She looked shyly at him, ‘Really, Cobie, really?’
It was his turn to nod. ‘And now we must go to bed. We have an early train to catch, and Paris is waiting. I think that you are going to enjoy yourself there.’
Dinah wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or sorry that Cobie and she were not going to…she could hardly say it even to herself. What she did know was that she had felt a sense of relief when he had told her he was prepared to wait.
Paris, now, was quite another matter. From the moment that she saw it, brilliant beneath the early summer sun, she fell in love with it, and remained so for the rest of her life. She and Cobie had separate bedrooms in a big house he owned off the Faubourg Saint Germain, the most fashionable address in Paris, she was to discover. On the first morning they drove to a little eighteenth-century mansion set in a courtyard, behind iron gates.
Inside they went up a flight of stairs and a footman outside a pair of double doors threw them open and shouted their names into an exquisitely furnished drawing room where a woman in her late fifties, white-haired, came to meet them.
‘The Marquise de Cheverney,’ Cobie told her. ‘Bow, my dear, bow.’
She did so, rising to find a pair of shrewd grey eyes assessing her.
‘Milady Grant,’ the Marquise said to Dinah, and then to Cobie, who stood there watching them both, curiously tense, she noticed with some surprise. ‘But she is charming, such promise. And clever, too, you say. But her clothes—atrocious!’ and she threw her hands up in mock despair. ‘We must remedy that, immediatement.’
Dinah wanted to say, I don’t like my clothes, either. My sister Violet chose them, I didn’t.
Cobie was speaking to them both. His tension had gone. ‘Madame la Marquise is to sponsor us in society,’ he told her. ‘And she will see that you are properly trained to be an ornament of it. Is that not so, Madame?’
The Marquise nodded. ‘Vraiment, mon ami.’ She turned to Dinah. ‘It is not just your clothes, you understand,’ she said kindly. ‘It is the hair, the way you walk, stand, talk. Everything must be just so. Oh, but we shall have some fun, you understand, but much hard work, too.’
Her English was good, but heavily accented, and Dinah wondered where Cobie had met her, they seemed to be old friends. Dinah made that observation to him later. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘I met her the first time I came here, five years ago. We each did the other some service,’ and then softly, ‘She was never my mistress, Dinah. I would not do that to you,’ and that was all that he would say.
After that the Marquise rang for coffee, and it came quickly: hot, strong and black. ‘We cannot start too soon,’ she was saying. ‘I understand that your time here is short, Monsieur Grant. No?’
‘True,’ Cobie said, ‘but when I go I shall leave my wife with you for a few weeks. I want her education to be completed as soon as possible, you understand.’
The Marquise looked grave. ‘You must not try to hurry things too much, my friend.’
‘My wife is a quick learner,’ Cobie told her. ‘I wish her lessons to begin this very morning.’
Apparently beginning meant being driven to a dressmaker with a house in a side street where they were shown into a salon and where girls, brunettes like Dinah, walked about wearing beautiful clothes.
After about an hour, Cobie said, ‘This house is too sophisticated, Madame la Marquise, something a little simpler; the simplicity of the very sophisticated is what we are aiming for.’
Are we? thought Dinah, amused. How is it he knows so much about women’s clothes? Before she could ask him he was conferring with Madame, and it was decided that on the next day they would visit an even grander house where a special showing would be arranged for them. Meantime, the Marquise told them severely, Monsieur and Madame must rest…
Dinah did. Cobie didn’t. He went out that night, doubtless explaining that his young English bride was exhausted, and came back, she thought, very late. How odd it all was. She had never visualised anything like this. Nor had she imagined what would happen in the morning.
This time the salon they went to was a grand one. Cobie and she sat on gilt chairs again, while the Marquise conferred with that great person, the couturier—who seemed more enchanted by Cobie than by Dinah.
‘An American!’ he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. ‘Monsieur looks to be a Frenchman to the life.’
