A Heart Most Worthy

by Siri Mitchell

  Mrs. Quinn jerked toward the screen, behind which she supposed her son was waiting. Her son. If nothing else had come from her marriage, at least she had him. She took a breath. Looked up at Madame Fortier. “Have you another book?”

  Madame passed the first one to Luciana and then handed a second one to the strega.

  Luciana left the safety of the screen and placed the book on the counter, avoiding any contact with or any glimpse of the man.

  Mrs. Quinn turned the pages, pausing halfway through. “I don’t see why you didn’t put me in a design like this last spring.”

  “Because we had decided that it did not properly highlight your stature.”

  The woman sent a sharp look at Madame through the mirror. “Yes . . . yes, I suppose I do recall you saying something like that.” But it had ruffles and lace. And contrary to everything she had ever believed about herself and fashion, she had come to crave ruffles and lace. Less of what was and more of what was not. She wanted something different.

  Madame coughed delicately into her handkerchief. “I should think you would want less of the distractions of ruffles and lace. So that the eye is drawn to your face and fine features.”

  The woman frowned and fiddled with her cuffs. Her face and fine features. It always came back to her face and fine features. But what had those things ever done for her? And why couldn’t she trade them in for something different? Something new? “Bring me that first book again.”

  Madame bowed. Looked at Luciana. Inclined her head toward the shop floor.

  Luciana ducked out from behind the screen and made for the counter where she’d left the book. But the man had already found it and was holding it out to her. Her gaze darted to the floor, but she accepted it from him and then turned and took it to Madame Fortier.

  The strega seized it from Madame’s hands. She was flipping through the pages toward the middle of the book when she suddenly stopped. “This one. This is the one I want.”

  Both Luciana and Madame tried to contain their dismay. They couldn’t imagine, either of them, that anyone would want a gown like that one. There were more than a dozen horizontal tucks circling the skirt that made the design read like a cone, wider at the hips than it was at the bottom. Patch pockets were placed at such an angle on the hips that they might as well have been potholders. It was an avant-garde gown intended for someone living at the bohemian fringe of society. Someone who cared little about what others liked or thought or expected. Someone as far from Mrs. Quinn as a Hollywood starlet could be.

  Madame considered it for a moment before replying. “Perhaps if we substituted georgette crepe for the wool jersey.” That way it wouldn’t flare out quite so much at the hips. If it lay flatter, then maybe . . . maybe. But Madame feared a gown like the one the strega wanted would be an unmitigated disaster. It would take on the look of a costume. And a gown maker didn’t do herself any favors by letting her clients walk around in unbecoming gowns. Sooner or later, either the client would realize the mistake – and blame the gown maker – or the client’s friends would see the catastrophe – and blame the gown maker. Either way, Madame’s business had not become what it was by letting her clients walk around in whatever pleased them. There was an art to gown making that required far more than familiarity with needle and thread.

  Mrs. Quinn pursed her lips as she considered the suggestion. The model in the illustration was the kind of person she wished she could be. Bold and bohemian. All dark, sleek hair, with a slash of red lips. Arresting and intriguing. Exotic. Exactly the kind of person Mrs. Quinn was not. “Maybe. Maybe if you do it up in georgette, then I can see if I want it.”

  Madame nodded. “And might I suggest that it be made in this lovely color?” She flipped a few pages further and revealed a sample of gray-colored silk that had a supple hand.

  “Is this a new shade for spring?”

  It was. One of them. In a particular shade that would set off the woman’s eyes.

  “I’m still rather partial to taupe.” She always had been, though she’d rarely ever ordered a gown in that color.

  Taupe! It always came back to taupe with Mrs. Quinn. The strega might be partial to that color but, just between you and me, taupe was not at all partial to her. “Perhaps.” It was as close to no as Madame would ever come. “Perhaps the pockets could be made of taupe. With wine-colored beading.” That would be acceptable.

  Mrs. Quinn squinted at the design, trying to imagine it in a different color and with a different material, but she had never been very good at imagining what she couldn’t actually see. “I suppose. I suppose . . . yes.”

