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“Ah, it’s a specialty, is it?”
“You of all men must know that seduction is an art, and some practitioners are more skilled than others,” she said. “I’ve chosen to apply my talents to dressing ladies beautifully. Women are capricious and difficult to please, yes. Men are easy to please but far more capricious.”
To a discerning woman, his beautiful face was wonderfully expressive. She watched, fascinated, while a speculative expression gradually erased the lingering signs of temper. He was puzzling over her, revising his original estimation and, therefore, his tactics.
This was an intelligent man. She had better be very careful.
“Frascati’s,” he said. “You’re a gambler.”
“The game of chance is my favorite sport,” she said. Gambling—with money, with people, with their futures—was a way of life for her family. “Roulette, especially. Pure chance.”
“This explains the risks you take with men you don’t know,” he said.
“Dressmaking is not a trade for the faint of heart,” she said.
The humor came back into his green eyes and the corners of his mouth quirked up. On any other man that look would have been charming. On him it was devastating. The eyes, the sweet little smile—it stabbed a girl to the heart and then lower down.
“So it would seem,” he said. “A more dangerous trade than I’d supposed.”
“You’ve no idea,” she said.
“This promises to be interesting,” he said. “I’ll see you at Frascati’s.”
He made her a bow, and it was pure masculine grace, the smooth and confident movement of a man completely at ease in his powerful body.
He took his leave, and she watched him saunter away. she watched scores of elegant hats and bonnets change direction as other women watched him pass.
She’d thrown down the gauntlet and he’d taken it up, as she’d known he would.
Now all she had to do was not end up on her back with that splendid body between her legs.
That was not going to be easy.
But then, if it were easy, it wouldn’t be much fun.
London
Wednesday night
Mrs. Downes waited in a carriage a short distance from the seamstress’s lodgings. Shortly after half-past nine, the seamstress passed the carriage. She glanced up but didn’t stop walking. A moment later, Mrs. Downes stepped down from the carriage, continued down the street, and greeted the young woman as though theirs was an accidental encounter of two old acquaintances. They asked after each other’s health. Then they walked a few steps to the door of the house where the seamstress lived. After a moment of conversation, the seamstress withdrew from her pocket a folded piece of paper.
Mrs. Downes reached for it.
“The money first,” the seamstress said.
“Let me see what it is first,” Mrs. Downes said. “For all I know, it’s nothing out of the way.”
The seamstress stepped closer to the street lamp and opened the folded sheet of paper.
Mrs. Downes gave a little gasp, and hastily covered it up with a disdainful sniff. “Is that all? My girls can run up something like that in an hour. It’s hardly worth half a crown, let alone a sovereign.”
The seamstress folded up the paper. “Well, then, let them do it if they can,” she said. “I’ve made notes on the back about how it’s done, but I’m sure your clever girls don’t need any help working out how to keep those folds the way she has them, or how to make those bows. And you don’t need to know which ribbon she uses and who she gets it from. No, indeed, you don’t want any of that. So I’ll take this in with me, shall I, and throw it on the fire. I know how it’s done, and Madame knows how it’s done, and one or two of our less clumsy girls know the trick.”
This particular seamstress spoke dismissively of the others, deeming herself superior to them and not half-properly appreciated. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been standing in the street, late at night, when she was hungry for her supper. She certainly wouldn’t be talking to the competition if Some People valued her as they ought to do.
“No, madam, you don’t need a bit of it,” she said, “and I wonder at your coming out at this hour, wasting your valuable time.”
“Yes, I’ve wasted quite enough,” Mrs. Downes reached into her reticule. “Here’s your money. But if you want more, you’d better bring me something better.”
“How much more?” the seamstress said as she pocketed the money.
“One can’t do much with scraps. One dress at a time. The book of sketches, now that would be worth something.”
“It certainly would,” said the seamstress. “It would be worth my place. It’s one thing to copy a pattern. But the book of sketches? She’d miss it right away, and they’re sharp, those three, you know.”
