deliberately obstructing his departure from France.”
They were all accustomed to playing cards. This was why Sophy and Leonie did not fall down laughing, and why Marcelline, who was growing increasingly exasperated, had no trouble maintaining her politely interested expression. As though she hadn’t enough problems, with Dowdy actively working to destroy her business. Now Marcelline was to be torn to pieces by the scandalmongers, merely because some people had seen what looked like flirtation! It was absurd—but then, the high ranks were not famous for their rationality.
She ought to be amused, but she was alarmed. Rumors alone could destroy her business. Though it wasn’t hard to seem unmoved outwardly, she was having trouble deciding what to say.
Leonie, who didn’t have her problems, had no such difficulty. “Clearly, members of the higher orders cannot count,” she said. “If they would only count the number of days my sister had been in Paris—let alone the date when she first met the gentleman—they’d realize this is utter nonsense. Their first encounter occurred on the fourteenth of this month. I remember the date, because it headed the letter she wrote to us the same night, announcing the fact. That leaves the time from the night of the fourteenth to the early morning of the seventeenth, when my sister left Paris. How, I ask your ladyship, could all these events occur in little more than two full days?”
Leave it to Leonie to reduce emotion to numbers, Marcelline thought. And how little those numbers seemed. A few days. That was all the time Clevedon had needed to damage Marcelline’s brain and jab thorns into her heart and plant dreams in her mind, so that she was uneasy by day and by night.
She gathered her wits. “Meanwhile he’d had so many months to live among the Parisians,” she said. “They’re the ones you ought to blame, if you want scapegoats. You’ve never been to Paris, I believe?”
“Not yet,” said Lady Clara.
“Then you’ve no notion how different it is from London.”
“I know what Paris is like,” said Lady Clara. “Cleve—The gentleman wrote to me faithfully—until, that is, he met you. It’s no good denying it. When I asked him why he hadn’t written—I could see he had not broken his arm—he told me what had happened.”
“And what, precisely, was that?” Marcelline said. “It can’t have been an incriminating tale. Last week you accompanied him here in cheerful spirits. You didn’t look at all as though you wanted to kill him. Or me.”
“He told me he’d met a vastly provoking dressmaker,” Lady Clara said. “But he’s a man, and as articulate as he can be in letters, his vocabulary, in matters of emotion, is less than clear. What he meant—and pray don’t confuse me with an idiot, as you know it perfectly well—what he meant was that Mrs. Noirot was provocative. What he meant was, he was fixed on her.”
As though he did nothing to fix me on him, Marcelline thought. As though he’s a victim of my wiles—or demonic powers, more like it.
“I asked him directly whether he was infatuated,” Lady Clara continued, “and he laughed and said that seemed the likeliest explanation.”
Business, Marcelline reminded herself. This was business. This was the customer she’d wanted. It was trying to lure Lady Clara into her shop that had led Marcelline into so much trouble. And here the lady was. In the shop.
She said, “How could he help it? Only look at me.”
She gestured in the graceful way she so often did, her hand sweeping downward from her neckline.
Lady Clara looked, truly looked, finally, at what Marcelline was wearing.
Pink and green, one of her favorite color combinations, this time in silk batiste, with a deeply plunging pelerine of the same material, over gossamer puffed sleeves and a delicately pleated chemisette.
“My goodness,” said Lady Clara.
Marcelline resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. Lady Clara was as oblivious as Clevedon. They noticed nothing about a dress until one forcibly called their attention to it.
“This isn’t half what you would have seen in Paris,” Marcelline said. “There I was obliged to exert myself, because I was competing with the most stylish women in the world, who’ve made a high art of attracting men. That is your ladyship’s true rival: Paris. I’m nothing. If the gentleman is bored and remote, it’s because the women about him at present don’t know how to get his attention.”
She let her gaze slide from the top of Lady Clara’s dull bonnet, over the white crepe dress trimmed in black—mainly ribbon and a little embroidery but not a stitch of lace in sight—and downward, with a small, despairing sigh, to the hem. The style was—well, it hadn’t any style. As to the craftsmanship: In a drunken stupor, the least talented of Marcelline’s six seamstresses could do better than this.
Sophy and Leonie drew nearer to Marcelline, their gazes moving in the same pitying way over the dress.
“The Court has been wearing mourning for the Emperor of Austria, then the Prince of Portugal,” Lady Clara said defensively. “We’ve only recently changed from black.”
“You cannot wear this shade of white,” Marcelline said. “It ruins your complexion.”
“Such a complexion!” Sophy said. “Translucent. Women would weep and gnash their teeth in envy, were you not wearing a white that drains away all the vitality.”
“The black trim can’t be helped,” said Leonie. “But must it be so heavy?”
“It isn’t required to be crepe, certainly,” said Marcel-line. “Where is the rule that says one may not use a thinner ribbon, of satin? And perhaps some knots—so. Or a jet lozenge. And a little silver, perhaps here and here, to brighten it. But above all, never this shade of white!”
“You’re not making the most of your figure,” said Sophy.
“I’m big,” Lady Clara said.
“You’re statuesque,” said Leonie. “What I should give to have your height. What I should give to be able to look a man in the eye.”
“Mainly, I’m looking down at them,” said Lady Clara. “Except for my brothers and Cl—the gentleman.”
“All the better,” said Sophy. “A man ought to look up to a woman, literally or figuratively, because that is the proper mode of worship, and worship is the very least he can do. It doesn’t matter what her height is. You’re the most beautiful young woman in London—”
“That’s doing it too brown,” said Lady Clara. She drank more brandy. “You’re wicked, the three of you.”
She was not wrong.
“Perhaps one might see at the theater a whore who seems prettier,” said Sophy. “But that’s only because she makes the most of herself and of certain cosmetic aids. You, however, have a deep, true English beauty that will only make you handsomer as time passes. It’s disgraceful and ungrateful of you not to make the most of the gifts with which you’ve been blessed.”
“You look big,” said Marcelline, “because the dress is matronly. You look big because it’s carelessly
