“This is Madame Norton,” he went on, “that the Duchess Alice recommended. Would you walk again, my dear? For my wife.”
I noticed that his orders softened in the presence of that lady.
Irene obliged. Her theatrical training had made her docile in only one area: that of obeying a maestro, a stage director, or a composer like Antonin Dvořák—and perhaps a world- renowned composer of ladies’ toilettes like Worth.
He shook his head as she paraded, not in disapproval but in wonder. “I have not seen such fine carriage since yours,” he commented to his wife. He then waved Irene to a halt. “You are American, no?”
She nodded.
“Ah, my American clients. Such women, goddesses of liberty with three divine attributes: faith, figures, and francs. Between them and the Russian grand duchesses I am kept in seventh heaven... and caviar.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” Irene said, “but I fear I somewhat lack the third element in your dressmaking equation.”
“That may not be fatal, my dear,” Madame Worth put in quickly. “My husband is aware that the times change as we near the twentieth century. We have seen royal houses fall, empires dissolve, and aristocrats flee. Commerce remains. I have long passed the time when I could introduce my husband’s more daring inventions. He seeks a substitute.”
“But—” Irene appeared bemused. “The mannequins below. I recognized a duplicate of Alice, of Maria Feodorovna, the Empress of Russia. You shrewdly employ living dressmaker’s dummies, ‘doubles’ of your most famous patrons, Monsieur, but I do not resemble anyone famous.”
“Exactly!” The silly man clapped his hands again, his ludicrous beret trembling like a blancmange. He glanced at his stolid wife. “I believe that we have found here our own Madame X, our mannequin de ville.”
She nodded at this mysterious statement, and even Irene allowed herself to look a trifle blank.
“But first I must see more!” he declared. “You must repair below and allow yourself to be laced into a more fitted gown. Aesthetic dress is all very well for effect, but most of my clients prefer to exhibit their small waists. I trust that you are as accomplished, Madame.”
“The cruel schoolmistress Corsetry has long since made hourglasses of us all,” Irene answered, unruffled.
“True!” Marie Worth’s hands patted her broad midsection with a laugh. “One of the comforts of old age is... comfort.”
“I will do as you suggest,” Irene said, turning to leave. I started to follow her.
“Wait!” came Worth’s command.
We stopped as one and looked back. The odious man- milliner was glaring at me through narrowed eyes. “This other lady. Is she to be clothed as well?”
I froze in blind umbrage, as speechless as a rabbit. “Miss Huxleigh,” Irene answered swiftly on my behalf, “is too sensible to follow fashion. She is Shropshire born.”
“Ah.” Monsieur Worth nodded soberly under his frivolous beret. “I myself was a Lincolnshire lad until I went to London at twelve to make my fortune.” He frowned at me. “It is for the best. Even I could not do much for her.” A plump hand waved us on.
So I was allowed to escape that interview unmolested.
Chapter Three
A GOOD DRESSING-DOWN
We were escorted below by the waiting mannequin through the crowded salon and ensconced in one of several dressing rooms. These private chambers were paneled and gilded as lavishly as the main salon, with hooks for gowns ringing the perimeter.
“A shame to drive so much hardware into such splendid woodwork,” I commented after our guide left us.
“Forget the woodwork!” Irene’s voice was hushed as in a church, but her excitement was hardly religious. “Do you realize what good fortune I may have? Maison Worth is seeking a discreet but public mannequin for its most forward designs. ‘A model of the city.’ I may possibly acquire more gowns than I can afford for a discounted price!”
“I should think that Monsieur Worth would pay you for acting as his experiment, if so.”
“You do not seem to comprehend the honor. His wife was key in his early career; he apparently hunts a modern substitute, and I am a candidate.”
“Honor, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.”
Irene sighed hugely. Her cheeks were fervid and her eyes glowed as if glossed by fever. “This is a fabulous piece of luck, Nell! Monsieur Worth is not merely considering another in-house mannequin, but an... ambassadress of dress, as it were, someone who will move in the larger society and command attention for his gowns.”
