Vixen In Velvet

“I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”

What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.

“It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”

Blast.

And this afternoon had been going so well, too.

Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.

“What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”

He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.

“I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”

“Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”

“And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”

He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.

He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.

“Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”

Forty-five minutes later

Are you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”

She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.

She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult. Normal client behavior, in other words.

At present, Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, stripped to corset and chemise, thanks to Jeffreys’s able assistance and Lady Clara’s moral support. Even so, reaching this point had been a battle. Meanwhile, Leonie’s ankle hurt, and so did her head, and neither of these things mattered, any more than Lady Gladys’s obnoxious behavior did.

This was the opportunity of a lifetime.

“My lady, one of the basic principles of dress is to emphasize one’s assets,” Leonie said. “Where men are concerned, your bosom is your greatest asset.”

“Greatest I can’t quarrel with, if you mean immense,” Lady Gladys said. “I know I’m not the sylph here.” She shot an angry glance at Lady Clara, who was too statuesque to qualify as a sylph. She did qualify as impossibly beautiful, though: blonde and blue-eyed, gifted with a pearly complexion and a shapely body. And brains. And a beautiful nature.

Nature had not gifted Lady Gladys with any form of classical beauty. Dull brown hair. Eyes an equally unmemorable brown, and like her mouth too small for her round face. A figure by no means ideal. She had little in the way of a waist. But she had a fine bosom, and acceptable hips, though at the moment, this wasn’t obvious to any but the most expert observer.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a shape,” Leonie said.

“Do you hear her, Gladys?” Lady Clara said. “Did I not tell you that you were hiding your good parts?”

“I don’t have good parts!” Lady Gladys said. “Don’t patronize me, Clara. I can see perfectly well what’s in the mirror.”

“I beg to differ,” Leonie said. “If you could see perfectly well, you’d see that your corset is wrong for your ladyship’s figure.”

“What figure?” Lady Gladys said.

“Well, let’s see what happens when we take off the corset.”

“No! I’m quite undressed enough. My dressmaker at home—”

“Seems to have a problem with drink,” Leonie said. “I cannot imagine any sober modiste stuffing her client into this—this sausage arrangement.”

“Sausage?” Lady Gladys shrieked. “Clara, I’ve had quite enough of this creature’s insolence.”

“Jeffreys, kindly assist Lady Gladys with her corset,” Leonie said firmly. The modiste who let the client take charge might as well close up shop and earn her living by taking in mending.

“You will not, girl,” Lady Gladys snapped. “You most certainly will not. I refuse to be manhandled by a consumptive child who speaks the most disgusting excuse for French to assault my ears in a city grossly oversupplied with ignoramuses.”

Jeffreys had grown up in a harsh world. This was motherly affection compared to her childhood experience. Undaunted, she moved to the customer, but when she tried to touch the corset strings, Lady Gladys twisted about and waved her arms, practically snarling.

Like a cornered animal.

“Come, come, your ladyship is not afraid of my forewoman,” Leonie said.

“Jeffreys can’t possibly be consumptive,” Lady Clara said. “If she were, she’d be dead, after the ordeal of wrestling you out of your frock and petticoats.”

“I told you this would be a waste of time!”

“And I told you I was tired of a certain person’s sly remarks about remembering your dresses from your first Season. And you said—”

“I don’t care what anybody says!”

“Ça suffit,” Leonie said. “Everybody go away. Lady Gladys and I need to talk privately.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Lady Gladys said. “You are the most encroaching—no, Clara, you are not to go!”

But Lady Clara went out, and Jeffreys followed her, and gently closed the door behind them.

Lady Gladys couldn’t run after them in her underclothes. She couldn’t dress herself, because, like most ladies, she had no idea how. She was trapped.

Leonie drew out from a cupboard an excessively French dressing gown. The color of cream and richly embroidered with pink buds and pale green vines and leaves, it was not made of muslin, as ladies’ night-dresses usually were. This was silk. A very fine, nearly transparent silk.

She held it up. Lady Gladys sniffed and scowled, but she didn’t turn away. Her gaze settled on the risqué piece of silk, and her expression became hunted.

