Scandal Wears Satin (7 page)

“At least you got yourself a beauty,” Theaker said. “Mostly, when their pa sets a big dowry on them, it’s on account of being squinty or spotty or bowlegged.”

“What he means is, mostly, they’re dogs,” Meffat said.

“I’m fortunate,” Adderley said. “I know that. I might have done so much worse.”

She was a beauty, and that would make the bedding and getting of heirs more agreeable. Still, she wasn’t to his taste, a great cow of a girl. He liked daintier women, and he would have preferred a brunette.

But her dowry was enormous, she’d been vulnerable, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Bless her innocence,” said Theaker. “She went just like a lamb.”

“There’s one won’t give you any trouble,” said Meffat.

Warford House

Wednesday 3 June

C
lara kept her composure until she’d closed her bedroom door behind her.

She swallowed, walked quickly across the room, and sat at her dressing table.

“My lady?” said her maid, Davis.

A sob escaped Clara. And another.

“Oh, my lady,” said Davis.

“I don’t know what to do!” Clara buried her face in her hands.

“Now, now, my lady. I’ll make you a good, hot cup of tea and whatever it is, you’ll feel better.”

“I need more than tea,” Clara said. She looked up to meet Davis’s gaze in the mirror.

“I’ll put a drop of brandy in it,” said Davis.

“More than a drop,” Clara said.

“Yes, my lady.”

Davis hurried out.

Clara took out the note Lord Adderley had sent her.

A love note, filled with beautiful words, the kinds of words sure to melt the heart of a romantic girl.

Of course the words were beautiful. They’d been written by poets: Keats and Lovelace and Marvell and scores of others. Even Shakespeare! He thought she wouldn’t recognize lines from a Shakespeare sonnet! Either he was a complete idiot or he thought she was.

“The latter, most likely,” she muttered. She crumpled the note and threw it across the room. “Liar,” she said. “It was all lies. I knew it. How could I be such a fool?”

Because Mr. Bates had not asked her to dance, and she’d watched him whirl Lady Susan Morris, Lady Bartham’s daughter, about the floor. Lady Susan was petite and dark and pretty, and next to her Clara always felt ungainly and awkward.

Then what?

A moment’s hurt. Then Lord Adderley was at her elbow, with a glass of champagne, and a perfect remark, sure to make her smile.

Irish blarney, Mama would have said.

Maybe that’s what it was. Or maybe it was like the beautiful words he wrote, stolen from gifted writers. False, either way.

Champagne and waltzing and flattery, and Clara had taken the bait.

And now . . .

What to do?

She rose and walked to the window and looked out. In the garden below, the rain was beating the shrubs and flowers into submission. If she’d been a man—if she’d been Harry—she’d have climbed out and run away, as far as she could go.

But she wasn’t a man, and she had no idea how to run away.

Time, she thought. Her only hope was time. If they could drag out the engagement for months and months, a new scandal would come along, and everybody would forget this one.

Davis entered with the tea. “I put in a few extra drops, but you’ll need to drink it quickly,” she said. “Lady Bartham’s called, and Lady Warford said you’re to come straightaway.”

“Lady Bartham,” Clara said. “That wants more than a few drops. That wants a bottle.”

She swallowed her brandy-laced tea, put on her company face, and went down to the drawing room.

The visit was even worse than anticipated. Lady Bartham was so sympathetically venomous that she left Clara half blind with rage and Mama with a sick headache.

The next morning, Mama announced that she was sick to death of this ghastly engagement and everybody’s insinuations. They would consult the calendar and fix a date for the wedding.

“Yes, of course, Mama,” Clara said. “In the autumn, perhaps. Town won’t be so busy then.”

“Autumn?” Mama cried. “Are you mad? We’ve not a moment to lose. You must be married before the end of the Season—before the Queen’s last Drawing Room at the latest.”

“Mama, that’s only three weeks!”

“It’s sufficient time to arrange a wedding, even a large one—and a small one is out of the question. You know what people will say. And if those wicked French dressmakers Harry took you to can’t finish your bride clothes on time, it is too bad. It is not my fault if my children disobey me at every turn.”

Chapter Four

Now, thanks to steam-presses, steam-vessels, and steam-coaches, the prolific brain of a French dress-maker or milliner has hardly given a new cap of trimming to the Parisian élégantes, before it is also in possession of the London belles.

—
La Belle Assemblée
, March 1830

Friday 5 June

L
ongmore transferred the reins to one hand and with his other took out his pocket watch. He flicked it open.

Eleven o’clock
, she’d said.
In the morning
—because the fashionable aristocrats shopped in the afternoon, and she had to get there before they did.

“It’s important to arrive before Dowdy’s favorite customers do,” Sophy had told him. “Shopkeepers like that will fawn over the great ladies with the heavy purses and pass off dull rustic misses to lowly assistants. It would be truly useful to see the pattern for your mother’s dress, since she’s one of their most important customers. That means I can’t be passed off to an assistant. It has to be Horrible Hortense herself or her forewoman.”