He did, too, Dinah thought. He was wearing French clothes as though he had worn them since he was a child. Black-and-white striped trousers, a black frock coat, high white glossy collar, black cravat, a very, very tall top hat, high black buttoned boots and a cane with a silver top. His French was superb, too.
It came to her that in England he looked and sounded exactly like an English gentleman. She supposed that in America he was totally Yankee. What was the real man like beneath his trappings, she wondered. Which was the real Cobie Grant? Was there even a real Cobie Grant? She had half-thought this before but never quite as strongly as she did now.
After that she had no time to think anything, because the Marquise and Cobie chose clothes for her to wear and she was pushed and pulled in and out of them, the couturier murmuring in her ear while he rearranged the folds of her gown, ‘You have the perfect figure for the clothes I design, Milady. When I have finished with you, tout Paris will be at your feet.’ Which was going a bit far, Dinah thought.
When they had bought her a complete wardrobe they all went to luncheon at a very grand hotel, and Dinah found that she was ravenous, which surprised her enormously. Her appetite pleased her husband, or so he told her, and then she was driven to a hairdressing salon, where her unruly locks were tamed at last.
She was allowed to rest a little when they reached home. The Marquise shooed Cobie away, ‘Go and amuse yourself, child. We have work to do.’
To Dinah’s surprise and secret amusement, he, the man whom she was sure organised and arranged everything, meekly bowed and said, ‘Of course. I have work to do, too, and will go and do it.’
‘Be not back too late,’ the Marquise ordered him. ‘It is the Richelieus’ reception tonight, and Milady Dinah must be baptised there!’
Well, if baptism is to follow, catechism comes after, thought Dinah wryly, but it didn’t: it came before!
After she had been allowed to lie down for about half an hour she returned to the drawing room. There, a large book was balanced on her head—‘To destroy your bookworm’s slouch,’ said Madame de Cheverney severely. She was told to walk up and down the room, curtsy, take a full cup of tea, return it to the Marquise, sit down, acknowledge an imaginary Excellency, converse politely with him, and all without the book falling off!
Oh, but it did: many times.
Each time the Marquise groaned at her. ‘And this is to be done, all day and every day—even when you eat,’ she was told, ‘until your back is straight, your head is just so, and you look the world calmly in the eye. Calm, always calm, my child. I see that you are inclined to be passionate. Save that for your life in private, for him. Be calm in public and all will be well.’
After that Madame organised a conversazione—still with the wretched book on Dinah’s head—and she was told again, ‘Be gentle, my child, when you speak. Do not so much express an opinion as subtly offer it. On some things you must have no opinion at all. You must learn those useful phrases which are the mortar of conversation. At the moment you have too many bricks to offer!’
This made Dinah giggle, and, inevitably, the book fell off. Again!
She was allowed another short rest in her room, and a tisane was sent up.
‘To calm your nerves, my child’—a favourite phrase of the Marquise’s, Dinah was to discover. Before the tisane had time to work properly, however, the Marquise was back, with Pearson in tow, looking sullen, the Marquise’s lady’s maid, and a little French girl wearing a black dress and a pretty white lace apron and cap.
‘This,’ the Marquise told her tersely, ‘is Hortense, who will be your la
dy’s maid in future. Mees Pearson will be her aide to do the sewing, to iron your clothes, and take charge of your wardrobe. Hortense will arrange your hair and dress you. We shall begin now the ceremony which you will follow in England, when you return.’
Pearson threw Dinah a pleading look. The Marquise fielded it and said sternly, ‘All this Monsieur Grant arranged in the last week, before you arrived in Paris. To save you trouble, you understand.’
‘He said nothing of this to me,’ observed Dinah mutinously.
‘He is your husband,’ the Marquise returned, as though that explained all.
Well, she would speak to Cobie about that, rather than brawl with the Marquise before the servants. Without knowing it, Dinah had already begun to learn the lessons which the Marquise was teaching her. Before the afternoon session she would have defied the Marquise and rushed at Cobie when he returned. But she did neither, allowing the Marquise and Hortense to dress her, Pearson assisting.
