To make sure it truly existed, for one thing—and to see what sort of place it was. For all I knew, you were toiling alone in a dark room in a cellar.”

“Good grief, what a mind a man has,” she said. “How could you imagine I should produce such creations in—But never mind. Maison Noirot is an elegant shop. Everything is of the first stare, exceedingly neat and clean and airy. It’s much more neat and elegant, I promise you, than the den of that dull-witted incompetent—but no, I will not foul the air with her name.”

He was done with her. He needed to be done with her. But now, when she spoke of her shop, she was so animated. So passionate.

“I smell a rival,” he said.

She sat straighter. “Certainly not. I have no rivals, your grace. I am the greatest modiste in the world.” She leaned forward to look out of the door window. “We’re nearly there. You’ll soon see for yourself.”

It wasn’t as soon as it might have been, the street being a tangle of carriages, riders, and pedestrians. But eventually they came to the place, and there it was, a handsome modern shop, with a bow window and the name in gold lettering over the door: Noirot.

The carriage stopped. The door opened. The steps were folded down.

Clevedon stepped out first, and put out his hand to steady her.

As she took his hand, he heard a cry behind him.

She looked up, looked past him, and the light he’d seen in her face before was nothing to this. Her countenance was the sun, shedding happiness and setting the world aglow.

“Mama!” the voice cried.

Noirot practically leapt from the last step, past him, forgetting him entirely.

She crouched down on the pavement and opened her arms, and a little girl, a little dark-haired girl, ran into them.

“Mama!” the child cried. “You’re home!”

Chapter Seven

The Dress-Maker must be an expert anatomist; and must, if judiciously chosen, have a name of French termination; she must know how to hide all defects in the proportions of the body, and must be able to mould the shape by the stays, that, while she corrects the body, she may not interfere with the pleasures of the palate.

The Book of English Trades, and Library of the Useful Arts, 1818

A child.

She had a child.

A little girl with dark, curling hair who ran at her, laughing. Noirot’s arms went around her and tightened to hold her close. “My love, my love,” she said, and the way she said it made a knot in his chest.

He was distantly aware of other feminine voices, but his attention was locked upon the scene: Noirot crouched on the pavement, crushing the little girl to her, and the child, whose face he could see so clearly over her mother’s shoulder, eyes closed, her face alight and dawn-rosy, her happiness radiating in almost visible waves.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, oblivious to all else about him: the busy street, the people detouring round the mother and child on the pavement. He scarcely noticed his own servants, carrying her things into the place, then returning to the carriage. He was only dimly aware of the two women who had come out of the shop behind the little girl.

He stood and watched the mother and child because he couldn’t turn away, because he didn’t understand and scarcely believed what his senses told him.

After some time, some very short time perhaps, Noirot rose and, taking her daughter’s hand, started toward the shop. The child said, “Who is that, Mama?”

Noirot turned around and saw him standing, like a man at the window of a peepshow, entranced by a foreign world, unable to look away.

He collected his wits and took a step toward them. “Mrs. Noirot, perhaps you’d be so kind as to make me known to the young lady.”

The child looked up at him, eyes wide. They were not her mother’s eyes, but b1ue, vividly blue. They seemed vaguely familiar, and he tried to remember where he might have seen those eyes before. But where could that have been? Anywhere. Nowhere. It didn’t signify.

Noirot looked from the girl to him and back to the girl, who said, “Who is it, Mama? Is it the king?”

“No, it isn’t the king.”

The child tipped her head to one side, looking past him at the carriage. “That is a very grand carriage,” she said. “I should like to drive about in that carriage.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said her mother. “Your grace, may I present my daughter, Miss Lucie Cordelia Noirot.”

“I beg your pardon, Mama,” the child said. “That isn’t my name, you know.”

Noirot looked at her. “Is it not?”

“My name is Erroll now. E-R-R-O-L-L.”

“I see.” Noirot began again. “Your grace, may I present my daughter—” She broke off and looked enquiringly at the child. “You’re still my daughter, I take it?”

“Yes,” said Erroll. “Of course, Mama.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. I had quite grown used to you. Your grace, may I present my daughter Erroll. Erroll, His Grace, the Duke of Clevedon.”

“Miss…erm…Erroll,” he said. He bowed gravely.

“Your grace,” the girl said. She curtseyed. It was nothing half so stunning as her mother’s style of curtsey, but it was gracefully done nonetheless. He wondered at it and at her remarkable self-possession.

Then he recalled whose daughter she was, and wondered why he wondered.

Then he recalled who it was who had a child.

A child, Noirot had a child!

How had she failed to mention such a thing? But what was wrong with him that he was so shocked? She was Mrs. Noirot—and while the title “Mrs.” was used, cavalierly enough, by unwed shopkeepers, actresses, and whores alike, he needn’t have assumed she wasn’t a married woman, with a family and…a husband…who did not seem to be in evidence. Dead? Or perhaps there was no husband, merely a scoundrel who’d fathered and abandoned this child.

“Do you ever take children for a drive in that carriage?” Erroll said, calling him back to the moment. “Not little children, I mean, but proper grown-up girls who would sit quietly—not climbing about and spoiling the cushions or putting sticky fingers on the glass. Not them, but well-behaved girls who keep their hands folded in their laps and only look out of the window.” The great blue eyes regarded him steadily.

“I—”

“No, he does not,” her mother said. “His grace has many claims on his time. In fact, I am sure he has an appointment elsewhere any minute now.”

“Do I?”

Noirot gave him a warning look.

“Yes, of course,” he said. He took out his pocket watch and stared at it. He had no idea where the hands pointed. He was too conscious of the little girl with the great blue eyes watching him so intently. “I nearly forgot.”

He put the watch away. “Well, Erroll, I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Yes, I’m glad to meet you, too,” she said. “Please come again, when you’re not so busy.”

He made a polite, non-committal answer, and took his leave.

He climbed into his coach and sat. As the vehicle started to move, he looked out through the louvered panel. That was when he finally took notice of the other two women, a blonde and a redhead. Even through the wooden slats, at this distance, he discerned the family resemblance, most especially in the way they carried themselves.

He had mistaken her. He’d formed an idea that was entirely wrong.

Her shop was not a little hole-in-corner place but a proper, handsome establishment. She had a family. She had a child.

She was not to be trusted. Of that he was quite, quite sure.

As to everything else—he’d misjudged, misunderstood, and now he was at sea again, and it was a rough sea, indeed.

“Well done,” Sophy said, when the shop door had closed behind them. “I know you, of course, and I should never underestimate you—”

“But my dear,” said Leonie, “you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw the crest on the carriage door.”

“And then to see him spring out of the carriage—”

“—the prints don’t half do him justice—”

“—to see him hand you out—”

“—I thought for a minute I was dreaming—”

“—It was very like a vision—”

“I saw it first, Mama,” Lucie/Erroll cut into her aunts’ chatter. “I was sitting in the window, reading my lessons, when I heard a noise, and I looked out—and I thought the king was passing by.”

“The king, with a paltry two footmen?” Marcelline said. “I think not.”

“Oh, yes. It might have been, Mama. Everyone knows King William doesn’t like to make a show. I’m sorry, too, because they say the old king, the one before this one…” She frowned.

“King George the Fourth,” Leonie prompted.

“Yes, that one,” Lucie said. “Everyone says he was vastly more splendid, and you always knew who it was when he went by. But a duke is grand, too. I thought he was very handsome, like the prince in the fairy tale. We did not expect you so soon, but I’m glad you came early. Was it very agreeable to travel in that fine carriage? I collect the seat cushions were thick and soft.”

“They were, indeed,” Marcelline said. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted two women approaching the shop. It would not do for Lucie to be interrogating her about the Duke of Clevedon in front of customers, but it wasn’t easy to distract her daughter from a fascinating object, especially a large, expensive fascinating object. “I shall tell you all about it down to the last detail, but I’m perishing for a cup of tea. Shall we go upstairs, and will you make Mama a cup of tea?”

“Yes, yes!” Lucie jumped up and down. “I’ll send Millie to the pastry shop. We’re so glad you’re home, and we shall have a party, a wonderful party, with cakes!”

Hours later, when Lucie was safely abed, the sisters gathered in the workroom.

There they drank champagne, to celebrate Marcelline’s return—with her quarry, no less—and while they drank, Marcelline described her experiences with the Duke of Clevedon in all their lurid detail. Though her sisters were virgins, so far as she knew—and she couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t tell her if they were not—they were by no means innocent. In any case, one could hardly expect them to help her deal with the complications if they did not fully understand what had happened.

“I’m truly sorry,” she said. “I had promised I wouldn’t bollix it up—”

“So you did,” said Leonie. “Yet none of us expected him to be quite so…quite so—”

“Everyone said he was handsome,” said Sophy. “But really, he’s beautiful. He took my breath away.” She patted Marcelline’s hand. “I’m so sorry you had to restrain yourself. I’m not sure I could have done it.”

“It’s not his beauty,” Marcelline said.

Both sisters eyed her skeptically.

“It’s his curst ducal-ness,” she said. “Those fellows are the very devil to manage. They’re not merely accustomed to having their way: The alternative simply doesn’t enter their heads. They don’t think the way normal people do. Then, too, he can think. He’s quicker-witted than I had allowed for. But what sort of excuse is that? I should have adjusted my methods, but for reasons that still elude me, I didn’t. The fact is, I played it very ill, and now Sophy must turn my error to account.”

She went on to explain the advertisements she and Jeffreys had devised immediately after the comtesse’s party—a lifetime ago, it seemed…before the storm…when he’d looked after her…

His hands, his hands…

“I’ll plant a story in the Morning Spectacle,” Sophy said. “But it may be too late to make tomorrow’s edition. Confound it, you haven’t left us much time.”

“I came as quickly as I could. We were nearly ship-wrecked!”

“Sophy, do be reasonable,” said Leonie. “And only think, if the storm delayed their packet, others were delayed as well. The mail will be late. That gives you as much as an extra day, if you’ll only be quick about it.”

“We can’t rely on the mail’s arriving late,” Sophy said. “I’ll have to find Tom Foxe tonight. But that might answer very well: a late-night summons…a story whispered in the dark. I’ll wear a disguise, and let him think I’m Lady So-and-So. He won’t be able to resist. We’ll have the front of the paper, a prime spot.”

“The ladies will flock to see the dress,” said Leonie. “We may even see some as early as tomorrow afternoon. I know for a fact that the Countess of Bartham reads the Spectacle devotedly.”

“The dress had better be on display, then,” Marcelline said. “It needs repairs. Jeffreys was able to clean it before the packet sailed, but she was too sick afterward to stitch the bodice. And I lost at least one papillon bow. What else?” She rubbed her head.

“We’re perfectly capable of seeing for ourselves what needs to be done,” Leonie said. “I’ll work on it while Sophy goes out to her clandestine meeting with Tom. You’d better go to bed.”

“You’ll want to be rested,” Sophy said. “We’ve got a—”

She broke off, and Marcelline looked up in time to catch the look Leonie sent Sophy.

“What?” Marcelline said. “What are you not telling me?”

“Really, Sophy, you might learn to curb your dramatic impulses,” Leonie said. “You can see she’s weary.”

“I did not say—”

“What haven’t you told me?” Marcelline said.

There was a pause. Her two younger sisters exchanged reproachful looks. Then Sophy said, “Someone is stealing your designs and giving them to Horrible Hortense.”

Marcelline looked to Leonie for confirmation.

“It’s true,” Leonie said. “We’ve a spy in our midst.”

On Monday night, Lady Clara Fairfax received a note from the Duke of Clevedon, informing her of his return to London and of his wish to call on her on Tuesday afternoon, if convenient.

The family were not usually at home to callers on Tuesday, but the usual rules did not apply to the Duke of Clevedon. For one thing, as her father’s former ward, his grace was considered a part of the family; for another, he was no better at following rules than her brothers were. Papa had forbidden Clevedon and Harry to go abroad three years ago, citing the raging cholera epidemic. They went anyway, leaving Papa no alternative but to shrug and say Clevedon needed to sow his wild oats, and since Longmore was bound to do damage somewhere, it might as well be in another country.

The Tuesday appointment was not, in short, inconvenient to anybody else, and Lady Clara told herself it wasn’t inconvenient to her, either. She had missed Clevedon, truly, especially when Longmore was behaving in a particularly obnoxious manner and in dire need of one of the duke’s crushing setdowns—or, better yet, his powerful left fist.