It was exactly eleven o’clock. Longmore looked up at the sky. Cloudy, but not threatening rain as his tiger, Reade, had insisted. Reade had not been happy about having to remain behind. If it rained—as he assured his lordship it would surely do—his lordship would need help raising the curricle’s hood.

Well, then, they’d simply have to get wet, Longmore decided. While convenient for minding horses and helping one wrestle temperamental hoods, on the present occasion a groom would be very much in the way.

Longmore put the watch away and reverted to staring at the shop door. She’d told him to collect her, not at Maison Noirot, but at the ribbon shop farther down St. James’s Street, near St. James’s Palace. To Allay Suspicion.

She was hilarious.

“Cousin?” said a familiar female voice.

He blinked. It was Sophy’s voice and it wasn’t. He knew this had to be her but his eyes denied it. The woman standing on the pavement next to his carriage was so nondescript that he’d probably been looking straight at her without actually seeing her.

The murky brown cloak concealed her shape. The muddy green bonnet and lace cap underneath concealed most of her hair. What was visible was limp, dull, and stringy. She’d sprouted a mole to one side of her perfect nose. And on that nose she’d planted a pair of tinted spectacles, which dulled her brilliant blue eyes to cloudy grey.

He was aware of his jaw dropping. He quickly collected himself. “There you are,” he said.

“You’d have seen me sooner if you hadn’t been woolgathering,” she said, as shrewish as Gladys—and in the same graceless accents. She climbed up into the vehicle as clumsily as his cousin would have done.

If he didn’t know better, he’d have been sure this was his cousin, playing a trick on him.

But Cousin Gladys didn’t play tricks. She had no imagination.

“How did you do it?” he said. “You can’t have met her. She hasn’t left Lancashire in ages.”

“Lady Clara is a fair mimic,” she said, “and it was easy enough to classify the type. We do that, you know: We size up a woman when she walks into the shop. Broadly speaking, they tend to fall into certain categories.”

“Gladys is a type? I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always thought her one of a kind, and that one more than sufficient.”

He gave his horses leave to walk on, then he had to keep his attention on them. Though he’d driven them through Hyde Park to work off their morning high spirits, they were still excitable. Apparently they were as little used as he was to traveling the shopping streets in the early hours with ordinary folk. Whatever the reason, they were looking for trouble: They tried to lunge at other vehicles, run onto the pavement, take aim at passing pedestrians, and bite any other horses who looked at them the wrong way.

Normally, he’d find this entertaining.

Today it was inconvenient. He had a campaign to conduct with the woman beside him, and she was tricky and he needed his wits about him. At present, however, he had to concentrate his wits on getting them to Piccadilly alive. Then he had to wrestle his way through the great knot of traffic approaching the quadrant into Regent Street.

“What the devil are all these people doing out in the streets at the crack of dawn?” he said.

“They heard the Earl of Longmore would be up and about before noon,” she said. “I believe they mean to mark the event with illuminations and fireworks.”

He’d been driving since childhood, and he couldn’t remember when last he’d had to work so hard at it.

“I think you’re frightening the horses,” he said.

“I think they’re not used to busy streets in daylight,” she said.

“Maybe it’s the mole that’s bothering them,” he said. Or maybe it was her scent. It wasn’t Gladys’s. This was so faint as to be more of an awareness than a fragrance: Woman and jasmine and something else. Some kind of herb or greenery.

No, the scent wasn’t bothering the horses. It was getting him into a lather he couldn’t do anything about at the moment. That wasn’t the only disturbance. He was extremely aware of her swollen skirts brushing against his trouser leg, and he could hear the petticoats rustle under the skirts. It was as clear as clear to him, above the street’s cacophony of animals, vehicles, people.

He was primed for tackling her and he couldn’t, and the horses sensed the agitation.

It was so ridiculous he laughed.

“What is it?” she said.

He glanced at her. “You,” he said. “And me, up at this hour to drive to a dressmaker’s shop.”

“I know you rise before noon on occasion,” she said.

“Not to shop,” he said.

“No. For a race. A boxing match. A wrestling match. A horse auction. I’m not sure I can offer equal excitement.”

“I expect it’ll be exciting enough when they find you out,” he said. “Which they’re bound to do. You’ll need to get undressed to get measured. What if the mole falls off while you’re taking off your clothes? What if your spectacles get tangled in your wig?”

“I’ve put on several extra layers of clothing,” she said. “I don’t plan to allow them to get beyond the first one or two. And it isn’t a wig, by the way. I put an egg mixture in my hair. People say it leaves a shine after you wash it out, but it does the opposite.”

It would be quite a job, washing her hair. It was thick and curly, and unless she added false pieces to it, as some women did, it must be long. To her waist? He saw long, golden hair streaming down a bare, silken back.

There was something to look forward to.

“You promised me bullies,” he said. “I was looking forward to the fight. It’s the only thing that got me out of bed. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anybody did me the courtesy of hitting back?”

“If I were a gentleman, and I saw you coming at me with fists up, I’d run in the other direction,” she said.

“Bullies aren’t gentlemen,” he said. “They won’t run.”

“If you get desperately bored, you can always pick a fight,” she said.

