Vixen in Velvet

by Loretta Chase

  She brought her hand up to the edge of the bodice. “It’s very low-cut,” she said.

  “But of course, my dear,” Marcelline said. “You have a beautiful bosom. We want to draw the eye to it.”

  “I’ll feel naked,” Lady Gladys said.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Lady Clara said. “You’ll feel naked and still look perfectly respectable.”

  “Hardly perfectly respectable,” said her cousin.

  “It’s all right to look tempting,” Lady Clara said.

  “Will you stop it!” Lady Gladys snapped, her vehemence startling everybody. “Stop being kind. I can’t tell you how provoking it is. No, wait, yes I can. You’ve only to crook a finger to have any man you want. You have no idea what it’s like to be—to be—not to be beautiful and sweet-natured!”

  “I’m not sweet at all,” Lady Clara said. “People only think that because of my looks.”

  “That’s the point! You can say anything!”

  “No, I can’t,” Lady Clara said sharply. “I can’t be myself. There’s Mama, looming over me all the time. You don’t know how suffocating it is.”

  “Oh, yes, all those men crowding about you, clamoring for a smile.”

  “They only see the outside. They don’t know who I am, or care particularly. You know me—or you ought to know. And you know I’m on your side and always have been, in spite of how difficult you make it.”

  Lady Gladys went scarlet and her eyes filled. “I don’t know how to behave!” she cried. “I don’t know how to do anything! You complain because your mother is always at you. But at least you have one. You’ve had women about to teach you how to be womanly. Look at me! My father’s a soldier, and I might as well have been raised in an army camp. He treats me like a regiment. He gives orders and then off he goes, to smash some Foe of England.” She flung away and stormed back to the dressing room. “Jeffreys! Get this thing off me!”

  With a panicked look at Leonie, Jeffreys trotted after her.

  Lady Clara stomped to a chair and flung herself onto it.

  Marcelline looked at Leonie.

  Leonie lifted her shoulders and mouthed, I have no idea.

  “What on earth is the matter?” Marcelline said to Lady Clara.

  “I don’t know,” Lady Clara said.

  “I can tell you what’s the matter,” Lady Gladys said from behind the curtain. “I’m not going to Almack’s tonight, no matter how they cajole. I told them I wouldn’t do that sort of thing ever again, yet Clara won’t stop plaguing me about it. And now you’ve given her this curst dress for ammunition!”

  “You look very well in it, but you’re too obstinate to admit it!” Lady Clara cried.

  “I don’t care if I look well. They should never have made it, because I’ll have no occasion to wear it. I don’t want it! I wish I’d never come to London!”

  Lady Clara sighed, braced her forehead with one hand, and stared at the floor.

  From behind the dressing room curtain came a choked sob.

  Other than that, the consulting rooms were silent, apparently peaceful.

  That was when Mary Parmenter came in, all flustered, to report that Lord Lisburne and Lord Swanton had arrived. They had business with Miss Noirot, they said. Should Mary ask them to wait in the showroom or in the office?

  “We’re busy,” Leonie said. “You may tell them to make an appointment.”

  She heard a gasp from behind the curtain. Then, “You can’t make Lord Swanton wait,” Lady Gladys called out shakily. “You’re not busy with me anymore. You might as well see what the gentlemen want.”

  “Tell them to make an appointment,” Leonie told Parmenter.

  Then she sent the others away and walked behind the curtain.

  Leonie found Lady Gladys sitting on the edge of the dressmaking platform, head in her hands.

  “I’m not talking to you,” her ladyship muttered. “You’re like a human thumbscrew.”

  “One of the secrets of our success is knowing our ladies’ minds,” Leonie said. “We squeeze it out of you one way or another. You might as well tell me and save us both energy we can employ more happily elsewhere.”

  “Happy!”

  Leonie dropped onto the platform beside her.

  Lady Gladys lifted her head. “You only pretend to be my friend. You only want me to order more clothes.”

  “I haven’t got to pretending to be your friend yet,” Leonie said. “But I do want you to order more clothes. Why else be in business?”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that I might put you out of business? All of London knows you’ve taken me in hand. They’re already betting on the outcome.”

  In truth, of all the matters that might be making Lady Gladys irrational, this hadn’t been the first to cross Leonie’s mind—probably because of the large mental distraction known as the Marquess of Lisburne.

  Still, the betting didn’t surprise Leonie. Members of the ton, men and women alike, gambled, mainly because they were bored and idle. And whether they made bets or not, the women would be deeply interested in the results of Lady Gladys’s visits to the shop.

  Leonie knew this. It was, in fact, part of what had propelled her toward Lady Gladys. Once Maison Noirot succeeded in showing her ladyship at her best, all the fashionable world would be pounding on Maison Noirot’s doors.

  But her ladyship did have to cooperate.

  “Aristocrats wager about everything,” Leonie said briskly. “Naturally, you find it galling—”

  “Especially when Lady Bartham’s irritating daughter takes great pains to explain the terms,” Lady Gladys said. “As will not surprise you, the phrase ‘silk purse from sow’s ear’ came up more than once.”