But Clevedon in person was a different proposition than Clevedon via letter.

Now that he was here, she wasn’t sure she was ready for him to be here.

But any doubts or shyness she’d felt vanished the instant he entered the drawing room on Tuesday. He wore the same affectionate smile she knew of old, and she smiled at him in the same way. She loved him dearly, always had, and she knew he loved her.

“Good grief, Clara, you might have warned me you’d grown,” he said, stepping back to look her over, quite as he used to do when he came home from school. “You must be two inches taller at least.”

He didn’t remember, she thought. She’d always been a tall girl. She hadn’t grown at all since last he saw her. He was used to French women, she supposed. The observation, which she wouldn’t have hesitated to put in a letter, she wouldn’t dream of uttering aloud, most certainly not in front of her mother.

“I should hope she is not such a gawky great Amazon as that,” said Mama. “Clara is the same as she ever was, only perhaps a little more womanly than you recollect.”

Mama meant more shapely. For a time, she’d claimed that Clevedon had “run away” because Clara was too thin. A man liked a woman to have some flesh on her—and she would never have a good figure if she would not eat.

It hadn’t occurred to Mama at the time that Grand-mama Warford had died only a few months earlier, and Clara, still grieving, had no appetite and did not particularly care what Clevedon thought of her figure.

But a great deal did not occur to Mama. She’d ordered tray upon tray of refreshments, and plied Clevedon with cake, which he took politely, though Mama ought to know by now he did not have a sweet tooth. And while she fed him sweets he didn’t want, she dropped what she thought were exceedingly subtle hints about Clara’s numerous beaux, with the obvious intent of stirring his competitive instincts.

In her mind’s eye, Clara saw herself jumping up, covering her mother’s mouth, and dragging her from the room. A tiny snort of laughter escaped her. Mama, happily, was too busy talking to hear it. But Clevedon noticed. He shot her a glance, and Clara rolled her eyes. He sent her a small, conspiratorial smile.

“I’m relieved I didn’t have to fight my way through hordes of your beaux, Clara,” he said. “I’m still a little tired, I confess, after the Channel tried so determinedly to drown me.”

“Good heavens!” Mama cried. “I read in the Times of a near shipwreck in the Channel. Were you aboard the same vessel?”

“I sincerely hope ours was the only one caught in that storm,” he said. “Apparently it took our mariners unawares.”

“I would not be too sure of that,” said Mama. “They’re supposed to know about the wind and that sort of thing. Those steam packets take too many risks, and as I have told Warford any number of times…” She went to repeat one of Papa’s harangues about the steam trade.

When she paused for breath, Clevedon said, “Indeed, I’m glad to be on English ground again, and to breathe English air. I drove here today because I woke up wishing to take a turn round Hyde Park in an open vehicle. If you would be so kind as to give your permission, perhaps I might persuade Clara to join me.”

Mama threw Clara a triumphant glance.

Clara’s heart began to pound.

He can’t be meaning to propose. Not yet.

But why should he not? And why should she be so alarmed? They’d always been meant to marry, had they not?

“I should like it above all things,” Clara said.

“An original design!” Lady Renfrew cried. She pushed the ball gown that lay on the counter at Marcelline. “You assured me it was an original design, your own creation. Then how, pray, did Lady Thornhurst come by precisely the same dress? And now what am I to do? You know I meant to wear the dress to Mrs. Sharpe’s soirée this very night. You cannot expect me to wear it now. Lady Thornhurst will attend—and she’ll recognize it. Everyone will recognize it! I’ll be mortified. And I know there isn’t time to make up another dress. I’ll have to wear the rose, which everyone has seen. But that isn’t the point. The point is, you assured me—”

A clatter behind her made her break off. She turned an indignant look in that direction. But the irritation vanished in an instant, and wonder took its place. “Good heavens! Is that it?”

Clever, clever Sophy. She’d stepped away from the temper tantrum to the other side of the shop. There stood a mannequin, wearing the gown Marcelline had worn to the comtesse’s ball. Sophy had knocked over a nearby footstool accidentally on purpose.

“I beg your pardon?” Marcelline said innocently.

She wasn’t sure what exactly Sophy had done to or with Tom Foxe. Perhaps it was better not to know. What mattered was, the tale—of Mrs. Noirot’s gown and her dancing with the Duke of Clevedon at the most exclusive ball of the Paris Season—had appeared in today’s Morning Spectacle.

Lady Renfrew was a reader, apparently, because she moved away from the counter to the famous poussière gown. When she’d first entered the shop, His Majesty might have been there, telling his favorite sailor jokes, and she wouldn’t have noticed. She’d been in too hysterical a state to heed anything but her own grievances and Marcelline, the ostensible cause of them.

“Is this the gown you wore to the ball in Paris, Mrs. Noirot?” her ladyship said.

Marcelline admitted that it was.

Lady Renfrew stared at it.

Marcelline and Sophy exchanged looks. They knew what the lady was thinking. The highest sticklers of the Fashion Capital of the World had admired this gown. Its designer stood, not in Paris, but a few feet away, behind the counter.

They let Lady Renfrew study it. She had a great deal of money, and she had taste—which was not the case with all of their customers. She was socially ambitious, which they understood perfectly well, for they were, too.

After Marcelline reckoned her ladyship’s meditations upon the wondrous dress had calmed her sufficiently, she said, “Was it precisely like?”

Lady Renfrew turned back to her, still looking slightly dazed. “I beg your pardon.”

“Was the gown Lady Thornhurst wore precisely like this one?” Marcelline ran a loving hand over the beautiful green gown lying rejected upon the counter.

Lady Renfrew returned to the counter. She considered the dress. “Not precisely. Now I think of it, her gown was not so—not so…” She trailed off, gesturing helplessly.

“If your ladyship would pardon me for speaking plainly, I should suggest that the other was not so well made,” Marcelline said. “What you saw was a mere imitation, of inferior construction. I’m sorry to say this is not the first case that has been brought to our attention.”

“There’s shocking skullduggery at work,” Sophy said. “We haven’t yet got to the bottom of it—but that is not your ladyship’s problem. You must have a magnificent gown for the ball tonight—and it must not be in any way like the other lady’s.”

“I shall remake this dress,” Marcelline said. “I shall remake it myself, in private. When I’m done, no one will see the smallest resemblance to the thing Lady Thornhurst wore. I call it a thing, your ladyship, because it would shame any proper modiste to call those abominations dresses.”

The shop bell tinkled.

Neither Marcelline nor Sophy so much as glanced toward the door. Lady Renfrew was their best customer to date. They could not afford to lose her. All their world—their very beings—revolved around her. Or so it must appear.

“I or one of my sisters will personally deliver it to you, at not later than seven o’clock this evening, at which time we shall make any final adjustments you require,” Marcelline continued. “The dress will be perfect.”

“Absolutely perfect,” said Sophy.

Lady Renfrew was not listening. Not being a shopkeeper in danger of losing her most profitable and prestigious customer, she did look over her shoulder at the door. And she froze.

“Well, then, here we are,” said a familiar, deep voice. “You may see for yourself, my dear. And there is the dress itself, by gad.”

And the Duke of Clevedon laughed.

His heart was beating in an embarrassingly erratic way.

He’d opened the door, and tried to keep his attention on Clara, but it was no use. He was talking to her, treating this visit to the shop like the joke he’d made out the entire Noirot Episode to be. Meanwhile, though, he couldn’t stop his gaze from sweeping the shop, dismissing everything until he found what he was looking for.

Noirot stood behind the counter, dealing with an apparently troublesome customer, and she did not at first look toward the door. Neither did the blonde standing nearby, who appeared to be a relative.

He quickly looked away from her, past the gaping customer, and spotted the mannequin wearing the dress. How could he forget that infernal dress? Then he had to laugh, because Noirot had done exactly as she’d promised. She’d taken charge of the gossip before it could take hold, and turned it to her own account.

Saunders had brought him a copy of today’s Morning Spectacle. There it was, impossible to miss on the front page: Noirot’s version of events in all its stunning audacity—and not very unlike the mocking advertisement she’d composed when he’d driven her home from the ball. He remembered the tone of her voice when she’d come to the last bit: Mrs. Noirot alone can claim the distinction of having danced with a duke.

Mrs. Noirot’s dark, silken hair was, as usual, slightly askew and contriving to appear dashing and elegant rather than untidy under a flimsy, fluttery bit of lace apparently passing for a cap. Her dress was a billowy white froth, adorned with intricate green embroidery. A lacy cape sort of thing floated about her neck and shoulders, fastened in front with two bows of the same shade of green as the embroidery.

He’d taken all that in with only a glance before making himself look away—but what was the good of looking away when it wanted only the one glance to etch her image in his mind?

“My goodness,” said Clara, calling his attention back to her, back to the dust-colored dress with its red bows and black lace. “This is…rather daring, is it not?”

“I know nothing of these matters,” he said. “I only know that every lady at the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball wanted this dress—and those were the leaders of Parisian Society. I shall not be at all surprised if one of them at least sends to London—Ah, but here she is.”

He’d done a creditable job, in the circumstances, of pretending not to be watching Noirot out of the corner of his eye, while all his being was aware of her every movement. He’d been aware of her stepping out from behind the counter and approaching them, seeming not at all in any hurry. She brought with her a light haze of scent, so familiar that he ached with recollection: her scent swarming about him while they waltzed, and when she’d kissed him, and when she’d climbed onto his lap in the carriage. He tried to make his mind call up images of her sick on the boat, but those only made him ache the more. For a time she’d been vulnerable. For a time, she’d needed him. For a time, he’d been important to her—or at least he’d believed himself to be.

Meanwhile, she wore a smile, a professional smile, and her attention was on Clara, not him.

He introduced her to Clara, and at the words “Lady Clara Fairfax,” a sharp little gasp emanated from the troublesome customer, who’d evidently been handed off to the blonde.

Noirot curtseyed. It was nothing like the outrageous thing she’d done at the ball, but light and polite and graceful, exactly the proper amount of deference in it.

“I thought Lady Clara would like to be among the first to view your ball gown,” he said, “before the curious hordes descend upon your shop.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Clara said.

“We wonder whether one ought to call the gown ‘daring,’” he said.

“It’s daring compared to the usual run of English fashion, admittedly,” said Noirot. “The color combination is not what English ladies are accustomed to. But pray keep in mind that I designed this dress for an event in Paris, not London.”

“And you designed it to attract attention,” he said.

“What was the point of attending that ball if not to attract attention?” she said.

“Indeed, I do wish you had been there, Clara,” he said, turning back to her. But she wasn’t there. She was circling the dress, warily, as though it were a sleeping tiger. He went on doggedly, “I thought it would be amusing, to discover whether Mrs. Noirot and I should be admitted or ejected. But the joke was on me.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Clara said. “How pretty it must have been, when you were dancing.” She looked at Clevedon, then Noirot, then quickly looked away, toward the counter. “Oh, what a beautiful shade of green!”

The troublesome customer laid her hand protectively over the dress. “This is mine,” she said. “It only wants…alterations.”

But Clara assured her she simply wanted to look at it, and in a minute or less, three heads were bent over the dress, and a conversation proceeded, in murmurs.

“Thank you,” Noirot said in an undertone.

“You hardly needed me to bring her,” he said, in the same low tone. He was hot, stupidly hot. “You’ll have half the beau monde on your doorstep by tomorrow, thanks to your stunning piece of puffery in the Morning Spectacle.”

She looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “I didn’t know you read the Spectacle.”

“Saunders does,” he said. “He brought it to me with my coffee.”

“In any event, while I’m happy to accommodate half the beau monde, your bride-to-be is the prize I covet.”

“I promise nothing,” he said. “I’ve only made the introduction—much as I did at the countess’s ball. As you see, I hold no grudges, though you’ve used me abominably.”

“I told you I was using you, practically from the beginning,” she said. “I told you as soon as I was sure I had your full attention.”

She was incorrigible. She was the most hard-hearted, calculating, aggravating…

And he was a dog, because he wanted her still, and there was Clara, the innocent, who’d been worried—worried!—because he hadn’t written to her for a week.

He had meant to get it over with, to put his life in order, and make his offer of marriage in the park, while it was yet quiet, before the ton descended. But they’d hardly left Warford House when she’d said, “What on earth happened to you, Clevedon? A week without a letter? I thought you’d broken your arm—for when do you not write?”

And so he’d told her, shaving very near the truth, and instead of driving to Hyde Park, he’d taken her here.

