Vixen in Velvet (30 page)

And this one had astounding self-control.

She didn’t turn at the sound of his voice, and if he hadn’t got into the habit of watching her so closely he wouldn’t have discerned the slight change in her posture, the alertness.

“One can only hope her ladyship won’t toy with his affections,” she said.

“This doesn’t mean you’ve won our wager,” he said. “Swanton’s been infatuated with Gladys’s voice this age.”

“Has he been, indeed?” Finally she looked up at him, her blue eyes wide and innocent.

“He falls in love with appalling frequency,” he said. “If he hadn’t been occupied with fending off admirers and writing new poetry to make them love him even more hopelessly—and possibly go into declines in droves—I daresay he’d have fallen in love a dozen times at least by now. But fame is distracting. I’m so relieved to see he’s returned to normal.”

“Was he always violent before, do you mean?”

“Violent emotions,” he said.

“When was the last time he tried to kill a man?” she said.

A pause, though Lisburne didn’t have to search his memory for the answer.

“Never,” he said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

“I see a Botticelli in my future,” she said.

“He’s not going to offer for Gladys, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“One of them will,” she said.

“Possibly,” he said. “Eventually. But the Season is nearly over.”

“ ‘The season—the season—/It’s nearly all over;/and spite of my schemings,/I can’t get a lover.’ ”

“You’ve got one,” he said, dropping his voice.

“It’s a poem,” she said. “Lady Gladys was reciting it, to the enraged confusion of Lady Alda—exactly as I suggested. Call me Pygmalion.”

“Dance with me, Pygmalion,” Lisburne said.

Her gaze went to the couples whirling about in front of the orchestra, then came back to him. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s bad for business.”

“It’s Vauxhall,” he said, “not Almack’s. Once they spot you, all the other fellows will ask you, too. But I should like to be . . . first.”

Again.

Always.

And that was when he realized how much trouble he was in.

Chapter Sixteen

We waltz! and behold her,

Her head on my shoulder,

Cheeks meeting, eyes greeting, hearts beating, and thus

I twist her and twirl her,

And whisk her and whirl her—

We whirl round the room till the room whirls round us!

—
The Atheneum; or, Spirit of the English Magazines,
1826

L
isburne made a bow so extravagantly beautiful, Leonie couldn’t help laughing. In answer she gave him the extreme version of the famous Noirot curtsey. It was a theatrical performance of a curtsey, a flurry of silk and lace as she floated down, down, down like a ballerina, then rose up again “like Venus rising from the waves,” someone had once said.

Then his arm went round her waist and he whirled her into the crowd of dancers, and all her sensible thoughts flew away, up into the boughs of the trees among the colored lamps and up among the stars, to look down on her from afar.

She’d had more than one triumph tonight. She’d recovered her shop’s and the Milliners’ Society’s reputation. She’d helped a potential tragedy of a girl become the belle of the ball, dancing with—unless Leonie had entirely lost her ability to read people—her heart’s desire. She’d helped Dulcie Williams out of the trouble she’d got herself into.

Leonie was entitled to celebrate a little. She was entitled to forget her anxieties, at least for one dance.

“Such a trial you continue to be!” he said.

Startled, she looked up at him. But he was smiling.

“An enigma, or a puzzle at the very least,” he said. “Where did a dressmaker learn to dance so well? Among other unlikely accomplishments, like Greek and Roman mythology and Byron’s poetry. And when do you find time to practice?”

“I doubt any woman needs much practice to dance well with you,” she said.

“Do you accuse me of making my partners look good?” he said.

“It’s a waltz,” she said. “A man takes hold of a girl and she must go where he takes her. You waltz in the same decisive way you do everything else. I’m certain you would never allow me to trip over your feet.”

“And risk scuffing my boots’ brilliant shine?”

“In spite of my profession, I’m overcome sometimes with the wild desire—”

“This sounds promising—”

“To scuff your boots and rumple your neckcloth and—”

“
Extremely
promising.” His voice had deepened.

“But then I think of Polcaire,” she said.

“To the devil with Polcaire,” he said.

“And I can’t do it in public, in any case,” she said.

“An excellent point,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere private. Later. Soon, but after this. Because your dress was meant to be seen in motion. It was meant for waltzing, especially with me, because my attire complements it so well. For which we have Polcaire to thank.”

“So I assumed,” she said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “When he put out the blue waistcoat, I said, ‘A certain lady remarked particularly on the touches of green, which complement her attire.’ And he said, ‘But my lord cannot wear green with that coat, and I have laid out the blue waistcoat.’ Which only proves he is an oracle, because here you are in blue—”

“I think I rather love Polcaire,” she said.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “I worry constantly that a woman will lead him astray or throw him into a state of careless desolation.”

