Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

“I’m going to wait,” Lisburne said. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying out our errand on my own. And I can do it in a more businesslike manner if you’re not mooning about.”

“I need to write half a dozen new poems in less than a week!” Swanton said. “You’d be in a state of abstraction, too.”

“All the more reason for you to go away to a quiet place, where the women are not giggling and blushing and making up excuses to get close to you.”

Naturally Swanton didn’t realize what was going on about him. The shopgirls would have to hit him on the head with a hat stand to get his full attention. Still, unlike the young ladies of the ton, they were mainly excited to have a celebrity in their midst. They probably hadn’t time to read his poetry—if they could read. Their interest wasn’t personal, in other words.

Swanton looked about him, seeing whatever hazy version of reality he saw. “Very well,” he said. “I can take a hint.”

No, you can’t, Lisburne thought.

With any luck, Swanton would manage to cross St. James’s Street without walking into the path of an oncoming carriage. If not, and if he seemed headed into danger, a sympathetic female would rush out and rescue him, even if she was one of the two people in London who didn’t know who he was. Because he looked like an angel.

In any case, Lisburne wasn’t his nursemaid. Furthermore, he’d wrestled with enough of the poet’s problems in the past two days.

He was in dire need of mental relief.

Such as Miss Leonie Noirot.

Who was too busy to see him.

He walked about the shop, studying the mannequins and the contents of the display cases. He even allowed himself to be consulted on the matter of brown ribbons.

He was solemnly examining them through his quizzing glass, trying to decide which had a yellower cast, when Gladys hurried out into the showroom, then swiftly through the street door. Clara followed close behind. Neither noticed him, and he didn’t try to attract their attention.

“I wonder if Miss Noirot will see me now,” he said to the girl who’d told him to make an appointment.

The girl went out.

She returned a quarter hour later and led him to Miss Noirot’s office.

Chapter Five

The management of a dispute was formerly attempted by reason and argument; but the new way of adjusting all difference in opinion is by the sword or a wager: so that the only genteel method of dissenting, is to risk a thousand pounds, or take your chance of being run through the body.

The Connoisseur, 1754

When Lisburne entered, he found Miss Noirot straightening her ledgers with excessive force.

Since she’d spent more than an hour with Gladys, he diagnosed pent-up rage. No surprise there.

He was, however, distracted by the stormy picture Leonie Noirot made, in a maniacally feminine concoction of white muslin: the swoosh of the billowing sleeves and the way the overdress—robe—whatever it was—lifted and fell against the dress underneath and the agitated flutter of lace. Her bosom rose and fell, the embroidery and lace like white-capped waves on a tumultuous sea.

It was only a woman in a pet, by no means an unfamiliar sight. All the same, he had to take a moment to slow his breathing to normal and drag his wits out from the dark seas into which they were sinking.

“I sent Swanton up to White’s, but I thought it best to wait,” he said, his voice a shade hoarser than it ought to be.

She took up the little watch at her waist and opened the case. “An hour and twenty minutes,” she said.

“But I was waiting for you,” he said. “The time was as nothing. And it allowed me to perform deeds of mercy without much trouble.”

“Deeds of mercy,” she said. “Have you been helping my employees lose their wits? Or were you mercifully wafting sal volatile at the customers after you made them swoon?”

He adopted a hurt expression. “I helped somebody’s great-grandmother choose ribbons.”

“You ought to be careful, plying your ‘mercy’ upon elderly persons,” she said. “Their constitutions may not withstand the onslaught of so much manly beauty and charm. You may not realize how bad it is for business when ladies go off into apoplexies in our showroom.” She put the watch away, folded her arms, and donned a blankly amiable expression.

As though he were any other customer.

He squelched the prickle of irritation and told himself not to act like an oversensitive schoolboy. Careful to keep his voice smooth, he said, “Thank you for the reminder, madame. In future, I’ll take care to inflict my beauty and charm only on big, strong wenches.”

“I know you can’t help it,” she said. “You were born that way. But some of my best customers are the older ladies, and I don’t wish to send them off before their time.”

“I promise to try not to murder any elderly ladies by accident,” he said.

“Strictly speaking, it isn’t murder if it’s an accident,” she said. “Or if it looks like one,” she added, as though to herself. He saw her gaze shift to the desk . . . where she kept her penknife and probably other instruments of mayhem, like sharp scissors. Dressmakers always had sharp things about them—scissors, needles, pins. He had an odd sensation of having wandered inadvertently into danger. No doubt because the atmosphere seemed to vibrate with the passion she was having so much trouble suppressing.

He was very badly tempted to push, to see—experience—what happened when her control slipped.

“I have customers waiting, my lord,” she said. “I believe Parmenter said that you and Lord Swanton had come on business.”

He caught the note of impatience. What next? Would she throw things?

“So we did,” he said. He put two fingers to his right temple and pretended to think.

The air about him throbbed harder yet. “Perhaps it would be best for you to join Lord Swanton at White’s. Perhaps if the two of you put your heads together, you’ll remember what it was that was so desperately urgent.”

She started toward the door.

“Oh, yes, now I remember,” he said. “It’s to do with the girls you’ve taken under your wing. Swanton and I want to help.”

She paused. “My girls,” she said.

Her girls.

“The Milliners’ Society,” he said. “The poetic genius and I came to tell you about our brilliant idea for raising funds.”

She wanted him to go to the devil. She wanted funds for her girls. The struggle between these opposing desires was so well concealed that he would have missed it had he not been watching her so closely.

She couldn’t altogether calm herself, but she mastered the impatience.

“I shouldn’t have plagued you today, especially when it’s clear you’re so extremely busy,” he said. “The trouble is, we need to do it quickly, and I wasn’t sure I could get an appointment soon enough.”

She folded her hands at her waist. “It was very good of you and Lord Swanton to think of the Milliners’ Society,” she said.

“I should like to know how we could avoid doing so, when I brought home the shop’s entire contents,” he said. “We can hardly stir a step in the library without tripping over pincushions and purses and who knows what. Having to plan prevented Swanton from excessive weeping. I was so glad I didn’t bring him to the shop with me. He’d have wanted weeks to recover. And I very much doubt we have weeks, young women being famously fickle.”

“You said you had a plan,” she said, womanfully crushing her impatience.

“Ah, yes. The plan.” He went on to describe it. In detail. With various detours and contingencies.

If he’d hoped for an explosion, he’d underestimated her.

She moved to her desk, took up a pen, and took brisk notes.

While she wrote, he talked and wandered seemingly aimlessly about her office, gradually drawing nearer, until he paused beside her to watch her write.

She had compressed his meandering verbiage amazingly: a charity fête at Vauxhall during the grand gala on Monday night. Swanton to read new poems in one of the smaller theaters. An additional five-shilling fee for admission to the poetry reading. A small percentage of proceeds to Vauxhall’s proprietors for use of the hall. The rest to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females.

He was aware of the words but more aware of the sounds. Everything upon her person fluttered and billowed, so that even nearly still, only writing, she made a sort of murmuring sea of sound, audible below the pen’s scratching. Mingling with the sibilance was her scent, light and clean, of lavender.

His mind conjured nights in the Tuscan mountains, high in a villa overlooking a tiny village . . . glowworms flickering in the darkness of the terraced vineyards below . . . and the scent of lavender, carrying his first intimations of grief easing and a possibility of peace.

He was aware of a stabbing in his chest, and of heat, in so sudden a surge that it startled him, and he drew back a fraction.

She looked up at him.

“What a knack you have for . . . reducing the thing to its essentials,” he said.