“I thought it best to tell Clara the truth, though not every everlasting detail,” he said. “I told her that you’d waylaid me at the opera, determined to use me to further your own mercenary ends, that you were the most provoking woman who ever lived, otherwise I should not have taken leave of my senses and dared you to attend the ball with me. And the rest was more or less as you put it in your clever little piece in the Morning Spectacle.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but as much as he could tell without hurting Clara. He’d told it in the way he believed would entertain her, the way of his letters. In any event, what he’d told her was no more or less than the truth from Noirot’s point of view: All she’d ever wanted him for was to get Clara into her shop.

She’d been right, too, drat her: Clara needed her. He had only to look at Noirot and the blonde relative and even the troublesome customer to realize that Clara was ill dressed. He’d be hard put to explain the difference in words—women’s clothes were merely decoration to him—yet he could see that, compared to these women, she looked like a provincial.

He wished he had not been able to see it. The difference made him angry, as though someone had deliberately tried to make a fool of Clara. But it was natural to be angry, he told himself. He’d been protective of her from the moment he’d met her, when she was a little girl, probably younger than Noirot’s daughter.

Her daughter!

“I leave the rest to you,” he said. “I don’t doubt you’ll manage matters with your usual aplomb.”

More audibly he said, “Clara, my dear girl, I did not bring you to shop. You know I loathe shopping with women above all things. At any rate, it’s long past time I took you home. Come away from the fascinating dress. Make Longmore bring you again another day, if you want Mrs. Noirot to dress you.” Then, for the troublesome customer’s benefit as well as to ease his conscience, he added, “I see no reason you should not, as you won’t find a better dressmaker in London—or Paris, for that matter—but do shop without me, pray.”

Chapter Eight

Mrs. Thomas takes this opportunity of observing, that she hopes the inconvenience she has always sustained by the imposition of Milliners coming to her Rooms, under assumed characters, to take her Patterns, will not be repeated.

La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for November 1807

Clevedon had already handed Clara into the carriage. Resisting the impulse to look back at the shop—as though he’d gain anything by that—he was about to join her, when he felt a tug at the hem of his coat. He whipped round, ready to collar a pickpocket.

At first he saw nothing. Then he looked down.

A pair of enormous blue eyes looked up at him. “Good afternoon, your grace,” said Erroll.

A nursemaid, out of breath, hurried to the carriage. “Miss, you ought not to—oh, do come away.” She took the child’s hand, muttering apologies, and tried to lead her away.

A hard, stubborn look came over Erroll’s face, and she wrenched her hand from the maid’s. “I only wished to say good day to his grace,” she said. “It would be rude to pass by without saying a word.”

“Which you was not passing by, only broke away from me and ran halfway down the street, as you know—”

“Good afternoon, Erroll,” said Clevedon.

She had turned to regard the nursemaid with a baleful eye. At his greeting, though, the thunderclouds vanished, and she beamed upon him a sunshine so pure and clear that, for a moment, he couldn’t bear it.

All those years ago…his little sister, Alice, shedding sunshine…

“It is a fine day, is it not?” she said. “A fine day to drive in an open carriage. If I had a carriage like that, I should drive in Hyde Park on such a day.”

He wrenched himself back to the present.

She was beautifully dressed, as one might expect. A little straw bonnet, adorned with heaps of ribbons and lace, set off prettily a precise miniature of one of those coat-like dresses women wore. What did they call them? The same as a man’s type of frock coat, wasn’t it? Redingotes, that was the term. Erroll’s was pink. A long row of black frog fastenings down the front gave it a vaguely—and on her, comically—military look.

“Yes, miss,” said the maid, “but the gentleman was getting ready to leave, in case you didn’t notice, which he has a lady with him as well.”

“I noticed, Millie,” said Erroll. “I’m not blind. But I can’t speak to the lady, because we haven’t been introduced. Don’t you know anything?”

Millie’s face went scarlet. “That’s quite enough, Miss Lu—Miss Er—Miss Noirot. I never heard such impertinence, and I’m sure the lady and the gentleman never did, neither. Come along now. Your mama will be vexed with you for pestering customers.” She tugged at the little gloved hand. Erroll’s countenance changed again: eyes narrowing, mouth tightening into a stubborn line. She refused to budge, and the maid seemed less than eager to try to make her budge.

Clevedon couldn’t blame the servant. While he did not approve of children disobeying those in charge of them, he was not entirely sure what one ought to do in such cases. In any event, it was not his place to interfere.

“Oh, Clevedon, don’t be obtuse,” Clara said. “It’s Miss Noirot—the dressmaker’s daughter, I take it?”

The maid nodded, biting her lip.

“Yes, it is,” he said, and marveled all over again that she was Noirot’s daughter, that Noirot was a mother. Where the devil was the father? How could he abandon…but men did that all the time. They carelessly brought children into the world and carelessly treated them. It was none of his concern…and perhaps, after all, the poor fellow was dead.

“Well, then, Mrs. Noirot knows you,” Clara said. “She won’t mind your taking her daughter up for a moment, and letting her hold the reins.”

She turned to Millie, who was sending panicked looks at the shop door. “You needn’t be anxious,” Clara said. “Miss Noirot will be perfectly safe. His grace used to let me hold the reins when I was a child. He will not let the carriage run away with her.”

For an instant, the old nightmare returned: the lurid scene his imagination had painted in boyhood, of a carriage overturning into a ditch, his mother and sister screaming, then the dreadful silence.

What was wrong with him? Old ghosts. So stupid.

Clara had always been safe with him. His father’s recklessness had taught him to be careful.

Even so, this child…

Erroll’s murderous expression instantly melted into childish eagerness and her eyes widened another degree. “May I, truly, your grace?” she said. “May I hold the reins?”

“Lady Clara says you may, and I dare not contradict her,” he said.

He wasn’t sure what possessed Clara at present. Still, he knew she was fond of children in general and had some notion how to manage them. In her letters she’d described numerous amusing incidents with young cousins.

He was not used to small children—not anymore, at any rate—and this was no ordinary child. But what choice had he now? His best groom, Ford, held the horses and he could be counted on to control the mettlesome pair.

In any event, how was Clevedon to deny the child the treat, when she was trembling with excitement?

He lifted her up—the small, quivering body weighed a shocking nothing—and set her next to Clara. Then he climbed up into his seat, took the child onto his lap, took up the reins, and showed her how to hold them to go straight. She watched and listened avidly. Soon her trembling abated, and before long she had the reins threaded between her little gloved fingers. She looked up, smiling proudly at him, and he smiled back. He couldn’t help it.

“How quick and clever you are,” Clara said. “You got the hang of it in no time at all. I thought you would.”

Erroll turned from him to send her beatific smile upward to Clara—and melt her ladyship’s heart, as was plain enough to see. Not that this was any difficult accomplishment. Clara was soft-hearted, and Erroll, it had become abundantly clear, was a calculating creature. Like her mother.

“How does one make them go?” she said.

He didn’t have time to decide what to answer.

Noirot burst from the shop. “Oh, the wretched child,” she said. “Has she wheedled you into taking her up? She’ll persuade you to drive her to Brighton, if you don’t look out. Come down, Erroll. His grace and her ladyship have business elsewhere.” She put up her hands. Torn between reluctance and relief, Clevedon yielded the girl to her mother.

He ought to feel relieved—he was no longer used to children and found them tedious, in fact. But she…ah, well, she was a cunning little minx.

He noticed that Erroll did not fight with her mother as she’d done with the maid. Docile or not, though, Noirot didn’t trust her. She didn’t set her down but carried her back into the shop.

He watched them go, Erroll waving goodbye to him over her mother’s shoulder.

He waved back, smiling, yet he was watching the sway of Noirot’s hips as she moved along, apparently unhampered by her daughter’s weight. To him, the weight was nothing, but Noirot was not the great, hulking fellow he was, nor was she built in the Junoesque mold, like Clara…whose presence he belatedly recalled.

He turned away hastily and gathered the reins. A moment later, they were on their way.

Clara had watched those swaying hips, too, and she’d watched him watching them.

She’d felt the atmosphere change when she and Clevedon entered the shop. She’d felt him tense, in the way of a hound scenting quarry. When the dressmaker had approached, the tension between them was palpable.

“A fetching little girl,” she said. That was the only thing she could safely say. The child was adorable. Clevedon’s? But no, she’d discerned no resemblance at all, and the Angier looks were distinctive.

“I dare not come again,” he said. “Next time Miss Noirot will wish to drive. And I’ll have you to thank. I shouldn’t have taken her up—I’m sure her mother wasn’t pleased. But she could hardly rebuke me. Shopkeepers must consider their livelihood before their own feelings.”

“Mrs. Noirot didn’t seem angry. She seemed amused, rather.”

“That’s her way. It’s her business to make herself pleasing. I told you how she had the ladies at the ball eating out of her hand. But never mind. It doesn’t signify. I have no reason to come again, in any event. You’ll persuade Longmore or one of your other brothers to bring you. Or come on your own, with Davis.”

Davis was Clara’s bulldog of a maid.

“Or with Mama,” she said.

“What a nonsensical thing to say!” he said. “Your mother would never approve of this shop. It’s too fashionable, and she seems determined that you should wear the most—” He broke off, his expression taut.

“Determined I should wear the most what?” Clara said.

“Nothing,” he said. “I slept ill last night, and I’ve spent too long in a dressmaker’s shop. Women’s chatter has addled my wits. What were you three conspiring about, by the way?”

“Clevedon.”

“You three were bent over the green dress you admired, talking in whispers,” he said.

She glanced up at his face. He was looking straight ahead, his handsome face set in hard lines.

What a state he was in!—a contained fury that made the air about him seem to thrum even while he appeared outwardly calm.

Clevedon wasn’t like this—not the Clevedon she knew, the man she’d recognized when he’d entered the drawing room and smiled in his old, fond way. This was a stranger.

She looked away, to gaze blankly at the passing scene while she tried to form an answer. She hardly knew what the other two women had been saying about the green dress. She’d been trying to hear what he was saying to Mrs. Noirot. She’d been trying to watch them without appearing to do so.

“I didn’t quite understand,” she said. “It was a beautiful dress, I thought, but they seemed to be discussing how to remake it.” She tried desperately to remember what exactly they’d said, but she had only half-listened, and now her mind was whirling.

She was not naïve. She knew Clevedon had affairs. Longmore did, too. But she’d never seen her brother in a state anything like Clevedon’s when Mrs. Noirot approached them. She’d been trying to make sense of that, when he snapped about Mama and…what Clara wore?

“I think…” She thought frantically. “I received the impression that something was wrong with the dress, but not wrong with the dress.”

“Clara, that makes no sense.”

Really, he could be as irritating as any of her brothers. She said goodbye to her patience. “If it’s so important to you, you’d better ask Mrs. Noirot,” she said. “What did you mean about Mama and what I wear?”

“Damnation,” he said.

“You told me I ought to shop there, but you said I must not take Mama.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I should not have said that.”

“Oh, come, Clevedon. When did you ever mince words with me? What makes you so missish all of a sudden?”

“Missish?”

“So delicate. One of the things I have always liked about you is your refusing to treat me like an imbecile female. In your letters, you speak your mind. Or so I thought. Well, perhaps you don’t tell me everything.”

“Good God, certainly not. And I shall not tell you where to have your dresses made. It’s of no concern to me.”

“You may be sure that I shall take care not to ask you to accompany me to a dressmaker ever again,” she said. “It puts you in the vilest temper.”

Some hours later

“The little wretch!” Marcelline said, when they were closing up the shop that evening. “I knew she wouldn’t forget his fine carriage or his fine self.”

“My dear, she can’t help it,” said Sophy. “It’s in her blood. She can spot a mark at fifty paces.”

“He didn’t seem to mind,” said Leonie. She’d come out into the showroom in time to see Clevedon and Lady Clara leave.

All three sisters had had time to observe Lucie/Erroll’s antics through the shop windows. It was clear in an instant that Millie had lost control of her, but it had taken Marcelline precious minutes to extract herself from Lady Renfrew and go out to collect her wayward child.

Sitting on his lap, the schemer, and holding the ribbons! She’d be expecting to drive her own carriage next.

“Of course he didn’t mind,” Marcelline said. “She was at her winsome best, and even the Duke of Clevedon can’t help but succumb.” Meanwhile, she, more cynical and calculating than he could ever be, had not been able to steel her heart against the sweet, indulgent smile he bestowed upon her daughter.