“You can’t mean that for me,” she said. “That is suitable for a harlot.”

Leonie advanced and draped it over her ladyship’s stiff shoulders.

She turned her to face the looking glass. Lady Gladys’s mutinous expression softened. She blinked hard. “I-I could never wear such a thing, and you’re wicked to suggest it.”

Leonie heard the longing in her voice, and her hard little dressmaker’s heart ached.

Lady Gladys wasn’t a beauty. She’d never been and never would be, no matter how much of the dressmaker’s art one applied.

Yet she could be more.

“I’m not suggesting you purchase it,” Leonie said. “Not yet. It will be more suitable for your trousseau.”

“Trousseau! What a joke!”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Leonie said. “We’re going to rid you of that monstrosity of a corset.”

“You are the most managing, impudent—”

“I’ll provide you with something more suitable until I can make up exactly what you need.” Corsets were Leonie’s specialty.

“I will not … You will not …” Lady Gladys blinked hard and swallowed.

“Your ladyship is never to wear ready-made stays again,” Leonie went on briskly. It never did to become emotional with clients. They could manage that sort of thing more than adequately themselves. “They don’t provide proper support and they make you shapeless.”

“I am shapeless. Or rather, I have a fine shape if you like b-barrels.”

“You do have a figure,” Leonie said. “It isn’t classical, but that isn’t important to men. They’re not as discriminating as young women think. You’re generously endowed in the bosom, and once we get that ghastly thing off, you’ll see that your hips and bottom are in neat proportion.”

Lady Gladys looked into the mirror. Her face crumpled. She walked away and sank onto a chair.

“Let us review your assets,” Leonie said.

“Assets!” Lady Gladys’s voice was choked.

“In addition to what I’ve enumerated, you own a clear complexion, an elegant nose, and pretty hands,” Leonie said.

Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.

“Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”

Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.

Leonie gave her a handkerchief.

“Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.

Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”

“Yet here you are,” Leonie said.

Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”

“A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”

Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”

“I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly dressed.”

“Oh, yes, that explains everything. If you’d had the managing of things, I’d have been the belle of the ball.”

Leonie stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and eyed her new client critically. After a long, busy moment while her mind performed complicated calculations, she said, “Yes, my lady. Yes, you would have been. And yes, you can be.”

Early evening of Friday 10 July

You hateful little sneak! I always attend her!”

“Always? Once, two months ago.”

“It was only last week I waited on Miss Renfrew, while you was flirting with Mr. Burns.”

“I never was!”

“Maybe he wasn’t flirting with you, but you was trying hard enough.”

Leonie had heard the raised voices, and was hurrying from her office into the workroom at the same time as Jeffreys, on the same errand, was running that way from the showroom.

By the time they burst through the door, Glinda Simmons had got hold of Joanie Barker. They scratched and kicked and slapped and pulled each other’s hair, screeching the while. The other girls shrieked, too. In a matter of minutes, they’d tumbled bolts of costly fabric, boxes of ribbons, flowers, feathers, and other articles hither and yon.

Leonie clapped her hands, but no one was paying attention. She and Jeffreys had to move in and forcibly separate the two girls. This didn’t stop the screaming. The combatants called for witnesses to various crimes perpetrated by the opposing party, and the noncombatants took that as an invitation to express their own grievances against this one or that one.

It took nearly an hour to restore full order. Having warned the girls that they’d all be dismissed without notice or a character if they indulged in another outburst, Leonie hurried upstairs to change out of her workday dress. Jeffreys followed her.

“You’d better send Mary Parmenter to help me dress,” Leonie said. Mary had been left in charge of the showroom when Jeffreys came to stop the war. “You keep an eye on the seamstresses. You’re the best at managing these battles.”

This was only one of the reasons Selina Jeffreys, despite her youth and apparent frailty, was their forewoman.

Jeffreys ignored her, and started unfastening Leonie’s pelerine. “You’re going to be late, madame,” she said. “And you know Parmenter gets nervous and clumsy when she feels rushed. I don’t.”

Late wasn’t good enough, in Leonie’s opinion. Never would be preferable. She was not looking forward to this evening’s engagement.

