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“That is to say, I’m not Botticelli, you know, the fellow being dead some centuries. I’m Lisburne.”
Leonie collected her wits, brought business to the front of her mind, and flipped through the pages of her mental ledger, wherein she kept her private compendium of Great Britain’s aristocracy as well as important tidbits from the gossip sheets and her gossipy customers.
She found the entry easily, because she’d updated it not many days ago: Lisburne meant Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne. Age seven and twenty, he constituted the sole issue of the greatly lamented third Marquess of Lisburne, whose very recently remarried widow resided in Italy.
Lord Lisburne, who’d lived abroad, too, for these last five or six years, had arrived from the Continent a fortnight ago with his first cousin and close friend Lord Swanton.
The Viscount Swanton was Leonie’s reason for being in a Pall Mall gallery on a workday.
She looked back at the painting. Then she looked about her, for the first time, really. It dawned on her, then, why nobody else had stood in her way. Elsewhere on the gallery walls hung landscapes, mythological and historical deaths and battles and such, and madonnas and other religious subjects. The Botticelli had nothing to do with any of them. No preaching, no violence, and definitely no bucolic innocence.
“Interesting choice,” she said.
“It stands out, rather, now you mention it,” he said. “No one seems to care much for Botticelli these days. My friends urged me to put in a battle scene.”
“Instead you chose the aftermath,” she said.
His green gaze shifted briefly to the painting, then back to her. “I could have sworn they’d been making love.”
“And I could swear she’s vanquished him.”
“Ah, but he’ll rise again to—er—fight another day,” he said.
“I daresay.” She turned fully toward the painting and moved a step closer, though she knew she risked drowning in it. Again. Surely she’d seen equally beautiful works—in the Louvre, for instance. But this …
Its owner moved to stand beside her. For a moment they regarded it in silence, an acute physically conscious one on her part.
“Venus’s expression intrigues me,” she said. “I wonder what she’s thinking.”
“There’s one difference between men and women,” he said. “He’s sleeping and she’s thinking.”
“Somebody must think,” she said. “And it does so often seem to be the women.”
“I always wonder why they don’t go to sleep, too,” he said.
“I couldn’t say,” Leonie said. She truly couldn’t. Her understanding of the physical act between men and women, while as detailed and precise as her eldest sister could make it, was in no way based on personal experience—and this was not the time to imagine the experience, she reminded herself. Business came first, last, and always. Especially now. “What occupies me is a lady’s outward appearance.”
She opened her reticule, withdrew a small card, and gave it to him. It was a beautiful card, as of course it must be, hers being the foremost establishment of its kind in London. The size of a lady’s calling card and elegantly engraved and colored, it was nonetheless a trade card for Maison Noirot, Dressmakers to Ladies of Fashion, No. 56 St. James’s Street.
He studied it for a time.
“I’m one of the proprietresses,” she said.
He looked up from the card to meet her gaze. “You’re not the one married to my cousin Longmore?”
She couldn’t be surprised he was a cousin of her newest brother-in-law. All the Great World seemed to be related to one another, and the Fairfax family, to which the Earl of Longmore belonged, was large in its main branch and prolific in its associated twigs and vines.
“That’s my sister Sophy,” she said. “For future reference, she’s the blonde one.” That was the way Society thought of the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot, she knew: the Three Sisters—sometimes the Three Witches or French Tarts—the brunette, the blonde, and the redhead.
“Right. And one of you is married to the Duke of Clevedon.”
“My sister Marcelline. She’s the brunette.”
“How good of your parents to make you easy to tell apart,” he said. “And how kind of you to explain. Were I to mistake, say, the Countess of Longmore for you, and make a stab at flirtation, her brute of a spouse would try to do me a violence, to the detriment of my neckcloth. I spent fully half an hour arranging it.”
Leonie was an experienced businesswoman of one and twenty, not a sheltered young lady. She examined the neckcloth in a businesslike manner—or tried to. This proved a great deal more difficult than it ought to be.
Below the finely chiseled angle of his jaw, his neckcloth was not only immaculate but so flawlessly folded and creased that it might have been carved of marble.
The rest of his dress was inhumanly perfect, too. So were his face and physique.
The inner woman felt light-headed, and thought this would be a good time to swoon. The dressmaker regarded the neckcloth with a critical eye. “You employed your time to excellent effect,” she said.
“Not that it makes the least difference,” he said. “No one looks at the other fellows when he’s about.”
“He,” she said.
“My poetical cousin. I’m overburdened with cousins. Oh, there they are now, blast it.”
She became aware of voices coming from the central staircase.
