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She doubted he was laughing now.
He was thinking, and he would need to be thinking very hard. Harder, probably, than he’d done before in all his life.
She felt certain he wouldn’t back down from the challenge. He was too proud and too determined to have the upper hand—of her, certainly, and probably the world.
It would be entertaining, indeed, to see how he managed her entrée into the comtesse’s party. If it ended in humiliation for him, maybe he’d learn from the experience. On the other hand, he might come to hate Marcel-line instead, and forbid his wife to darken the door of Maison Noirot.
But Marcelline’s instincts told her otherwise. What-ever his faults—and they were not few—this was not a mean-spirited man or the sort who held grudges.
“Go to bed,” she told Jeffreys. “We’ve a busy time ahead of us, preparing for the party. Everything must be perfect.”
And it would be. She’d make sure of it, one way or another.
Awaiting her was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, nearly as important as stealing the about-to-be Duchess of Clevedon from Dowdy’s.
Clevedon had complicated what ought to have been a straightforward business. On her own, getting in would have merely demanded expert camouflage, evasive maneuvers, and, of course, thorough self-assurance. But no matter. Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it.
Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever, returned to the same place. It didn’t stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic.
Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.
All the same, every time life had knocked her plans awry, she’d made a new plan and salvaged something. Sometimes she even triumphed. She was nothing if not resilient.
Whatever happened this night, she’d make the most of it.
That night
It would have served the insolent dressmaker right had Clevedon made her wait. He was not accustomed to taking orders from anybody, let alone a conceited little shopkeeper. Nine o’clock sharp, she’d said, as though he was her lackey.
But that was a childish reaction, and he preferred she not add childishness to the list of character flaws she seemed to be compiling. She was sure to ascribe any delays to cowardly heel-dragging. She’d already as much as called him a coward, in offering to release him from the wager.
He arrived promptly at nine o’clock. When the carriage door opened, he saw her outside at one of the tables under the portico. A gentleman, whose manner and dress proclaimed him English, was bent over her, talking.
Clevedon had planned so carefully: what to wear to the ball and what to say to his hostess and what expression to wear when he said it. He had taken up and discarded half a dozen waistcoats and left his valet, Saunders, a heap of crumpled neckcloths to tend to. He had composed and rejected scores of clever speeches. He was, in short, wound up exceedingly tight.
She, on the other hand, could not have appeared more at ease, lounging under the portico, flirting with any fellow who happened along. One would think she’d no more on her mind than an idle conversation with yet another potential payer of dressmakers’ bills.
And why should she consider anything else? It wasn’t her friends who’d be whispering behind her back and shaking their heads in pity.
He could easily imagine what his friends would whisper: Cupid’s arrow had at last struck the Duke of Clevedon—and not on account of Paris’s greatest beauty, not on account of its most irresistible courtesan, not on account of its most fashionable, sought-after titled lady.
No, it was a nobody of an English shopkeeper who’d slain his grace.
He silently cursed his friends and his own stupidity, stepped down from the carriage, and strolled to her table.
As he approached, her dark glance slanted his way. She said something to the talkative fellow. He nodded at her and, without taking any notice of Clevedon, bowed and went into the hotel.
When Clevedon came to the table, she looked up at him. To his very great surprise, she smiled: a warm, luscious upturn of the mouth that had nearly brought him to his knees.
But he was not slain, not by half.
“You’re prompt,” she said.
“I never keep a lady waiting,” he said.
“But I’m not a lady,” she said.
“Are you not? Well, then, you’re a conundrum. Are you ready? Or would you prefer a glass of something first, to fortify yourself for the ordeal?”
“I’m as fortified as I need to be,” she said. She rose and made a sweeping arc with her hand, drawing his attention to her attire.
He supposed a woman would have a name for it. To him it was a dress. He knew that the sleeves would have their own special name—à la Taglioni or à la Clotilde or some equally nonsensical epithet, comprehensible only to women. Their dresses were all the same to him: swelling in the sleeves, billowing out in the skirts, and tight in the middle. It was the style women had been wearing throughout his adulthood.
Her dress was made of silk, in an odd, sandy color he would have thought bland had he seen the cloth in a shop. But it was trimmed with puffy red bows, and they seemed like flowers blooming in a desert. Then there was black lace, yards of it, dripping like a waterfall over her smooth shoulders and down the front, under a sash, down over her belly.
He made a twirling gesture with his finger. Obligingly she turned in a complete circle. She moved as effortlessly and gracefully as water, and the lace about her shoulders floated in the air with the movement.
