Silk Is for Seduction (The Dressmakers 1)

The woman ran past him. She was carrying something, but he did not try to stop her. Noirot was struggling to get up, and the fire was racing from the window curtains to shelves of books and papers. One corner of the room was in flames already. His mind flashed over the materials he’d seen in the showroom. There would be more materials of their trade elsewhere, in storerooms and workrooms: heaps of highly combustible wrapping papers and boxes as well as cloth of all kinds.

Already the flames were too high for him to smother easily.

He made his decision in a fraction of a heartbeat. He couldn’t chance fighting the fire. In minutes they’d be trapped in an inferno.

Clutching the precious portfolio, Pritchett pushed through the rear door into the yard, and ran without once looking back, all the way to Cary Street. Only then did she stop to catch her breath. She saw the smoke rising from the shop, and she felt a pang. She hoped the child wasn’t hurt. She’d planned so carefully, then madame had thrown everything into disarray with her abrupt decision to send the seamstresses home early. Pritchett had chased them out, saying she’d tidy the workroom. When the duke came, she’d breathed a prayer of thanks. She’d thought he’d keep madame occupied for a time.

But it had all gone wrong, and now not only madame but his grace knew what she’d done.

Never mind, never mind. She had the patterns, and Mrs. Downes’s money would allow her to start fresh elsewhere. Frances Pritchett would take a new name, and nobody would be the wiser.

She glanced upward again. Above the rooftops, against the starry sky, the smoke hovered like a black thundercloud.

Marcelline saw the flames, and stared for a moment in shocked disbelief. Then, “Lucie!” she screamed.

Clevedon was dragging her up from the floor, dragging her to the door. She heard shouts from upstairs. They’d heard the noise or smelled the smoke

“Out!” Clevedon shouted. “Everybody out! Now!”

A thumping and clatter from above. More shouting.

“Everybody!” he roared.

Marcelline started toward the stairs. He pulled her back.

“Lucie!” she cried. She heard more noise from above. “Why don’t they come?” Had the fire risen so fast? Were they trapped? “Lucie!”

But he was dragging and pushing her down the passage toward the front door. “No!” she cried. “My daughter!”

“They’re coming,” he said.

Then she heard the footsteps on the stairs and the voices.

Behind her came his voice: “Out, out, everybody. Quickly. Noirot, for God’s sake, take them all outside.”

In the dark, smoke-filled passage, she couldn’t see them. But she heard Lucie’s voice, and her sisters’ and Millie’s.

Clevedon shoved her. “Out!” he shouted, his voice savage.

She went out, and it was only then, when they were all out of the smoke and confusion that she discovered Lucie wasn’t with them after all.

“Where’s Lucie?” Marcelline shouted over the din of panicked neighbors and the clatter of carriages and neighing horses.

“But she was with us.”

“She was just here.”

“I had her, ma’am,” Millie said. “But she broke away—and I thought she was running to you.”

No. No. Marcelline’s gaze went to the burning building. Her mind shrank from the thought.

“Lucie!” she shouted. Her sisters echoed her. The street was filling with gawkers. Her gaze raced over the crowd but no, there was no sign of her. There wouldn’t be. Lucie wasn’t brave at night. She wouldn’t run into a crowd of strangers.

“The doll!” Sophy cried. “She wanted to take the doll. There wasn’t time.”

“But she couldn’t have gone back,” Leonie said, her voice high, panicked.

Marcelline started to run back into the shop. Her sisters grabbed her. She fought.

“Marcelline, look,” Sophy said in a hard voice.

Flames boiled in the windows. The showroom was a bonfire of garish colors made of silks and satins and laces and cottons.

“Lucie!” Marcelline screamed. “Lucie!”

Clevedon had counted heads as they passed through the door. He’d heard their voices outside the building. He was sure they were all safely out.

But he’d scarcely stepped out onto the pavement when he heard Noirot scream for her child.

No. Dear God, no. Don’t let her be in there.

He ran back in.

“Lucie!” he shouted. “Erroll!”

The fire was spreading over the ground floor and flowing upward, hissing, crackling. Through the smoke, he could scarcely make out the stairs. He found them mainly by memory, and ran up.

“Lucie! Erroll!”

He kept calling, straining to hear, and at last, as he felt his way along the first-floor passage, he heard the terrified cry.

“Lucie!” he shouted. “Where are you, child?”

“Mama!”

The smoke was thick and choking. He could barely hear her above the fire’s noise. He very nearly missed her. Had he passed that spot a moment sooner or later, he wouldn’t have caught the muffled cry. But where was it coming from? “Lucie!”

“Mama!”

He searched frantically, and it was partly by sight and partly by sound and partly by moving his hands over the place where the cry seemed to come from that led him to the low door. It was under the stairs leading to the second floor. She might have hidden or played there before, or it simply might have been the first door she found.

He wrenched the door open.

Darkness. Silence.

No, please. Don’t let her be dead. Give me a chance, please.

Then he made out the little form, huddled in a corner.

He scooped her up. She had the doll clutched tightly against her chest, and she was shaking. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice rough—with the smoke, with fear, with relief. She turned her face into his coat and sobbed.

He cradled her head in his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

Everything would be all right, he promised himself. It had to be. She would not die. He wouldn’t let her.

Behind him the fire hissed and crackled, racing toward them.

Marcelline fought bitterly, but they wouldn’t let her go back for Lucie. Now it was too late.

The fire engine had come quickly, but not quickly enough. The hose poured water into the shop, but the flames had told her how fierce and fast the fire was. With luck, they could keep it from spreading to the adjoining shops.

As to hers . . .

Nothing could have survived that furious fire. She didn’t want to survive, either, but they wouldn’t let her go back.

She was sick, so sick that her legs would not hold her. She sank to her knees on the pavement, her arms wrapped about her, shivering as though she were naked. She couldn’t weep. The pain burned too deep for that. She only rocked there, in a black misery beyond any she’d ever known. Mama, Papa, Charlie, Cousin Emma—what she’d felt, losing them, was mere sorrow.

She was only dimly, distantly aware of her sisters on either side—their touch on her head, her shoulders . . . the sound of their sobs.

Around her was pandemonium and she was in Hell, and Hell was a black eternity where the only sensation was pain, sharp as a knife.

Lucie. Lucie. Lucie.

Clevedon had to decide in an instant, and he decided against the stairs. The fire seemed to be moving from back to front on the western side of the building. That meant a conflagration might await them at the foot of the stairs. He went the other way, to the back, but keeping to the side of the passage where he’d found Lucie, in hopes that the floor would hold. Above the showroom and workrooms, packed with combustibles, the fire would burn more fiercely.

That was the gamble, at any rate.

“Hold tight,” he told Lucie. “And don’t look.” Her arms tightened about his neck and she buried her face in his neckcloth. She didn’t release the doll, and he was aware of one of its limbs tapping his shoulder blade. A bizarre thing to notice, and he wanted to break the doll in pieces for the trouble it had caused, but she needed it, and the doll was the least of their problems.