Betina Krahn (37 page)

He tried to slip past the two women ahead of him to get a closer look at the display, and they promptly jostled him right back to his former place. “How dare you, sir? Take a place in the queue and wait your turn like the rest of us.”

“Wait? For what?” He stared at the dress and sailor suit, taking in their details.

“Ideal clothes, of course. They’re only taking orders, you know. You can’t get the actual garments today,” one of them said before they all turned their backs on him.

There was no doubt; those were the very garments Madeline had designed for the children of Ideal’s workers. Somehow they had made it to Liberty with the shipment of samples, and were mistakenly being offered for sale too. He glanced around at the number of women waiting to give the harried clerk their orders for the garments, and was caught off guard by a surge of pleasure. If Madeline could only—

But Madeline hadn’t seen it and wouldn’t see it. And the garments these women were so eager to order probably would never be made.

He turned and barreled through the increasing crowd and was halfway down the block before he could draw his next breath.

Walking, sitting, standing—Madeline was having to relearn virtually every movement living required. Life in a corset
wasn’t really so difficult once she got the hang of it. She only had to remember to limit her exertions—no hurrying, no reaching or carrying or climbing, and no laughing, not that she had had many opportunities for the last in recent days. Dragging around twelve pounds of fabric, steel framework, and horsehair padding was bearable once she got used to the way it rubbed and bumped her bottom. Sitting, however, required something like a military campaign; a flanking approach, a bit of tactical positioning, engagement of forces, and, finally, occupation.

It was probably a tribute to the hardiness of her sex, she decided, that some women were capable of engaging in riding or punting or badminton while encumbered in such garb. She, however, would probably be relegated to the ranks of those ladies identified as “delicate.” Her lungs and brain were accustomed to a full complement of air, and, with their supply greatly reduced, they had a disconcerting tendency to rebel and produce dizziness and dark spots before her eyes. When Gilbert took her shopping for hats and for refreshments in a tearoom, she had to sit down no less than four times.

But being of delicate constitution did have benefits, she discovered. Women prone to swooning were never expected to engage in lively interactions or to say anything clever or witty. And according to her maid, fragile females were never required outside their chambers before three in the afternoon and were always excused from arduous activity and potentially difficult or unpleasant situations.

Well, she reasoned, corsets couldn’t be all bad if they allowed her to be excused from life for at least half of every day.

Being excused from life was precisely what she had craved for the first several days after her explosive departure from St. Crispin. She sat for long periods in her room, staring at upholstery patterns and the print in the books of popular romantic poetry that Cousin Gilbert provided, grateful to feel nothing, to be numb all the way to her bones. If she could
have arranged it, she would have stayed in that dazed and sensationless state forever. It certainly made her new clothing, her new acquaintances, and her attentive cousin Gilbert more bearable.

But all good things, as the saying goes, come to an end. Her rebounding sensitivity awakened to small things; at first, pricks with hairpins, a dinner partner who was overperfumed, the incessant clatter of dishes at dinner, and the nasal whine that crept into Gilbert’s voice. It seemed she was constantly being pestered for her opinions on purchases, and she noticed that whenever she was alone with Gilbert for five minutes, he began driveling bits of that treacly poetry he had given her. “Rapturous hours unending” and “Hearts overarching, to meet in sweet divine”—that sort of nonsense.

She could have told him a thing or two about “hours unending.”

The cracks in her protective insulation, once noticed, widened all too quickly. By her seventh night in Gilbert’s house, her merciful insensitivity was a thing of the past. She found herself constantly on edge, alert to the slightest discomfort or annoyance and reacting with increasingly volatile thoughts and comments. The maid, scuffing her heels across the carpets, sounded like a column of Prussians. As she dressed for her first evening engagement—a dance given by a wealthy earl—her garters kept feeling like they were sliding down, her corset seemed tighter than usual, and her bodice kept drooping off her shoulders. By the time she descended the stairs to join Gilbert and his friend Lord Glenroven in the parlor, her new shoes were pinching her toes, her skin itched from the perfumed powder, and she was in a ripe mood indeed.