When she finished the turn, though, she didn’t pause but walked on toward the carriage. He walked on with her.
“What is that dreadful color?” he said.
“Poussière,” she said.
“Dust,” he said. “I congratulate you, madame. You’ve made dust alluring.”
“It’s not an easy color to wear,” she said. “Especially for one of my complexion. True poussière would make me appear to be suffering from a liver disease. But this silk has a pink undertone, you see.”
“How can I make you understand?” he said. “I don’t see these things.”
“You do,” she said. “What you lack is the vocabulary. You said it’s alluring. That is the pink undertone, which flatters my complexion, and the magnificent blond lace, close to my face, is even more flattering as well as adding drama.”
“It’s black,” he said. “Noir, not blond.”
“Blond lace is a superior silk lace,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the color.”
This exchange took them to the carriage. He had braced himself for a continuation of last night’s battle, but she behaved as though they were old friends, which disarmed and bothered him at the same time. Too, he was so preoccupied with the nonsense of blond referring to every color under the sun that he almost forgot to look at her ankles.
But instinct saved him, and he came to his senses in the nick of time. As she went up the steps and took her seat, she gave him a fine view of some six inches of stockinged, elegantly curving limb, from the lower part of her calf down.
Last night came back in a dark surge of recollection, more feeling than thought, that sent heat pumping through him. He saw himself bending and grasping one slim ankle and bringing her foot onto his lap and sliding his gloved hand up her leg, up and up and up…
Later, he promised himself, and climbed into the carriage.
A short time later
“I hope you will do me the kindness of allowing me to present Madame Noirot, a London dressmaker of my acquaintance,” the Duke of Clevedon said to his hostess.
For a time, the noise about them continued. But about the instant the Comtesse de Chirac realized she hadn’t misunderstood the duke’s less-than-perfect French and that he had actually uttered the words London dressmaker in her presence and referring to the uninvited person beside him, the news was traveling the ballroom, and a silence spread out like ripples from the place where a large rock had landed in a small pond.
Madame de Chirac’s posture grew even tighter and stiffer—though that seemed anatomically impossible—and her chilly grey gaze hardened to steel. “I do not understand English humor,” she said. “Is this a joke?”
“By no means,” Clevedon said. “I bring you a curiosity, in the way that, once upon a time, the savants brought back remarkable objects from their travels in Egypt. I met this exotic creature the other night at the opera, and she was the talk of the promenade yesterday. I beg you will forgive me, and in the interests of scientific inquiry, overlook this so-great imposition upon your good nature. You see, madame, I feel like a naturalist who has discovered a new species of orchid, and who has carried it out of the hidden places of its native habitat and into the world, for other naturalists to observe.”
He glanced at Noirot, whose stormy eyes told him she was not amused. The tan and black she wore made her look like a tigress, and the bursts of red might have been her victims’ blood.
“Perhaps, on second thought, a flower is not the most apt analogy,” he added. “And all things considered, I might have done better to put her on a leash.”
The tigress slanted him a smile promising trouble later. Then she bowed her head to the countess and sank into a curtsey so graceful and beautiful—the lace wafting gently in the air, the butterfly bows fluttering, the fabric shimmering—that it took his breath away.
All about him, he heard people gasp. They were French, and couldn’t help but see: Here were grace and beauty and style combined in one unforgettable, tempestuous masterpiece.
The comtesse heard the onlookers’ reactions, too. She glanced about her. Everyone in the room was riveted on the tableau, all of them holding their breath. This scene would be talked about for days, her every word and gesture anatomized. It would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened at her annual ball. She knew this as well as Clevedon did.
The question was whether she would break tradition and allow excitement.
She paused, with the air of a judge about to deliver sentence.
The room was quite, quite still.
Then, “Jolie,” she said, precisely as though Clevedon had presented an orchid. With a condescending little nod, and the slightest motion of her hand, she gave the modiste leave to rise. Which Noirot did with the same dancer’s grace, eliciting another collective intake of breath.
That was all. One word—pretty—and the room began to breathe again. Clevedon and his “discovery” were permitted to move on, along the short reception line and thence into the party proper.
“A dressmaker? From London? But it is impossible. You cannot be English.”
The men had attempted to surround her, but the ladies elbowed them aside and were now interrogating her.
