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She settled back in her chair and smiled at him. “I’m observant,” she said. “I watched you play before.”
“Yet you lost.”
“Your beauty must have distracted me,” she said. “Now I’ve grown used to it. Now I can discern the ways you signal whether it’s going well or badly for you.”
“I thought I gave no signals,” he said.
She waved a hand. “You nearly don’t. It was very hard for me to decipher you—and I’ve been playing cards since I was a child.”
“Have you, indeed?” he said. “I’ve always thought of shopkeepers as respectable citizens, not much given to vices, especially gambling.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “Frascati’s teemed with ordinary citizen-clerks and tradesmen. But to men like you and Émilien, they’re invisible.”
“The one thing you are not is invisible.”
“There you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve passed within a few yards of you, on more than one occasion, and you didn’t look twice.”
He sat up straighter. “That’s impossible.”
She took up the cards and shuffled them, her hands quick, smooth, expert. “Let me see. On Sunday at about four o’clock, you were riding with a handsome lady in the Bois de Boulogne. On Monday at seven o’clock, you were in one of the latticed boxes at the Académie Royale de Musique. On Tuesday shortly after noon, you were strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.”
“You said I wasn’t your sole purpose for coming to Paris,” he said. “Yet you’ve been following me. Or should I say stalking me?”
“I’ve been stalking fashionable people. They all go to the same places. And you’re hard to miss.”
“So are you.”
“That depends on whether I wish to be noticed or not,” she said. “When I don’t wish to be noticed, I don’t dress this way.” One graceful hand indicated the low bodice of the crimson gown. His diamond stickpin twinkled at him from the center of the V to which the bodice dipped. She lay the cards, precisely stacked now, on the table in front of her, and folded her hands.
“A good dressmaker can dress anybody,” she said. “Sometimes we’re required to dress women who prefer not to call attention to themselves, for one reason or another.” She brought her folded hands up and rested her elbows on the table and her chin on her entwined fingers. “That you failed to notice me in any of those places ought to prove to you that I’m the greatest dressmaker in the world.”
“Is it always business with you?” he said.
“I work for a living,” she said. She turned her head, and he watched her gaze sweep over the various bodies draped over furniture and sprawled on the floor. The look spoke the volumes she left unsaid.
He was nettled, more than he ought to be. Otherwise he would have pretended not to understand. But these were the people with whom he customarily associated, and her mocking half smile was extremely irritating. Provoked, he said it for her before he could catch himself: “Unlike me and these other dissolute aristocrats, you mean. The bourgeoisie is so tediously self-righteous.”
She shrugged, calling his attention to her smooth shoulders, and unfolded her hands. “Yes, we’re great bores, always thinking about money and success.” She took out her purse and scooped her winnings into it, a clear signal that the evening was over for her.
He rose and came round the table to move her chair. He gathered up her shawl, which had slid down her arm. As he did so, he let his fingers graze her bare shoulder.
He heard the faint hitch in her breath, and a bolt of pleasure wiped out his irritation. The feeling was fierce—fiercer than it ought to have been after so slight a touch and so obvious a ploy. But then, she gave so little away that to achieve this much was a great deal.
Though no one about them was conscious, he bent his head close to her ear and said, in a low voice, “You haven’t told me when I’ll see you again. Longchamp, the first time. Frascati’s this night. Where next?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, moving a little away. “Tomorrow—tonight, rather—I must attend the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball. I suspect that gathering will be too staid for you.”
For a moment he could only stare at her, his eyes wide and his mouth open. Then he realized he was gaping at her like a yokel watching a circus. But he’d no sooner erased all signs of surprise than he wondered why he bothered. What was the use, with her, of pretending that nothing surprised him when everything did? She was the least predictable woman he’d ever met. And at this moment he felt like one of the men who’d walked into a lamp post.
He said, slowly and carefully, because surely he’d misunderstood, “You’ve been invited to Madame de Chirac’s ball?”
She made a small adjustment to her shawl. “I did not say I was invited.”
“But you’re going. Uninvited.”
She looked up at him, and the dark eyes flashed. “How else?”
“How about not going where you’re not invited?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s the most important event of the social season.”
“It’s also the most exclusive event of the social season,” he said. “The king will be there. People negotiate and plot and blackmail each other for months in advance to get an invitation. Did it not occur to you that an uninvited guest is very liable to be noticed?”
“Didn’t I pass by you a dozen times undetected?” she said. “Do you think I can’t attend a ball without calling attention to myself?”
“Not this ball,” he said. “Unless you were planning to go disguised as a servant?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” she said.
“You’ll never get through the door,” he said. “If you do, you’ll be discovered immediately thereafter. If you’re lucky, they’ll merely throw you into the street. Madame de Chirac is not a woman to trifle with. If she’s not amused—and she rarely is—she’ll claim you’re an assassin.” The accusation might well be taken seriously, for France was unsettled, and one heard rumblings of another revolution. “At best you’ll end up in jail, and she’ll make sure no one remembers you’re there. At worst, you’ll make the personal acquaintance of Madame Guillotine. I don’t see the fun in that.”
“I won’t be discovered,” she said.
“You’re mad,” he said.
“The richest women in Paris will be there,” she said. “They’ll be wearing creations by Paris’s greatest modistes. It’s the greatest fashion competition of the year—a notch above Longchamp. I must see those dresses.”
“You can’t stand outside with the rest of the crowd and watch them go in?”
Her chin went up and her eyes narrowed. Emotion flashed in those dark depths, but when she spoke, her voice was as cool and as haughty as the comtesse’s. “Like the child with her nose pressed to the bakery shop window? I think not. I mean to examine those gowns closely as well as study the jewelry and coiffures. Such opportunities do not come along every day. I’ve been planning for it for weeks.”
She’d said she was a determined woman. He’d understood—to a point—her wishing to dress Clara. Dressing a duchess would be highly profitable. But to run this risk—she, an English nobody—with the Comtesse de Chirac, stupendously high in the instep and one of the most formidable women in Paris? And to do so at a time like this, when the city was in a state of ferment on account of an impending trial of some alleged traitors, and nobles like the comtesse saw assassins lurking in every shadowy corner?
It was a mad chance to take, merely for a little shop.
Yet Madame Noirot had announced her lunatic intention as cool as you please, with a gleam in her eye. And why should this surprise him? She was a gambler. This gamble, clearly, was of vast importance to her.
“You may have slipped into other parties unnoticed but you won’t get into this one,” he said.
“You think they’ll know I’m a nobody shopkeeper?” she said. “You think I can’t fool them? You think I can’t make them see what I want them to see?”
“Others, perhaps. Not Madame de Chirac. You haven’t a prayer.”
He thought perhaps she did have a prayer, but he was goading her, wanting to know what else she’d reveal of herself.
“Then I reckon you’ll simply have to see for yourself,” she said. “That is, I presume you’ve been invited?”
He glanced down at his diamond stickpin, winking up at him from the deep neckline of her red dress. Her bosom was rising and falling more rapidly than before.
“Oddly enough, I have,” he said. “In her view, we English are an inferior species, but for some reason, she makes an exception of me. It must be all my deceitful French names.”
“Then I’ll see you there.” She started to turn away.