“If she lost her book of sketches, she’d lose everything,” Mrs. Downes said. “You’d have to find another place then. And I daresay seeking new employment would be a more agreeable experience, were you to have twenty guineas to ease the way.”
A lady’s maid in a noble household might earn twenty guineas per annum. That was a great deal more than an experienced seamstress was paid.
“Fifty,” the seamstress. “It’s worth fifty to you, I know, to have her out of your way, and I won’t risk it for less.”
Mrs. Downes drew in a long, slow breath while she did some quick calculations. “Fifty, then. But it must be everything. You’d better note every last detail. I’ll know right away, and if I can’t make an exact copy, you shan’t have a penny.” She stalked away.
The seamstress watched her retreating back and said, under her breath, “As if you could make any kind of copy, you stupid hag, if I didn’t tell you every last detail.”
She chinked the coins in her pocket and went into the house.
Paris, the same night
Since the Italian Opera was closed on Wednesdays, Clevedon took himself to the Théâtre des Varieties, where he could count on being amused as well as treated to a superior performance. Perhaps, too, he might find Madame Noirot there.
When she failed to appear, he grew bored with the entertainment, and debated whether to cut his stay short and proceed directly to Frascati’s.
But Clara looked forward to his reports, and he’d failed to give her an account of Tuesday’s performance of The Barber of Seville, one of her favorites. Now he recalled that he’d come away from Longchamps with nothing as well—nothing, that is, he chose to describe to Clara.
He stayed, and dutifully made notes in his little pocket notebook.
Its pages held none of Madame Noirot’s remarks about Clara’s style—or lack thereof. At the time, he’d dismissed them from his mind. Or so he’d thought. Yet he found them waiting, as though the curst dressmaker had sewn them onto his brain.
When last he’d seen Clara, she’d been in mourning for her grandmother. Perhaps grief’s colors did not become her. The style…Confound it, she was grieving! What did she care whether she wore the latest mode? She was a beautiful girl, he told himself, and a beautiful girl could wear anything—not that it mattered to him, because he loved her for herself, and had done so for as long as he could remember.
Still, if Clara were to dress as that provoking dressmaker did…
The thought came and hung in his mind through the last scenes of the performance. He saw Clara, magnificently garbed, making men’s heads turn. He saw himself proudly in possession of this masterpiece, the envy of every other man.
Then he realized what he was thinking. “Devil take her,” he said under his breath. “She’s poisoned my mind, the witch.”
“What is it, my friend?”
Clevedon turned to find Gaspard Aronduille regarding him with concern.
“Does it truly matter what a woman wears?” Clevedon said.
The Frenchman’s eyes widened and his head went back, as though Clevedon had slapped him. “Is this a joke?” he said.
“I want to know,” Clevedon said. “Does it really matter?”
Aronduille looked about him in disbelief. “Only an Englishman would ask such a question.”
“Does it?”
“But of course.”
“Only a Frenchman would say so,” said Clevedon.
“We are right, and I will tell you why.”
The opera ended, but the debate didn’t. Aronduille called in reinforcements from their circle of acquaintance. The Frenchmen debated the subject from every possible philosophical viewpoint, all the way to the Hotel Frascati.
There the group separated, its members drifting to their favorite tables.
The roulette table was crowded, as usual, men standing three deep about it. Clevedon saw no signs of any women. But as he slowly circled it, the wall of men at the table thinned.
And the world shifted.
Revealed to his view was a ravishingly familiar back. Again, her coiffure was slightly disarranged, as though she’d been in a lover’s embrace only minutes ago. A bit was coming undone, a dark curl falling to the nape of her neck. The wayward curl drew one’s gaze there and down over the smooth slope of her shoulders and down to where her sleeves puffed out. The dress was ruby red, shockingly simple and daringly low cut. He wished, for a moment, he could have her captured like that, in a painting.
He’d title it Sin Incarnate.