“She made sure to shed some winsomeness on Lady Clara, I noticed,” said Sophy.

“Yes,” Marcelline said.

“He did bring her,” Leonie said. “And not a moment too soon.”

They hadn’t had time until now to talk of the day’s events, because the day had been exceedingly eventful.

Marcelline had had her hands full, making the changes to Lady Renfrew’s dress. She’d had to do this in secret, of all things—upstairs, away from the seamstresses, as though she were forging passports. Meanwhile Sophy and Leonie, in between trying to calm two other irate customers, had to dance attendance on the steady trickle of curious ladies who’d come mainly to stare at the famous gown.

The curious ladies gaped at the dress and peered into every corner of the shop, looking for Marcelline. They made the sisters show them lengths of fabric and take out of the drawers any number of buttons, ribbons, beads, feathers, fur, and other trim.

They left without buying anything.

At present, Sophy and Marcelline were restoring order to the drawers of trim and accessories. Leonie, as she did every evening, was taking an inventory of the showroom and trying to deduce which of their visitors had made off with a length of black satin ribbon, eleven jet buttons, and three cambric handkerchiefs.

“His timing couldn’t have been better,” Marcelline said. “If he hadn’t turned up while Lady Renfrew was in the shop, I think we might have lost her forever.”

She told herself to concentrate on that, and never mind the savage beating of her heart when she’d heard his voice. He’d come in the nick of time, and that was what mattered. It was all very well to offer to remake a dress to appease an irate customer, but customers had no idea of the amount of work involved. Meanwhile, into Lady Renfrew’s mind would enter poisonous doubts about Marcelline’s advertised ability to create “unique styles, designed for the individual, not the general.”

“That doesn’t bear thinking of,” said Leonie. “Lady Clara is all very well, but we haven’t got her yet. At present Lady Renfrew is our best customer. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Lady Renfrew’s gown had been delivered precisely at seven o’clock—a few last, minor alterations had taken not half an hour—and Sophy had left a mollified customer behind her.

“She’ll be back,” Sophy said. “The whole time I was there, she talked about the duke and Lady Clara. You know that’s all she’ll talk about tonight at Mrs. Sharp’s. She’ll be quoting him, you may be sure: ‘You won’t find a better dressmaker in London—or Paris, for that matter.’” She mimicked Clevedon’s bored voice and his accent—the unmistakable sound of the upper reaches of the privileged classes.

“We can only hope she was too busy being impressed with his grandeur to notice the way he looked at Marcel-line,” said Leonie.

“Like a hungry wolf,” said Sophy.

Marcelline went hot all over. She still hadn’t shaken off the feelings he’d stirred, And with what? A look. The sound of his voice. She still felt his melting green gaze upon her. She still heard the husky intimacy of his voice. Had she been free to do so, had she nothing and no one else to consider but herself, she would have led his provoking self away into one of the shop’s back rooms and had her way with him, and there would be an end of it.

But she wasn’t free, on a dozen counts. His beautiful bride-to-be stood a few yards away, across the shop, and the easy way he and she conversed made their mutual affection clear. Marcelline had pointed this out to herself. She’d planted Lucie’s image firmly in her mind, too. And her own parents, the living example of what happened to a family when the adults thought only of themselves, their whims and passions.

She had no morals to speak of, but her survival instincts were acute. Succumbing to Clevedon was a mistake that would undermine the respect she’d worked day and night to earn. That would destroy her business and, with it, her family.

Even so, when she’d looked up into his eyes, and felt as much as heard the sound of his voice, her brain clouded over and her willpower ebbed away.

Such a fool she was! She need only recall how Charlie had looked at her, and the husky longing in his voice…

And where had that led?

“That’s the way Clevedon always looks at women,” she said. “That’s the look of an expert seducer. Engrave it upon your mind, if you don’t want to end up on your back, or against a wall, losing your maidenhead before you’d quite meant to.”

“He didn’t look at Lady Clara that way,” Leonie said.

“Why should he?” Marcelline said. “Everything between them is settled or as good as settled. He takes her for granted, the coxcomb. But that’s their problem. If she’s wise, she’ll find a way to get his full attention. It’s not that difficult. Meanwhile, we have a serious problem.” She glanced at the door leading to the workroom, now empty, the seamstresses having gone home at their usual time.

“Well,” said Leonie, “I have my suspicions.”

On Tuesday night, Mrs. Downes met with the seamstress at the usual time at the usual place.

The seamstress gave her a pattern she’d copied.

“That’s all?” Mrs. Downes said. “You promised me a book of patterns, with details.”

“And you’ll get it,” the seamstress said. “But they were in an uproar over that green dress of Lady Renfrew’s, and then we were run ragged, fetching this and that for all the ladies coming to look at the dress Mrs. Noirot wore to that ball.”

Mrs. Downes knew about the poussière dress, and the excitement it had stirred among the ladies. Her own customers had been talking about it, right in front of her!

But worse even than this indignity was the news of the Duke of Clevedon taking Lady Clara Fairfax to the accursed shop.

“I want those patterns,” she said. “And you’d better get them soon.”

“I’d better!” the seamstress said. “Or else what? I’m the one doing your dirty work.”

“And I’m the one losing customers to that French whore. If you can’t do what you promised, I’ll tell her how you came to me and offered to spy for me. Then you’ll be out on the street. There won’t be any fifty pounds. I will give you something, though, like your mistress will: a bad name. And you won’t ever get work in any respectable shop again.”

On Wednesday night, the Duke of Clevedon was among the last to arrive at the Earl of Westmoreland’s assembly. Had he tried to enter Almack’s at that hour, he’d have found the doors firmly shut. But Almack’s weekly assemblies had not yet begun, and in spite of this being a much livelier gathering, he danced only once with Lady Clara, then adjourned to the card room for the remainder of the evening.

On Thursday, he spent a quarter hour at the Countess of Eddingham’s rout before departing for White’s Club, where he played cards until dawn.

On Friday, he dined at Warford House. That night he couldn’t escape to play cards. Instead, he pretended to enjoy himself, though it was clear as clear to Clara that he couldn’t wait for the evening to be over.

He wasn’t unkind to her. He hadn’t said a cross word to her since Tuesday. But he was remote and unhappy, and she’d heard he was losing shocking amounts at cards. Even allowing for the usual gossipy exaggerations, he was playing more recklessly than was his custom.

Then, on Saturday, at a ball, Lady Gorrell, pretending not to see Clara standing well within hearing range, described in lurid detail the contents of the letter she’d received that day from her sister-in-law in Paris.

Monday

Two sharp knocks at the closed shop door startled the Noirot sisters. It was scarcely nine o’clock in the morning, and while they and their seamstresses usually toiled from nine to nine, the shop itself usually did not open until late in the forenoon. There wasn’t much point in opening the showroom early when few of their customers rose before noon.

The question was whether they’d have any more customers. If they didn’t stop their traitor soon, they wouldn’t have a shop to open.

While Leonie had her suspicions, so far they hadn’t any proof, and various ruses had failed. Early this morning they’d set a trap. If this one worked, they’d discover the culprit by tomorrow. Meanwhile, they could only wait, and seethe, and go about their business in the usual way.

At present that meant Marcelline, Sophy, and Leonie were arranging shawls and lengths of fabric upon the counters in a seemingly careless array meant to entice.

Early hour or not, business was business, and one must put a cheerful face on it.

Leonie went to the door and opened it.

Lady Clara Fairfax, red-faced, sailed over the threshold, a square-jawed maid following close behind. Ignoring Leonie’s greeting, her ladyship made straight for Marcelline. Gliding toward her with a smooth greeting and a smoother curtsey, Marcelline asked in what way she might serve her ladyship.

“You might serve me by telling me the truth,” Lady Clara said. “On Saturday night, I overheard a most astonishing tale—one I could hardly credit—”

She broke off, belatedly remembering the servant at hand. “Davis, wait in the carriage,” she said.

Davis sent a glower round the shop, alighting on each sister in turn, then went out, slamming the door behind her.

Lady Clara took a breath, let it out, and began again. “Mrs. Noirot, I happened to overhear an outrageous story regarding a gentleman of my acquaintance—a gentleman who accompanied me to this shop not a week ago.”

Marcelline did not utter a single one of the sarcastic responses, flippant rejoinders, interruptions, distractions, or violent oaths that came to mind. She was a professional. Her expression became one of polite interest.

“Before you leap to any conclusions,” Lady Clara went on, “let me assure you that I have not come here in a jealous spirit. That would be absurd, in his case. I’m not blind, and I know—That is, I have brothers, and they think they’re more discreet than they are. Oh.” She took out a handkerchief, and dabbed her eyes. “Oh.”

This was an alarming turn of events. Anger, outrage—perfectly usual and understandable.

Tears—Oh, Gemini!

“My dear—my lady.” Marcelline took her by the elbow and led her to a chair. “Sophy, bring her ladyship a glass of wine.”

“No,” Lady Clara said. “I do not need wine.”

“Brandy, then,” said Marcelline.

“Well, perhaps,” said Lady Clara.

Sophy went out.

Lady Clara gave a little sob, then stiffened, visibly composing herself. “I don’t cry. I never cry. I’m not like that. But he’s the dearest friend I have.” Her blue gaze lifted to Marcelline. “I can’t let you hurt him,” she said.

Noirots were born unencumbered with consciences. Even if she’d owned one, Marcelline had not done anything so very wrong as to cause it to trouble her.

She told herself she was untroubled, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. After all, this was an agreeable young lady, who had not treated Marcelline or her sisters other than politely—which was far from the case with most of their customers. Furthermore, it was clear she truly loved Clevedon, and it was very true that Marcelline felt sorry for her on this count, though she knew that was completely absurd. Lady Clara was the daughter of a marquess. She was on the brink of marrying a duke, and looking forward to an income of at least one hundred thousand pounds a year, perhaps double that. Marcelline’s shop, along with their upstairs living quarters, would easily fit into his London townhouse’s servant quarters, and still leave room for his army of servants.

Meanwhile, the Noirots were on the brink of being destroyed by an incompetent competitor.

While Marcelline tried to harden her heart, Leonie—the least sentimental of three unsentimental siblings—said, “Pray, put your mind at rest, my lady. None of us wish to hurt any gentleman except in the pocketbook. In that regard, naturally, we should like to do as much damage as possible.”

Lady Clara looked over at her. “That is not what I heard.”

“I daresay not,” said Leonie. “But I don’t think that anyone in your circle quite understands the degree to which we are mercenary.”

Ah, yes. Disarming honesty. That was the best tack with this one. Leave it to hardheaded Leonie to strike the right note when her elder sister was temporarily unhinged.

“My sister is right,” said Marcelline. “It’s completely incomprehensible to persons of rank. You never think of money. We think of little else.”

“Well, then, if it is money,” said Lady Clara, “I shall give you as much as ever you want, if only you would go away, without letting him find out, to a place where he can’t find you.”

“This is very dramatic,” said Marcelline.

“Brandy is definitely called for,” said Sophy, entering with the Noirots’ sovereign remedy for all troubles. The brandy glowed within a small crystal decanter that sat, along with a matching glass, on a pretty tray. There she’d set out a delectable offering of biscuits, cakes, and cheese. Some customers spent hours in the shop, and one must be prepared to feed them—and ply them with drink, if necessary.

Lady Clara sipped her brandy without blinking and with obvious appreciation. Given the early hour, this small gesture went a great way in increasing the Noirot sisters’ respect for her—which was highly inconvenient, when they were all trying to maintain a coldly professional and mercenary detachment.

“I know these things are always exaggerated,” she said. “But I know as well that there’s truth in the tales. I’ve seen with my own eyes. He’s changed.”

“With respect, your ladyship has not seen the gentleman for three years,” Leonie said. “Men change. They’re the most changeable creatures.”

“He’s moody and bored and remote,” said her ladyship. “No matter where he is, he’s absent. The only time he was present, truly present, was when we came here. I saw.” She waved her glass at Marcelline. “I saw the way he looked at you, Mrs. Noirot. And so what must I think, when I hear about a dark adventuress who got her hooks into the D—into a certain gentleman. Or that he had pursued this exotic at the opera, at Longchamp, at the gaming hells—with half the world as witness—before he so far took leave of his reason as to bring this object of his obsession—”

“This sounds like something I could have written,” Sophy murmured.