Did Gilbert always sound like a donkey when he laughed? And this Glenroven fellow had hands like limp noodles—he even left spots on her gloves!

When the carriage was brought around, Lord Glenroven declared that riding backward made him ill, and Madeline
found herself wedged between the two for the ride to Belgrave Square. By the time they arrived at Lord and Lady Reardon’s elegant house, the poufs and silk violets on her bustle had been crushed, and she felt pressed and crowded by Gilbert and his ever-present hands. As they waited in a line in the entry hall, to be announced, he kept bending to her ear and whispering instructions for what she was to do and say to various people he was keen to impress. His constant nattering about details only added to her case of nerves.

Can’t he see that his breath is loosening some of my curls? Don’t these people have anything better to do than stand around staring at my crushed poufs?

The music was very nice, she admitted grudgingly as they entered the heavily mirrored drawing room for a circuit of the first floor. The doors had been thrown back between rooms and guests were mingling freely amid lavish flowers, lilting chamber music, and liberally poured champagne. Gilbert was beaming, obviously in his element. He seemed to know a good many people, and they were all more than eager to meet her. On occasion there were comments or questions about her being “the one,” but Gilbert slyly deflected them and smiled.

Three days earlier such comments would have passed her by altogether. But now she noted them and grew tense and uneasy, interpreting them as proof that a good many of these people had read the wretched articles about her and wondered how much of them was true. If she was to make any sort of life in this society, she had to start then and there. Surpressing her anxiety, she forced herself to greet these new acquaintances with more enthusiasm. Then Lord Reardon, their host, joined them and asked to be put on her dance card. When she demurred, saying that she did not dance, Gilbert seemed mortified and whisked her away for a private word.

“You truly cannot dance?” He made it sound a hanging offense.

“I cannot, Cousin. There was never an occasion for it,”
she answered, trying to contain her surprise at his ill-concealed outrage.

“Had I known, I never would have brought you
here.”
He gave his vest a jerk and glanced about to see if they were being noticed. “Then we shall have to keep you well away from the ballroom.” He noticed the surprise on her face and checked his reaction, producing an ingratiating smile. “It wouldn’t do to subject you to the onslaught of admirers you would undoubtedly attract until you’re ready for them. Unfortunately, I have already bid for several dances with other ladies. Perhaps I can get Dunroven to take care of you for a while.”

Take care of me? Like the family embarrassment who can’t be trusted in polite company?
she thought, furious at the insinuation that she had to be “handled.”
Or an unruly child?

Cole’s handsome black coach rumbled through the warm spring evening, swerving this way and that to avoid pedestrians and rain-washed ruts. Inside, a harried Cravits was fussing with Cole’s tie—“Do hold still, sir. I simply cannot have you seen looking like a scruffian”—up to the very moment the coach stopped in the street outside Lord Reardon’s house.

“Good enough, Cravits.” He reached for the door handle but was stopped cold by the valet’s grip on his collar and had to wait for the final twist that set a perfect pucker. “For God’s sake, I’m not a guest. And I doubt they hold gate-crashers to the same exalted standards.”

He stepped over the clothes on the floor of the coach and sprang down the coach steps. After instructing his driver, he headed for the massive front doors of the grandest house on Belgrave Square.

This was madness, he knew. He had returned to Gilbert Duncan’s residence a short while before, intending to see Madeline and tell her about the success of her inadvertently “ideal” garments. When informed that she was out, he managed
to prize her location out of the houseman, then returned home just long enough to grab his evening clothes and Cravits. Now his morning clothes lay on the floor of the coach and he was about to barge into the Earl of Reardon’s home uninvited.

But, in truth, lack of an invitation was the least of his worries. Upon entering, he paused for a moment by the door, located an acquaintance in the entry, and made straight for the couple with an effusive greeting. As soon as the doorman assumed what it was natural to assume and looked the other way, he headed immediately up the grand stairs to the ballroom. A quick circuit of the room told him Madeline wasn’t there, and he hurried downstairs, pausing halfway to search the crowd. He had no luck—until it dawned on him that he was looking for a young woman with a plain chignon, a scarlet tunic, and trousers. She would hardly be wearing those here, and he hadn’t a clue what she might look like in regular clothing.