“If they exist,” he said. “I’ve never heard of hired ruffians in a dressmaking shop.”

“You’ve never noticed because you never think about how a shop is run,” she said. “You only notice whether the service is good or bad. But they can be useful in an all-woman shop. One has to deal with drunken men knocking over things or pawing the seamstresses. But the worst for us is a pack of thieves. They’ll come in small groups of twos and threes, all dressed respectably and seeming not to be together. One or two will keep the shopkeepers busy while the others fill their pockets. They’ve special pockets sewn into their clothes. They’re very quick. You’d be amazed at how much they can make off with if you look away, even for a second.”

“Where do you hide the muscled fellows who work for you, then?” he said.

“We don’t need ruffians,” she said. “We started in Paris, you know, and it was a family business, so we started young. Let me see. I think Marcelline was nine, so I was about seven or eight, and Leonie was six. When you’re absorbed in a trade from childhood, every aspect of it becomes instinctive. Drunks, thieves, men who think milliners’ shops are brothels—we’re perfectly capable of dealing with such matters ourselves.”

He remembered the hard look that had flashed across her face so briefly, when she’d told him she’d dealt with messy situations. He hadn’t time to pursue that train of thought, though. As they were turning into Oxford Street, two boys ran out in front of the curricle. Swearing violently, Longmore turned his pair aside an instant before they could trample the children.

His heart pounded. A moment’s delay or distraction, and the brats could have been killed. “Look where you’re going, you confounded idiots!” he roared above the neighing horses and the other drivers’ shouted comments.

“Ow, you ugly bitch!” a voice shrieked close to his ear. “Let go of me, you sodding sow!”

“O
h, no, I don’t think so,” Sophy said.

Longmore glanced that way.

A ragged boy half hung over the back of the seat. Sophy had him by the arm, and she was regarding him with amusement.

Longmore could spare them only a glance. His team and the traffic wanted all his attention. “What the devil?” he said. “Where did he come from?”

“Nowhere!” the boy snarled. He wriggled furiously, to no avail. “I wasn’t doing nothing, only getting a free ride in back here, and the goggle-eyed mort tried to take my arm off.”

This, at least, was what Longmore presumed he said. The Cockney accent was almost impenetrable.
Nothing
was “nuffin,” and aitches were dropped from and attached to the wrong words, and some of the vowels seemed to have arrived from another planet.

“And you were trying to keep your hand warm in the gentleman’s pocket?” she said.

Longmore choked back laughter.

“I never went near his pocket! Do I look like I’m dicked in the nob?”

“Far from it,” Sophy said. “You’re a clever one, and quick, too.”

“Not quick enough,” the boy muttered.

“I wish you could have seen it,
Cousin
,” she said. “The two who ran in front were meant to distract you while this one jumped on and did his job. The little devil almost got by me. It took him two seconds to leap onto the groom’s place. Probably he would have wanted only another two to get your pocket watch—perhaps your seals and handkerchief as well—while you had both hands busy with the horses. I daresay he thought I was a gently bred female who’d only stare or scream helplessly while he collected his booty and got away.”

She reverted to the boy. “Next time, my lad, I advise you to make sure there’s only one person in the vehicle.”

Next time?

Longmore nearly ran down a pie seller.

“What next time?” he said. “We’re making a detour to the nearest police office, and leaving him to them.”

The boy let loose a stream of stunning oaths and struggled wildly. But Sophy must have tightened her hold or done something painful, because he stopped abruptly, and started whimpering that his arm was broken.

“As soon as I get out of this infernal tangle, I’ll give you a cuff you won’t soon forget,” Longmore said. “
Cousin
, will you give him a firm thump or something to stifle him in the meantime?”

“I don’t think we should take him to the police,” she said. “I think we should take him with us.”

Longmore and the boy reacted simultaneously.

The boy: “Nooooo!”

Longmore: “Are you drunk?”

“No, you don’t,” the boy said. “I ain’t going nowhere with you. I got friends, and they’ll come any minute now. Then you’ll be sorry. And I think my chest’s got a rib broke from being bent like this.”

“Stifle it,” Longmore told the boy. He needed a clear head to find his way through Sophy’s rabbit warren of a mind. He couldn’t do that and translate the boy’s deranged version of English at the same time.

To Sophy he said, “What exactly do you propose to do with him?”

“He’s wonderfully quick,” she said. “He could be useful. For our mission.”

Occupied with horses and traffic, Longmore could give the urchin no more than a swift survey. He looked to be about ten or eleven years old, though it was hard to tell with children of the lowest classes. Some of them looked eons older than they were, while others, small from malnourishment, seemed younger. This boy was fair-haired under his shabby cap, and while his neck was none too clean, he wasn’t an inch thick with filth as so many of them were. His clothes were worn and ill-fitting but mended and only moderately grimy.

“I don’t see what use he’d be to anybody, unless someone was wanted to pick pockets,” he said.

“He could hold the horses,” she said.

“Could he, indeed?” he said. “You suggest I put my cattle in charge of a sneaking little thief?”

The boy went very still.