“—bring his obsession to the Comtesse de Chirac’s annual ball. And this was not because his grace thought it a great joke to bring her, but because his—his lover—his paramour had threatened to kill herself if he didn’t.”

“Kill herself?” all three sisters echoed. They looked at one another. Their eyebrows went up a barely perceptible degree. This was the only outward sign of their incredulity—this and Leonie’s having to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“Nor was this the first time this woman had made threats,” Lady Clara went on. “I heard of violent scenes all over Paris, culminating in a duel with the Marquis d’Émilien. This shocked even the most jaded of jaded Parisians. Shortly after grievously wounding the marquis in the Bois de Boulogne, the love-maddened gentleman pursued the young woman from Paris in the dead of night. In the course of this pursuit, he threatened the British consul and every other official he encountered. He was so deranged, it appears, that he believed they were deliberately obstructing his departure from France.”

They were all accustomed to playing cards. This was why Sophy and Leonie did not fall down laughing, and why Marcelline, who was growing increasingly exasperated, had no trouble maintaining her politely interested expression. As though she hadn’t enough problems, with Dowdy actively working to destroy her business. Now Marcelline was to be torn to pieces by the scandalmongers, merely because some people had seen what looked like flirtation! It was absurd—but then, the high ranks were not famous for their rationality.

She ought to be amused, but she was alarmed. Rumors alone could destroy her business. Though it wasn’t hard to seem unmoved outwardly, she was having trouble deciding what to say.

Leonie, who didn’t have her problems, had no such difficulty. “Clearly, members of the higher orders cannot count,” she said. “If they would only count the number of days my sister had been in Paris—let alone the date when she first met the gentleman—they’d realize this is utter nonsense. Their first encounter occurred on the fourteenth of this month. I remember the date, because it headed the letter she wrote to us the same night, announcing the fact. That leaves the time from the night of the fourteenth to the early morning of the seventeenth, when my sister left Paris. How, I ask your ladyship, could all these events occur in little more than two full days?”

Leave it to Leonie to reduce emotion to numbers, Marcelline thought. And how little those numbers seemed. A few days. That was all the time Clevedon had needed to damage Marcelline’s brain and jab thorns into her heart and plant dreams in her mind, so that she was uneasy by day and by night.

She gathered her wits. “Meanwhile he’d had so many months to live among the Parisians,” she said. “They’re the ones you ought to blame, if you want scapegoats. You’ve never been to Paris, I believe?”

“Not yet,” said Lady Clara.

“Then you’ve no notion how different it is from London.”

“I know what Paris is like,” said Lady Clara. “Cleve—The gentleman wrote to me faithfully—until, that is, he met you. It’s no good denying it. When I asked him why he hadn’t written—I could see he had not broken his arm—he told me what had happened.”

“And what, precisely, was that?” Marcelline said. “It can’t have been an incriminating tale. Last week you accompanied him here in cheerful spirits. You didn’t look at all as though you wanted to kill him. Or me.”

“He told me he’d met a vastly provoking dressmaker,” Lady Clara said. “But he’s a man, and as articulate as he can be in letters, his vocabulary, in matters of emotion, is less than clear. What he meant—and pray don’t confuse me with an idiot, as you know it perfectly well—what he meant was that Mrs. Noirot was provocative. What he meant was, he was fixed on her.”

As though he did nothing to fix me on him, Marcelline thought. As though he’s a victim of my wiles—or demonic powers, more like it.

“I asked him directly whether he was infatuated,” Lady Clara continued, “and he laughed and said that seemed the likeliest explanation.”

Business, Marcelline reminded herself. This was business. This was the customer she’d wanted. It was trying to lure Lady Clara into her shop that had led Marcelline into so much trouble. And here the lady was. In the shop.

She said, “How could he help it? Only look at me.”

She gestured in the graceful way she so often did, her hand sweeping downward from her neckline.

Lady Clara looked, truly looked, finally, at what Marcelline was wearing.

Pink and green, one of her favorite color combinations, this time in silk batiste, with a deeply plunging pelerine of the same material, over gossamer puffed sleeves and a delicately pleated chemisette.

“My goodness,” said Lady Clara.

Marcelline resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. Lady Clara was as oblivious as Clevedon. They noticed nothing about a dress until one forcibly called their attention to it.

“This isn’t half what you would have seen in Paris,” Marcelline said. “There I was obliged to exert myself, because I was competing with the most stylish women in the world, who’ve made a high art of attracting men. That is your ladyship’s true rival: Paris. I’m nothing. If the gentleman is bored and remote, it’s because the women about him at present don’t know how to get his attention.”

She let her gaze slide from the top of Lady Clara’s dull bonnet, over the white crepe dress trimmed in black—mainly ribbon and a little embroidery but not a stitch of lace in sight—and downward, with a small, despairing sigh, to the hem. The style was—well, it hadn’t any style. As to the craftsmanship: In a drunken stupor, the least talented of Marcelline’s six seamstresses could do better than this.

Sophy and Leonie drew nearer to Marcelline, their gazes moving in the same pitying way over the dress.

“The Court has been wearing mourning for the Emperor of Austria, then the Prince of Portugal,” Lady Clara said defensively. “We’ve only recently changed from black.”

“You cannot wear this shade of white,” Marcelline said. “It ruins your complexion.”

“Such a complexion!” Sophy said. “Translucent. Women would weep and gnash their teeth in envy, were you not wearing a white that drains away all the vitality.”

“The black trim can’t be helped,” said Leonie. “But must it be so heavy?”

“It isn’t required to be crepe, certainly,” said Marcel-line. “Where is the rule that says one may not use a thinner ribbon, of satin? And perhaps some knots—so. Or a jet lozenge. And a little silver, perhaps here and here, to brighten it. But above all, never this shade of white!”

“You’re not making the most of your figure,” said Sophy.

“I’m big,” Lady Clara said.

“You’re statuesque,” said Leonie. “What I should give to have your height. What I should give to be able to look a man in the eye.”

“Mainly, I’m looking down at them,” said Lady Clara. “Except for my brothers and Cl—the gentleman.”

“All the better,” said Sophy. “A man ought to look up to a woman, literally or figuratively, because that is the proper mode of worship, and worship is the very least he can do. It doesn’t matter what her height is. You’re the most beautiful young woman in London—”

“That’s doing it too brown,” said Lady Clara. She drank more brandy. “You’re wicked, the three of you.”

She was not wrong.

“Perhaps one might see at the theater a whore who seems prettier,” said Sophy. “But that’s only because she makes the most of herself and of certain cosmetic aids. You, however, have a deep, true English beauty that will only make you handsomer as time passes. It’s disgraceful and ungrateful of you not to make the most of the gifts with which you’ve been blessed.”

“You look big,” said Marcelline, “because the dress is matronly. You look big because it’s carelessly cut and ill sewn. Puckers! My six-year-old daughter can sew better than this. I say nothing of the overall design, which seems to have been adopted from fashions current in Bath among the grandmother set. The analogy is fitting, since so many drink the waters for their health, and this shade of white makes you look bilious. Let me show you the shade of white you ought to wear. Sophy, fetch a hand mirror. Leonie, the soft white organdy.”

“I did not come here to buy a dress,” Lady Clara said.

“You came because you want to bring the gentleman back from wherever it is he’s gone to,” said Marcelline. “We’re going to show you how to do it.”

Chapter Nine

We have seen some robes of white crape prepared for the change of mourning; the corsages drooped, and retained in the centre of the bosom, and at the sides by knots of black satin riband, with a jet lozenge in the centre of each.

La Belle Assemblèe, fashions for the month of April 1835

Warford House Tuesday afternoon

Her ladyship is at home, your grace, but she is engaged,” Timms the butler said.

“Engaged?” Clevedon repeated. “Isn’t this Tuesday?”

The Warfords were not at home to visitors on Tuesdays. That was why he’d called today rather than yesterday or tomorrow. On Tuesday he need not make his way through the scrum of Clara’s beaux, the infatuated puppies who swarmed about her at social events. Whenever he approached, he was disagreeably aware of casting a pall over the activities, whatever they were: fellows composing odes to her eyes and such, he supposed. Squabbling over who had which dance. And competing, no doubt, in point of fashion—which was amusing, since Clara didn’t care about fashion. She could not tell one lapel from another, let alone evaluate the quality of a waistcoat.

Still, he might have mistaken the day. He had drunk more than agreed with him last night, and his head still ached. Perhaps it would be better to come back on the correct day. Maybe the damned sun wouldn’t be shining so brightly then.

After confirming that this was indeed Tuesday, Timms apologetically led Clevedon to the small drawing room to wait while he sent a footman to inform Lady Clara of his grace’s arrival.

Unaccustomed to be made to wait when he called anywhere, least of all at Warford House, Clevedon grew restive.

It was exceedingly odd, Clara being engaged on a Tuesday afternoon. He was sure he’d told her—on Saturday, wasn’t it?—he’d take her for a drive today.

He needed to settle this marriage business today. Already a week had passed since he’d decided to put his life in order and make his formal offer. After that, they’d put all in train for a wedding at the earliest opportunity.

The trip to the dressmaker’s had thrown him off balance. Seeing Noirot again…and the child…

He’d been unable to collect his thoughts, let alone remember what he’d meant to say to Clara. The time hadn’t felt…right. He and Clara needed to get used to each other again, he’d told himself. Hadn’t Longmore said so?

But now it seemed they’d have to get used to each other after they were married. Now a formal—and short—engagement seemed the best way to put an end to speculation and gossip.

He’d heard rumors of a mad tale that had traveled from Paris, and would, he knew, reach Warford House before long. Last week he’d confided in Clara—to a point. He knew she was too sensible a girl to fret over idle gossip. In her letters, hadn’t she ridiculed one after another piece of scandal making the London rounds? Her mother, though, was another matter altogether.

When Lady Warford heard the rumors, she’d throw one of her fits. She’d say nothing to Clevedon directly. Instead, she’d harass her family, carrying on about the shame of Clara’s being ignored in favor of a dressmaker, a milliner, a common shopkeeper! She’d grow more and more hysterical until one of the men took Clevedon to task.

In Paris, only last month, he’d borne one awkward visit from Longmore—instigated, no doubt, by Lady Warford. Clevedon doubted his friend was any more eager than he to repeat the experience.

He had nothing to feel anxious or guilty about, he told himself. He’d done nothing improper since he’d returned to London. Before that didn’t count.

Dreams, however torrid, were nothing to feel in the least uneasy about. Fantasies were nothing more than that. Men had fantasies regarding women, all sorts of women, suitable and unsuitable. They had them all the time, waking and sleeping.

As to the discontent: That would stop after he was married.

But his mind, not shy in the least, shied away from contemplating his wedding night.

Where the devil was the footman? Why hadn’t Timms gone himself? What on earth was Clara about? With whom was she engaged on a Tuesday? Had he not told her he would come? He was sure he had…but his mind strayed from time to time—and how could he recollect now, with this vile headache?

He realized he was pacing. He stopped, and told himself he was out of sorts. This was not a suitable humor for a casual call, let alone a momentous one.

She had something else to do. He must have forgotten to tell her about driving today. Or she’d forgotten.

He’d see her tomorrow night at Almack’s. When he did, he’d make an appointment to speak to her.

No, he ought to speak to her father first. That was the proper way to go about it. He’d return another day, when Lord Warford was at home. On Tuesdays his lordship customarily visited one of his charities.

Clevedon left the drawing room. Having run tame in this house since boyhood, he knew every inch of it. Best to slip out quietly, before he ran into other family members.

He strode to the antechamber nearby, where he knew he’d find his hat, gloves, and walking stick.

He entered, and his heart began to beat very hard.

It happened before he was fully conscious of what had set it going.

A bonnet. An absurd conglomeration of ribbons and flowers and feathers, it sat on the table where the servants customarily put visitors’ hats and such.

He stared at it for a moment, then started for the door. But there was something…in the air.

He paused at the door. Then he turned back and walked to the bonnet. He picked it up, and brought it close to his face. The scent, the familiar, tormenting scent swam about him, as light and as inescapable as a gossamer net: the faint scent of jasmine, mingled with the scent of her hair and her skin.

Noirot.

He set the bonnet down.

He stepped out into the corridor.

A maid passed, carrying a heap of clothing.

He started in the direction she’d come from.

He heard an anguished cry.

Clara.

He ran toward the sound.

He pulled open the door to the music room. Bright sunlight burst upon him, blinding him for a moment and making lightning bolts in his head.