  “There’s a new sleeve that’s being shown for spring. Would you like me to incorporate it?”

  “Does anyone else have it?”

  “No.” For no one else was as eager, as willing as Mrs. Quinn, to return from vacation three weeks early just to get her orders in first.

  “I won’t have what anyone else is having.”

  “Of course not. In fact, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that everyone else will have to content themselves with wearing what you’re wearing.”

  The strega smiled at that thought.

  “That is what I always tell them. ‘Of course you know that Mrs. Quinn will be wearing the same.’ ”

  “I did like all that beadwork. On the pockets. And I’d want the same on the collar. But I’ll want mine done up in jewels.” Mrs. Quinn had moved from her seat, past the screen and up to the counter. There, standing beside her son, she took from him a velvet pouch and spilled its contents onto the counter. “These were my father’s.”

  If Luciana hadn’t missed her guess, she thought she’d already spied one or two made of paste among the batch. Clearly the woman’s father knew very little about fine gems.

  Madame’s heart had nearly stopped in her chest when she’d seen the tumbling, flashing jewels. Now she moved to sweep them back into their bag. “So many of them! The gown will gleam like a prize.” There. She’d almost recaptured every one. “I’ve found a fabulous girl for beads. I’m sure you’ll be very happy with her work.” She gave Luciana a long look as she spoke, tying off the sack with its ribbon, and then handing it back to Mrs. Quinn.

  But the woman handed it right back. “They’re to stay here.

  For the gown.”

  Madame set the bag on the counter. “I don’t have the ability to keep such fine jewels for such a prolonged period.” Nor did she have the insurance.

  “Surely you’re not saying your shop is not safe.”

  “No. I am simply saying that I would feel more comfortable if you kept them.”

  “And I want them to stay here.” She didn’t say it, but she had lately begun to suspect that some of her maids were stealing from her. And though Madame was both a shopkeeper and a foreigner, she judged her jewels were more safely kept there instead of the Quinn mansion. “I must insist. As long as you don’t . . .” Her gaze traveled to where Luciana stood, holding the sample book. “As long as you don’t have any Italians working here.”

  11

  “Italians? Of course not.” Madame Fortier had long since ceased to be Italian. She had given up her heritage to embrace proprietorship and had become all things to all people. She hardly noticed anymore when people disparaged her fellow countrymen. What’s more, she was inclined to agree with them. So although the building was filled above the shop floor with Italians, she lied through her teeth and had no compunction about doing so.

  Since Mrs. Quinn insisted on leaving her jewels and Madame could not imagine life without the dual blessing and curse of her patronage, the shopkeeper finally acquiesced.

  Now, Billy Quinn had been leaning against the counter all that time, watching the goings-on. He wasn’t opposed to stopping in at a dressmaker’s the way some of his friends might have been. To his mind, dresses and girls went together. And why would he forgo the opportunity to haunt the former if it guaranteed the presence of the latter?

  Madame Fortier’s.
<
br />   It had been a while since he’d been in the shop. He’d graduated from college, and then they’d gone away for the summer. He hadn’t minded so much being dragged back to the city. He was tired of sun and sand and surf, though he wouldn’t have wanted to admit it. Not to his set. They wouldn’t have understood. But he’d run through all the girls in his crowd. They only knew how to giggle, dance, and flirt. It didn’t seem quite right, in his opinion, to carry on that way, as if nothing in life were serious, when half the world was dying a mere continent away. He supposed that meant that he was growing up. And that a job at his father’s bank and marriage couldn’t be far behind.

  A job and marriage. He stifled a yawn.

  No, he hadn’t been to Madame Fortier’s in a while. A trip to the shop was usually just a prelude to distributing leaflets on behalf of the National Women’s Party, or charming his mother’s friends over tea. Sometimes even stopping by his father’s office on the way home. The shop hadn’t changed much, and neither had Madame herself. She was an interesting one. Not French. He’d spent enough time in the vicinity of the family’s French chef to know that her accent was not from that country. If he had to guess, he would say Hungarian, or Romanian. She had that dark look about her.

