AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ehind. If it rained—as he assured his lordship it would surely do—his lordship would need help raising the curricle’s hood.
Well, then, they’d simply have to get wet, Longmore decided. While convenient for minding horses and helping one wrestle temperamental hoods, on the present occasion a groom would be very much in the way.
Longmore put the watch away and reverted to staring at the shop door. She’d told him to collect her, not at Maison Noirot, but at the ribbon shop farther down St. James’s Street, near St. James’s Palace. To Allay Suspicion.
She was hilarious.
“Cousin?” said a familiar female voice.
He blinked. It was Sophy’s voice and it wasn’t. He knew this had to be her but his eyes denied it. The woman standing on the pavement next to his carriage was so nondescript that he’d probably been looking straight at her without actually seeing her.
The murky brown cloak concealed her shape. The muddy green bonnet and lace cap underneath concealed most of her hair. What was visible was limp, dull, and stringy. She’d sprouted a mole to one side of her perfect nose. And on that nose she’d planted a pair of tinted spectacles, which dulled her brilliant blue eyes to cloudy grey.
He was aware of his jaw dropping. He quickly collected himself. “There you are,” he said.
“You’d have seen me sooner if you hadn’t been woolgathering,” she said, as shrewish as Gladys—and in the same graceless accents. She climbed up into the vehicle as clumsily as his cousin would have done.
If he didn’t know better, he’d have been sure this was his cousin, playing a trick on him.
But Cousin Gladys didn’t play tricks. She had no imagination.
“How did you do it?” he said. “You can’t have met her. She hasn’t left Lancashire in ages.”
“Lady Clara is a fair mimic,” she said, “and it was easy enough to classify the type. We do that, you know: We size up a woman when she walks into the shop. Broadly speaking, they tend to fall into certain categories.”
“Gladys is a type? I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always thought her one of a kind, and that one more than sufficient.”
He gave his horses leave to walk on, then he had to keep his attention on them. Though he’d driven them through Hyde Park to work off their morning high spirits, they were still excitable. Apparently they were as little used as he was to traveling the shopping streets in the early hours with ordinary folk. Whatever the reason, they were looking for trouble: They tried to lunge at other vehicles, run onto the pavement, take aim at passing pedestrians, and bite any other horses who looked at them the wrong way.
Normally, he’d find this entertaining.
Today it was inconvenient. He had a campaign to conduct with the woman beside him, and she was tricky and he needed his wits about him. At present, however, he had to concentrate his wits on getting them to Piccadilly alive. Then he had to wrestle his way through the great knot of traffic approaching the quadrant into Regent Street.
“What the devil are all these people doing out in the streets at the crack of dawn?” he said.
“They heard the Earl of Longmore would be up and about before noon,” she said. “I believe they mean to mark the event with illuminations and fireworks.”
He’d been driving since childhood, and he couldn’t remember when last he’d had to work so hard at it.
“I think you’re frightening the horses,” he said.
“I think they’re not used to busy streets in daylight,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the mole that’s bothering them,” he said. Or maybe it was her scent. It wasn’t Gladys’s. This was so faint as to be more of an awareness than a fragrance: Woman and jasmine and something else. Some kind of herb or greenery.
No, the scent wasn’t bothering the horses. It was getting him into a lather he couldn’t do anything about at the moment. That wasn’t the only disturbance. He was extremely aware of her swollen skirts brushing against his trouser leg, and he could hear the petticoats rustle under the skirts. It was as clear as clear to him, above the street’s cacophony of animals, vehicles, people.
He was primed for tackling her and he couldn’t, and the horses sensed the agitation.
It was so ridiculous he laughed.
“What is it?” she said.
He glanced at her. “You,” he said. “And me, up at this hour to drive to a dressmaker’s shop.”
“I know you rise before noon on occasion,” she said.
“Not to shop,” he said.
“No. For a race. A boxing match. A wrestling match. A horse auction. I’m not sure I can offer equal excitement.”
“I expect it’ll be exciting enough when they find you out,” he said. “Which they’re bound to do. You’ll need to get undressed to get measured. What if the mole falls off while you’re taking off your clothes? What if your spectacles get tangled in your wig?”
