Leonie heard the longing in her voice, and her hard little dressmaker’s heart ached.
Lady Gladys wasn’t a beauty. She’d never been and never would be, no matter how much of the dressmaker’s art one applied.
Yet she could be more.
“I’m not suggesting you purchase it,” Leonie said. “Not yet. It will be more suitable for your trousseau.”
“Trousseau! What a joke!”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Leonie said. “We’re going to rid you of that monstrosity of a corset.”
“You are the most managing, impudent—”
“I’ll provide you with something more suitable until I can make up exactly what you need.” Corsets were Leonie’s specialty.
“I will not . . . You will not . . .” Lady Gladys blinked hard and swallowed.
“Your ladyship is never to wear ready-made stays again,” Leonie went on briskly. It never did to become emotional with clients. They could manage that sort of thing more than adequately themselves. “They don’t provide proper support and they make you shapeless.”
“I am shapeless. Or rather, I have a fine shape if you like b-barrels.”
“You do have a figure,” Leonie said. “It isn’t classical, but that isn’t important to men. They’re not as discriminating as young women think. You’re generously endowed in the bosom, and once we get that ghastly thing off, you’ll see that your hips and bottom are in neat proportion.”
Lady Gladys looked into the mirror. Her face crumpled. She walked away and sank onto a chair.
“Let us review your assets,” Leonie said.
“Assets!” Lady Gladys’s voice was choked.
“In addition to what I’ve enumerated, you own a clear complexion, an elegant nose, and pretty hands,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.
“Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”
Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.
Leonie gave her a handkerchief.
“Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.
Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”
“Yet here you are,” Leonie said.
Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”
“A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”
Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”
“I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly dressed.”
“Oh, yes, that explains everything. If you’d had the managing of things, I’d have been the belle of the ball.”
Leonie stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and eyed her new client critically. After a long, busy moment while her mind performed complicated calculations, she said, “Yes, my lady. Yes, you would have been. And yes, you can be.”
Early evening of Friday 10 July
You hateful little sneak! I always attend her!”
“Always? Once, two months ago.”
“It was only last week I waited on Miss Renfrew, while you was flirting with Mr. Burns.”
“I never was!”
“Maybe he wasn’t flirting with you, but you was trying hard enough.”
Leonie had heard the raised voices, and was hurrying from her office into the workroom at the same time as Jeffreys, on the same errand, was running that way from the showroom.
By the time they burst through the door, Glinda Simmons had got hold of Joanie Barker. They scratched and kicked and slapped and pulled each other’s hair, screeching the while. The other girls shrieked, too. In a matter of minutes, they’d tumbled bolts of costly fabric, boxes of ribbons, flowers, feathers, and other articles hither and yon.
Leonie clapped her hands, but no one was paying attention. She and Jeffreys had to move in and forcibly separate the two girls. This didn’t stop the screaming. The combatants called for witnesses to various crimes perpetrated by the opposing party, and the noncombatants took that as an invitation to express their own grievances against this one or that one.
It took nearly an hour to restore full order. Having warned the girls that they’d all be dismissed without notice or a character if they indulged in another outburst, Leonie hurried upstairs to change out of her workday dress. Jeffreys followed her.
“You’d better send Mary Parmenter to help me dress,” Leonie said. Mary had been left in charge of the showroom when Jeffreys came to stop the war. “You keep an eye on the seamstresses. You’re the best at managing these battles.”
This was only one of the reasons Selina Jeffreys, despite her youth and apparent frailty, was their forewoman.
Jeffreys ignored her, and started unfastening Leonie’s pelerine. “You’re going to be late, madame,” she said. “And you know Parmenter gets nervous and clumsy when she feels rushed. I don’t.”
Late wasn’t good enough, in Leonie’s opinion. Never would be preferable. She was not looking forward to this evening’s engagement.
Lord Swanton was hosting a poetry lecture to raise funds for the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. This was the sort of activity at which Sophy shone. She would put in an appearance, then slip away and write all about it for London’s favorite gossip sheet, Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The account would include detailed descriptions of what every Maison Noirot customer was wearing.
Leonie looked forward to the writing much in the way a French ancestor had looked forward to making the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.
Misinterpreting her frown, Jeffreys said, “Please don’t worry about the girls, madame. They’ll be all right now. It’s that time of the month, and you know how it is with girls who’re always together.”
They all had That Time of the Month at the same time.
“It’s worse this month, and we both know why,” Leonie said. Marcelline had married a duke and Sophy had married a future marquess. Though any other women would jump at the chance to quit working, Marcelline and Sophy weren’t like other women. They might give it up eventually, but not without a fight.
The girls didn’t understand this, and it wasn’t easy to prove, since neither sister was much in evidence at present. Marcelline, who was having a miserable time with morning sickness, was abed a good deal, on her doctor’s orders. Sophy had had to go away to give Fashionable Society time to forget what the French widow she’d recently impersonated had looked lik
e.
That left Leonie, who could do what the other two did, but not with their brilliance and flair. Each sister had her special skills, and Leonie was missing her sisters’ talents acutely. And their company.
And she was more worried than anybody about what would become of Maison Noirot. She’d put everything she had into the shop—mind, body, soul. The cholera had killed Cousin Emma and wiped out their old life in Paris. Emma had died too young, but here in London her spirit and genius lived on in their hearts and in the new life they’d so painstakingly built.
“The girls will be better when my sisters are in the shop more regularly,” Leonie said. “Routine and habit, Jeffreys. You know our girls need not merely to be kept busy, but to have order in their lives.” Many had ended up in charitable institutions. Their lives before had been hard and chaotic. “But matters are bound to change, and everybody needs to adapt.” For these girls, adapting wasn’t easy. Change upset them. She understood. It upset her, too. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, getting them used to a new routine.”
“You don’t need any more work,” Jeffreys said. “You need more rest, madame. You can’t be three people.”
Leonie smiled. “No, but with your help, I might be nearly that. But do let us make haste. I must get there before it’s over.”
Later that evening
Leonie hurried into the conversation room adjoining the New Western Athenaeum’s lecture hall—
—and stopped short as a tall, black-garbed figure emerged from the shadows of a window embrasure.
“I thought you’d never come,” Lord Lisburne said.
He was not, she saw, dressed entirely in black. In addition to the pristine white shirt and neckcloth, he wore a green silk waistcoat, exquisitely embroidered in gold. It called attention to his narrow waist . . . thence her gaze wandered lower, to the evening trousers that lovingly followed the muscled contours of his long legs.
Leonie took a moment to settle her breathing. “Did we have an appointment?” she said. “If so, I must have made it while concussed, because I don’t recall.”
“Oh, I was sure you’d be here.” He waved a gloved hand at the door to the lecture hall. “Swanton. Young ladies in droves.” He waved at her dress. “Advertising.”