wouldn’t recognize lines from a Shakespeare sonnet! Either he was a complete idiot or he thought she was.
“The latter, most likely,” she muttered. She crumpled the note and threw it across the room. “Liar,” she said. “It was all lies. I knew it. How could I be such a fool?”
Because Mr. Bates had not asked her to dance, and she’d watched him whirl Lady Susan Morris, Lady Bartham’s daughter, about the floor. Lady Susan was petite and dark and pretty, and next to her Clara always felt ungainly and awkward.
Then what?
A moment’s hurt. Then Lord Adderley was at her elbow, with a glass of champagne, and a perfect remark, sure to make her smile.
Irish blarney, Mama would have said.
Maybe that’s what it was. Or maybe it was like the beautiful words he wrote, stolen from gifted writers. False, either way.
Champagne and waltzing and flattery, and Clara had taken the bait.
And now …
What to do?
She rose and walked to the window and looked out. In the garden below, the rain was beating the shrubs and flowers into submission. If she’d been a man—if she’d been Harry—she’d have climbed out and run away, as far as she could go.
But she wasn’t a man, and she had no idea how to run away.
Time, she thought. Her only hope was time. If they could drag out the engagement for months and months, a new scandal would come along, and everybody would forget this one.
Davis entered with the tea. “I put in a few extra drops, but you’ll need to drink it quickly,” she said. “Lady Bartham’s called, and Lady Warford said you’re to come straightaway.”
“Lady Bartham,” Clara said. “That wants more than a few drops. That wants a bottle.”
She swallowed her brandy-laced tea, put on her company face, and went down to the drawing room.
The visit was even worse than anticipated. Lady Bartham was so sympathetically venomous that she left Clara half blind with rage and Mama with a sick headache.
The next morning, Mama announced that she was sick to death of this ghastly engagement and everybody’s insinuations. They would consult the calendar and fix a date for the wedding.
“Yes, of course, Mama,” Clara said. “In the autumn, perhaps. Town won’t be so busy then.”
“Autumn?” Mama cried. “Are you mad? We’ve not a moment to lose. You must be married before the end of the Season—before the Queen’s last Drawing Room at the latest.”
“Mama, that’s only three weeks!”
“It’s sufficient time to arrange a wedding, even a large one—and a small one is out of the question. You know what people will say. And if those wicked French dressmakers Harry took you to can’t finish your bride clothes on time, it is too bad. It is not my fault if my children disobey me at every turn.”
Now, thanks to steam-presses, steam-vessels, and steam-coaches, the prolific brain of a French dress-maker or milliner has hardly given a new cap of trimming to the Parisian élégantes, before it is also in possession of the London belles.
—La Belle Assemblée, March 1830
Friday 5 June
Longmore transferred the reins to one hand and with his other took out his pocket watch. He flicked it open.
Eleven o’clock, she’d said. In the morning—because the fashionable aristocrats shopped in the afternoon, and she had to get there before they did.
“It’s important to arrive before Dowdy’s favorite customers do,” Sophy had told him. “Shopkeepers like that will fawn over the great ladies with the heavy purses and pass off dull rustic misses to lowly assistants. It would be truly useful to see the pattern for your mother’s dress, since she’s one of their most important customers. That means I can’t be passed off to an assistant. It has to be Horrible Hortense herself or her forewoman.”
It was exactly eleven o’clock. Longmore looked up at the sky. Cloudy, but not threatening rain as his tiger, Reade, had insisted. Reade had not been happy about having to remain behind. If it rained—as he assured his lordship it would surely do—his lordship would need help raising the curricle’s hood.
Well, then, they’d simply have to get wet, Longmore decided. While convenient for minding horses and helping one wrestle temperamental hoods, on the present occasion a groom would be very much in the way.
Longmore put the watch away and reverted to staring at the shop door. She’d told him to collect her, not at Maison Noirot, but at the ribbon shop farther down St. James’s Street, near St. James’s Palace. To Allay Suspicion.
She was hilarious.
“Cousin?” said a familiar female voice.
He blinked. It was Sophy’s voice and it wasn’t. He knew this had to be her but his eyes denied it. The woman standing on the pavement next to his carriage was so nondescript that he’d probably been looking straight at her without actually seeing her.
The murky brown cloak concealed her shape. The muddy green bonnet and lace cap underneath concealed most of her hair. What was visible was limp, dull, and stringy. She’d sprouted a mole to one side of her perfect nose. And on that nose she’d planted a pair of tinted spectacles, which dulled her brilliant blue eyes to cloudy grey.
He was aware of his jaw dropping. He quickly collected himself. “There you are,” he said.
“You’d have seen me sooner if you hadn’t been woolgathering,” she said, as shrewish as Gladys—and in the same graceless accents. She climbed up into the vehicle as clumsily as his cousin would have done.
If he didn’t know better, he’d have been sure this was his cousin, playing a trick on him.
But Cousin Gladys didn’t play tricks. She had no imagination.
“How did you do it?” he said. “You can’t have met her. She hasn’t left Lancashire in ages.”
“Lady Clara is a fair mimic,” she said, “and it was easy enough to classify the type. We do that, you know: We size up a woman when she walks into the shop. Broadly speaking, they tend to fall into certain categories.”
“Gladys is a type? I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always thought her one of a kind, and that one more than sufficient.”
He gave his horses leave to walk on, then he had to keep his attention on them. Though he’d driven them through Hyde Park to work off their morning high spirits, they were still excitable. Apparently they were as little
