New World, New Love (25 page)

Louise raised her chin determinedly. ‘Then I shall make elegant, but less expensive hats for those with smaller purses. They will enjoy coming to my shop.’

‘But a lower pitch for customers whose interest in fashion is not all-consuming will put you on a level with all the other milliners and you’ll lose your chance to use your creative abilities to the full.’

‘Nevertheless I don’t intend to submit myself to any kind of subterfuge in being with you. I’m not afraid of scandal. I’ll face whatever comes.’

‘It’s of no consequence to me either, but that’s not the solution. You have to think about your cousins. Any scandal about you would rub off on those two highly respected people. And then there’s Delphine. She would suffer from having a sister with a notorious reputation. You could be responsible for ruining her chances of the good marriage that she’s hoping to make. Believe me, the social importance of position and class and outwardly impeccable reputations for women is probably stronger here in Boston than anywhere else in the country.’

Her face was bleak. ‘Does this mean that we must stay apart?’

‘That’s a sacrifice I’m not prepared to make and it’s one too many for you after all you’ve done already for your imp of a sister. No, but I have a solution.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We’ll have a marriage of convenience by which you can live above your millinery shop and I’ll continue to live here. People will think it strange, but since we shall be married, there will be no cause for gossip. We can be together whenever we wish. Otherwise, my dear Louise, I fear you’ll end up bankrupt and your diamonds will have been sold to no purpose.’

She tossed her napkin down on the tray and swung her legs over the side of the bed to spring to her feet. ‘You’re trying to trick me into marriage!’ Her voice was sharp and defensive. ‘It happened to me once before and I won’t let it happen again!’

He had not moved, but continued to look at her. ‘Every word I’ve spoken is the truth. You have to make a decision.’

She stood for a few moments, her fingers pressed to her temples, wretched that once again her original aims had been thwarted, but in declaring her love for Daniel, she had crossed the Rubicon and there was no going back. She could not live without him and behind his words she had heard his desperate need of her.

Thoughtfully, she sat down again on the edge of the bed. ‘Do you really mean that we could go on leading our separate lives?’

‘I give you my word. You’ll have your freedom and we shall go on being lovers just as you planned originally, but causing no harm to anyone. If we should have a child, he or she would not be illegitimate.’

‘It’s a bizarre arrangement!’ she exclaimed in protest.

‘But a practical one. You told me once in New York that you always tried to deal with matters in a practical manner.’

‘That’s true,’ she admitted.

He clambered across the wide bed to swing down his feet and sit beside her. He tilted her chin up to him and there was laughter in his eyes. ‘I think we’ve found a way to keep married love alive. Maybe we should recommend it to others.’

She jerked her chin away, remote in her thoughts. ‘If I should decide that marriage is the only solution,’ she pondered uncertainly, ‘it would have to be a quiet wedding. Just two witnesses and us.’

‘That’s easily arranged. Let’s get married today! This morning!’

Once again she sprang to her feet, close to panic for the first time in her life. ‘It’s too soon! You’re rushing me into this! I must think about it for a few days.’

‘Take all the time you want, but don’t expect wagging tongues to wait too.’

She clasped her hands distractedly, lifting them up and down as she paced the floor several times before coming to a halt. ‘I see that I’ll have to do as you suggest,’ she conceded reluctantly. ‘I can’t let anything I do taint the lives of my cousins or my sister. If we are to marry, it might as well be today.’

He came to put his arms around her, speaking softly. ‘You won’t regret it. Maybe there will come a day in the future when you’ll decide that the time is right for us to be together for the rest of our lives.’

She frowned, putting a finger firmly against his lips. ‘You mustn’t count on that, but you’ll be the only one I’ll love until my last breath.’

He drove her back to the Bradshaws’ home to wait while she changed, for she was certain that no minister would marry her in her present gown, which had such a low décolletage. She ran up the steps and a servant admitted her. Nobody else saw her arrive or leave, for it was not yet nine o’clock and Madeleine and Delphine were still in their rooms. Theodore was always up early, but he was shut away in his study.