She turned that way as hats and heads rose into view. Torsos soon followed. After a moment’s apparent confusion about which way to go, the group, mainly young women, surged toward the archway of the gallery in which she stood. There they came to a halt, with only a moderate degree of unladylike pushing and elbowing. The clump of women opened up to make way for a tall, slender, ethereal-looking gentleman. He wore his flaxen hair overlong and his clothing with theatrical flair.
“Him,” Lord Lisburne said.
“Lord Swanton,” she said.
“Who else could it be, with two dozen girls looking up at him, every one of them wearing the same besotted expression.”
Leonie’s gaze took in the women, all about her age or younger, except for a handful of mamas or aunts obliged to chaperon. Near the outer edge of Lord Swanton’s worshippers and their reluctant attendants she spied Sophy’s new sister-in-law, Lady Clara Fairfax, looking bored. Her ladyship stood with a plain young woman who was dressed stupendously wrong.
Leonie’s spirits soared. She’d come intending to add to her clientele. This was more than she’d dared to hope for.
For a moment she almost forgot ye god Mars and even the painting. Almost. She beat down her excitement and turned her attention back to Lord Lisburne.
“Thank you, my lord, for stopping me from toppling like the unfortunate artist’s easel,” she said. “Thank you for choosing that particular painting to lend to the exhibition. I don’t care for scenes of violence, which seem to be so popular. And saintly beings are so trying. But this experience was sublime.”
“Which experience, exactly?” he said. “Our acquaintance has been short but eventful.”
She was tempted to linger and continue flirting. He was so good at it. Moreover, in addition to being beautiful he was a nobleman who owned a painting that, popular or not, was probably priceless. Beyond a doubt he owned several hundred other priceless or at least stunningly costly objects, along with two or three immense houses set upon large expanses of Great Britain. If—or more likely, when—he took a wife and/or set up a mistress, he’d pay for her housing, servants, carriage, horses, etc. etc.—and, most important of et ceteras, her clothing.
But the girl, Clara’s friend, looked out of sorts and seemed ready to bolt. A prize like that didn’t turn up every day. Leonie had already obtained Lord Lisburne’s attention, in any event. He’d saunter into the shop one of these days, if she was any judge of men.
“It has, indeed,” Leonie said. “However, I came on business.”
“Business,” he said.
“Ladies,” she said. “Dresses.” She made a brisk gesture, indicating her ensemble, which she’d spent well more than half an hour arranging for this event. “Advertising.”
Then she made a quick curtsey and started toward Lord Swanton and his acolytes. She heard a muffled sound behind her, but she couldn’t take the time to look back. The ill-dressed girl was tugging on Lady Clara’s arm.
Leonie walked more quickly.
Eyes on Lady Clara’s companion, she didn’t see the canvas cloth in her way.
The toe of her brodequin caught on it and she pitched forward.
She was aware of a collective gasp, interspersed with titters, as she went down, arms flailing ungracefully.
Lisburne hadn’t noticed the artist’s cloth, either.
He was too busy taking in the rear view of Miss Noirot, though he’d already fully employed the opportunity to study that at length—at a distance as well as at improperly close quarters—while she stood before the Botticelli, oblivious to him and everybody and everything else. When she’d turned to look up at him, he’d nearly staggered, thinking Botticelli’s Venus had come to life: the same—or very like—heart-shaped face and alluringly imperfect nose … the ripe mouth with its hint of a smile or deep thought or troublesome recollection … the surprisingly determined chin.
His mind might have wandered into indecorous fantasies but his reflexes were in sharp working order. He moved forward, caught her, and swept her up into his arms in one smooth movement.
Ladies’ dress had only grown more extravagantly fanciful since he was last in England, nearly six years ago. It was hard to tell which parts of a girl were real and which were created for artistic effect. While he appreciated artistic effect, he was happy to discover that what seemed to be a gloriously shapely form was artificial only in the most superficial way. Judging by the warm parts with which he was in contact, her body was as lavishly rounded as he’d supposed. She smelled good, too.
He saw her eyes widen—eyes of a vivid blue that put sapphires and Tuscan skies to shame—and her plump mouth fall open slightly.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said under his breath. “Everybody’s staring.”
No exaggeration. Everybody in view had stopped whatever they were doing or saying to gape. Who could blame them? Gorgeous redheads didn’t drop into a fellow’s arms every day.
The commotion was drawing in people from the other rooms.
This day was turning out infinitely less boring than he’d expected.
“Miss Noirot!”
Swanton thrust through his crowd of worshippers—treading on a few toes in the process—to hurry toward them. The worshippers followed. Even Lisburne’s cousins, Clara and Gladys Fairfax, tagged along, though neither looked especially worshipful or even enthusiastic.
“Great Zeus, what’s happened?” Swanton demanded.
“The lady fainted,” Lisburne said.