They had brought home with them from the atelier several of the dresses which Cobie had chosen and which fitted Dinah perfectly. One of them was of peau de soie striped in pale blue, cream and the most delicate of pinks. It had an oval neckline, descending towards Dinah’s slight bosom, with a small frill of cream lace, running around it.
Around her waist Hortense fastened a ribbon from which small pads depended, and over which the dress fell, giving her the air of a woman with a grander figure than the one she possessed, but not overdoing things. The skirt had been cut to give the dress a beautiful line from her waist to just above the ankle. This allowed her pale blue silk stockings and her little Louis-heeled blue, pink and cream shoes to show their best advantage.
The dress had also been cunningly cut to make her bosom look larger than it was, and before it was reverently eased on to her, she had been laced into a corset which made her tiny waist even tinier.
After everyone had walked around her, exclaiming at her transformation, Hortense went to work on her face. First, she creamed it; next, she applied the merest touch of papier poudré and pale pink lip salve, and finally arranged her hair so that it rose high at the back but fell in cunning little tendrils around her face.
To finish off the whole remarkable ensemble Dinah was handed a dear little fan, cream, painted with roses, and told to allow it to depend from her wrist, unless the room grew too hot when she was to use it.
‘But not violently, you understand. Nothing must be violent,’ the Marquise told her severely as though it were Dinah’s custom to go around striking at people—with her fan as well as her voice, presumably.
The whole operation took so long that Dinah thought ruefully that she would have had time to read a whole chapter of Gibbon’s great work which Mr Van Deusen had given her, and which, if today was anything to go by, she would never have the time or opportunity to read again.
She was not allowed to look in a mirror, nor to sit down. Instead, the book was placed on her head again, and she walked round the room, Pearson glowering, the Marquise and Hortense applauding when all was done correctly, and looking sad when the book dropped off, or she said the wrong thing.
There was a knock on the door, and in response to the Marquise crying, ‘Enter,’ after she had gently pushed Dinah behind a screen, Cobie came in.
Dinah peered around the screen to see that he was dressed for the evening, French style. He looked so magnificent that the very sight of him made her feel nervous. He was carrying a small leather case and a bouquet of tiny pink and cream rosebuds.
‘Lady Dinah is ready, Madame?’
‘Just,’ said the Marquise. ‘I think that you will find an improvement, even after this short time. Milady is an apt pupil. Patient and willing to learn.’
She walked to the screen, folded it shut, exclaiming in a dramatic fashion, ‘Voila!’ as though she were a stage magician demonstrating her greatest illusion.
Cobie looked at his wife. She bore no resemblance to the girl he had married and brought to Paris. The gown, the careful and discreet make-up, her newly styled hair, and the improvement in her carriage which the afternoon’s drill had brought about, had already begun to change her. At this rate Dinah’s weeks in France would have her sister Violet eating her heart out with jealousy when she was let loose on London.
‘You look enchanting, Lady Dinah Grant,’ he said gravely, holding out to her the leather case and the bouquet which he was carrying. ‘I think that this will complete your ensemble.’
His compliment bewildered Dinah—but, of course, she thought, he was simply being kind. Cobie saw her disbelieving expression, and said to the Marquise, ‘She has not yet been allowed a mirror?’
‘As you ordered, Monsieur Grant.’
‘Good. Come here, Dinah, my love. Take your present from me, and open it.’
Mortar, Dinah was thinking sardonically, I mustn’t forget mortar. She took the case from him and said, calmly, remembering the Marquise’s insistence that she must not be passionate, ‘Thank you, Cobie. You do me too great an honour.’
She felt, as much as heard, the Marquise purr with pleasure, and knew from the expression on her husband’s face, and the slight twitch of his mouth that he was aware that she was mocking them both.
Still smiling, not too little, not too much, after the fashion which the Marquise had taught her earlier, she opened the case, to find there an exquisite necklace of tiny pale pink pearls. This time, her pleasure was genuine. ‘Oh, how beautiful, and it goes with my new dress, too.’
