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“Noblemen have married courtesans,” he said. “They’ve married their housekeepers and their dairymaids.”
“And it never turns out well,” she said. When gentlemen married far beneath them, their wives and children paid for it. They became outcasts. They lived in limbo, unable to return to their old world and shunned in their new one. “I can’t believe you think this is sane.”
“You know it’s the only sane thing,” he said. “I love you. I want to give you everything. I want to give Lucie everything she needs—not merely dolls and fine clothes and schooling, but a father. I lost a family, and I know how precious it is. I want you and I want your family and I want to be part of your lives.”
She heard the desperation in his voice, the urgency, and she wanted to weep.
“I know the shop is your passion,” he said, “and it would kill you to give it up—but you don’t have to. I thought about that, too. In fact, I’ve been thinking about your shop for weeks.”
She didn’t doubt it. She didn’t doubt that he meant every word.
“I have ideas,” he went on eagerly. “We can do this together. Other noblemen have business interests. I can write, and I’ve the resources to create a magazine. Like La Belle Assemblée, but better. I’ve other ideas about expanding the business. You said you were the greatest modiste in the world. I can help you make all the world realize it. Marry me, Marcelline.”
It wasn’t fair.
She was a dreamer, yes. All of her kind were. They dreamed impossible dreams. Yet she and her sisters had made some of them come true.
It was a beautiful dream he offered. But he saw only the beautiful part.
“Other noblemen’s business interests have to do with property,” she said. “And great schemes. They own mines and invest in canals and the new railways. They do not open little shops and sell ladies’ apparel. The Great World will never forgive you. These aren’t the old days, Clevedon. These aren’t the days of the Prince Regent and his loose-living set. Society isn’t as tolerant as it used to be.”
“Then Society is a great bore,” he said. “I don’t care whether they approve of my going into trade. I believe in you and in what you do. I want to be part of it.”
He didn’t know what he was saying. He didn’t understand what it meant to lose Society’s regard and his friends’ respect, to be barred from the world to which one ought to belong. She knew all too well.
Even if he could understand that and accept it, there remained the nasty little business of who she really was.
She had no choice. She had to be the sane one. This was one dream she couldn’t dream. He was watching her, waiting.
She unfolded her arms.
She put her hands together, like one offering a prayer, and said, “Thank you. This is kind and generous, and, truly, you do me a great honor—I know that’s what one is supposed to say, but I mean it, truly—”
“Marcelline, don’t—”
“But no, your grace, no. I can never marry you.”
She saw his face go white, and she turned away, quickly, before she could weaken. She walked to the door that led to the back rooms, and opened it, and walked through, and closed it, very, very gently, behind her.
Clevedon walked blindly from the shop, down St. James’s Street. At the bottom of the street he paused, and gazed blankly at St. James’s Palace. There was a noise in his head, a horrible noise. He was aware of misery and pain and rage and the devil knew what else. He hadn’t the wherewithal to take it apart and name its components. It was a kind of hell-brew of feelings, and it consumed him. He didn’t hear the shout. He couldn’t hear above the noise in his head.
“What the devil is wrong with you, Clevedon? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse, running down the street like a damn fool. One damn fool after another, obviously. I saw you come out of that shop, you moron.”
Clevedon turned and looked at Longmore. “I recommend you not provoke me,” he said coldly. “I’m in a mood to knock someone down, and you’ll do very well.”
“Don’t tell me,” Longmore said. “The dressmaker doesn’t want you, either. By gad, this isn’t your day, is it? Not your week, rather.”
The urge to throw Longmore against a lamp post or a fence or straight into the gutter was overpowering. The guards would probably rush out from the palace gates—and there Clevedon would be, in the newspapers again, the name on every scandalmonger’s lips.
Hell, what was one more scandal?
He dropped his walking stick and grasped Long-more by the shoulders and shoved him hard. With an oath, Longmore shoved back. “Fight me like a man, you swine,” he said. “I dare you.”
A moment later, they’d torn off their coats. In the next instant, their fists flew, as they tried, steadily and viciously, to pummel each other to death.
Marcelline sent Sophy out into the showroom to close the shop.
Though she was so tired, tired to death and heartsick, she knew better than to go to bed. Lucie would think she was ill, and she’d get panicky—and very possibly do something rash again.
In any case, Marcelline knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She needed to focus on making beautiful clothes. That would calm her.
She was trying to redesign the fastening for a pelisse when Sophy came in. Leonie trailed after her. Sophy hadn’t said anything before, but she’d given Marcelline a searching look. Even wearing a card-playing face, it was hard to hide one’s emotions from one’s own kind.
The two younger sisters had come to find out the trouble and comfort her as they always did.
“What happened?” Sophy said. “What’s wrong?”