A woman drifting through the colonnade at the rear of the long entry hall caught his eye. Something familiar about her movement sent him flying down the rest of the steps. When she paused outside the conservatory doors, he slowed, praying it was Madeline and strangely both eager and reluctant to confront her.

She turned slightly, presenting a familiar profile—a straight nose, and neatly squared chin—and he relaxed. Nothing else would have identified her as the same fiery young woman who single-handedly battled the legal establishment, built a factory, resurrected a dead village, rescued a dozen families from London’s slums, and considered flaming scarlet and Turkish trousers ideal mourning apparel. This young woman was clothed in the height of London fashion: a delicate white satin gown with a narrow waist and a delectably low neckline, trimmed with a drape of violet velvet and alternating flounces and poufs of satin and velvet, with silk violets down a substantial train. She wore twenty-button
gloves, a cameo on a velvet ribbon around her throat, and an air of misery that was palpable.

When she entered the conservatory, he followed at a distance, unsettled by the sight of her in conventional evening dress. The gown was exquisite even by Paris standards, and she filled it to perfection. Until a month earlier he would have considered her appearance—voluptuously curved, faintly aloof, and swathed in luxury—to be the epitome of genteel womanhood. She would have been his ideal woman.

But just then, when he looked at her, what struck him most was the heartache that drained her features to a ladylike pallor and the tightly reined sorrow that others probably mistook for languorous poise. She looked to him like a woman who was wearing someone else’s clothes … living someone else’s life.

“There you are,” he declared, startling her. She whirled, and at the sight of him staggered back, tripping on her train. If he hadn’t darted forward and grabbed her, she would have fallen bustle-first into Lord Reardon’s prize equatorial ferns.

“Cole.” For a moment there was a flare of light in her eyes, then she quelled it and pointedly removed her arm from his grip. “What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same,” he said, moving closer, looming over her and watching her tense more with each degree he advanced.

Madeline looked up, feeling her senses jolted by him and aching at that impact. He was dressed in elegant evening clothes, with a pristine shirt and embroidered silk vest and perfectly tied neck cloth. His dark hair shone and his autumn-forest eyes glowed with emotion she found both absorbing and painful to see. He looked as if he might have just stepped out of her turbulent dreams. When his image began to swim before her eyes, she realized she wasn’t breathing and gasped air just as he spoke.

“Are you going to marry Gilbert?” he demanded.

“What?” She opened and fluttered her fan. “Don’t be absurd. He’s my cousin.”

“A
distant
cousin,” he corrected her. “And I understand you are now staying with him in his house. That may have given rise to certain … 
expectations.”

“Not on my part,” she snapped. But even as she said it, an embarrassingly large piece of logic fell into place in her mind, and she suddenly saw her situation as others might—as Cole apparently did … as
Gilbert
did! All of his adoring looks, incessant hand-kissing, and babbling about “hearts overarching” suddenly came together in her mind. Her eyes widened and she lowered her fan. Gilbert
was
angling to marry her!

She looked up at Cole’s knowing expression, appalled at having him watch her discover the mess she had made in seeking to escape an even bigger mess. Arrogant wretch—why did he always have to be
right
about everything?

“Then if you’re not marrying Gilbert, what in blazes are you doing in those clothes?”

“I’ve had a change of style”—she fumbled furiously with her train, then kicked it out of the way so she could step back—“to go along with my change of heart.”

“Oh?” He gave her a slow, thorough look. “About this change of heart—”

“It’s none of your business, actually,” she preempted his comment.

“I beg to differ.”

“You’re relieved of duty, absolved of all responsibility.” She came straight to the point. “You needn’t worry about my magnanimous impulses ever again.” Gathering her train over her arm, she straightened with as much dignity as she could muster. “They’re dead. Gone. Defunct. I shall be happy to write Sir William a letter to that effect, if you wish.”