When Louise emerged into the sunshine again she was wearing a cream straw hat that she had made, and the amber-hued muslin of her gown flowed against her legs as she hurried down the steps. On the way to the church, Daniel stopped the horses and jumped out to buy her a posy of flowers from a street seller. She inhaled the scent of the blossoms as they continued on their way.

‘It’s just as if we were eloping.’ She tilted back her head, laughing happily.

‘I suppose in a way we are!’ he declared, laughing with her.

The minister had called in his wife and daughter to be witnesses while he married Daniel and Louise in the otherwise empty church. The ring that Daniel slid on to her finger was a family heirloom of diamonds and pearls set in gold. They looked at each other very seriously before they kissed once the minister had pronounced that they were now husband and wife.

‘Now to break the news!’ Daniel declared with a grin, kissing her again on the church steps.

The Bradshaws were surprised, but pleased about the marriage. Delphine, after her initial disappointment at not having been a bridesmaid to outshine the bride, realized with relief that she would be free at last from her sister’s eagle eye. Louise had always been able to read her like a book, whereas Madeleine only saw her in a rose-tinted light.

Theodore announced the marriage of Daniel and Louise that same evening at the soirée and there were congratulations and good wishes from all present.

Louise was to stay with Daniel all the time the alterations and decorations took place at the shop. There were several delays when it was discovered that the property had to be re-roofed and subsidence corrected in the basement. She visited Daniel’s warehouse to select the silk fabrics she would need for her millinery. Afterwards, in a special storeroom, she had her choice of the exquisite Lyons silks to be made into high-waisted coats and gowns by the best seamstresses.

Neither she nor Daniel had ever been happier and they made love at every opportunity. It was as if their passion, long denied, could never be assuaged.

She called into the shop every day to see how the work was progressing. At her instructions the atelier and her office were the first to be made ready. Then she interviewed a number of women sent to her by an agency. Several were suitable, but she chose two older women with considerable experience in the millinery trade, as well as an apprentice, who showed she would be quick to learn the unique plaiting for the straw hats.

Finally she engaged a young woman of twenty, named Amy Saville, to assist in the showroom itself. She was the plainest of the applicants, but she was stylish in her simple summer clothes and wore her hat with flair. Louise intended to teach her how to show and display hats with the right tilt of the head, just as she herself had once done for Daniel at Miss Sullivan’s. He had long since admitted that his purchase had been a pretext by which to meet her again, something she had known from the start.

To build up stock Louise took on four other milliners on a temporary basis and they and the two others were soon at work at the long tables, cutting and shaping and steaming. The hats they produced were from Louise’s own designs, which she had started to sketch during her days at Miss Sullivan’s and had continued periodically ever since. The latest London fashion plates showed that hats were gaining high crowns and narrower brims, some without brims at all, and even a bonnet shape that was all brim, like half a flowerpot.

By chance Louise met an American woman at a card party, Mrs Amelia Jackson, who was visiting her daughter in Boston after just returning from travelling with her husband on a diplomatic mission to Paris. She spoke descriptively of the neoclassical styles evolving there and of the hats being worn, which included spectacular turbans. Louise was delighted to know that, in spite of the war, fashion was rising again in France under the ruling Directory. Some of it sounded extreme, such as a daringly low décolletage, almost to the nipples, with the throat wrapped in a silk neck cloth. There were also bonnet brims extending to absurd lengths over the face. Yet it was through exaggeration that trends were set for the future.

Louise went to every social occasion that allowed her splendid eye-catching hats to be seen. Madeleine was delighted to have her company at any time and Daniel was always at her side at evening events and other important festivities. At the ball for Delphine and others that followed, Louise created a headdress for herself of pearls or plumes or ribbons. She knew that wherever she went women were starting to watch for her arrival to see what she was wearing.

