It laughed at logic.
Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.
All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.
Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.
That night
It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.
But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.
He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.
Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.
She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.
And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.
He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.
No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.
He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.
As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.
When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.
But he was not slain, not by half.
“You’re prompt,” she said.
“I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.
“But I’m not a lady,” she said.
“Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”
“I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.
He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.
Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.
He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.
When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.
“What is that dreadful color?” he said.
“Poussière,” she said.
“Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”
“It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”
“How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”
“You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”
“It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”
“Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”
This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.
But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.
Last night came back in a dark surge of recollection, more feeling than thought, that sent heat pumping through him. He saw himself bending and grasping one slim ankle and bringing her foot onto his lap and sliding his gloved hand up her leg, up and up and up…
Later, he promised himself, and climbed into the carriage.
A short time later
“I hope you will do me the kindness of allowing me to present Madame Noirot, a London dressmaker of my acquaintance,” the Duke of Clevedon said to his hostess.
For a time, the noise about them continued. But about the instant the Comtesse de Chirac realized she hadn’t misunderstood the duke’s less-than-perfect French and that he had actually uttered the words London dressmaker in her presence and referring to the uninvited person beside him, the news was traveling the ballroom, and a silence spread out like ripples from the place where a large rock had landed in a small pond.
Madame de Chirac’s posture grew even tighter and stiffer—though that seemed anatomically impossible—and her chilly grey gaze hardened to steel. “I do not understand English humor,” she said. “Is this a joke?”
“By
