Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

Miss Noirot’s face lit, and she bounded up from the chair, momentarily forgetting the injured ankle. She winced and swore softly in French, but her eyes sparkled and her face glowed. “Send them up to the consulting room, and bring them refreshments. I’ll be there in a moment.”

The girl went out.

“Up to the consulting room?” he said. “Are you meaning to mount stairs in your condition?”

“Lady Clara has brought Lady Gladys Fairfax,” she said. “Did you not see her?”

“Of course I saw Gladys. One can no more fail to notice her than one could overlook a toppling building or a forty-day flood. I pointed her out to you.”

“I meant her dress,” she said.

“I looked away immediately, but not soon enough. It was a catastrophe, as usual.”

What Gladys lacked in good nature she made up in bad taste.

“It was,” Miss Noirot said, her tell-nothing face radiant with an excitement as incomprehensible as it was breathtaking. “She needs me. I would get up those stairs if I had to crawl.”

Blast.

And this afternoon had been going so well, too.

Leave it to Gladys to barge in like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.

“What nonsense you talk,” Lisburne said. “You can’t crawl up the stairs. You’ll wrinkle your dress.”

He crossed to Miss Noirot and offered his arm before she could attempt to stagger to the door.

“I’d carry you in,” he said, “but if she spots us, it’ll only make Gladys sarcastic. More sarcastic. And she’ll make your afternoon disagreeable enough as it is. Are you sure you want to see her? Couldn’t you send one of those multitudes of girls?”

“Fob her off on an inferior?” She took his arm. “Clearly you have a great deal to learn about business, my lord.”

“And you’ve a great deal to learn about Gladys. But there’s no helping it, I see. Some people have to learn the hard way.”

He got her up to the next floor, but retreated when he saw the open door and heard Gladys’s voice. It had reached the peevish stage already.

He had a nightmarish recollection of the first time he’d seen her, waiting at the house after his father’s funeral. A spotty, surly, sharp-tongued fifteen-year-old girl who oughtn’t to have been let out of the schoolroom. And her father! The famous military hero, who’d tried to bully a grieving widow into betrothing her son to that obnoxious child. Lord Boulsworth had acted as though Father had been one of his officers, struck down in combat, over whose regiment Boulsworth must assume command—as though other people’s wives and sons and daughters existed merely to march to his orders. Lisburne had encountered her a few times since his return to London. Apart from a remarkably clear complexion, he’d seen no signs of Gladys’s improving with maturity. On the contrary, she seemed to have grown more like her father.

“Sorry to play the coward and cut and run,” he said, “but I’ll do you no favors by hanging about. Clara’s well enough, of course. Gladys is another article. Let’s simply say that she and I won’t be exchanging pleasantries. Seeing me will only put her in a worse humor, if you can imagine that, and I’d rather not make your job any more difficult.”

Forty-five minutes later

Are you blind?” Lady Gladys said. “Only look at me! I can’t have my breasts spilling out of my dress. People will think I’m desperate for attention.”

She glared at the three women studying her, her color deepening to a red unfortunately like a drunkard’s nose.

She sounded furious, but Leonie discerned the misery in her eyes. Her ladyship was difficult: imperious, rude, impatient, uncooperative, and quick to imagine insult. Normal client behavior, in other words.

At present, Lady Gladys stood before the dressing glass, stripped to corset and chemise, thanks to Jeffreys’s able assistance and Lady Clara’s moral support. Even so, reaching this point had been a battle. Meanwhile, Leonie’s ankle hurt, and so did her head, and neither of these things mattered, any more than Lady Gladys’s obnoxious behavior did.

This was the opportunity of a lifetime.

“My lady, one of the basic principles of dress is to emphasize one’s assets,” Leonie said. “Where men are concerned, your bosom is your greatest asset.”

“Greatest I can’t quarrel with, if you mean immense,” Lady Gladys said. “I know I’m not the sylph here.” She shot an angry glance at Lady Clara, who was too statuesque to qualify as a sylph. She did qualify as impossibly beautiful, though: blonde and blue-eyed, gifted with a pearly complexion and a shapely body. And brains. And a beautiful nature.

Nature had not gifted Lady Gladys with any form of classical beauty. Dull brown hair. Eyes an equally unmemorable brown, and like her mouth too small for her round face. A figure by no means ideal. She had little in the way of a waist. But she had a fine bosom, and acceptable hips, though at the moment, this wasn’t obvious to any but the most expert observer.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have a shape,” Leonie said.

“Do you hear her, Gladys?” Lady Clara said. “Did I not tell you that you were hiding your good parts?”

“I don’t have good parts!” Lady Gladys said. “Don’t patronize me, Clara. I can see perfectly well what’s in the mirror.”

“I beg to differ,” Leonie said. “If you could see perfectly well, you’d see that your corset is wrong for your ladyship’s figure.”

“What figure?” Lady Gladys said.

“Well, let’s see what happens when we take off the corset.”

“No! I’m quite undressed enough. My dressmaker at home—”

“Seems to have a problem with drink,” Leonie said. “I cannot imagine any sober modiste stuffing her client into this—this sausage arrangement.”

“Sausage?” Lady Gladys shrieked. “Clara, I’ve had quite enough of this creature’s insolence.”

“Jeffreys, kindly assist Lady Gladys with her corset,” Leonie said firmly. The modiste who let the client take charge might as well close up shop and earn her living by taking in mending.

“You will not, girl,” Lady Gladys snapped. “You most certainly will not. I refuse to be manhandled by a consumptive child who speaks the most disgusting excuse for French to assault my ears in a city grossly oversupplied with i

gnoramuses.”

Jeffreys had grown up in a harsh world. This was motherly affection compared to her childhood experience. Undaunted, she moved to the customer, but when she tried to touch the corset strings, Lady Gladys twisted about and waved her arms, practically snarling.

Like a cornered animal.

“Come, come, your ladyship is not afraid of my forewoman,” Leonie said.

“Jeffreys can’t possibly be consumptive,” Lady Clara said. “If she were, she’d be dead, after the ordeal of wrestling you out of your frock and petticoats.”

“I told you this would be a waste of time!”

“And I told you I was tired of a certain person’s sly remarks about remembering your dresses from your first Season. And you said—”

“I don’t care what anybody says!”

“Ça suffit,” Leonie said. “Everybody go away. Lady Gladys and I need to talk privately.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Lady Gladys said. “You are the most encroaching—no, Clara, you are not to go!”

But Lady Clara went out, and Jeffreys followed her, and gently closed the door behind them.

Lady Gladys couldn’t run after them in her underclothes. She couldn’t dress herself, because, like most ladies, she had no idea how. She was trapped.

Leonie drew out from a cupboard an excessively French dressing gown. The color of cream and richly embroidered with pink buds and pale green vines and leaves, it was not made of muslin, as ladies’ nightdresses usually were. This was silk. A very fine, nearly transparent silk.

She held it up. Lady Gladys sniffed and scowled, but she didn’t turn away. Her gaze settled on the risqué piece of silk, and her expression became hunted.

“You can’t mean that for me,” she said. “That is suitable for a harlot.”

Leonie advanced and draped it over her ladyship’s stiff shoulders.

She turned her to face the looking glass. Lady Gladys’s mutinous expression softened. She blinked hard. “I-I could never wear such a thing, and you’re wicked to suggest it.”