Vixen in Velvet (4 page)

“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

A
re 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’ nightdresses 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.

Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.

“Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”

Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.

Leonie gave her a handkerchief.

“Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.

Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”

“Yet here you are,” Leonie said.

Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”

“A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”

Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”

“I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly dressed.”

“Oh, yes, that explains everything. If you’d had the managing of things, I’d have been the belle of the ball.”

Leonie stepped back a pace, folded her arms, and eyed her new client critically. After a long, busy moment while her mind performed complicated calculations, she said, “Yes, my lady. Yes, you would have been. And yes, you can be.”

Early evening of Friday 10 July

Y
ou hateful little sneak! I always attend her!”

“Always? Once, two months ago.”

“It was only last week I waited on Miss Renfrew, while you was flirting with Mr. Burns.”

“I never was!”

“Maybe he wasn’t flirting with
you
, but you was trying hard enough.”

Leonie had heard the raised voices, and was hurrying from her office into the workroom at the same time as Jeffreys, on the same errand, was running that way from the showroom.

By the time they burst through the door, Glinda Simmons had got hold of Joanie Barker. They scratched and kicked and slapped and pulled each other’s hair, screeching the while. The other girls shrieked, too. In a matter of minutes, they’d tumbled bolts of costly fabric, boxes of ribbons, flowers, feathers, and other articles hither and yon.

Leonie clapped her hands, but no one was paying attention. She and Jeffreys had to move in and forcibly separate the two girls. This didn’t stop the screaming. The combatants called for witnesses to various crimes perpetrated by the opposing party, and the noncombatants took that as an invitation to express their own grievances against this one or that one.

It took nearly an hour to restore full order. Having warned the girls that they’d all be dismissed without notice or a character if they indulged in another outburst, Leonie hurried upstairs to change out of her workday dress. Jeffreys followed her.

“You’d better send Mary Parmenter to help me dress,” Leonie said. Mary had been left in charge of the showroom when Jeffreys came to stop the war. “You keep an eye on the seamstresses. You’re the best at managing these battles.”

This was only one of the reasons Selina Jeffreys, despite her youth and apparent frailty, was their forewoman.

Jeffreys ignored her, and started unfastening Leonie’s pelerine. “You’re going to be late, madame,” she said. “And you know Parmenter gets nervous and clumsy when she feels rushed. I don’t.”

Late
wasn’t good enough, in Leonie’s opinion.
Never
would be preferable. She was not looking forward to this evening’s engagement.

Lord Swanton was hosting a poetry lecture to raise funds for the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. This was the sort of activity at which Sophy shone. She would put in an appearance, then slip away and write all about it for London’s favorite gossip sheet,
Foxe’s Morning Spectacle.
The account would include detailed descriptions of what every Maison Noirot customer was wearing.

Leonie looked forward to the writing much in the way a French ancestor had looked forward to making the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.

Misinterpreting her frown, Jeffreys said, “Please don’t worry about the girls, madame. They’ll be all right now. It’s that time of the month, and you know how it is with girls who’re always together.”

They all had That Time of the Month at the same time.

“It’s worse this month, and we both know why,” Leonie said. Marcelline had married a duke and Sophy had married a future marquess. Though any other women would jump at the chance to quit working, Marcelline and Sophy weren’t like other women. They might give it up eventually, but not without a fight.

The girls didn’t understand this, and it wasn’t easy to prove, since neither sister was much in evidence at present. Marcelline, who was having a miserable time with morning sickness, was abed a good deal, on her doctor’s orders. Sophy had had to go away to give Fashionable Society time to forget what the French widow she’d recently impersonated had looked like.

That left Leonie, who could do what the other two did, but not with their brilliance and flair. Each sister had her special skills, and Leonie was missing her sisters’ talents acutely. And their company.

And she was more worried than anybody about what would become of Maison Noirot. She’d put everything she had into the shop—mind, body, soul. The cholera had killed Cousin Emma and wiped out their old life in Paris. Emma had died too young, but here in London her spirit and genius lived on in their hearts and in the new life they’d so painstakingly built.

“The girls will be better when my sisters are in the shop more regularly,” Leonie said. “Routine and habit, Jeffreys. You know our girls need not merely to be kept busy, but to have order in their lives.” Many had ended up in charitable institutions. Their lives before had been hard and chaotic. “But matters are bound to change, and everybody needs to adapt.” For these girls, adapting wasn’t easy. Change upset them. She understood. It upset her, too. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, getting them used to a new routine.”