“I should think he had achieved all the attention necessary and indeed healthy by now, Irene.”
“A genius like Worth never stops innovating; that is his genius.”
“He has made a lot of money from vain and foolish women. That is his true genius, and you will be both of those if you allow yourself to become a fashion advertisement.”
“Wait until you see a Worth gown in detail. Even a Shropshire lass will be impressed.”
At that moment a knock tapped lightly at our door. Our vendeuse swept in. Armfuls of violet velvet sparkled with an entire firmament of ornament: jet-spangled black lace splashed with silver, peacock blue, and green beadwork.
Irene’s sigh escaped with the ecstatic control of an aria: a long sustained exhalation of utter bliss.
The vendeuse smiled as she hung this theatrical curtain of a gown on a gilt hook. “I will let Madame’s maid assist her,” she said, preparing to withdraw.
I remained mystified, but Irene merely reached up to unpin her bonnet. “Huxleigh will consider it an honor to fit a Worth gown,” she murmured wickedly.
No sighs for me. I gasped my indignation, but it was too late. The vendeuse had bowed herself and her full skirts out of the chamber and shut the door.
“Irene! I am not your personal maid. How could you let her think so?”
“You do aid me now and again with my corsetry, when Godfrey is not available, as I aid you in turn.”
“Yes. But—”
Irene ignored my sputterings. Instead she was circling the dress—yes, like a hunter circuitously approaching a rare and dangerous beast. She avoided coming too near too soon, only to draw out the moment of capture.
I shook my head, took her bonnet and laid it on a small table, then marched right up to the garment in question.
“Silk velvet,” I pronounced from my ancient few days in Whiteley’s drapery department. “Probably French,” I added, crushingly.
“Lyons silk,” Irene speculated dreamily. “Worth has made the Lyons looms and their products famous.”
“This is most oddly constructed,” I said, ignoring her indrawn breath as I reached to examine the gown. “Many panels make up the skirt, but the bodice, the corsage, is all of one piece.”
“Cut on the bias,” Irene explained, as though discussing a work of art. “Worth is noted for it.”
“No doubt to save fabric.”
“And he is famed for asymmetry in decoration. He does not wish a dress to be predictable, to be anticipated. A woman wearing a Worth is a living sculpture, imbued with the capacity to surprise from every angle.”
“Oh, really, Irene! Will you stop mooning over this overdone piece of dress-making? I will at least help you to disrobe.”
I did indeed play lady’s maid, for Irene was so enraptured by the sight of the gown that she stood as leaden-armed as a sleepy schoolgirl while I worked. Fortunately, the shapeless Liberty silk gown was child’s play to unfasten. I soon had it hung on an opposite hook and turned to regard its monstrous replacement. This gown’s drama, sheer yardage and glittering trellis of ornament made it a kind of feminine suit of armor, and a far more rambunctious garment to don or discard than the Liberty.
Irene remained frozen in dreamy contemplation of the violet gown, looking quite charming in her silk-and-cotton combinations, lace-trimmed at shoulder and knee, and very like an abbreviated bathing costume, in that her pale silk stockings were her
only covering from knee to slipper.
“You are wearing no petticoats!” I observed.
She answered me without taking her eyes from the gown. “That is the entire idea of aesthetic dress: to dispense with excess yardage and poundage. The silk must fall unimpeded.”
“But—” I began, for I had never left home without a petticoat, and usually several, under the most casual of day dresses.
Irene frowned as if hearing a sour note. She waved me silent with the same imperious gesture that Monsieur Worth had used, save that hers indicated mental abstraction rather than arrogance.
“Shhh. I hear something,” she whispered.
Of course she heard something. The women in the salon, in the other dressing rooms, were chattering like chickens. We had simply ignored them as we would an out-of-tune chorus at the opera.
Now Irene did not ignore those nearby voices. Now she cocked her head to listen.
I couldn’t help following her lead, though I abhor eavesdropping. The first familiar word I heard struck my composure with ice-water shock.