‘Why don’t you make me a pretty hat?’ Delphine pouted. She had no lack of male admirers herself and her coming-out ball had been an enormous personal success, but she had begun to resent the attention directed towards her sister. Men had always given Louise a second glance, a sharp turning of the head so often following in her wake, but now she was making her mark on Boston society in general and Delphine felt in danger of being overshadowed.

‘I can’t make you one yet,’ Louise replied, ‘because I need to wear my own designs exclusively to get them talked about. Then, when I open my shop, I hope everyone will come flocking to buy. But I have a special creation in mind for you and you shall have it on my opening day.’

By October, when the trees were in their full glory, Daniel had become convinced that Louise had dismissed all thought of moving into her own apartment, even though it had been furnished and ready for some time. So it came as a shock to him on the eve of the shop’s opening when he saw her trunks being carried down the stairs. He went in search of her, flinging open doors and charging from one room to another until he finally found her with her writing box on her lap as she penned a letter. She looked up with a smile, about to tell him she was answering a letter from her aunt in England, and then saw his rage-congested face.

‘Why?’ he demanded furiously before she could speak. ‘There’s no reason at all for you to move out! You can be at the shop for opening hours like anyone else running a business. You don’t have to live on site!’

She answered him quietly, putting the writing box aside. ‘You’ve known from the start that this is what I planned to do. When the property became mine I told you that I’d move in on the eve of its opening. You agreed to it.’

‘My God! I thought that once you were here you’d never leave. This house will be like a morgue without you. I want you here! I need to hear your voice and your laughter in these rooms.’ He flung his arms wide. ‘Your footsteps on the stairs. The essence of you in my breathing. To see you come through these doors. And I want you in my bed, to feel you there all through the night and to wake to the sight of you.’

She felt overwhelmed by this passionate outpouring of his love for her and rose to her feet, for he had been towering over her. During the past weeks her excitement over her shop had blunted her realization of what her absence from his house would mean to him, no matter how cheerfully he had accepted the arrangement originally.

‘I would stay if I could, but you know only too well that I have this desperate need to achieve success independently, to prove to myself that I am a whole person by right and not just a chattel. Somehow it’s the only way by which I can shake off the past that still haunts me. I want to be free. Not of loving you, but of all the old nightmares.’ She caught up his hand and clasped it to her. ‘I shall be here often, always with you when we entertain our friends or wish for an evening here on our own, and you can come to me and to my bed every night. Everything will be just as you mapped out when you suggested marriage and gave me your word that you would keep to our agreement.’

Her calmness had the effect of exacerbating his anger and he jerked his hand away. ‘I never thought you’d keep me to such a promise! I believed you loved me enough to realize that we couldn’t live apart. You’re throwing me out of your life!’

‘That’s not true! All I’m asking is a breathing space in which to slay all my dragons. Is it so much to ask?’

‘Indeed it is! You’re driving in the thin edge of the wedge. This separation is only the beginning of the end!’

Her face became rigid with the gust of anger that swept through her. ‘After all we have been to each other, do you still know so little about me that you believe I would be so devious?’

‘I don’t know what to believe any more!’ he gave back fiercely, a desolate bitterness behind his rage.

‘In that case, there’s nothing more to be said.’ White-faced, she swept furiously away from him and out of the room.

He ran a hand through his hair in exasperation before he slammed his way into the library and threw himself into a chair. He was shaking with rage and frustration. Louise was the most infuriating and stubborn and desirable woman he had ever known, but she was in his blood and his bones, the other half of himself, and there was nothing he could do about it. Half an hour later he heard her come from the stairs and across the marble floor of the hall to pause outside the library door. He thought for a few swift moments that she was coming to tell him she had changed her mind about leaving, but then she went on out of the house. He heard the door close after her.

That night, Louise spent a restless night on her own in her new surroundings, unable to put the quarrel from her mind. She was thankful when the first light of dawn signalled that it was time to get up.