“Clara, are you—”

“Clevedon! What on earth—”

But Clara was gaping at him, astonished, and his gaze shot to the other woman.

Noirot stood, eyes wide and mouth slightly parted. She closed it promptly, and her face closed down into her playing-cards look.

“What are you about?” he said. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Look at her,” Clara cried. “That’s my favorite dress—the one I was wearing when Lord Herringstone composed an ode to my eyes.”

Look at her. At Noirot. Look at her.

He looked, his gaze sliding down from the slightly disordered coiffure, loose strands of dark, silken hair clinging to her neck…down over her dark, brilliant eyes…down over her dangerous mouth while he remembered the taste of her, the feel of her mouth against his…down over the firm bosom while he remembered the velvet of her skin under his hand and against his mouth…and down at last to the dress she was holding.

Clara crossed to her and snatched the dress away.

“She says we must give it away,” Lady Clara said. “She objects to everything. Nothing is right—even this, my favorite.”

“The dress is jade green,” Noirot said. “Your eyes are blue and very beautiful, and that’s what prompted Lord Herringstone to compose an ode. Had you been wearing a more suitable color, you would have inspired him to compose an epic. Very few women can wear this color successfully. You may not wear very many shades of green. I should recommend against it—”

“That woman—Lady Renfrew—you made her a beautiful dress, exactly this color.”

“It was not exactly this color,” Noirot said. “It was an entirely different shade of green—and one that would suit you no better. It would seem that your ladyship cannot distinguish hues. Whether it was your governess or your painting master, whoever failed to train your eye ought to be pilloried. You must give me the dress, my lady.”

“Oh, you are horrible, cruel! You’ve taken all my favorite things!”

Noirot pulled the dress away from her and threw it on the floor and kicked it aside.

Clara clapped her hand over her mouth.

Noirot folded her arms.

A dangerous glint came into Clara’s blue eyes.

Noirot regarded her with the same cool lack of expression she would have bestowed on a promising hand of cards.

The fool! She could not treat a marquess’s daughter like a temperamental child, even if she was behaving like one. Noirot would lose any hope of a commission—she’d lose Clara forever—and she’d be lucky if Lady Warford didn’t have her driven from London.

“If I may interpose a—”

“No, Clevedon, you may not,” Clara said. “I told her to come. I made her come. She left me no choice. Nothing she’s proposed bears the smallest resemblance to what I normally wear, and I can’t believe I am such a provincial, so lacking in taste and discernment—but you know I’ve never cared very much, and Mama always advises me. But now I’m told to throw everything out, and what am I to tell Mama? And I am not to have a green dress!”

She stamped her foot. Clara actually stamped her foot.

“It must be blue-green,” Noirot said. She put the tip of her index finger to her chin and regarded Clara with narrowed eyes. “I envision embroidered poult de soie, the corsage decorated with a mantilla of blond lace.” Her finger came away from her chin to lightly glide over her shoulder. As she indicated the fall of the mantilla she imagined, her finger lingered at the place where he’d touched her, on that night when they’d played cards, when he’d helped her with her shawl. He remembered the tiny hitch in her breath and the heated triumph he’d felt, because finally, finally he’d affected her.

“But that is for later,” she went on. “For the present, as your ladyship has reminded me repeatedly, we are wearing white. And as I have reminded your ladyship repeatedly, it must be a soft white. No ivory.” She made a dismissive gesture at a dress draped over a chair. “Too yellow. And not that blinding white.” She indicated another dress, hanging over the back of a small sofa.

“Speaking of blinding,” Clevedon said. “Might we have the curtains drawn? I’ve the devil of a headache—”

“I wonder where you got it,” Clara said. “The same place Longmore gets his, I daresay. Well, you must grin and bear the light. Madame can’t work in the dark.”

“I thought she could do anything,” Clevedon muttered, retreating to the darkest corner of the room. “She told me—more than once—that she’s the greatest modiste in the world.”

“Beyond a doubt she’s the most exacting modiste in the world,” Clara said. “She’s been showing me how colors affect one’s complexion. We came to this room because it has the best light at this time of day.” She paused, frowning. “If you have a headache, why are you here?”

“You were screaming,” he said.

“It’s upsetting when someone takes one’s clothes away,” Clara said. “I find I’m not as philosophically detached as I had supposed. But why are you here, at the house, I mean? You know Papa is never at home on Tuesdays, and you would never come to see Mama, even if she were at home, which she isn’t, else Mrs. Noirot wouldn’t be here. She’s my dark secret, you know.”

“I came to take you for a drive,” Clevedon said. Had she always used to be so talkative?

“But you can see I’m not at liberty. Why did you not tell me you meant to come?”

“I did, on Saturday.”

“You did not. You did not spare me above five minutes on Saturday, and if you uttered ten words to me, that’s all you did. Today, obviously, is inconvenient.”

“We’re nearly done,” Noirot said.

“Hardly,” Clara said. “Now we must decide what to tell Mama.”

Noirot didn’t roll her eyes, which he considered evidence of superhuman self-control. Clara was driving him mad, and he’d only been here for a few minutes. Noirot must be wanting to throttle her.

But her expression only became kindly. “Tell her, my lady, that one can’t expect a fashionable gentleman—who has spent time in Paris—to come up to scratch—”

“Come up to what?” Clevedon said.

“—when one looks like a dowd and a fright and elderly to boot,” Noirot continued past the interruption. “Be sure to hold your head high when you say it, and make it sound like a fact that ought to be obvious to the meanest intelligence. And if there’s a difficulty, throw a tantrum. That’s what high-bred girls generally do.”

“But I never did,” Clara said aghast.

“A moment ago you stamped your foot,” Clevedon said. “You pouted, too.”

“I did not!”

“Your ladyship was too distressed to realize,” Noirot said. “However, you must do it with greater force and with absolute confidence in the rightness of your cause. Still, we must remember that a temper fit is simply a way to obtain the audience’s notice. Once you have her ladyship’s full attention, you will become sweet reason itself, and tell her this anecdote.”

Noirot folded her hands and, while Clevedon and Clara watched, astonished, her eyes filled. The tears hung there, glistening, but did not fall. She said, “Dearest Mama, I know you do not wish for me to be mortified in front of all my acquaintance. And here,” Noirot added in a more normal voice, “be sure to mention somebody your mother loathes. And when her ladyship says this is all nonsense, as she well might, you will tell her about the French gentleman who was mad in love with a married woman—”

“That isn’t the sort of thing for Clara to—”

“Pray let her finish,” Clara said. “You’re the one who brought me to this aggravating person, and I’ve steeled myself to suffer with her in order to be beautiful.”

“Your ladyship is already beautiful,” Noirot said. “How many times must I repeat it? That’s what’s so infuriating. A perfect diamond must have the perfect setting. A masterpiece must have the perfect frame. A—”

“Yes, yes, but we know that argument won’t work with Mama. What about the gentleman and the married woman?”

“His friends reasoned with him, pleaded with him— all in vain,” Noirot said. “Then, one night, at an entertainment, the lady asked him to fetch her shawl. He hastened to serve her, imagining the silken softness of a cashmere shawl, the scent of the woman he loved enhancing its perfection…”

Clevedon remembered Noirot’s scent, the memory reawakened only minutes ago: the scent her bonnet held. He remembered inhaling her, his face in her neck.

“…a cashmere shawl that would put all the other ladies’ cashmeres to shame. He found the garment but—quelle horreur!—not cashmere at all. Rabbit hair! Sick with disgust, he fell instantly and permanently out of love, and abandoned her.”

Clara stared at her. “You’re roasting me,” she said.

Clevedon collected himself and said, “You’ll find the anecdote in Lady Morgan’s book about France. It was published some years ago, but the principle remains. I wish you’d seen my friend Aronduille’s face when I asked him whether it mattered what a woman wore. I wish you could have heard him and his friends talking about it, quoting philosophers, arguing about Ingres and Balzac and Stendhal and David, art and fashion, the meaning of beauty, and so on.”

Clara glanced at him, then returned to Noirot. “Well, then, I shall try it, and I shall say it is all because Clevedon is so infernally discriminating, worse even than Longmore—”

“Clara would it not be better if you—”

“But what am I to wear to Almack’s tomorrow night?” Clara said. “You’ve rejected everything.”

Almack’s, he thought. Another dreary evening among the same people. He would have to pluck Clara from her hordes of admirers and dance with her. Whatever she wore, he would know Noirot had touched it.

He said, “Since no one was being murdered, and I seem to be de trop—”

“Not at all, your grace,” Noirot said. “You’ve arrived in the nick of time. Her ladyship has been remarkably patient and open-minded, considering that I’ve upset her universe.”

“You have, rather,” Clara said.

“But here is his grace, come to take you for a drive. Fresh air, the very thing you need after this trying morning and afternoon.”

“But Almack’s—”

“I shall send you a dress tomorrow,” Noirot said. “I or one of my sisters will personally deliver it to you, at not later than seven o’clock, at which time we shall make any final adjustments you require. The dress will be perfect.”

“But my mother—”

“You will have already dealt with her, as I suggested,” Noirot said.

Clara looked at Clevedon. “She is the most dictatorial creature,” she said.

“His grace has been so kind as to mention this character flaw before,” Noirot said with nary a glance at Clevedon. “I serve women of fashion all day long, six days a week. One must either dominate or be dominated.”

Ah, there it was: the disarming frankness, leavened with a touch of humor.

Gad, she was beyond anything!

“I have had enough of being dominated for the present,” Clara said. “Clevedon, pray be patient another few minutes, and I shall be glad to take the air with you. I promise to be back in a trice. Mrs. Noirot has left me a few paltry items she finds not completely abhorrent. My maid shall not have any momentous decisions to make regarding bonnets or anything else.”

She started toward the door, and hesitated. Then, with the look of one who’d made up her mind, she went out.

She had exactly what she wanted, Marcelline told herself. More than she’d hoped for. She hadn’t even had to wait for the betrothal. She had Lady Clara already, and a large order. Tomorrow night, the crème de la crème of Society would see Lady Clara Fairfax wearing a Noirot creation.

Maison Noirot would soon be the foremost dressmaking establishment in London.

Marcelline had accomplished everything—and more—than she’d planned when she set out for Paris, mere weeks ago.

She could not be happier.

She told herself this while she set about sorting the various rejected items of Lady Clara’s wardrobe.

“Are you going to burn them?” came Clevedon’s voice from the corner to which he’d withdrawn.

“Certainly not,” she said.

“But they have no redeeming qualities,” he said. “I should never have noticed the poor choices in color before you poisoned my mind, but even I can discern inferior cut and stitchery.”

“They can be taken apart and remade,” Marcelline said. “I am a patroness of a charitable establishment for women. Her ladyship was so generous as to allow me to take half the discards for my girls.”

“Your girls,” he said. “You—you’re a philanthropist?” He laughed.

She longed to throw something at him.

A chair. Herself.

But that was her shallow Noirot heart speaking. He was beautiful. Watching him move made her mouth go dry. It wasn’t fair that she couldn’t have him without complications. In bed—or on a carriage seat or against a wall—it wouldn’t matter that he was idle and arrogant and oblivious. If only she could simply use him and discard him, the way men used and discarded women.

But she couldn’t. And she’d used him already, though not in that way. She’d used him in a more important way. She’d got what she’d wanted.

A maid entered, and Marcelline spent a moment directing her. When she went out again with a heap of clothing, Marcelline did not take up the conversation where it had stopped. She did not take up the conversation at all.

She wouldn’t let him disturb her in any way. She was very, very happy. She’d achieved her goals.

“Which set of unfortunate women is it?” he said. “I’ll tell my secretary to make a donation. If they can make anything of those dresses, they’ll have earned it.”

“The Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females.” She could have added that she and her sisters had founded it last year. They’d learned at an early age more than they wanted to know about indigence and the difficulties of earning a living.

But her past was a secret under lock and key. “Some of our girls have gone on to become ladies’ maids,” she said. “The majority find places as seamstresses, for which there’s always need, particularly during mourning periods.” Luckily for them, the court was frequently in mourning, thanks to the British royal family’s penchant for marrying their Continental cousins.

The butler entered, followed by a footman carrying a tray of refreshments to sustain his grace during the wait for her ladyship.

Marcelline was famished. She’d been waiting on Lady Clara since this morning, and had not been offered a bite to eat or anything to drink. But mere tradesmen did not merit feeding.