  His eye settled on the girl standing to the side, over by Madame Fortier. Not quite behind the counter, yet not quite on the shop floor. She didn’t seem to belong to either realm. She wasn’t a customer, of course. She’d been assisting Madame Fortier, hadn’t she? But he wasn’t yet convinced that she was a shop girl either. She seemed to hold herself apart, from all of them, through an act of choice rather than deference. She was, however –

  Luciana looked up at him just then.

  She was beautiful.

  Her gaze sank from his again just as surely as it was weighted with a stone. And it told him, just as surely, that she wasn’t American. American girls in Boston didn’t mind meeting a man’s look straight on. So this girl wasn’t American. Her skin . . . it wasn’t swarthy. Not like the Italians’. It had more of the golden tones of Madame Fortier’s. Her hair was dark, it was true, but he’d have bet anything that it didn’t tend toward coarse. And her eyes . . . he’d caught a glimpse of startling sadness in their sable-colored depths. But if she wasn’t American – and she wasn’t Italian – then what exactly was she?

  He removed himself from his end of the counter and draped himself closer to hers.

  Alarm fired the look that she gave him, and she moved back toward the screen.

  He’d never have the chance to speak to her if she kept moving away like that!

  “You’ll have the gown finished by November?” The strega had put up a hand to adjust her hat.

  Madame nodded. “But I’d like you to take a look at another design I just got in.”

  Mrs. Quinn had already turned from the counter toward the door. “I haven’t the time.”

  “It’s a lovely gown that mixes wool serge and silk satin.”

  “I haven’t the time to be lounging around here all day, looking at books.” Indeed, she didn’t. There were so very many tedious things that had to be done oneself if one wished them to be accomplished properly. “Send them later. With your girl.”

  Billy lifted his hat toward Luciana before he put it on his head and sauntered out of the shop behind his mother, regretting that he hadn’t been afforded the chance to speak with the girl.

  Both Madame and Luciana let out a sigh of gigantic proportions as soon as Mrs. Quinn and her son had left the shop. Madame retreated behind her counter, pulled the sample book close, and turned to the design Mrs. Quinn had ordered. And then she turned to the page after it.

  Luciana raised a hand to hide a smile. It seemed Madame Fortier had persuaded Mrs. Quinn from the gown her heart had been set on into another gown entirely. The one on the very next page.

  Madame looked up and caught the glimmer of humor in the girl’s eyes. “Sometimes it seems my clients don’t know what they really want. In that case, it is my job to tell them.”

  Although, that wasn’t quite the truth. Not in this case. During many other appointments over the years, with many other clients, Madame had done exactly that. But with Mrs. Quinn, things had always been different. Madame had a particular image and particular look she had in mind for Mrs. Quinn. She always had. Ever since the beginning. Ever since she had made the woman’s wedding gown. And so it wasn’t so much a case of Madame talking Mrs. Quinn into a particular style or color; it was more a matter of trying to talk Mrs. Quinn into the person Madame thought that she should be. And Mrs. Quinn had always been amenable. Until now.

  Madame summoned Luciana once again, late that afternoon, placing several sample books into the girl’s hands. “I need you to deliver these to Mrs. Quinn. She may look at them while you wait, but she is not to keep them.”

  Luciana nodded, though she couldn’t imagine what she would do if the woman tried.

  “She shouldn’t keep them. If she tries to keep them, then I won’t be able to order her new gowns.”

  Luciana nodded.

  “You can remind her of that.”

  But of course she couldn’t. Luciana didn’t speak English. A fact that Madame had conveniently forgotten if she had ever known it at all.

  The shop owner frowned. She wasn’t sure about this. She’d never sent her books to any of her clients before. Without her books, Madame was worse than useless. She was impotent. She was nothing. Her customers made appointments to view them at the shop. That’s how it was done. Before now. But what else could Madame do? Mrs. Quinn had changed the rules.