“Clevedon,” Marcelline said. She jammed her pencil into the paper. The pencil broke. “Oh, it’s ridiculous. I ought to laugh. But I can’t. You won’t believe it.”
“Of course we will,” Sophy said.
“He offered you carte blanche,” Leonie said.
“No, he asked me to marry him.”
There was a short, stunned silence.
Then, “I reckon he’s in a marrying mood,” Sophy said.
Marcelline laughed. Then she started to sob.
But before she could fall to pieces, Selina Jeffreys came to the door. “Oh, madame, I beg your pardon. But I was just out—I went to get the ribbons from Mr. Adkins down the bottom of the street—and when I came out of his shop, there were the two gentleman fighting down at the palace, and people coming out of every shop and club, and running to watch the fight.”
“Two gentlemen?” Leonie said. “Two ruffians, you mean.”
“No, Miss Leonie. It’s his grace the Duke of Clevedon and his friend, the other tall, dark gentleman.”
“Lord Longmore?” Sophy said. “He was here only a little while ago.”
“Yes, miss, that’s the one. They’re trying to kill each other, I vow! I couldn’t stand to watch—and besides, there was all sorts of men coming along to see. It wasn’t any place for a girl on her own.”
Sophy and Leonie didn’t have Jeffreys’s delicate scruples. They ran out to watch the fight. They didn’t notice that their older sister didn’t follow.
Sophy and Leonie returned not very long after they’d gone out.
Marcelline had given up trying to create something beautiful. She wasn’t in the mood. She looked in on the seamstresses, then she went upstairs and looked in on Lucie, who was reading to Susannah from one of the books Clevedon had bought.
After the visit to the nursery, Marcelline went into their sitting room and poured herself a glass of brandy.
She’d taken only a few sips before her sisters returned, looking windblown and sounding a little out of breath, but otherwise undamaged.
They poured brandy, too, and reported.
“It was delicious,” Sophy said. “They must practice at the boxing salons, because they’re very good.”
“It didn’t look like practice to me,” Leone said. “It looked like they were trying to kill each other.”
“It was wonderfully ferocious,” Sophy said. “Their hats were off, and their coats, too, and they were trampling their neckcloths. Their hair was wild and they had blood on their clothes.” She fanned herself with her hand.
“I vow, it was enough to make a girl swoon.”
“It put me in mind of the Roman mobs at the Coliseum,” Leonie said. “Half of White’s must have been there—all those fine gentlemen, and all of them shouting and betting on the outcome and egging them on.”
“Leonie’s right,” Sophy said. “It did look to be getting out of hand, and I was thinking we ought to find a safer place to watch from. But then the Earl of Hargate came out of St. James’s Palace with some other men.”
“Straight through the crowd of men he came, pushing them out of his way—and he must be sixty if he’s a day,”
Leonie said.
“But he carries himself like Zeus,” Sophy said. “And the men gave way, and he ordered his grace and his lordship to stop making damned fools of themselves.”
“They weren’t listening,” Leonie said.
“It was the bloodlust,” Sophy said. “They were like wolves.”
“None of the other men had dared to try to break it up,” Leonie said.
“But Lord Hargate waded right into the fight,” Sophy said. “And he got in the way of Longmore’s fist. But the earl dodged the blow—oh, Marcelline, I wish you’d seen it—and then he grabbed Longmore’s arm and pulled him away from Clevedon. And one of the gentleman with him—it had to be one of his sons—the same features, build, and coloring. Whichever one it was, he took hold of Clevedon.”
“And then the earl and his son dragged them away.”
“And one of the other gentlemen was threatening to read the Riot Act, and so we came away.” Sophy drank her brandy and poured some more.
“I’m sure we needn’t wonder what it was about,” Marcelline said. “Longmore avenging his sister’s honor, or some such.”
“Why should he need to?” Sophy said. “Everyone thought Lady Clara avenged her own honor very well. Anything Longmore did would be anticlimactic, don’t you think?”
“Then what provoked fisticuffs in St. James’s Street?” Leonie said.
“Don’t be thick,” Sophy said. “It’s not as though men need a sane reason. They were both in a bad mood. One of them picked a fight. And I’ll wager anything that now it’s over, they’ll be getting drunk together.”
“Why was Longmore in a bad mood, Sophy?” Marcel-line said. “You said he’d been here, after Clevedon left.”
“He came to plague me about the ball and call me a traitor for spying for Tom Foxe on his sister and friend. I pretended not to know what he was talking about. Oh, Lord.” Her pretty countenance turned repentant. “Oh, Marcelline, what horrid sisters we are. We hear of a fight, and off we go, little bloodthirsty cats, and there you are, your heart breaking—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marcelline said. “Save the drama for the newspapers.”