He knew that a number of people had seen the dressmaker trip—those, that is, who could tear their gazes from Swanton. Lisburne glanced about, lazily inviting any witnesses to contradict him. None did so. Even those blackguards Meffat and Theaker held their tongues for once.
True, Lady Gladys Fairfax did harrumph, but no one ever paid attention to her—not, that is, unless they wanted to work themselves into a murderous rage. Though she, too, had only very recently returned to London after some years’ absence, no one could have forgotten her, much in the way that no one forgot the plague, for instance, or the Great Fire, or a bout of hydrophobia.
“Merci,” Miss Noirot said in an undertone. Lisburne didn’t so much hear it as feel it, in the general environs of his chest.
“Je vous en prie,” he replied.
“It was only a momentary dizziness,” she said more audibly. “You may put me down now, my lord.”
“Are you quite sure, madame?” Swanton said. “You’re flushed, and no wonder. This infernal heat. Not a breath of a breeze this day.” He looked up at the skylight. Everybody else did, too. “And here’s the sun, blasting down on us, as though it made a wrong turn on its way to the Sahara Desert. Would somebody be so good as to fetch Madame a glass of water?”
Madame? Then Lisburne remembered the elegant trade card. One generally referred to a modiste, especially the expensive sort, as Madame, regardless of her marital status.
And Swanton knew this particular Madame. He’d never said a word, the sneak. But no, sneakiness wasn’t in character. More than likely, some poetic ecstasy had taken possession of him and he simply forgot until he saw her again. Typical.
Swanton’s father had died young at Waterloo, and Lisburne’s father had taken over the paternal role. That made Lisburne the protective elder brother, a position he retained on account of Swanton being Swanton.
“My lord, you’re too kind,” she said. “But I don’t require water. I’m quite well. It was only a moment’s faintness. Lord Lisburne, if you’d be so good as to let me down.”
She squirmed a little in Lisburne’s arms. That was fun.
Being a male in rude good health, all parts in prime working order, he wasn’t eager to let go of her. Still, since it had to be done, he made the most of it, easing her down with the greatest care, letting her body inch down along his, and not releasing her until a long, pulsing moment after her feet touched the floor.
She closed her eyes and said something under her breath, then opened them again and produced a smile, which she aimed straight at him. The smile was as dazzling as her eyes. The combined effect made him feel a little dizzy.
“Madame, if you feel strong enough, would you allow me to present my friends?” Swanton said. “I know they’re all clamoring to meet you.”
The gentlemen, beyond a doubt. They’d be wild to be made known to any attractive woman, especially in the present circumstances, when it was nigh impossible to get any attention from the lot swarming about Swanton.
But the ladies? Wishing to be introduced to a shopkeeper?
Perhaps not out of the question in this case, Lisburne decided. The three Noirot sisters had made themselves famous. He’d heard of them on the Continent recently. Their work, it was said, rivaled that of the celebrated Victorine of Paris, who required even queens to make appointments and attend her at her place of business.
Lisburne watched the dazzling gaze and smile sweep over the assembled audience.
“You’re too kind, my lord,” she said. “But I’ve disturbed everybody sufficiently today. The ladies will know where to find me: around the corner, at No. 56 St. James’s Street. And the ladies, as you know, are my primary concern.”
At the end of the speech, she shot a glance at somebody in the crowd. Cousin Clara? Then Madame curtseyed and started away.
The others turned away, the women first. Swanton resumed poeticizing or romanticizing or whatever he was doing, and they all moved on to Veronese’s Between Virtue and Vice.
Lisburne, however, watched Miss Noirot’s departure. She seemed not altogether steady on her feet, not quite so effortlessly graceful as before. At the top of the stairs, she took hold of the railing and winced.
Leonie was not allowed to make a quiet escape.
She heard the Marquess of Lisburne coming behind her. She knew who it was without looking. This was probably because he’d made her so keenly attuned to him, thanks to the extremely improper way he’d set her on her feet a moment ago. She was still vibrating.
Or perhaps he sent some sort of pulsation across the room, in the way certain gods had been believed to herald their arrival with strange lights or magical sounds or divine scent.
“You seem to be in pain,” he said. “May I assist you?”
“I was hoping to slink off quietly,” she said.
“No difficulty there. Everybody else is hovering about my cousin. He’s spouting about Virtue and Vice, and they all believe he’s saying something.” While he spoke, he took possession of her left arm and arranged it around his neck. He brought his arm round her waist.
She caught her breath.
“It must hurt like the devil,” he said. “On second thought, I’d better check your ankle before we proceed. It might be more damaged than we think.”
If he touched her ankle she would faint, and not necessarily for medical reasons.
“I only turned it,” she said. “If I’d done worse, I’d be sitting on the step, sobbing with as much mortification as pain.”