  Lady Bartham was a close friend and venomous social rival of Lady Clara’s mother, Lady Warford. Leonie didn’t understand why anybody would make friends—or having made them in ignorance, continue—with an adder. She was aware that one of Lady Bartham’s daughters, Lady Alda, was equally toxic.

  “Some people are either so ignorant, self-centered, or deeply unhappy that hurting others makes them feel good,” Leonie said. “It’s perverse, but there it is. The best way to fight back is to find a reason to laugh or to feel pleased. It will confuse and upset them. A good revenge, I think.”

  Lady Gladys scowled at her. “Tell me what’s amusing. Tell me what I ought to feel pleased about.”

  “Why should she go to so much trouble to insult and hurt you unless she’s trying to undermine your self-confidence? Maybe she’s afraid you’ll turn into competition.”

  Lady Gladys gave Leonie a you-need-medical-help look.

  “Only imagine,” Leonie said, “if you had patted her hand reassuringly and said, ‘Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry to worry you, but I promise to try not to steal any of your beaux, if I can help it.’ Then you could laugh. You have such a pretty laugh. And she would go away a good deal more upset than you.”

  “A pretty laugh?” Lady Gladys said. She turned away to stare at a French fashion print on the opposite wall.

  “A beautiful voice altogether.” Leonie rose. “Please stop wishing to look like your cousin. It makes you blind to your own assets. You’ll never look like Lady Clara. But she’ll never have your voice.”

  “That hardly makes us even!”

  “The biggest army, even in the smartest uniforms, doesn’t always win the battle,” Leonie said. “Did his lordship your father never tell you that cleverness and luck come into it?”

  Shortly thereafter

  At this time of day, when ladies of fashion were dressing for the parade in Hyde Park, Lisburne had expected to find the shop relatively quiet. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let Swanton come with him. The shop was quiet enough. The showroom held a few shopgirls restoring order after their most recent customers. They were putting ribbons and trinkets in
to drawers, reorganizing display cases, straightening hats their clientele had tipped askew, and rearranging mannequins’ skirts. The only remaining customer was an elderly lady who couldn’t make up her mind among several shades of brown ribbon.

  Swanton was pacing at one end of the showroom when the girl returned to inform them that they needed to make an appointment.

  “They must be busy with an important client,” Lisburne told him. “Why don’t you toddle up to White’s? The club will be free of women, and you can compose your turbulent mind with the aid of a glass of wine or whiskey.”

  Swanton had stopped pacing when the girl returned from her errand. Now he looked about him as though he’d forgotten where he was. “White’s,” he said.

  “Yes. The young ladies can’t get to you there.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m going to wait,” Lisburne said. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying out our errand on my own. And I can do it in a more businesslike manner if you’re not mooning about.”

  “I need to write half a dozen new poems in less than a week!” Swanton said. “You’d be in a state of abstraction, too.”

  “All the more reason for you to go away to a quiet place, where the women are not giggling and blushing and making up excuses to get close to you.”

  Naturally Swanton didn’t realize what was going on about him. The shopgirls would have to hit him on the head with a hat stand to get his full attention. Still, unlike the young ladies of the ton, they were mainly excited to have a celebrity in their midst. They probably hadn’t time to read his poetry—if they could read. Their interest wasn’t personal, in other words.

  Swanton looked about him, seeing whatever hazy version of reality he saw. “Very well,” he said. “I can take a hint.”

  No, you can’t, Lisburne thought.

  With any luck, Swanton would manage to cross St. James’s Street without walking into the path of an oncoming carriage. If not, and if he seemed headed into danger, a sympathetic female would rush out and rescue him, even if she was one of the two people in London who didn’t know who he was. Because he looked like an angel.

  In any case, Lisburne wasn’t his nursemaid. Furthermore, he’d wrestled with enough of the poet’s problems in the past two days.

  He was in dire need of mental relief.

  Such as Miss Leonie Noirot.

  Who was too busy to see him.

  He walked about the shop, studying the mannequins and the contents of the display cases. He even allowed himself to be consulted on the matter of brown ribbons.

  He was solemnly examining them through his quizzing glass, trying to decide which had a yellower cast, when Gladys hurried out into the showroom, then swiftly through the street door. Clara followed close behind. Neither noticed him, and he didn’t try to attract their attention.

  “I wonder if Miss Noirot will see me now,” he said to the girl who’d told him to make an appointment.

  The girl went out.

  She returned a quarter hour later and led him to Miss Noirot’s office.

  Chapter Five

  The management of a dispute was formerly attempted by reason and argument; but the new way of adjusting all difference in opinion is by the sword or a wager: so that the only genteel method of dissenting, is to risk a thousand pounds, or take your chance of being run through the body.

  The Connoisseur, 1754

  When Lisburne entered, he found Miss Noirot straightening her ledgers with excessive force.

  Since she’d spent more than an hour with Gladys, he diagnosed pent-up rage. No surprise there.

  He was, however, distracted by the stormy picture Leonie Noirot made, in a maniacally feminine concoction of white muslin: the swoosh of the billowing sleeves and the way the overdress—robe—whatever it was—lifted and fell against the dress underneath and the agitated flutter of lace. Her bosom rose and fell, the embroidery and lace like white-capped waves on a tumultuous sea.