Oh, would the girl never be dressed? How long did it take to tie on a bonnet and throw a shawl about one’s shoulders? One would think, given her anxieties about Marcelline ruining his life, Lady Clara would not leave them alone together for above half a minute.

But they were hardly alone, with servants going to and fro. Not that Lady Clara had anything to worry about, servants or no servants.

The only designs Marcelline had were upon her lady-ship’s statuesque person—and her father’s and future husband’s purses.

That was all.

She was very, very happy.

The silence stretched out, broken only by the servants’ comings and goings.

Then, at last, at long last, Lady Clara reappeared.

Marcelline stopped sorting for long enough to make an adjustment to her ladyship’s bonnet—it was not tilted precisely as it ought to be—and to twitch her cashmere shawl into a more enticing arrangement. Her shawls were very fine. One could not fault her there.

Having arranged Lady Clara to her satisfaction, Marcelline stepped away, made a proper curtsey, and returned to her work.

She was aware of Clevedon’s big frame passing not far from her. She was aware of the muffled sound of his boots on the carpet. she heard the low murmur, his voice mingling with Lady Clara’s, and the latter’s soft laughter.

Marcelline kept busy with her work and did not watch them go.

And when they were gone, she told herself she’d done a fine job, and she’d done nobody any great wrong—a miracle, considering her bloodline—and she had every reason to be glad.

That evening

The gown Mrs. Whitwood had returned lay on the counter. the enraged customer had come and gone while Marcelline was dancing attendance upon Lady Clara Fairfax at Warford House.

Sophy had soothed Mrs. Whitwood. Sophy could soothe Attila the Hun. The dress would be remade. The cost was mainly in labor, the smallest cost of making a dress. Still, it cost time—time that Marcelline, her sisters, and her seamstresses could be spending on other orders.

If this kept up, they’d be ruined. It wasn’t simply that they couldn’t afford to keep remaking dresses. They couldn’t afford the damage to their reputation.

Marcelline was studying the dress, deciding what to change. “Who worked on it?” she asked Pritchett, her senior seamstress.

“Madame, if there is a fault with the workmanship it must be mine,” Pritchett said. “I supervised every stitch of this dress. But madame can see for herself. It is precisely as madame ordered.”

“Indeed, and the details, as you know, are of my own design,” Marcelline said. “It’s very strange that another dress should appear, bearing these same details. The angle and width of the pleats of the bodice was my own invention. How curious that another dressmaker should have precisely the same idea, in the same style of dress.”

“Most unfortunate, madame,” Pritchett said. “Yet some would think it a miracle we haven’t had this problem before, when you consider that we take in all sorts of girls, from the streets, practically. One doesn’t wish to be uncharitable. Some of them don’t know any better, I daresay. Never taught right from wrong, you know. I shall be happy to work late—as late as needed—to make the dress over, if madame wishes.”

“No, I’ll want you fresh tomorrow,” Marcelline said. “Lady Clara Fairfax’s ball dress must be ready to deliver at seven o’clock sharp in the evening. I shall want all my seamstresses well rested and alert. Better to come in early. Let us say eight o’clock in the morning.” She glanced at her pendant watch. “It’s nearly eight. Send them all home now, Pritchett. Tell them we want them here at precisely eight o’clock tomorrow morning, ready for a very busy day.”

She rarely kept her seamstresses past nine o’clock, even when the shop was frantically busy, as it had been when Dr. Farquar’s daughter had needed to be married in a hurry—or when Mrs. Whitwood, having quarreled with Dowdy, had come to Maison Noirot to have herself and her five daughters fitted out in mourning for a very rich aunt.

Marcelline’s personal experience had taught her that one did better work early in the day. By nightfall, spirits flagged and eyesight failed. The workroom had a skylight, but that was no use after sunset.

“Yes, Madame, but we have not quite completed Mrs. Plumley’s redingote.”

“It isn’t wanted until Thursday,” Marcelline said. “Everybody is to go home, and prepare for a long, hard day tomorrow.”

“Yes, Madame.”

Marcelline watched her go out of the showroom.

The trap she and her sisters had set yesterday morning was simple enough.

Before they went home at the end of the workday, the seamstresses were required to put everything away. The workroom was to be left neat and tidy. No stray bits of thread or ribbon, buttons or thimbles should remain on the worktable, the chairs, the floor, or anywhere else. The room had been perfectly neat early yesterday morning when Marcelline deliberately dropped a sketch of a dress for Mrs. Sharp on the floor.

The first seamstress arriving in the morning—and that was usually Pritchett—should have noticed the sketch, and turned it over to Marcelline, Sophy, or Leonie. But when Sophy went in, shortly after the girls’ workday began, the sketch was gone and nobody said a word about it. It didn’t turn up until this morning. Selina Jeffreys found it under her chair when she came to work.

Pritchett had scolded her for hurrying away at night and leaving a mess. She’d made a great fuss about the sketch—Madame’s work was never to be carelessly handled.

But Marcelline, Leonie, and Sophy knew there hadn’t been a mess, and that Jeffreys’s place had been as clean and orderly as the others. Nothing had been lying under her chair or anyone else’s.

Well, now they knew. And now they were ready.

The shop door swung open, setting the bell jangling.

She looked up from the dress, and her heart squeezed painfully.

Clevedon stood for a moment, his green gaze sweeping the shop and finally coming to rest on her. He frowned, then quickly smoothed his beautiful face and sauntered toward her. Riveted on that remarkable face, too handsome to be real, it took her a moment to notice the large box he was carrying.

“Your grace,” she said, bobbing a quick curtsey.

“Mrs. Noirot,” he said. He set the box on the counter.

“That cannot be Lady Clara’s new dress,” she said. “Sophy said her ladyship was delighted with it.”

“Why the devil should I be returning Clara’s purchases?” he said. “I’m not her servant. This is for Erroll.”

Marcelline’s heart beat harder, with rage now. She was aware of her face heating. It probably didn’t show, but she didn’t care whether it did or not. “Take it back,” she said.

“Certainly not,” he said. “I went to a good deal of trouble. I know nothing about children anymore, and you will not believe the number and variety of—”

“You may not give my daughter gifts,” Marcelline said.

He took the lid off the box, and lifted from it a doll—such a doll! She had black curling hair and vivid blue glass eyes. She was dressed in silver net and lace, trimmed with pearls. “I’m not taking it back,” he said. “Burn it, then.”

At that moment, Lucie burst through the door from the back. She stopped short at the sight of the doll, which the beast hadn’t the grace to return to its box.

She’d been watching the street from the window upstairs, no doubt, as she always did. She’d recognized his fine carriage.

She was six years old. It was too much to expect her to resist the doll. Her eyes widened. Yet she managed a creditable “Good evening, your grace,” and a curtsey. All the while, her eyes never left the doll. “My, that’s a fine doll,” she said. “I think it’s the most beautiful doll I’ve ever seen in all my life.”

All six years of it.

“You’re going to pay for this,” Marcelline said under her breath. “And painfully.”

“Is it, indeed?” he said to Lucie. “I’m not a good judge of these matters.”

“Oh, yes.” Lucie drew a step nearer. “She isn’t like ordinary dolls. Her eyes are blue glass, you see. And her face is so lifelike. And her hair is so beautiful, I think it must be real hair.”

“Perhaps you’d like to hold her,” Clevedon said.

“Oh, yes!” She started toward him, then hesitated and looked at Marcelline. “May I, Mama?” she asked in her best Dutiful Child voice.

“Yes,” Marceline said, because there was nothing else she could say. She was hardheaded and practical, and any mother would know this was setting a terrible precedent as well as compromising her reputation.

But to deny her child—any child—such a treat, after the child had seen it and had done nothing wrong to be punished for, was wanton cruelty. She was a strict mother. She had to be. But too many cruelties, large and small, had marked her own childhood. That was one legacy she wouldn’t pass on.

Folding his large frame, he crouched down to Lucie’s level. Solemnly he held out the doll. Equally solemnly, she took it, holding her breath until it was safely in her arms. Then she held it so carefully, as though she believed the thing was magical, and might disappear in a minute. “What is her name?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “I thought you would know.”

Oh, the wretched, manipulative man!

Lucie considered. “If she were my doll, I should call her Susannah.”

“I think she would like to be your doll,” Clevedon said. He slanted a glance upward, at Marcelline. “If she may.”

Though she was captivated by the doll, Lucie didn’t fail to see whose permission he sought. “Oh, if Mama says she may? Mama, may she? May she be my doll?”

“Yes,” Marcelline said. What other answer could she make, curse him!

“Oh, thank you, Mama!” Lucie turned back to Clevedon, and the look she sent him from those great blue eyes was calculated to break his heart, which Marcelline sincerely hoped it did. “Thank you, your grace. I shall take very good care of her.”

“I know you will,” he said.

“Her limbs move, you see,” Lucie said, demonstrating. “She needn’t wear only one dress. This one is very beautiful, but she’s like a princess, and a princess must have a vast wardrobe. Mama and my aunts will help me cut out and sew dresses for her. I’ll make her morning dresses and walking dresses and the most beautiful carriage dress, a blue redingote to match her eyes. The next time you come, you’ll see.”

The next time you come.

“Why don’t you take Susannah upstairs to meet your aunts?” Marcelline said. “I have something to discuss with his grace.”

Lucie went out, cradling the doll as though it were a living infant. Clevedon rose and watched her go out, through the door to the back of the shop. He was smiling, and it was a smile Marcelline had never seen before. It was not his charming smile or his seductive one or his winning one.

It was fond and wistful, and she could not withstand it. It won her and weakened her will more effectively than any of his other smiles could have done.

Which only made her angrier.

“Clevedon,” she began.

He turned back to her, the smile fading. “You may not rake me over the coals,” he said. “She set out to captivate me, much as her mother did—”

“She’s six years old!”

“You both succeeded,” he said. “What was I to do? She’s a little girl. Why should she not have a doll?”

“She has dolls! Does she seem neglected to you? Deprived in any way? She’s my daughter, and I take care of her. She has nothing to do with you. You’ve no business buying her dolls. What will Lady Clara think? What do you think your fine friends in the ton will say when they hear you’ve given my daughter gifts? You know they’ll hear of it.” Lucie would show the doll to the seamstresses, naturally, and they’d tell everybody they knew, and word would spread through the ton in no time at all. “And do you think their speculations will do my business any good?”

“That’s all you think about. Your business.”

“It’s my life, you great thickhead! This”—she swept her hand to indicate the shop—“This is how I earn my living. Can you not grasp this simple concept? Earning a living?”

“I’m not—”

“This is how I feed and clothe and house and educate my daughter,” she raged on. “This is how I provide for my sisters. What must I do to make you understand? How can you be so blind, so willfully obtuse, so—”

“You’ll make me run mad,” he said. “Everywhere I turn, there you are.”

“That’s monstrous unfair! Everywhere I go, there is your great carcass!”

“You upset everything,” he said. “I’ve been trying for a fortnight to propose to Clara, and every time I steel myself to it—”

“Steel yourself?”

“Every time,” he went on, unheeding, “you”—he waved his hand—“There you are. I went to Warford House today to come up to scratch, as you so poetically put it, but you had her worked up into such a state, we couldn’t have a proper conversation, and all my speech— and I spent half an hour composing it—went out of my head.”

The door to the back of the shop opened again and Leonie came in.

“Oh, your grace,” she said, feigning surprise, though she’d probably heard the row from the stairs. Marcelline hoped the seamstresses had followed orders and left early, else they’d have had an earful.

“He was about to leave,” Marcelline said.

“No, I wasn’t,” he said.

“It’s closing time,” Marcelline said, “and we know you aren’t buying anything.”

“Perhaps I shall,” he said.

“Leonie, please lock up for me,” she said. To him she said, “I’m not keeping my shop open all night to pander to your whims.”

“Do you plan to throw me out bodily?” he said.

She could knock him unconscious. Then she and her sisters could drag him out into the alley behind the shop. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d had to dispose of a troublesome male.

“You’re too big, curse you,” she said. “But we’re going to settle something, once and for all.”

Chapter Ten

Approaching Marriages in High Life.—A marriage is on the tapis between Mr Vaughan and Lady Mary Anne Gage, sister of Lord Kenmare. Viscount Palmerston, it is said, will shortly be united to the rich Mrs Thwaites.

The Court Journal, Saturday 25 April 1835

Marcelline stormed through the passage, past the stairs toward the back of the building, and through the open door into the workroom.

She met chaos.