Marcelline’s dress had awakened both curiosity and envy. The colors were not unusual. They were fashionable colors. The style was not so very different from the latest fashions displayed at Longchamp. But the way she combined style and color and the little touches she added—all this was distinctively Noirot. Being French, these ladies noticed the touches, and were sufficiently intrigued to approach her, though she was a social anomaly—not a person but an exotic pet.
Clevedon’s exotic pet.
She was still seething over that, though a part of her couldn’t help but admire his cleverness. It was the sort of brazen nonsense members of her family typically employed when they found themselves in a tight spot.
But she’d deal with His Arrogance later.
“I am English and a dressmaker,” said Marcelline. She opened her reticule and produced a pretty silver case. From the case she withdrew her business cards: simple and elegant, like a gentleman’s calling card. “I come to Paris for inspiration.”
“But it is here you should have your shop,” said one lady.
Marcelline let her gaze move slowly over their attire. “You don’t need me,” she said. “The English ladies need me.” She paused and added in a stage whisper, “Desperately.”
The ladies smiled and went away, all of them mollified, and some of them charmed.
Then the men swarmed in.
“This is a mystery,” said Aronduille.
“All women are mysteries,” Clevedon said.
They stood at the fringes of the dance floor, watching the Marquis d’Émilien waltz with Madame Noirot.
“No, that is not what I mean,” said Aronduille. “Where does a dressmaker find time to learn to dance so beautifully? How does an English shopkeeper learn to speak French indistinguishable from that of the comtesse? And what of the curtsey she made to our hostess?” He lifted his gaze heavenward, and kissed the tips of his fingers. “I will never forget that sight.”
I’m not a lady, she’d said.
“I admit she’s a bit of a riddle,” Clevedon said. “But that’s what makes her so…amusing.”
“The ladies went to her,” said Aronduille. “Did you see?”
“I saw.” Clevedon hadn’t imagined they’d approach her. The men, yes, of course.
But the ladies? It was one thing for the hostess to admit her, politely overlooking a high-ranking guest’s bad manners or eccentricity. It was quite another matter for her lady guests to approach his “pet” and converse with her. Had Noirot been an actress or courtesan or any other dressmaker, for that matter, they would have snubbed her.
Instead, they’d pushed men aside to get to her. The encounter was brief, but when the women left, they all looked pleased with themselves.
“She’s a dressmaker,” he said. “That’s her profession: making women happy.”
But the curtsey he couldn’t explain.
He couldn’t explain the way she talked and the way she walked.
And the way she danced.
How many times had Émilien danced with her?
It was nothing to Clevedon. He’d never do anything so gauche as dance with her all night.
But considering he’d risked humiliation for her, he was entitled to one dance, certainly.
Though Marcelline appeared to heed only the partner of the moment, she always knew where Clevedon was. It was easy enough, his grace standing a head taller than most of the other men, and that head being so distinctive: the profile that would have made ancient Greece’s finest sculptors weep, the gleaming black hair with its boyish mass of tousled curls. Then there were the shoulders. No one else had such shoulders. But then, no one else had that body. Very likely he could have spouted any nonsense he pleased at their hostess, and she would have accepted whatever he said, for aesthetic reasons alone. Well, prurient ones, too, possibly. The countess was old and cold but she wasn’t dead.
For a time he’d danced, and now and again, the steps took them within inches of each other. But he always appeared as attentive to his partner as Marcelline did to hers. One might have believed he was completely indifferent to what she did. He’d got her into the party, and anything after that was her affair.
But one must be an extremely stupid or naïve woman to believe such a thing, and she was neither.
She knew he was watching her, though he excelled at seeming not to. In the last hour, though, he’d shed the pretense. He’d been prowling the ballroom, his friend trailing him like a shadow—a talkative one, by the looks of it.
Then at last the Duke of Clevedon’s seemingly casual wanderings brought him to her.
Men crowded about her, as they had from the instant she’d satisfied the ladies’ curiosity. He seemed not to notice the other men. He simply walked toward her, and it was as though a great ship sailed into port. The pack of men offered no resistance. They simply gave way, as though they were mere water under his hull.
She wondered if that was what it had been like, once upon a time, for her grandfather, when he was young and handsome, a powerful nobleman of an ancient family. Had the world given way before him, and had it likewise never occurred to him that the world would do anything else?
“Ah, there you are,” Clevedon said, as though he’d stumbled upon her by accident.
“As you see,” she said. “I have not shredded the curtains, or scratched the furniture.”
“No, I reckon you’re saving your claws for me,” he said. “Well, then, shall we dance?”