Lord Swanton was hosting a poetry lecture to raise funds for the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. This was the sort of activity at which Sophy shone. She would put in an appearance, then slip away and write all about it for London’s favorite gossip sheet, Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The account would include detailed descriptions of what every Maison Noirot customer was wearing.

Leonie looked forward to the writing much in the way a French ancestor had looked forward to making the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.

Misinterpreting her frown, Jeffreys said, “Please don’t worry about the girls, madame. They’ll be all right now. It’s that time of the month, and you know how it is with girls who’re always together.”

They all had That Time of the Month at the same time.

“It’s worse this month, and we both know why,” Leonie said. Marcelline had married a duke and Sophy had married a future marquess. Though any other women would jump at the chance to quit working, Marcelline and Sophy weren’t like other women. They might give it up eventually, but not without a fight.

The girls didn’t understand this, and it wasn’t easy to prove, since neither sister was much in evidence at present. Marcelline, who was having a miserable time with morning sickness, was abed a good deal, on her doctor’s orders. Sophy had had to go away to give Fashionable Society time to forget what the French widow she’d recently impersonated had looked like.

That left Leonie, who could do what the other two did, but not with their brilliance and flair. Each sister had her special skills, and Leonie was missing her sisters’ talents acutely. And their company.

And she was more worried than anybody about what would become of Maison Noirot. She’d put everything she had into the shop—mind, body, soul. The cholera had killed Cousin Emma and wiped out their old life in Paris. Emma had died too young, but here in London her spirit and genius lived on in their hearts and in the new life they’d so painstakingly built.

“The girls will be better when my sisters are in the shop more regularly,” Leonie said. “Routine and habit, Jeffreys. You know our girls need not merely to be kept busy, but to have order in their lives.” Many had ended up in charitable institutions. Their lives before had been hard and chaotic. “But matters are bound to change, and everybody needs to adapt.” For these girls, adapting wasn’t easy. Change upset them. She understood. It upset her, too. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, getting them used to a new routine.”

“You don’t need any more work,” Jeffreys said. “You need more rest, madame. You can’t be three people.”

Leonie smiled. “No, but with your help, I might be nearly that. But do let us make haste. I must get there before it’s over.”

Later that evening

Leonie hurried into the conversation room adjoining the New Western Athenaeum’s lecture hall—

—and stopped short as a tall, black-garbed figure emerged from the shadows of a window embrasure.

“I thought you’d never come,” Lord Lisburne said.

He was not, she saw, dressed entirely in black. In addition to the pristine white shirt and neckcloth, he wore a green silk waistcoat, exquisitely embroidered in gold. It called attention to his narrow waist … thence her gaze wandered lower, to the evening trousers that lovingly followed the muscled contours of his long legs.

Leonie took a moment to settle her breathing. “Did we have an appointment?” she said. “If so, I must have made it while concussed, because I don’t recall.”

“Oh, I was sure you’d be here.” He waved a gloved hand at the door to the lecture hall. “Swanton. Young ladies in droves.” He waved at her dress. “Advertising.”

For this event, she’d chosen a green silk. Though a dress for evening, exposing more neck than day attire did, it was simple enough to suit a public lecture. No blond lace or ruffles and only minimal embroidery, of a darker green, above the deep skirt flounce and along the hem. The immense sleeves provided the main excitement, slashed to reveal what would appear to be chemise sleeves underneath—a glimpse of underwear, in other words. Over it she’d thrown, with apparent carelessness, a fine silk shawl, a wine red and gold floral pattern on a creamy white ground that called attention to the white enticingly visible through the slashing.

“I meant to arrive earlier,” she said. “But we had a busy day at the shop, and the heat makes everybody cross and impatient. The customers are sharp with the girls in the shop, who then go into the workroom and quarrel with the seamstresses. We had a little crisis. It took longer to settle than it ought to have done.”

“Lucky you,” he said. “You missed ‘Poor Robin.’”

“ ‘Poor Robin’?” she said.

He set his hat over his heart, bowed his head, and in a sepulchral voice intoned:

When last I heard that peaceful lay

In all its sweetness swell,

I little thought so soon to say—

Farewell, sweet bird, farewell!