“I doubt he has it in him to be careless,” she said. “I suspect he’s an artistic genius like Marcelline. Why didn’t he become a tailor? The hours are shorter, and with his artistic eye, he could make a great fortune.”

“Because he never had the temperament to be a tailor’s apprentice, I suppose,” he said. “Or because so many tailors’ customers attach so little importance to paying their bills. I believe the late King bankrupted several vendors. I know Beau Brummell was thousands of pounds in debt to his tailors. And that was nothing to what he owed his friends.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “A more innocent time. There are ways of making sure customers pay their bills. Or perhaps you need to have worked in Paris to learn the knack. Still, I’ll admit it requires a degree of ruthlessness some artists can’t stomach.” Marcelline, for instance. Sophy. As ruthless and single-minded as they could be in other ways, they avoided all the nasty money issues.

“As I suspected, the waltz has aroused in you romantic feelings,” he said.

She swallowed. “I’m not romantic.”

“So you delude yourself,” he said. “But when you speak of your ruthless ways with customers in arrears, my heart pounds.”

She remembered the way he’d made her read the mercer’s bill . . . and what had followed. Her skin took fire and the heat raced through her veins. It pooled in her belly and melted her brain.

And because her brain was melted, she lost track of words and had no clever answer. She was too aware of his hands, one so warm at her waist and the other clasping hers. She stared at his neckcloth and tried to be sensible. She tried to think of the shop and her real life.

But she was in his arms, and waltzing was so perilously like making love. She could see his chest rise and fall, and when he spoke she heard the quickened rate of his breathing. She was aware of the strength of his long legs as they brushed against her dress, as he led her, so surely and easily, round and round. She was aware of the place about them dissolving, as in a dream, to a blur of music and lights like colored stars, and in the midst of this, the shadowlike dark colors of the men’s dress and the rainbow of women’s summer dresses, a galaxy swirling about them.

She gave up fighting and let the night’s sensual joys sweep her away. For this moment she would let herself be lost in the beauty of the fantasy world about her, set to music, real music.

Here she danced among men and women of the upper ranks as well as many of lesser importance. She wasn’t dancing with one of her sisters or a seamstress but with a man who might be the prince in any girl’s romantic fantasies. She danced with the man of her dreams. The man she’d fallen in love with, un-sensible she.

“In Paris,” she said, “we danced. At La Chaumière and Montagne Belleville and the Prado and elsewhere. Even seamstresses learn how to dance. Certainly they ought to, and I take care to have my Milliners’ Society girls learn. Dancing gives one grace and physical confidence. It’s one of life’s great pleasures, obtainable without great expense or difficulty. To dance, one doesn’t need a special place or an orchestra. A piano will do. Or a guitar. Or one can sing or hum. My sisters and I have danced to organ grinders in the street, playing Rossini.”

He didn’t answer right away, and that silence between them sounded louder than the music. Then he said so gently, “I think you dance so well because you love it. And because music appeals to your mathematical mind. And because . . .” He shook his head. “No, no more. I believe I was on the brink of poetry.”

And she was on the brink of telling him too much, explaining herself, her past, the world she’d come from. Who she was, really. As though this night wasn’t a dream, a momentary aberration in the real business of life. As though they had a future together.

She knew better. It was better to leave than to be left, and the longer she put it off, the harder the parting. Better to start as soon as possible, teaching herself how to fall out of love.

But she had these last few moments.

“Then let’s just dance,” she said.

P
erhaps it was better not to talk.

When Leonie spoke of Paris, Lisburne’s chest felt tight. He remembered her saying that of the three sisters she’d spent the greatest percentage of her life there. And this night he caught—along with the so-faint hint of Paris in her speech—the small, elusive note in minor key, of loss.

Any idea who your pretty vixen is, really?

Lisburne had thought he knew her, or knew all a man needed to know. She was pretty and shapely. She was clever and surprisingly well read, quick-witted and confident. He’d ended her virginity and discovered the sensuality and passion lurking under the businesslike exterior.

But this wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the girl she’d been before she came to London. The girl Swanton had met in a shop in Paris.

He almost hated Swanton for having seen her when she was—what? Fifteen or sixteen, perhaps. She must have been more French than English then, a girl who laughed more, Lisburne was sure, than she did now, and in other ways, not only the low, intimate laughter that crept under a man’s skin . . .

Whatever she’d done or said, she’d made an impression on Swanton, when scores of women hadn’t.

In those days she must have smiled more easily and naturally, and talked entirely in French, and she must have been more lighthearted and less well armored.

Lisburne wanted that girl as well as the woman in his arms.