“But what happened, dearest?” Sophy set down her glass and knelt by Marcelline and took her hand. “What did Clevedon say and what did you say—and why are you pretending your heart isn’t broken?”
Clevedon House
Sunday 10 May, three o’clock in the morning
The house was dark, everyone abed but one. In the library, a single candle flickered over a solitary figure in a dressing gown whose pen scratched rapidly across the paper.
The Duke of Clevedon had done his best to beat Long-more to a bloody pulp. Afterward they’d emptied one bottle after another. Yet he’d come home all too sober. It seemed there wasn’t enough drink in all the world to dull the ache in his heart or quiet his conscience and let him sleep.
Nothing to be done about the heartache but endure.
His conscience was another matter.
It drove him to the library. Then, even before he took up his pen to write to Clara, he knew how it must begin:
Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers, which were last night so disgusting to you.
It was the start of Mr. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Clara’s favorite novel. He could easily imagine her reluctant smile when she read it. He continued in his own words:
I was wrong to make an offer, and you were right in all you said, but you said not half enough. Our listeners should have heard the thousand ways I’ve taken you for granted and tried your good nature and the ways I’ve thought only of myself and never of you. You’ve been true to me for all the time I’ve known you, and for all that time I, too, have been true only to me. When you were grieving for the grandmother I knew you dearly loved, I abandoned you to jaunt about the Continent. I expected you to wait for me, and you did. How, then, did I return your patience and loyalty? I was neglectful, insensitive, and false.
He wrote on, of the many ways he’d wronged her. She’d brought joy and light into his life when he was a lonely, heartbroken boy. Her letters had brightened his days. She was dear to him, and always would be, but they were friends and no more. Surely he’d known in his heart this wasn’t enough for marriage, but it was the easy way and he took it. He’d been false to her and false to himself, because he’d been a coward, afraid to risk his heart.
He acknowledged all his thoughtless and unkind acts, and concluded:
I’m sorry, my dear, so deeply sorry. I hope in time you’ll forgive me—though I can’t at the moment suggest a reason to do so. With all my heart I wish you the happiness I ought to have been able to give you and a hundred times more.
He wrote his usual affectionate closing, and signed with his initial, as he always did.
He folded up the letter, addressed it, and left it in the tray for the servant to take out with the morning mail.
Then, only the heartache remained.
Chapter Seventeen
Experience, the mother of true wisdom, has long since convinced me, that real beauty is best discerned by real judges; and the addresses of a sensible lover imply the best compliment to a woman of understanding.
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807
Early afternoon, Sunday 10 May
The Duke of Clevedon blinked at the excessively bright light. Saunders, the sadist, stood looking down at him. He’d opened the curtains, and the sun was as bright as lightning bolts. When Clevedon moved his head, thunder cracked, right against his skull.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, your grace.”
“No, you’re not,” Clevedon croaked.
“Mr. Halliday was most insistent,” Saunders said. “He said you would wish to be wakened. Mrs. Noirot is here.”
Clevedon sat up abruptly. His brain thumped painfully against something hard and sharp. The interior of his skull had grown thorns. “Lucie,” he said. “Is she ill? Lost? Damn, I told her that child needed…” The sentence trailed off as his drink-poisoned brain caught up with his tongue.
“Mrs. Noirot said we were to assure your grace that the Princess Erroll of Albania is well and safely at home doing sums with her aunt. Mr. Halliday has taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Noirot to wait in the library. Being aware that you would need time to dress, he saw to it that refreshment was brought to her. I have brought your coffee, sir.”
Now Clevedon’s heart was pounding, too, along with his brain, but not at the same tempo.
He did not leap from his bed, but he got out more quickly than was altogether comfortable for a man in his condition. He hastily swallowed the coffee. He washed and dressed in record time, though it seemed an age to him, even though he decided not to bother with the nicety of shaving.
A glance in the mirror told him shaving wouldn’t do much to improve his appearance. He looked like an animated corpse. He tied his neckcloth in a haphazard knot, shrugged into his coat, and hurried out of the room, still buttoning it.
When he came in, smoothing his neckcloth like a nervous schoolboy called on to recite from the Iliad, he found Noirot bent over the library table.
She was perfect, as usual, in one of her more dashing creations, a heavy white silk embroidered all over with red and yellow flowers. The double-layered short cape, its edges gored and trimmed in black lace, was made of the same material. It extended out over her shoulders and over the big sleeves of her dress. Round her neck she’d tied a black lace something or other. Her hat sat well back on her head, so that its brim framed her face, and that inner brim was adorned with lace and ribbons. More ribbon and lace trimmed the back, where a tall plume of feathers sprouted.
He, clearly, did not make nearly as pretty a picture. At his entrance she looked up, and her hand went to her bosom. “Oh, no,” she said. Then she collected herself and said, in cooler tones, “I heard about the fight.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, though he knew it was. “I know how to dodge a blow to the face. You ought to see Longmore. At any rate, this is the way I always look after an excessively convivial night with a man who tried to kill me. Why are you here?”
