understand? How can you be so blind, so willfully obtuse, so—”
“You’ll make me run mad,” he said. “Everywhere I turn, there you are.”
“That’s monstrous unfair! Everywhere I go, there is your great carcass!”
“You upset everything,” he said. “I’ve been trying for a fortnight to propose to Clara, and every time I steel myself to it—”
“Steel yourself?”
“Every time,” he went on, unheeding, “you”—he waved his hand—“There you are. I went to Warford House today to come up to scratch, as you so poetically put it, but you had her worked up into such a state, we couldn’t have a proper conversation, and all my speech— and I spent half an hour composing it—went out of my head.”
The door to the back of the shop opened again and Leonie came in.
“Oh, your grace,” she said, feigning surprise, though she’d probably heard the row from the stairs. Marcelline hoped the seamstresses had followed orders and left early, else they’d have had an earful.
“He was about to leave,” Marcelline said.
“No, I wasn’t,” he said.
“It’s closing time,” Marcelline said, “and we know you aren’t buying anything.”
“Perhaps I shall,” he said.
“Leonie, please lock up for me,” she said. To him she said, “I’m not keeping my shop open all night to pander to your whims.”
“Do you plan to throw me out bodily?” he said.
She could knock him unconscious. Then she and her sisters could drag him out into the alley behind the shop. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d had to dispose of a troublesome male.
“You’re too big, curse you,” she said. “But we’re going to settle something, once and for all.”
Approaching Marriages in High Life.—A marriage is on the tapis between Mr Vaughan and Lady Mary Anne Gage, sister of Lord Kenmare. Viscount Palmerston, it is said, will shortly be united to the rich Mrs Thwaites.
The Court Journal, Saturday 25 April 1835
Marcelline stormed through the passage, past the stairs toward the back of the building, and through the open door into the workroom.
She met chaos.
Worktable covered with scraps of fabric, thimbles, thread, pincushions. Floor littered with debris. Chairs left where they’d been pushed out. It looked as though seamstresses had fled or been chased out.
She didn’t have time or mind to wonder at it. She didn’t have time or mind to put two and two together. The state of the room was one more trial in a long, wearying day of biting her tongue and maintaining an even temper in the face of stupidity, rudeness, and ill-usage. A long day of crushing her own wants and giving all her energy to winning and pleasing.
She’d deal with this latest aggravation later.
Clevedon first.
She turned to face him, bracing her hands against the edge of the disgracefully cluttered worktable.
She took pride in the neatness and order of her shop, a stunning contrast to life in her parents’ household, or what had passed for a household. But it didn’t matter what he thought of the disarray, she told herself. How would he know the difference between how a workroom ought and ought not to be maintained? And what did he care?
“You’re not to come here again,” she said. “Ever.”
“That suits me,” he said. “This is the last place on earth I’d wish to be.”
“You’re not to buy my daughter any more gifts,” she said.
“Why did you think I would?”
“Because she’s a conniving little minx who knows how to wrap men about her finger,” she said.
“So like her mother,” he said.
“Yes, I connived, and I wrapped you about my finger. But now I’m done with that. What did I ever want of you but your betrothed?”
Liar, liar.
“We’re not betrothed,” he said, “thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me?” she said with a mocking laugh. Mocking him. Mocking herself. “You’re not betrothed because of you. Why didn’t you make your so-carefully-rehearsed speech to that beautiful girl? The speech to which you devoted a mere half hour for the most important question of your life—”
“Clara doesn’t need—”
“But why should you take any trouble, when you take for granted everything you have? You’re used to getting whatever you want and losing interest as soon as you get it.”
“I love her,” he said. “I’ve loved her since we were children. But you—”
“It’s my fault, is it?” she said. “I’m the demon destroying your happiness? Only look at yourself and listen to yourself. Like every other man, you want what you can’t have. Like every other man, you’ll stay interested—even obsessed—until you get it. You came here this evening because you can’t think straight—because it drives you mad not to have something you want.”
His color darkened, and she saw his hands clench. “If you think that something is you, think again,” he said. “I don’t want you. But you want me, and I feel so sorry for you.”
Inwardly, it was as though she’d walked into a wall. Her head pounded and pain shot deep, deep inside.
She wanted him. She wanted to be the heartbreakingly beautiful girl he loved. She wanted to be someone else: a woman who mattered to him and to all those who mattered, instead of a nobody to be used and discarded. She wanted everything her family had taken away: every opportunity they’d squandered and all the damage done to her future long, long ago, generations before she was born.
Outwardly, she didn’t blink. “Then send me more customers,” she said. “I find money a great comfort in any calamity.”
She heard his sharp inhale. “By gad,” he said. “By gad, you’re a devil.”
“And you’re an angel?” She laughed.
He crossed the room, and in that instant she knew what would happen. But she was a devil and so was he, and she only stood there, gripping the table, daring him, daring her own destruction.
He
