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He looked at the face and the dress and thought about the neat numbers in their precisely ruled columns.
He put the ledger back.
She made a little sound.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Your foot is paining you? More brandy?”
“No, no, thank you,” she said. “My lord, I must detain you no longer. You’ve been so kind, so chivalrous.”
“It was my pleasure, I assure you.” He moved on to inspect her desk. “I had expected another dull afternoon of listening to Swanton being emotional.”
He picked up one of the alarmingly sharp pencils and stuck it into the end of his index finger. It made a tiny indentation. Probably not lethal, unless one stabbed ferociously, which he felt certain she was capable of doing. He examined her meticulously sharpened pens. As he put each object back, he was aware of her breathing erratically, in little huffs.
“Are you feeling overwarm, Miss Noirot?” he said. “Shall I open a window? Or will that only let in more of the day’s heat?”
She made a small strangled sound and said, “If you must pry, my lord—and I realize that noblemen must do as they please—can you not at least put my belongings back in the same order in which you found them?”
He stepped back from the desk and folded his hands behind his back. Not because he was abashed but because he was so sorely tempted to disarrange everything, including, most especially, her.
He looked down at the pencil and the pen, then at the ledgers once more. “Er, no. That is, I could try, but it mightn’t turn out as we hope. That’s the reason Uttridge intervenes, you see. I grow bored very quickly, and things go awry.” That wasn’t entirely untrue. Once he’d fully mastered a thing, he grew bored.
“Your dress is immaculate,” she said.
He glanced down at himself. “Odd, isn’t it? Don’t know how I do it. Well, there’s Polcaire, of course, my valet. Couldn’t do it without him.”
He contemplated his waistcoat for a moment. It was one of his favorites, and he was fairly sure he looked well in it. Some perspicacious genie must have whispered in his ear this day.
No, that was Polcaire.
Polcaire: But milord cannot wear the maroon waistcoat to this occasion.
Lisburne: Swanton is the occasion, which means all the girls will look at him. No one cares what I look like.
Polcaire: One never knows whom one will meet, milord.
Which proved that Polcaire was not only a genius among valets, but an oracle, too.
Lisburne looked up from his waistcoat at Miss Noirot.
The palest pink washed over her cheekbones like a little tide, coming and going. It was delicious.
“Shall I risk trying to get it all straight again?” he said. “My work may not be up to your standards—and I have a strong suspicion that you’re going to leap up from the chair, and …” He thought. “Stab me with the penknife?”
He was aware of her forcing herself to be calm. It wasn’t easy to discern. Her face ought to be in a dictionary, under inscrutable. Though she was a redhead, her complexion was strangely parsimonious about blushing. Still, whatever other faults he had, he wasn’t unobservant, especially of women. In her case, he was paying hawklike attention. The way she relaxed her pose wasn’t unconscious at all. He watched her arrange her features and bring her shoulders down.
“The thought crossed my mind,” she said. “But corpses are the very devil to get rid of, especially aristocratic ones. People notice when noblemen disappear.”
The door having been left partly open, he became aware of the approaching footsteps an instant after he saw her posture grow more alert.
Following a quick tap and Miss Noirot’s “Entrez,” one of the young females who’d thronged the showroom entered.
“Oh, madame, I am so sorry to interrupt you,” the girl said, or at least, that was what he made of her excessively mangled French, before she gave up on a bad job and went on in English, “But it’s Lady Clara Fairfax and … another lady.”
“Another lady?”
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 ignoramuses.”
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’ night-dresses 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.”
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.