  It was only a woman in a pet, by no means an unfamiliar sight. All the same, he had to take a moment to slow his breathing to normal and drag his wits out from the dark seas into which they were sinking.

  “I sent Swanton up to White’s, but I thought it best to wait,” he said, his voice a shade hoarser than it ought to be.

  She took up the little watch at her waist and opened the case. “An hour and twenty minutes,” she said.

  “But I was waiting for you,” he said. “The time was as nothing. And it allowed me to perform deeds of mercy without much trouble.”

  “Deeds of mercy,” she said. “Have you been helping my employees lose their wits? Or were you mercifully wafting sal volatile at the customers after you made them swoon?”

  He adopted a hurt expression. “I helped somebody’s great-grandmother choose ribbons.”

  “You ought to be careful, plying your ‘mercy’ upon elderly persons,” she said. “Their constitutions may not withstand the onslaught of so much manly beauty and charm. You may not realize how bad it is for business when ladies go off into apoplexies in our showroom.” She put the watch away, folded her arms, and donned a blankly amiable expression.

  As though he were any other customer.

  He squelched the prickle of irritation and told himself not to act like an oversensitive schoolboy. Careful to keep his voice smooth, he said, “Thank you for the reminder, madame. In future, I’ll take care to inflict my beauty and charm only on big, strong wenches.”

  “I know you can’t help it,” she said. “You were born that way. But some of my best customers are the older ladies, and I don’t wish to send them off before their time.”

  “I promise to try not to murder any elderly ladies by accident,” he said.

  “Strictly speaking, it isn’t murder if it’s an accident,” she said. “Or if it looks like one,” she added, as though to herself. He saw her gaze shift to the desk . . . where she kept her penknife and probably other instruments of mayhem, like sharp scissors. Dressmakers always had sharp things about them—scissors, needles, pins. He had an odd sensation of having wandered inadvertently into danger. No doubt because the atmosphere seemed to vibrate with the passion she was having so much trouble suppressing.

  He was very badly tempted to push, to see—experience—what happened when her control slipped.

  “I have customers waiting, my lord,” she said. “I believe Parmenter said that you and Lord Swanton had come on business.”

  He caught the note of impatience. What next? Would she throw things?

  “So we did,” he said. He put two fingers to his right temple and pretended to think.

  The air about him throbbed harder yet. “Perhaps it would be best for you to join Lord Swanton at White’s. Perhaps if the two of you put your heads together, you’ll remember what it was that was so desperately urgent.”

  She started toward the door.

  “Oh, yes, now I remember,” he said. “It’s to do with the girls you’ve taken under your wing. Swanton and I want to help.”

  She paused. “My girls,” she said.

  Her girls.

  “The Milliners’ Society,” he said. “The poetic genius and I came to tell you about our brilliant idea for raising funds.”

  She wanted him to go to the devil. She wanted funds for her girls. The struggle between these opposing desires was so well concealed that he would have missed it had he not been watching her so closely.

  She couldn’t altogether calm herself, but she mastered the impatience.

  “I shouldn’t have plagued you today, especially when it’s clear you’re so extremely busy,” he said. “The trouble is, we need to do it quickly, and I wasn’t sure I could get an appointment soon enough.”

  She folded her hands at her waist. “It was very good of you and Lord Swanton to think of the Milliners’ Society,” she said.

 
“I should like to know how we could avoid doing so, when I brought home the shop’s entire contents,” he said. “We can hardly stir a step in the library without tripping over pincushions and purses and who knows what. Having to plan prevented Swanton from excessive weeping. I was so glad I didn’t bring him to the shop with me. He’d have wanted weeks to recover. And I very much doubt we have weeks, young women being famously fickle.”

  “You said you had a plan,” she said, womanfully crushing her impatience.

  “Ah, yes. The plan.” He went on to describe it. In detail. With various detours and contingencies.

  If he’d hoped for an explosion, he’d underestimated her.

  She moved to her desk, took up a pen, and took brisk notes.

  While she wrote, he talked and wandered seemingly aimlessly about her office, gradually drawing nearer, until he paused beside her to watch her write.

  She had compressed his meandering verbiage amazingly: a charity fête at Vauxhall during the grand gala on Monday night. Swanton to read new poems in one of the smaller theaters. An additional five-shilling fee for admission to the poetry reading. A small percentage of proceeds to Vauxhall’s proprietors for use of the hall. The rest to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females.

  He was aware of the words but more aware of the sounds. Everything upon her person fluttered and billowed, so that even nearly still, only writing, she made a sort of murmuring sea of sound, audible below the pen’s scratching. Mingling with the sibilance was her scent, light and clean, of lavender.

  His mind conjured nights in the Tuscan mountains, high in a villa overlooking a tiny village . . . glowworms flickering in the darkness of the terraced vineyards below . . . and the scent of lavender, carrying his first intimations of grief easing and a possibility of peace.

  He was aware of a stabbing in his chest, and of heat, in so sudden a surge that it startled him, and he drew back a fraction.

  She looked up at him.

  “What a knack you have for . . . reducing the thing to its essentials,” he said.