All cloudy comes the snowy morn,

Poor Robin is not here!

I miss him on the fleecy thorn,

And feel a falling tear.

“Oh, my,” she said.

“It continued,” he said, “for what seemed to be an infinite number of stanzas.”

Her heart sank. One must give Lord Swanton credit for using his influence to raise funds for a worthwhile organization. All the same, if she had to listen to “Poor Robins” for another two hours or even more, she might throw herself into the Thames.

“Lord Swanton seems to take life’s little sorrows very much to heart,” she said.

“He can’t help himself,” Lord Lisburne said. “He tries, he says, to be more like Byron when he wrote Don Juan, but it always comes out more like an exceedingly weepy version of Childe Harold. At best. But happily for you, there’s no more room.”

No room. Relief wafted through her like a cooling breeze. She wouldn’t have to sit through hours of dismal poetry—

But she hadn’t come for her own entertainment, she reminded herself. This was business. Where Lord Swanton appeared, Maison Noirot’s prime potential clientele would be. Equally important, Lady Gladys would be here.

“All the better if it’s a crush,” Leonie said. “And a late entrance will draw attention.”

“Even if you deflated the sleeves and skirt, you couldn’t squeeze in,” he said. “I gave up my place and two women took it. The lecture hall is packed to the walls. That, by the way, is where most of the men have retreated to. Since they’re bored and you’re young and pretty, you might expect to encounter a lot of sweaty hands trying to go where they’ve no business to be.”

Leonie’s skin crawled. She’d been pawed before. Being able to defend herself did not make the experience any less disgusting. “I told Lady Gladys I’d be here,” she said.

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“It’s business,” she said.

“None of mine, in other words,” he said.

She had no intention of explaining about Paris and the night she’d been hurrying home, to warn her sisters of the danger, and found herself in a mob of men, being groped and narrowly escaping rape.

This wasn’t Paris, she told herself. This was London, and the place did not contain a mob. It was merely crowded, like so many other social gatherings. She walked to the lecture hall door.

He followed her. “A hot, stuffy room, crammed with excitable young women and irritated men, and Swanton and his poetic friends sobbing over fallen leaves and dead birds and wilted flowers,” he said. “Yes, I can understand why you can’t bear to be left out.”

“It’s business,” she said.

She cracked open the door and peered inside.

She had a limited view, through a narrow space the doorkeepers had managed to maintain in front of the door. Primarily women occupied the seats on the ground floor, and they were so tightly squeezed together, they were half in one another’s laps. They and a few men—fathers and brothers, most likely—thronged the mezzanine and upper gallery as well. The latter seemed to sag under the weight. Men filled every square inch of the standing room. The space was stifling hot, and the aroma of tightly packed bodies assaulted her nostrils.

Meanwhile somebody who wasn’t Lord Swanton was reading, in throbbing tones, an ode to a dying rose.

She retreated a step. Her back came up against a warm, solid mass. Silk whispered against silk.

Lord Lisburne leaned in to look over her shoulder, and the mingled scents of freshly pressed linen and shaving soap and male wiped out the smell of the crowd and swamped her senses.

“Aren’t you glad you were late?” he said. “You might be sitting in there.” His breath tickled her ear. “And you wouldn’t be able to get out until it was over.”

She’d be trapped, listening to poetic dirges, for hours. She closed her eyes and told herself it was business, then took a steadying breath and opened them again. She would go through this door. She—

His large, gloved hand settled on the door inches from her shoulder. He closed the door.

“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the circus.”

Chapter Three

Never warn me, my dear, to take care of my heart,

When I dance with yon Lancer, so fickle and smart;

What phantoms the mind of eighteen can create,

That boast not a charm at discreet twenty-eight.

—Mrs. Abdy, “A Marrying Man,” 1835

Miss Noirot turned quickly. Since Lisburne hadn’t moved, she came up against him, her bosom touching his waistcoat for one delicious instant. She smelled delicious, too.

She brought up her hand and gave him a push, and not, as you’d think, a little-girlish or flirtatious sort of push. It was a firm shove. While not strong enough to move him, it was a clear enough signal that she wasn’t playing coquette.