“I’ve put on several extra layers of clothing,” she said. “I don’t plan to allow them to get beyond the first one or two. And it isn’t a wig, by the way. I put an egg mixture in my hair. People say it leaves a shine after you wash it out, but it does the opposite.”
It would be quite a job, washing her hair. It was thick and curly, and unless she added false pieces to it, as some women did, it must be long. To her waist? He saw long, golden hair streaming down a bare, silken back.
There was something to look forward to.
“You promised me bullies,” he said. “I was looking forward to the fight. It’s the only thing that got me out of bed. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since anybody did me the courtesy of hitting back?”
“If I were a gentleman, and I saw you coming at me with fists up, I’d run in the other direction,” she said.
“Bullies aren’t gentlemen,” he said. “They won’t run.”
“If you get desperately bored, you can always pick a fight,” she said.
“If they exist,” he said. “I’ve never heard of hired ruffians in a dressmaking shop.”
“You’ve never noticed because you never think about how a shop is run,” she said. “You only notice whether the service is good or bad. But they can be useful in an all-woman shop. One has to deal with drunken men knocking over things or pawing the seamstresses. But the worst for us is a pack of thieves. They’ll come in small groups of twos and threes, all dressed respectably and seeming not to be together. One or two will keep the shopkeepers busy while the others fill their pockets. They’ve special pockets sewn into their clothes. They’re very quick. You’d be amazed at how much they can make off with if you look away, even for a second.”
“Where do you hide the muscled fellows who work for you, then?” he said.
“We don’t need ruffians,” she said. “We started in Paris, you know, and it was a family business, so we started young. Let me see. I think Marcelline was nine, so I was about seven or eight, and Leonie was six. When you’re absorbed in a trade from childhood, every aspect of it becomes instinctive. Drunks, thieves, men who think milliners’ shops are brothels—we’re perfectly capable of dealing with such matters ourselves.”
He remembered the hard look that had flashed across her face so briefly, when she’d told him she’d dealt with messy situations. He hadn’t time to pursue that train of thought, though. As they were turning into Oxford Street, two boys ran out in front of the curricle. Swearing violently, Longmore turned his pair aside an instant before they could trample the children.
His heart pounded. A moment’s delay or distraction, and the brats could have been killed. “Look where you’re going, you confounded idiots!” he roared above the neighing horses and the other drivers’ shouted comments.
“Ow, you ugly bitch!” a voice shrieked close to his ear. “Let go of me, you sodding sow!”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Sophy said.
Longmore glanced that way.
A ragged boy half hung over the back of the seat. Sophy had him by the arm, and she was regarding him with amuseme
nt.
Longmore could spare them only a glance. His team and the traffic wanted all his attention. “What the devil?” he said. “Where did he come from?”
“Nowhere!” the boy snarled. He wriggled furiously, to no avail. “I wasn’t doing nothing, only getting a free ride in back here, and the goggle-eyed mort tried to take my arm off.”
This, at least, was what Longmore presumed he said. The Cockney accent was almost impenetrable. Nothing was “nuffin,” and aitches were dropped from and attached to the wrong words, and some of the vowels seemed to have arrived from another planet.
“And you were trying to keep your hand warm in the gentleman’s pocket?” she said.
Longmore choked back laughter.
“I never went near his pocket! Do I look like I’m dicked in the nob?”
“Far from it,” Sophy said. “You’re a clever one, and quick, too.”
“Not quick enough,” the boy muttered.
“I wish you could have seen it, Cousin,” she said. “The two who ran in front were meant to distract you while this one jumped on and did his job. The little devil almost got by me. It took him two seconds to leap onto the groom’s place. Probably he would have wanted only another two to get your pocket watch—perhaps your seals and handkerchief as well—while you had both hands busy with the horses. I daresay he thought I was a gently bred female who’d only stare or scream helplessly while he collected his booty and got away.”
She reverted to the boy. “Next time, my lad, I advise you to make sure there’s only one person in the vehicle.”
Next time?
Longmore nearly ran down a pie seller.
“What next time?” he said. “We’re making a detour to the nearest police office, and leaving him to them.”
The boy let loose a stream of stunning oaths and struggled wildly. But Sophy must have tightened her hold or done something painful, because he stopped abruptly, and started whimpering that his arm was broken.
