had no choice. She had to be the sane one. This was one dream she couldn’t dream. He was watching her, waiting.
She unfolded her arms.
She put her hands together, like one offering a prayer, and said, “Thank you. This is kind and generous, and, truly, you do me a great honor—I know that’s what one is supposed to say, but I mean it, truly—”
“Marcelline, don’t—”
“But no, your grace, no. I can never marry you.”
She saw his face go white, and she turned away, quickly, before she could weaken. She walked to the door that led to the back rooms, and opened it, and walked through, and closed it, very, very gently, behind her.
Clevedon walked blindly from the shop, down St. James’s Street. At the bottom of the street he paused, and gazed blankly at St. James’s Palace. There was a noise in his head, a horrible noise. He was aware of misery and pain and rage and the devil knew what else. He hadn’t the wherewithal to take it apart and name its components. It was a kind of hell-brew of feelings, and it consumed him. He didn’t hear the shout. He couldn’t hear above the noise in his head.
“What the devil is wrong with you, Clevedon? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse, running down the street like a damn fool. One damn fool after another, obviously. I saw you come out of that shop, you moron.”
Clevedon turned and looked at Longmore. “I recommend you not provoke me,” he said coldly. “I’m in a mood to knock someone down, and you’ll do very well.”
“Don’t tell me,” Longmore said. “The dressmaker doesn’t want you, either. By gad, this isn’t your day, is it? Not your week, rather.”
The urge to throw Longmore against a lamp post or a fence or straight into the gutter was overpowering. The guards would probably rush out from the palace gates—and there Clevedon would be, in the newspapers again, the name on every scandalmonger’s lips.
Hell, what was one more scandal?
He dropped his walking stick and grasped Long-more by the shoulders and shoved him hard. With an oath, Longmore shoved back. “Fight me like a man, you swine,” he said. “I dare you.”
A moment later, they’d torn off their coats. In the next instant, their fists flew, as they tried, steadily and viciously, to pummel each other to death.
Marcelline sent Sophy out into the showroom to close the shop.
Though she was so tired, tired to death and heartsick, she knew better than to go to bed. Lucie would think she was ill, and she’d get panicky—and very possibly do something rash again.
In any case, Marcelline knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She needed to focus on making beautiful clothes. That would calm her.
She was trying to redesign the fastening for a pelisse when Sophy came in. Leonie trailed after her. Sophy hadn’t said anything before, but she’d given Marcelline a searching look. Even wearing a card-playing face, it was hard to hide one’s emotions from one’s own kind.
The two younger sisters had come to find out the trouble and comfort her as they always did.
“What happened?” Sophy said. “What’s wrong?”
“Clevedon,” Marcelline said. She jammed her pencil into the paper. The pencil broke. “Oh, it’s ridiculous. I ought to laugh. But I can’t. You won’t believe it.”
“Of course we will,” Sophy said.
“He offered you carte blanche,” Leonie said.
“No, he asked me to marry him.”
There was a short, stunned silence.
Then, “I reckon he’s in a marrying mood,” Sophy said.
Marcelline laughed. Then she started to sob.
But before she could fall to pieces, Selina Jeffreys came to the door. “Oh, madame, I beg your pardon. But I was just out—I went to get the ribbons from Mr. Adkins down the bottom of the street—and when I came out of his shop, there were the two gentleman fighting down at the palace, and people coming out of every shop and club, and running to watch the fight.”
“Two gentlemen?” Leonie said. “Two ruffians, you mean.”
“No, Miss Leonie. It’s his grace the Duke of Clevedon and his friend, the other tall, dark gentleman.”
“Lord Longmore?” Sophy said. “He was here only a little while ago.”
“Yes, miss, that’s the one. They’re trying to kill each other, I vow! I couldn’t stand to watch—and besides, there was all sorts of men coming along to see. It wasn’t any place for a girl on her own.”
Sophy and Leonie didn’t have Jeffreys’s delicate scruples. They ran out to watch the fight. They didn’t notice that their older sister didn’t follow.
Sophy and Leonie returned not very long after they’d gone out.
Marcelline had given up trying to create something beautiful. She wasn’t in the mood. She looked in on the seamstresses, then she went upstairs and looked in on Lucie, who was reading to Susannah from one of the books Clevedon had bought.
After the visit to the nursery, Marcelline went into their sitting room and poured herself a glass of brandy.
She’d taken only a few sips before her sisters returned, looking windblown and sounding a little out of breath, but otherwise undamaged.
They poured brandy, too, and reported.
“It was delicious,” Sophy said. “They must practice at the boxing salons, because they’re very good.”
“It didn’t look like practice to me,” Leone said. “It looked like they were trying to kill each other.”
“It was wonderfully ferocious,” Sophy said. “Their hats were off, and their coats, too, and they were trampling their neckcloths. Their hair was wild and they had blood on their clothes.” She fanned herself with her hand.
“I vow, it was enough to make a girl swoon.”
“It put me in mind of the Roman mobs at the Coliseum,” Leonie said. “Half of White’s must have been there—all those fine gentlemen, and all of them shouting and betting on the outcome and egging them on.”
“Leonie’s right,” Sophy said. “It did look to be getting out of hand, and I was thinking we ought to find a safer place to watch from. But then the Earl of Hargate came out of St. James’s Palace with some other men.”
“Straight through the crowd of men he came, pushing them out of his way—and he must be sixty if he’s a day,”
Leonie said.
“But he carries himself like Zeus,” Sophy said. “And the men gave way, and he ordered his grace and his lordship to stop making damned fools of themselves.”
“They