“Or course he is divinely handsome,” a languid, violalike voice was pronouncing in oddly accented French. “If I deigned to take a lover of no consequence, I would ensure that his personal attractions made up for his lack of social ones.”
“But to wed such a man, Serafina!” another voice broke in, merry as a flute. “A mere barrister. To end all opportunity of marrying well! Or at least of mistressing well.”
“And have you seen her jewels?” a deeper, crueler bassoon voice intoned. “No, of course not. She has none, save for a few sorry trinkets.”
“Still,” the more charitable flute trilled, “she has powerful friends.”
“La Bernhardt?” mocked the bassoon. “That upstart broomstick? I would be surprised if she didn’t desert Paris for good one day and fly off on one. Even Alice Heine is only American-born, after all, and connected to those German bankers, and you know what they are. Vulgar parvenus. Money men. Like the Rothschilds.”
“She is beautiful,” declared the viola, entering the fray, “and is said to sing like an angel. I hear that she quieted some scandal involving Alice Heine and thus paved her way to marrying the Prince of Monaco next autumn. Some say that this Norton woman is terribly clever.”
“Not clever enough,” the bassoon retorted, coughing as if from cigarette smoke. “A truly clever woman would cease pushing her nose into other people’s affairs and pursue her own. She shouldn’t have to sing for her supper. With her looks she could snag a grand duke, even a prince or a king, if she played her cards correctly. She could collect jewels enough to make even Monsieur Worth’s spaniels sit up and take notice. Clever? Oh no, my dears. She is an utter fool, with enough pathetic pretensions, mind you, to show up here. I cannot think what came over Monsieur Worth to allow her in.”
I had clutched a hand to my mouth, and found my other hand was fanned upon my breast, as if to hold my jumping heart inside my corset.
Irene had moved. I turned to look. She was marching toward the dressing room door, her face as white as cambric. I hurled myself into her path, and found myself, back to the door, facing a whirlwind of ice.
“Irene! You mustn’t. You cannot.”
She reached beyond me for the door lever even as I inched in front of it. “No, Irene. Confronting them will serve nothing but make a scene and make them happy— please!”
“Step aside,” she bid me in the most polite, stony tone I had ever heard. Her eyes were agate, and her lips were carved coral.
“Irene—” I inched away from that terrible gaze. In my instant of retreat, she seized the lever.
“You cannot!” I repeated in the same forced whisper I had used throughout our battle of wills.
“Why not, Nell?” she asked me calmly.
She pulled the door inward and, stunned, I gave with it, only mustering my final argument when she was already over the threshold.
“Irene!” I cried raggedly. “You are not fully dressed.”
She glanced over her implacable shoulder, over the lace and baby blue satin ribbon that edged her camisole like tiny angel wings.
“I am fully indignant, Nell, and therefore adequately attired to administer a dressing down.” And she marched down the hall toward the lightly laughing voices.
Never had my duty been so painful: I must follow, witness, and pick up the pieces.
As I scurried after her, there was no mistaking the proper door. Irene had paused, looking like a vengeful undergarment advertisement, and thrust open a door without knocking. Laughter choked and stopped.
I rushed to follow in her footsteps before I was shut out, and skittered over the threshold to find her momentarily facing me as she had turned to shut it behind her... quite softly.
She said not a word to me, but turned to face the women in the room. Five or six, I saw. I was too agitated to count precisely. Most sat on a pair of brocade sofas at right angles in the corner. Two, I noted with relief, were in equal dishabille to Irene, though they had not deserted their private rooms to parade in the passage as she had.
One stood by the long mirror in a hunter’s green riding habit, her auburn hair filling a net snood beneath a jaunty riding derby.
“Forgive the intrusion,” Irene began in a tone that asked no such thing, “but I am helpless to resist a good round of gossip, especially when I am the subject of it.”
A worried looking woman with light brown hair spoke up. “You are m-m-mistaken, Madame—?” In the interrogative lilt, I recognized the flute, as well as a false note in her performance.