Worktable covered with scraps of fabric, thimbles, thread, pincushions. Floor littered with debris. Chairs left where they’d been pushed out. It looked as though seamstresses had fled or been chased out.

She didn’t have time or mind to wonder at it. She didn’t have time or mind to put two and two together. The state of the room was one more trial in a long, wearying day of biting her tongue and maintaining an even temper in the face of stupidity, rudeness, and ill-usage. A long day of crushing her own wants and giving all her energy to winning and pleasing.

She’d deal with this latest aggravation later.

Clevedon first.

She turned to face him, bracing her hands against the edge of the disgracefully cluttered worktable.

She took pride in the neatness and order of her shop, a stunning contrast to life in her parents’ household, or what had passed for a household. But it didn’t matter what he thought of the disarray, she told herself. How would he know the difference between how a workroom ought and ought not to be maintained? And what did he care?

“You’re not to come here again,” she said. “Ever.”

“That suits me,” he said. “This is the last place on earth I’d wish to be.”

“You’re not to buy my daughter any more gifts,” she said.

“Why did you think I would?”

“Because she’s a conniving little minx who knows how to wrap men about her finger,” she said.

“So like her mother,” he said.

“Yes, I connived, and I wrapped you about my finger. But now I’m done with that. What did I ever want of you but your betrothed?”

Liar, liar.

“We’re not betrothed,” he said, “thanks to you.”

“Thanks to me?” she said with a mocking laugh. Mocking him. Mocking herself. “You’re not betrothed because of you. Why didn’t you make your so-carefully-rehearsed speech to that beautiful girl? The speech to which you devoted a mere half hour for the most important question of your life—”

“Clara doesn’t need—”

“But why should you take any trouble, when you take for granted everything you have? You’re used to getting whatever you want and losing interest as soon as you get it.”

“I love her,” he said. “I’ve loved her since we were children. But you—”

“It’s my fault, is it?” she said. “I’m the demon destroying your happiness? Only look at yourself and listen to yourself. Like every other man, you want what you can’t have. Like every other man, you’ll stay interested—even obsessed—until you get it. You came here this evening because you can’t think straight—because it drives you mad not to have something you want.”

His color darkened, and she saw his hands clench. “If you think that something is you, think again,” he said. “I don’t want you. But you want me, and I feel so sorry for you.”

Inwardly, it was as though she’d walked into a wall. Her head pounded and pain shot deep, deep inside.

She wanted him. She wanted to be the heartbreakingly beautiful girl he loved. She wanted to be someone else: a woman who mattered to him and to all those who mattered, instead of a nobody to be used and discarded. She wanted everything her family had taken away: every opportunity they’d squandered and all the damage done to her future long, long ago, generations before she was born.

Outwardly, she didn’t blink. “Then send me more customers,” she said. “I find money a great comfort in any calamity.”

She heard his sharp inhale. “By gad,” he said. “By gad, you’re a devil.”

“And you’re an angel?” She laughed.

He crossed the room, and in that instant she knew what would happen. But she was a devil and so was he, and she only stood there, gripping the table, daring him, daring her own destruction.

He stood over her, looking down into her dark, brilliant eyes. They mocked and taunted, as her voice had mocked and taunted him with the ways he lied to himself and everyone else.

The truth was, he was no angel. Three years ago, he’d abandoned his responsibilities, gone abroad, and found himself. He’d settled in Paris because he could be free there as he could never be in England. In Paris, his hunger for excitement and pleasure could do no damage to those he loved.

She promised nothing but damage, everywhere.

She was wrong for him in every possible way, and especially wrong at this time. Why couldn’t he have met her a year ago, three years ago?

But when he looked down into her eyes, right and wrong meant nothing. He and she were two of a kind, and like called to like, and he wanted her. And she, who read him so easily and so well, had spoken one needle-sharp truth after another.

Yes, he’d go on wanting her until he had her.

Then it would be done, and he could be free of her.

He cupped her face and tilted it upward and brought his mouth to hers and kissed her. She turned her head away, breaking the kiss. He trailed his mouth along her cheek, to her ear and down. Her scent rose from her neck, and all the air he breathed then was her and all he knew then was her.

“Fool,” she said. “Fool.”

“Yes,” he said. He wrapped his arms about her and pulled her away from the table and dragged her up against him.

That was right, no matter how desperately wrong it was. It was right, the warmth of her back against his forearm, and the way her supple body fit to his, as though it had been tailored special in some infernal shop where Beelzebub presided.

He was done for, caught. Heat pumped through him, fever-fierce, and scorched his reason.

This was all he’d ever wanted: possession. Images burned in his mind—the cool way she’d taken her leave of him in the opera house…men colliding with one another or stumbling over their own feet when she passed…the way she had of turning her head…the graceful arc of her fan, sweeping over her dress…the light movement of her hand touching her shoulder in the place where he’d touched her. All this and more—every moment in her company—all of it was swirling in his mind and racing through his veins when he took her into his arms.

This was what he’d wanted. To hold her. To keep her. Mine.

Unthinking, like a brute.

With one arm he swept the table clear. Pieces of cloth, bits of lace and ribbons wafted down, while spools of thread, thimbles, and other bric-a-brac clattered to the floor.

He lifted her onto the table.

She set her hand against his chest, to push him away. He laid his hand over hers, and held hers there, over his pounding heart. He lifted her chin and dared her, his gaze locking with hers. Her eyes were wide and so dark, as dark as night. That was where he wanted to be: lost in the darkness, the unknowable place that was Noirot.

Noirot. That was all he knew. He didn’t know if that was truly her name. He didn’t know her Christian name. He didn’t know whether she’d ever had a husband. It didn’t matter.

She brought her hands up and grasped his head and pulled him to her. She wrapped her legs about his hips and kissed him in that wild way of hers, holding nothing back, and demanding the same everything from him.

He gave it, too, in a mad, hungry kiss, while his hands moved greedily over her, wanting and wanting, endlessly wanting. He’d stored it up for so long. Mere weeks had passed since he met her, yet it seemed forever that he’d wanted her. It seemed an eternity he’d lived in dreams and fantasies and the memories that came unbidden, haunting his days and nights. Now he wasn’t dreaming. Now he was alive, finally, after sleepwalking for a lifetime.

Under his hands, silk and muslin and lace rustled, the sound so intimate, inviting possession. But everywhere he found obstacles, layer upon layer of her curst fashion between his hands and her skin. He slid his hand over her bodice, seeking skin, remembering the velvety miracle of hers, and its warmth. The memory was maddening, because he couldn’t touch her in the way he wanted, lingeringly. For all his demented heat, he knew they had little time, no time, only a moment. They’d met at the wrong time and they were not meant for each other and this was all he’d have.

No time.

He dragged up her skirt and petticoats and slid his hand up over the fine muslin drawers. Awareness crackled, electric: of the smooth flesh under his hand…its heat warming the thin fabric…the sweet fullness of her thighs…

But they had no time. He found the opening to the drawers. He heard her sharp inhalation as his fingers slid over the softness there. Then, as he stroked, she gave a little, unwilling cry, which she quickly smothered against his mouth.

He knew what he was doing. A part of him knew where they were and how mad it was. A part of him knew he’d closed the door behind him, but hadn’t locked it. A part of him knew this was a room anyone might enter at any moment. All this was in his mind, in the smallest part of his mind. The awareness hovered and nagged, a low, urgent warning: Make haste, make haste.

He was a fool and he ought to be mortified. After all this time, to be no more than a schoolboy, wanting a girl, and stealing a moment for a furtive and hurried coupling.

But he couldn’t stop.

She reached down and unbuttoned his trousers, and he gasped against her mouth as she touched him, her hand grasping his swollen shaft, and sliding up and down, and his mind went dark, and there was only need and heat.

He pushed her hand away, and pushed into her. She gave another little cry, again quickly stifled, and then there was only the sound of their breathing, ragged and harsh, as he thrust again and again, merely a brute, possessing, mindless.

Mine.

He felt her nails dig into his arms and he felt her body shudder as pleasure caught her, but that was all. She didn’t cry out. He heard only the sound of her breath, quick and shallow.

He wanted more, endless more, but he’d waited too long, wanted too long, and when her muscles contracted about him so fiercely at her climax, his control shattered. Pleasure pounded through him like a live thing, dragging him to a precipice, and over. And down he went, in a surge of triumph so ferocious that he never thought of pulling away. It was too late, too late. He felt her spasms as her pleasure peaked again, and he heard her hoarse cry, damning him to hell, and happiness flooded him, and he spilled into her, in a fiery rush of relief and raging joy.

Marcelline did not want to cling to him, but she had to, or she’d slide off the table and slither to the floor in a limp heap. Her heart had slowed from its frenzy, and now beat slow and fierce, a sledgehammer at her ribs.

Oh, she was a fool, the greatest fool there ever was! She could have lived in blissful ignorance. She could have supposed all men were the same and coupling was a relief for strong feeling as well as a great pleasure.

Now she knew that the simple act could be volcanic, and the world could begin and end in a few minutes, leaving everything upended, the universe destroyed and rebuilt, and nothing as it had been before.

But the day had offered one injury after another. What was one more catastrophe?

She’d made a fatal mistake, and it wouldn’t be the first time. She’d survived others. She’d survive this.

He held her still, so tightly, his powerful arms bracing her back. She needed to push him away. She should have done it long since, at least at the critical moment. She knew one couldn’t rely on a man to remember to withdraw at such a time. But she couldn’t be relied on, either. She’d wanted him inside her. She’d wanted him to be hers and hers alone, even if it was only for a moment, only for this once. And she hadn’t wanted to let go.

Even now.

She let herself wallow for one more moment in the strength and warmth enveloping her. She let herself inhale his scent, purely male and purely his. She let her cheek graze his—and somehow that seemed more intimate than anything they’d done, though he stood between her legs, though she felt his shaft slipping from her and the wetness of his seed…the seed he’d spilled inside her because she hadn’t the wit or will to prevent it. And that, too—their savage, desperate coupling, for she wouldn’t call it lovemaking, never, never—had seemed a greater intimacy than if they’d lain naked in bed, enjoying each other at their leisure.

But she was a fool, and there was the beginning and end of it.

“You must let go,” she said. Her voice was thick.

He tightened his hold, his arms like iron bands.

“You must let go,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

“We haven’t time.” She kept her voice low. “They’ll want me for dinner, and someone will come. You can’t stay, in any case. You can’t stay,” she repeated. “And you must never come back.”

She felt him tense.

“We can’t leave it like this,” he said.

“We shouldn’t have begun it.”

“Too late for that.”

“It’s done,” she said, “and I’m done with you and you’re done with me.” She pushed, and this time he let go. She found her handkerchief and made quick work of cleaning herself, then pushed her petticoat and skirt down.

While she attended to herself, he put his clothing in order.

She started to get down from the table, but he must be a glutton for punishment—or, more likely, he truly was done, and touching her again meant nothing to him—because he caught her by the waist and lifted her down in the same easy way he’d lifted her up, as though she weighed nothing.

She remembered how easily and gently he’d lifted Lucie out of his lap and into her arms. She remembered the wistful smile he’d bent on her child. Her throat tightened and she had all she could do not to weep.

She’d heard, she wasn’t sure where or when, that he’d lost a sister at a young age…

But what did it matter?

She was starting toward the door, steeling herself to watch him walk out of her life forever, when she heard the thud.

Leonie would have finished locking up the shop long before now, and she would have made sure nobody surprised Marcelline with an interruption. No one ought to be downstairs at present. The family ought all to be upstairs, setting out dinner.

“Wait,” she said in an undertone.

She went to the door and pressed her ear to it. Nothing.

“I thought I heard something,” he said softly. “Erroll? Would she—”

“No. Not after we close up shop. She’s not allowed, but she wouldn’t come, in any case. She’s afraid of the dark.” That had started after she recovered from the cholera. That and other anxieties. “Be quiet, will you?”

Another thump. Someone was out there, stumbling about in the darkness.

He reached for the door handle. “I’ll deal with—”

“Don’t be stupid,” she whispered. “You can’t be here.”

Carefully she opened the door. She looked down the passage in the direction the sound had come from. She saw a faint light in the little office where Leonie kept her ledgers. There, lately, they’d been storing Marcelline’s designs, in a locked box. And there, today, they’d set out their bait.

Her heart began to race.

She slipped through the door into the gloomy passage. She heard his soft footstep behind her. She stopped and gestured at him to stay in the workroom.