  Madame glanced at the girl before her. A very frightened-looking girl. “I’d send Julietta, but the girl is sometimes too bold for her own good.”

  Sometimes?

  “I’ve called a car for you. You’ll present Mrs. Quinn with the books, and you’ll wait to bring them back. You must bring them back.”

  Luciana was handed into the car by the chauffeur. She cowered on a seat in the back, not quite daring to look out the window for fear of being seen as she was driven from Temple Place around Boston Common and up Beacon Hill. Down not-quite-straight Mt. Vernon Street, lined with its bow-fronted faded brick townhouses. It was here that she started to relax. What could happen to her in a motorcar, after all? And wasn’t it wonderful to be riding in one again?

  At tree-lined, iron-fenced Louisburg Square, the plethora of cats that sunned themselves in the dappled shade and the general feeling of serenity reminded her of nothing so much as Europe before the war. Of languid and leisurely summer days spent in the tidy boroughs of Germany and the dignified neighborhoods of Vienna. They made her long for all that she had lost. So it was not with a sense of great awe or meek humility that Luciana descended the car; it was with a familiarity and ease, a sense of coming, if not home, then into her rightful domain.

  Which is why, you see, she ought to be forgiven for walking right up to the front door.

  The butler, upon understanding what her visit entailed, tried to shoo her around to the back, but Luciana didn’t understand him. She didn’t know what he was saying and her only acquaintance with a service entrance had been at Madame Fortier’s. In front of that house in Louisburg Square, she had quite forgotten, for a moment, whom she had become.

  Eventually, Mrs. Quinn, bothered by the commotion at the front door, came out of her sitting room and into the hallway. Upon seeing her, Luciana stepped forward and offered up the sample books as the doorman made his mistress aware of the girl’s breach in etiquette. Soon both the man and the strega were berating her.

  Luciana didn’t understand the words, though she understood the intent. She was being scolded. And the daughter of the Count of Roma didn’t take well to scolding. The more voluble Mrs. Quinn became, the more remote, the more patrician Luciana became. Until screeching at the girl became as satisfying as trying to engage her husband’s attention.

  Finally, she did something Luciana understood. She pointed toward the door at the far end
of the hallway.

  Luciana went toward it as she was bid, though she had no idea what to do or where to go once she had reached it. She stopped once, halfway down the hall, and turned back toward the front door, but Mrs. Quinn and the doorman had disappeared.

  Narrow doorways set into dark corners of hallways were not within her usual realm of existence. Before having fled to the North End, that is. In her experience, such things had usually been meant for servants. She was rather enjoying the prospect of a brightly lit hallway that smelled of nothing but furniture wax and carbolic. It was a well-proportioned hallway at that. Not marble, like she had been used to, but the wood paneling on the walls and the floorboards at her feet gleamed with quiet dignity. So she decided to enjoy that place of quiet and relative peace. And as she stood there, she made a decision. She decided that she needed to learn English. If for no other reason than to be able to understand people like the strega when they yelled at her.

  For then, she would be able to yell back.

  In any case, that’s where Billy came upon her. He’d long ago shed the suit he’d worn downtown. Clad now in his white duck outing pants and white canvas oxfords, he was on his way to The Tennis and Racquet Club.

  Luciana was standing in front of a picture, head tilted, wondering if, in fact, it was the Canaletto it claimed to be. She had her doubts.

  But he didn’t. It was definitely the beautiful girl from Madame Fortier’s shop who now stood in his hallway. “Delighted to see you again!”

  12

  Luciana jumped at his words.

  He put out his hand in welcome. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Forgetting who she was trying to be, she put her hand into his. She expected that Billy would raise it to his lips, so she let it lie in his palm.

  Billy, having expected to be given a hand to shake, had no idea what to do with such a treasure. But he was not his father’s son for nothing. Smiling in a way that displayed all of his innate Irish charm, he led her to the bench that sat in the hall. The invitation was unmistakable.