“Norton,” the woman in green at the mirror finished for her—and for Irene. The bassoon. Her sharp-featured face wore the cold indifference of the hunter as she looked Irene up and down even more narrowly than Monsieur Worth had. She won no advantage there: Irene wore only the most exquisite underthings. Much as I disapproved of their public debut, I had to admit that Irene’s undergarments were as imposing as most women’s outerwear.
Besides, Irene was not one to let whatever she wore put her at a social disadvantage.
“You have the advantage of me,” Irene told the woman by the mirror, “but please do not bother to introduce yourself. That will save me the momentary effort of forgetting you. I must, however, correct your misapprehensions.”
The woman at the mirror whirled to face us. “We need take nothing from you, including correction. Now get out.”
“I think not... yet.” Irene smiled, her voice adding a fourth and dominant instrument to the chamber orchestra here gathered. She was the cello—rich as chocolate-brown velvet, deep and overpowering.
She began to prowl back and forth like a wolf in deceptively frilly grandmother’s garb.
“You suffer from certain delusions,” she announced. “I do not complain about your attacks on my cleverness. Cleverness is most effective when it is underrated. Nor do I object to your debates about my talent and my physical attractions. These qualities are often the stuff of debates, and I have rather firm opinions of your failings in these areas myself, now that I have seen you all.”
A joint indignant sigh escaped six well-laced sets of lungs. One woman, partridge-plump with jet-black hair and rice-powder skin, half-rose.
“We need not stay to be insulted,” she said.
The other seated women stirred, even the unclothed ones, as a mass exodus threatened.
“I differ,” Irene said. “You definitely must stay. I insist.”
“Who will make us?” demanded the woman at the mirror. In her stern riding habit, she appeared most formidable. I shrank behind Irene as she stepped toward us.
Irene snatched something off the fragile Louis XV table by the door and held it up. At first I took it for a parasol.
“Sit!” Irene commanded the bestirring ladies on the sofa. She brandished her new accessory like a pointer—a riding crop, I saw, its base trimmed with a green plaid taffeta bow. The effect was akin to seeing an organdy bow gracing the neck of a
bulldog.
Five ladies eased back obediently with a sighing rustle of dress-making goods. The one at the mirror paused, then initiated action. She moved forward.
Snap! The crop licked at the charged atmosphere of the little room, it whipped like a long, thin snake-tail towards the red-haired woman, driving her back toward her own reflection.
“As you were. You may stand,” Irene gave the redhead elaborate permission, “but you may not move.”
“This is intolerable, Madame,” the viola throbbed indignantly from a sofa.
“Undoubtedly, but I assure you that it is most satisfying to me. Now.” She resumed pacing, the riding crop striking softly across the palm of one hand.
One of the seated women whimpered. Irene had proved at least that they were easy to intimidate. And she craved any sort of audience, even—or perhaps especially—a captive one.
“No, I must admit that my voice, my mind, my face are fair game,” she resumed. “What else are the idle to talk about but other people?” she inquired cuttingly, then stood still. “But you began by insulting my bourgeois flaw of marrying—and marrying so unexceptional a man as an English barrister, although you admit that the wrappings are attractive. You have erred grievously.”
“Oh?” the woman at the mirror inquired archly. “Does Monsieur Norton wear a toupee?”
Irene paused to smile sweetly. “I meant that you err in assuming that he is unexceptional. You ladies all suffer from short-sightedness. I, on the other hand, take the long view. It is true that I have few jewels, only those earned by my own work, or given to me by persons grateful for the exercise of any small wit I may possess. This gives me an advantage beyond price, one that may not be immediately evident to such eager acquirers as yourselves. My sorry trinkets may be modest and few, but no sapphire’s sparkle is tainted by memories of the fools or indignities suffered in its pursuit. No diamond necklace’s blue fire is dimmed by the number of the ceilings contemplated in boredom to earn each stone in the endless string. No ruby’s gleam is bought at the cost of self-respect or honesty.
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 3