He was careful to keep any hope from his face as well as his voice. It was harder to keep it from his heart. He didn’t want to let himself hope she’d changed her mind. He was fully awake and sober now and wishing he were drunk again.
He could truly understand at last, not only in his mind but in his gut as well, why his father had crawled into a bottle. Drink dulled the pain. Physical pain dulled it, too. While fighting with Longmore he’d felt nothing. Now he remembered every word he’d said to her, the way he’d opened his heart, concealing nothing. It hadn’t been enough. He wasn’t enough.
She gestured at the table. “I was looking at the magazines,” she said. “I’m unscrupulous. I looked at your notes, too. But I can’t read your writing. You said you had ideas. About my business.”
“Is that why you’ve come?” he said tightly. “For the ideas for your shop—the ideas to make you the greatest modiste in the world.”
“I am the greatest modiste in the world,” she said.
Dear God how he loved her! Her self-confidence, her unscrupulousness, her determination, her strength, her genius. Her passion.
He allowed himself a smile, and hoped it didn’t look too sickeningly infatuated. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “How could I forget? You are the greatest modiste in the world.”
“But I’m someone else as well,” she said.
She moved away from the table and walked to the window and looked out into the garden.
He waited. Had he any choice?
“I was tired yesterday,” she said, still looking out. “Very tired. It was a shockingly busy day, and we were run off our feet, and I was in a state, trying not to fall apart.” She turned away from the window and met his gaze. “I was trying so hard that I was unkind and unfair to you.”
“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man, We can still be friends. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.
“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”
Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”
“He’s dead.”
Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.
“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”
“No, I’m well.”
“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”
“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.
She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”
He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.
She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.
She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”
Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.
He tried to imagine what that had been like and his imagination failed. He and Longmore had been on the Continent when the cholera struck. They’d survived, and that, as far as he could make out, had been a miracle. Most victims died within hours.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”
“Why should you?” she said. “The point of all this is my family, and who I am.”
“Then your name really is Noirot,” he said. “I’d wondered if it was simply a Frenchified name you three had adopted for the shop.”
Her smile was taut. “That was the name my paternal grandfather adopted when he fled France during the Revolution. He got his wife and children out, and some aunts and cousins. Others of his family were not so lucky. His older brother, the Comte de Rivenoir, was caught trying to escape Paris. After he and his family went to the guillotine, my grandfather inherited the title. He saw the folly of trying to make use of it. His family, the Robillon family, had a bad name in France. You know the character, the Vicomte de Valmont, in the book by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses?”
He nodded. It was one of a number of books Lord War-ford had declared unfit for decent people to read. Naturally, when they were boys, Longmore had got hold of a copy and he and Clevedon had read it.
“The Robillon men were that sort of French aristocrat,” she said. “Libertines and gamblers who used people like pawns or toys. They weren’t popular at that time, and they’re still not remembered affectionately in France. Since he wanted to be able to move about freely, Grandfather took a name as common as dirt. Noirot. Or, in English, Black. He and his offspring used one or the other name, depending on the seduction or swindle or ruse in hand at the moment.”
He was leaning forward now, listening intently. Pieces were falling into place: the way she spoke, her smooth French and her aristocratic accent…but she’d told him she was English. Well, then, she’d lied about that, too.
“I knew you weren’t quite what you appeared to be,” he said. “My servants took you for quality, and servants are rarely taken in.”
“Oh, we can take in anybody,” she said. “We’re born that way. The family never forgot they were aristocrats. They never gave up their extravagant ways. They were expert seducers, and they used the skill to find wealthy spouses. Being more romantic and less practical than their Continental counterparts, the men had great luck with highborn Englishwomen.”
“That must hold true for English men as well,” he said.
Her dark gaze met his. “It does. But I never set out to get a spouse. I’ve lied and cheated—you don’t know the half of it—but it was all for the purpose I explained early in our acquaintance.”
“I know you cheat at cards,” he said.
“I didn’t cheat during our last game of Vingt et Un,” she said. “I merely played as though my life depended on it. People in my family often find themselves in that position: playing a game on which their life depends. But cheating at cards is nothing. I forged names on our passports to get out of France quickly. My family often finds it necessary to leave a country suddenly. My sisters and I were taught the skill, and we practiced diligently, because we never knew when we’d need it. We were well educated in the normal ways as well. We had lessons in deportment as well as mathematics and geography. Whatever else we Noirots were—and it wasn’t pretty—we were aristocrats, and that was our most valuable commodity. To speak and carry ourselves as ladies and gentlemen do—you can imagine the fears it allays, the doors it opens.”