He was tempted to stand beside her, close enough to inhale her scent and feel the silk of her gown brush his legs. But a roulette table was no place for dalliance—and by the looks of things, she was as engrossed in the turn of the wheel as everybody else.
He moved to a place opposite her. That was when he recognized the man standing next to her: the Marquis d’Émilien, a famous libertine.
“21—Red—Odd—Passed,” one of the bankers said.
With his rake another banker pushed a heap of coins toward her.
Émilien bent his head to say something to her.
Clevedon’s jaw tightened. He let his gaze drop to the table. Before her stood piles of gold coins.
“Gentlemen, settle your play,” the banker called. He threw in the ivory ball, and set the wheel spinning. Round and round it went, gradually slowing.
That time she lost. Though the rake took away a large amount of gold, she appeared not at all troubled. She laughed and bet again.
Next time Clevedon bet, too, on red. Round the ball went. Black—Even—Missed.
She won. He watched the rakes push his coins and others toward her.
The marquis laughed, and bent his head to say something to her, his mouth close to her ear. She answered with a smile.
Clevedon left the roulette table for Rouge et Noir. He told himself he would have come whether or not she was here. He told himself she was on the hunt for other men’s wives and mistresses and he wasn’t the only well-to-do bill payer in Paris. Émilien had deep pockets, too, not to mention a wife, a longtime mistress, and three favorite courtesans.
For about half an hour Clevedon played. He won more than he lost, and maybe that was why he became bored so quickly. He left the table, found Aronduille, and said, “This place is dull tonight. I’m going to the Palais Royal.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Aronduille. “Let’s see if the others wish to join us.”
The others had moved to the roulette table.
She was there still, in the crimson silk one could not ignore. The marquis remained at her side. In the same moment Clevedon was telling himself to look away, she looked up. Her gaze locked with his. An endless time seemed to pass before she beckoned with her fan.
He would have come whether or not he’d expected to find her here, he assured himself. He’d come, and found another man glued to her side. It was nothing to him. Paris abounded in fascinating women. He could have simply nodded or bowed or smiled an acknowledgment and left the hotel.
But there, she was, Sin Incarnate, daring him.
And there was Émilien.
The Duke of Clevedon had never yet yielded a woman he wanted to another man.
He joined them.
“Ah, Clevedon, you know Madame Noirot, I understand,” said Émilien.
“I have that honor, yes,” Clevedon said, sending her his sweetest smile.
“She has emptied my pockets,” said Émilien.
“The roulette wheel emptied your pockets,” she said.
“No, it is you. You look at the wheel, and it stops where you choose.”
She dismissed this with a wave of her fan. “It’s no use arguing with him,” she said to Clevedon. “I’ve promised to give him a chance to win back his money. We go to play cards.”
“Perhaps you will be so good as to join us,” said Émilien. “And your friends as well?”
They went to one of Paris’s more discreet and exclusive card salons, in a private house. When Clevedon arrived with the marquis’s party, several games were in progress in the large room.
By three o’clock in the morning, the greater part of the company had departed. In the small but luxurious antechamber to which the marquis eventually retired with a select group of friends, the players had dwindled to Émilien, a handsome blonde named Madame Jolivel, Madame Noirot, and Clevedon.
About them lay the bodies of those who’d succumbed to drink and fatigue. Some had been playing for days and nights on end.
At roulette, where skill and experience meant nothing, Noirot had won more often than not. At cards, where skill made a difference, her luck, oddly enough, was not nearly as good. The marquis’s luck had run out in the last half hour, and he was sinking in his chair. Clevedon was on a winning streak.
“This is enough for me,” said Madame Jolivel. She rose, and the men did as well.
“For me, too,” Émilien muttered. He pushed his cards to the center of the table and dragged himself out of the room after the blonde.
Clevedon remained standing, waiting for the dressmaker to rise. He had her to himself at last, and he was looking forward to escorting her elsewhere. Any elsewhere.
