Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

“I see,” she said. “You think my bottom’s too big.”

“That isn’t what I said,” he said. “You’re not shaped like a man. No one would ever mistake you for one. Gad, I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

He turned away and started walking.

Olivia went with him.

He was in a horrible mood, and that, she knew, was at least partly thanks to her. She’d woken him at a cruel hour after a long and wearying day and night . . . after an exceedingly emotional episode . . . which she didn’t want to think about. She’d been angry with him, and upset in ways she could scarcely explain even to herself.

What she’d done this morning was the equivalent of slapping him and running away. Very mature. But she was at a loss—a rare state for her—and she hated it.

“Passing for a man isn’t the point,” she said. “I dressed for comfort and convenience. You said to wear something sensible, and women’s garments simply aren’t sensible. They grow less so every year. Furthermore, a reasonable man would have understood that it’s impossible for a woman to change out of one dress into another in a quarter hour. It would serve you right if I’d come down in my shift.”

“It isn’t as though I haven’t already seen you in your shift,” he said.

“If you’re referring to last night, that was my nightdress,” she said. And don’t let’s talk about last night. I’m not ready.

“It looked like a shift to me.”

“You can’t have seen very many, if you can’t tell the difference.”

“I’m a man,” he said. “We don’t go in for the fine details of women’s dress. We notice how much or how little they’re wearing. I’ve noticed that you seem to wear very little.”

“Compared to what?” she said. “Egyptian women? They seem to go to extremes. Either they’re completely covered except for their eyes, or they’re dancing about wearing a few small bells. The point is—”

“This way,” he said, and turned into St. Helen’s Square.

The square, broader than Coney Street, wasn’t as gloomy.

As they passed the York Tavern, she looked up. The dark buildings were silhouetted against a sky lit by a great blur of stars.

In another moment they’d crossed the square. They turned briefly into Blake Street, then into Stonegate, another narrow York lane.

“The point is,” she said, “women ought to be allowed to wear trousers in cases like this.”

“The point is,” he said, “women ought not to be getting into situations requiring them to wear trousers.”

“Don’t be stuffy. Aunt Daphne wears them.”

“In Egypt,” he said. “Where women do wear a sort of trouserlike attire. But they’re not as form fitting, and they wear layers of other garments over them. Were you to wear those trousers in Cairo, you’d be arrested for public lewdness and flogged.”

“They are a bit tight, I’ll admit,” she said. “I don’t know how men can abide them. They do chafe in a sensitive area.”

“Do not talk about your sensitive areas,” he said.

“I have to talk about something,” she said. “One of us must attempt to lighten the heavy gloom of your company.”

“Yes, well . . .” He stopped walking. “Oh, damn. Olivia . . . about last night . . . when you came to my door . . .”

She stopped, too, her heart racing.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “A very bad mistake, on about a hundred counts. I’m sorry.”

He was right, she told herself. It had been a terrible mistake, on so many counts. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was. And not completely your fault. I’m sorry, too.”

He looked relieved.

She told herself she was relieved, too.

He nodded. “Good. That’s settled, then.”

“Yes.”

“Just to be clear, though: You’re still aggravating, and I don’t apologize for berating you,” he said.

“I understand,” she said. “I don’t apologize for anything I said, either.”

“Very well, then.”

They started walking again.

It was awkward. Lisle had never felt awkward in her company before. This was what came of crossing a line that shouldn’t have been crossed. He’d apologized to her, but he couldn’t apologize to Rathbourne, and he couldn’t shake off the sense of having betrayed him. He couldn’t shake off the sense of having done something irrevocable. He’d opened Pandora’s Box and now—

Her voice broke the lengthening silence. “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “Only a man would think that a reasonable amount of time.”

“You know perfectly well I was counting on you not to do it,” he said.

“And you know perfectly well that I’d do it or die trying,” she said. “We had a bit of a panic at first. Bailey couldn’t find my trousers and I thought we’d have to take Nichols’s.”

He looked at her. She didn’t look anything like a boy. Or did she? Was that his walk she was imitating?

“You really are ridiculous,” he said.

“Oh, I understood how difficult it would be,” she said, “but it was the first thing that leapt to my mind when we couldn’t find these clothes. Then, while Bailey was tearing off my dress and petticoats and squeezing me into my trousers, I was picturing what would have happened.”

He was picturing her maid tearing off her clothes and squeezing Olivia into narrow trousers.

Pandora’s Box.

Still, there was no harm in thinking. He was a man. Men always had lewd thoughts. It was perfectly natural and normal.

“He would make a fuss,” Olivia continued, “and I would have to distract him, while Bailey knocked him unconscious. Then we’d take the trousers. Then, after I’d gone, Bailey would bind up his wounds and tell him how sorry she was, and how it couldn’t be helped.”

“Why couldn’t you stay quietly in London and write dramas for the stage?” he said.

“Lisle, use your head,” she said. “If I had the least talent for staying quietly, I should have quietly stuck to the first gentleman I became engaged to and got married and had children and disappeared into that anonymous demi-existence other women disappear into.”

She began to wave her arms about. “Why must women stay quietly? Why must we be little moons, each of us stuck in our little orbit, revolving around a planet that is some man? Why can’t we be other planets? Why must we be moons?”

“Speaking astronomically,” he said, “those other planets all orbit about the sun.”

“Must you always be so literal??

?? she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m horribly literal and you’re appallingly imaginative. For instance, I see a cathedral rising behind some buildings ahead. What do you see?”

She looked to the end of Stonegate, where a black tower rose into the night sky.

“I see a ghostly ruin, looming through a narrow alley, a great black hulk against a star-studded night sky.”

“I’m not sure it’s a ruin,” he said. “But we’ll soon see.”

A few more steps brought them to the end of Stonegate. They crossed High Petergate, passed into an alley, and entered the darkened grounds of the ghostly ruin—or, depending on one’s point of view—the slightly burned York Minster.

Lisle supposed that the faint flickering light behind a stained-glass window would add to Olivia’s “ghostly” view of the place. To him it was merely a sign of life.

“Looks like somebody’s home,” he said. “All the same, I’d rather not stumble about getting in.” From a pocket of his great coat he took out his tinder box and a short candle.

“I’ve got lucifers,” she said.

He shook his head. “Filthy, vile-smelling things.” He took a moment to employ the tinderbox and light his stumpy candle.

“They are disgusting,” she said. “But one never knows when they’ll prove useful.”

“They’re useful to those who’re accustomed to having their servants make all the fires,” he said. “Any competent fellow can strike a spark as easily and quickly—and more safely—with a tinderbox.”

“Most people won’t practice ten thousand times, on purpose, just to prove they can do something,” she said.

“I did not practice ten— Gad, why do I let you bait me? Is it too much to ask you to stay close? We don’t know how much clearing out they’ve done.”

“Just because I’ve squeezed my gigantic bottom into men’s trousers, you needn’t assume my brains have shrunk to masculine size,” she said. “I’m perfectly aware that you’re the one holding the only candle, and I’m not longing to trip over stray bits of cathedral. It’s shockingly dark and quiet, isn’t it? London’s as busy at night as it is in the daytime. And better lit. But it’s perfectly in keeping: medieval church, medieval darkness, and tomblike silence.”