He’d almost said that and everything that was in his mind.

He’d wanted to believe she danced so well at least partly because she danced with him, and they were meant to be together, and they’d met in front of the painting of Venus and Mars because they were meant to be lovers, too. It was Fate. Inevitable.

He became aware of her scent first, and realized he was leaning in too close, much too close for dancing in public. He felt her pull away slightly, in the instant before he did.

“They’re all watching Swanton and Gladys,” he said.

“And you think no one notices
you
?” she said. And laughed.

The music was ending, and more than one head nearby turned toward the sound of her low, rich laugh.

He had the presence of mind to release his hold of her. But not enough to control his tongue. “It’s you they’re looking at,” he said softly. “The most beautiful girl in the place.”

She looked up at him, her eyes shining.

“That’s the perfect thing to say,” she said. “A perfect ending.”

“Ending?”

“Adieu, my lord.”

She moved away, and he couldn’t grab her and haul her back, with all the world looking on. In an instant she was gone, slipping into the crowd and disappearing, before his brain had caught up with what was happening. Had happened.

And while he stood there, bewildered and on the brink of anger, a familiar voice said, “Lisburne, if you do not save me I’ll find a dastardly way to get even.”

He looked to one side and not very far down, for it was his cousin Clara. She wasn’t exactly an Amazon, although to some fellows she seemed so, but she was decidedly on the tallish side.

The habits of a lifetime came to his rescue. He collected his composure, his manners, and his powers of address.

“Of course I’ll save you,” he said. “Who needs a broken jaw, cuz, and why can’t Val do it?”

“It’s not that sort of thing. It’s Sir Henry Jaspers.”

She made a small movement of her head. Lisburne threw a discreet glance that way—enough to spot a young man of fair coloring and bull-sized proportions—before returning his attention to her.

“He’s bearing down on me,” she said, “And I know that look in his eye. It means a lot of pretty poetry and admiration of my this and that and would I do him the honor of marrying him. He asks once a week, and even Mama cannot seem to dampen his ardor. He has a wonderful obliviousness. And one can’t be cruel to him, because he’s too sweet. But here! At Vauxhall of all places. He means no harm, I know, but if Gladys catches my eye, I’ll never be able to keep in countenance, and one doesn’t laugh at a gentleman in love, even if one doesn’t want him. Oh, here he comes. Do be a darling, Simon, and dance with me, I beg.”

He donned the right smile and said, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

S
ince resisting temptation wasn’t in her nature, Leonie had to get herself out of its vicinity. Had she gone home to Maison Noirot and Lisburne followed her there, she’d never be able to maintain her resolve. She lacked the strength of character to send him away.

And so she went straight from Vauxhall to Clevedon House, where she often spent Saturday night.

This night she found Marcelline looking well, truly well, for the first time in weeks. Her Grace was in good spirits, too. This was partly because she felt better and partly because today Lucie hadn’t clung to her like a limpet—as she’d done from the time Marcelline had first displayed symptoms of her pregnancy.

Lucie had stopped clinging because Bianca Williams had mysteriously arrived in the house in the middle of the night, “like a golden fairy princess,” Lucie said.

“Bianca is the perfect playmate,” Marcelline said after she and Leonie had withdrawn to the duchess’s sitting room. “She’ll sit still for hours on end while Lucie arranges her hair. She’ll wear whatever outrageous ensemble Lucie concocts. Lucie treats her like a doll, and Bianca, like a good little actress, plays Doll. She’ll play any other part, too. They made scenes from
The Arabian Nights
and went hunting as Red Indians. They played soldiers and had a tea party to celebrate the end of the battle. They’ve made costumes—and a fine wreck of the nursery, not to mention one of my gowns. Bianca hasn’t Lucie’s sewing skill, but she has strong ideas about proper costume. And props.”

“I believe she was onstage from the time she could walk,” Leonie said. “Or maybe before.”

“She’s been wonderful for Lucie,” Marcelline said. “Clevedon says she was lonely here.”

“But the servants dote on her,” Leonie said.

“Lucie adores Clevedon and she likes being a princess in a grand house with servants, but it’s not what she’s used to,” Marcelline said. “After all that happened in the spring . . .” She frowned. “He seems to understand her in a way I can’t, and when he’s about, she’s calmer and happier. When he isn’t about, she can be a little beast. But Bianca seems to have a positive effect. I’ll be sorry to see Mrs. Williams go. Not that they’ll be allowed to do so right away. She isn’t quite as strong as she pretends. Clevedon is looking about for something suitable for her.” She laughed. “But listen to me with my domestic tales!” She refilled Leonie’s brandy glass. “What about you, my love? Have you something to tell me?”