All the Marquise’s lessons flew away at once. Dinah began to move towards Cobie to embrace him. His mouth twitched even more, but all that he said when he received her kiss on his cheek was, ‘Yes, the match of colours was intended, my love. Now you will allow your husband to put it on for you, I hope. The clasp will be a little too difficult for you to manage on your own.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said impetuously, and then, eyes glowing, remembering all that she had learned that afternoon, she continued more gently, ‘It will be a pleasure.’
Dinah could feel the fingers of his strong and beautiful hands warm on her neck, and without thinking, after he had arranged the necklace to its greatest advantage, she bent her head to kiss them.
Cobie allowed his hands to linger on her neck for a moment, before saying quietly, ‘Unshroud the mirror, Madame la Marquise, s’il vous plaît.’
Madame obeyed and he swung Dinah gently round to face it, so that she saw her new self for the first time.
Was that Dinah Freville? Had one day done so much to change her?
Where had that graceful figure come from? The dressmaker’s art, and the Marquise’s instructions to Hortense and Pearson, together with the torture of the book, had all combined to create an elegant creature who bore little relation to the Dinah Freville who had been married in the dowdy gown which Violet had chosen for her.
Of course, it wasn’t Lady Dinah Freville she was looking at. She was Lady Dinah Grant now—and she must never forget it.
Like Cinderella, the Marquise and Cobie took her to the ball that night, but her Prince had already chosen her, her carriage didn’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight, and she only had one cruel sister, not two, and no one in their right mind could ever have called Violet ugly.
All the time that she was in Paris Dinah felt that she was living in a pantomime, instead of watching it, which she had once done with her nurse when she had been a child.
Except that in the here and now there was no curtain to fall at the end of the performance, no coat to put on to go through the dark streets back to normal life again.
For to be Lady Dinah Grant, Jacobus Grant’s wife, was to be admired and envied: and this, this, improbably was her real life.
Chapter Eight
‘He’s back from Paris, guv. Without his missis. D’you still want me to follow him?’
Walker knew that his vendetta against the mysterious Mr Horne, whom he was certain, but couldn’t yet prove, was Jacobus Grant, was personal, not official, an
d he really ought to drop the matter and concentrate on the real criminals who surrounded him, of whom he did know. Only yesterday the Commissioner had asked him if he had made any progress in discovering who the mystery man was who had bribed them.
When Walker told him, ‘No, but I’ve not given up hope of unmasking him, sir,’ the Commissioner had sighed and said,
‘There’s more important work on the agenda, Walker. Give it a miss now.’
Well, he wasn’t going to give it a miss. Neither Bates nor anyone else need know what the Commissioner had ordered.
‘No, not you, Bates,’ he told him. ‘Not for the time being. He knows your face. Put Alcott on to him. Tell him to be careful, and to report back to me at the weekend.’
Alcott was careful, but not careful enough. After forty-eight hours Cobie knew that he was being followed. He had a sixth sense about such things, one of his many odd talents about which London society knew nothing. He was not only blessed—or cursed—with total recall, which made him such a masterly card and chess player, but he always knew when he was being watched.
More than that, he invariably knew when he was being lied to, which was the most unnerving accomplishment of all, and which reinforced the profound cynicism with which he viewed his fellow men and women.
So he covertly watched his shadow, and led him a merry dance around Mayfair, while he ambled through its streets and squares in the sun. While doing so, now that he had been unmasked, he decided to baffle and annoy Walker even more—and amuse himself in the doing.
The next day, dressed in his undistinguished clothing, he led the wretched Alcott an even merrier dance. He had learned that the London police were nicknamed rozzers by the criminal element—of whom he was one—so he allowed this particular rozzer to follow him to his dingy office on the edge of the City. There the delighted Alcott, by devious questioning, discovered that he was going under the name of Mr Dilley.
He grinned to himself at the excitement with which this news would be greeted at Scotland Yard. He wasn’t wrong. Happy to have succeeded where Bates had failed, Alcott burst into Walker’s cubby-hole that afternoon, full of himself, to tell his guv’nor, and a glum Bates, what he had unearthed.
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