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The Society picked them up from the gutter—if they were willing to be removed from that location—and did everything possible to make them fit for employment. With practice, diligence, and good eyesight, most girls would learn to sew straight, tiny stitches at great speed, and they could be placed as seamstresses. Some, though, had the potential to rise higher—for instance, to embroider fine muslins, silks, linens, wools, and these materials’ numerous combinations. Perhaps one or two might even possess the wherewithal to rise to become successful milliners or dressmakers.
Bridget was fifteen years old. An unsuccessful flower seller, she had appeared on the Society’s doorstep after being assaulted and robbed who knew how many times, thanks to her refusing assorted pimps’ protection. She had been completely illiterate. She had turned out to be one of the most diligent students and an especially gifted embroiderer. In the display cases, her work always stood out.
Outside the building, so, unfortunately, did her looks.
“I can tell you what was in his mind,” Clara said. “He wasn’t thinking much beyond the fact of your being pretty and what males think when they see pretty girls.”
Lady Clara Fairfax ought to know. Twenty-two years old as of yesterday, she was the most beautiful and sought-after girl in London, and according to some, in all of England.
Small Drawing Room of Warford House
Monday 31 August 1835
Clara did not run screaming from the room. A lady didn’t run screaming from anywhere unless her life was in immediate danger.
This was simply another marriage proposal.
The Season was over. Almack’s had held its last assembly at the end of July. Most of Society had gone to the country. Yet her family remained in London because her father, the Marquess of Warford, never left before Parliament rose, and Parliament still sat.
And so her beaux lingered in London. For some reason—either they’d joined a conspiracy or had made her the subject of wagers in White’s betting book—they seemed to be proposing on a biweekly schedule. They were beginning to wear on Clara’s nerves.
Today was Lord Herringstone’s turn. He said he loved her. They all said so with varying degrees of fervor. But being an intelligent girl who read more than she ought to, Clara was sure that he, like the others, merely wanted to claim the most fashionable girl in London for his own.
She’d inherited the classic Fairfax looks—pale gold hair, clear blue eyes, and skin that seemed to have been poured like cream over an artistically sculpted face. The world agreed that in her these traits had reached the very acme and pitch of perfection. So had her figure, a model for one of those Greek or Roman goddess statues, according to her numerous swains.
Her single flaw—on the outside, that is—the tiny chip in her left front tooth, only made her human and thus, somehow, more perfect.
She was like a thoroughbred everybody wanted to own.
Or the latest style of dashing vehicle.
Her beauty surrounded her like a great stone wall. Men couldn’t see above, beyond, or through it. They certainly couldn’t think past it.
This was because men only looked at women. They didn’t listen to women, especially beautiful women.
When beautiful women talked, men merely made a greater pretense of listening. After all, everybody knew that women did not really have brains.
Clara wondered what women were imagined to have in their skulls in place of brains or what men thought women did their pitiful excuse for thinking with . . .
“ . . . if you would do me the inestimable honor of becoming my wife.”
She came back to the present and said no, as she always did, kindly and courteously, because she’d been rigorously trained in ladyship. Moreover, she truly liked Lord Herringstone. He’d written odes to her, and they were witty and scanned well. He was amusing and a good dancer and reasonably intelligent.
So were dozens of other men.
She liked them, most of them.
But they had no idea who she was and did not try to find out.
Perhaps it was quixotic of her, but she wanted more than that.
He looked disappointed. Yet he’d survive, she knew. He’d find another woman he would look at and not listen to, but that woman wouldn’t be so unrealistic as to expect him to. They’d wed and rub along together somehow or other, like everybody else.
And one of these days Clara would give up hoping for more. One of these days, she would have to say yes.
“Either that,” she muttered, “or become an eccentric and run away to Egypt or India.”
“My lady?”
Clara looked up. Her lady’s maid, Davis, had been standing in the corridor by the door during the marriage proposal. Though the door stood open, though any number of large footmen lurked in Warford House’s corridors, and though none of Clara’s infatuated swains would dream of uttering a cross word to her, let alone attempt to harm her, Davis remained ever vigilant. People said Davis looked like a bulldog, but looks, Clara very well knew, weren’t everything. Not many years older than her charge, Davis had been hired immediately after one of Clara’s many childhood contretemps, this time at Vauxhall. She protected Clara from fractures, concussions, drowning, and—most important to Mama—Clara’s becoming A Complete Hoyden.
“Where is Mama?”
Her mother usually entered close on the heels of rejected swains to wonder Where She’d Gone Wrong with her eldest daughter.
“Her ladyship is in bed with a sick headache,” Davis said.
This was probably because she’d had a visit earlier from her poisonous friend Lady Bartham.
“Let’s go out,” Clara said.
“Yes, my lady.”
“To the girls,” Clara said. A visit to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females would give her a chance to do some good instead of brooding about men. “Please order my cabriolet.”
Clara drove herself whenever possible, partly to reduce servants’ spying and tattling, but mainly to feel she was in command of something, even if it was one horse pulling a small, two-wheeled vehicle. At least it was a dashing vehicle. Her eldest brother, Harry, the Earl of Longmore, had bought it for her.
“We’ll stop on the way and buy some trinkets for the girls.” She glanced down at herself. “But I can’t go in this. They must see me in my finest finery.”
When a proposal could not be avoided, she dressed as unflatteringly as she dared, to make her rejection sting less.
The girls were another matter. The Milliners’ Society’s founders were London’s premier modistes, the proprietresses of Maison Noirot. They made Lady Clara’s clothes, and they had taught her that dress was a form of art and a form of manipulation and a language in itself. Twice they had saved her from what would have been catastrophic marriages.
And so, for their girls, she dressed to inspire.
Charing Cross
A short time later
Look out! Are you blind? Get out of the way!”
Clara hadn’t time to see what she was in the way of when an arm snaked about her waist and yanked her back from the curb. Then she saw the black and yellow gig hurtling toward her.
At the last minute, it swerved away, toward the watermen and boys clustered about the statue of King Charles I. Then once more it veered abruptly off course. It nicked a passing omnibus, struck a limping dog, and swung into St. Martin’s Lane, leaving pandemonium in its wake.
Some inches above her head—and plainly audible above the bystanders’ shouts and shrieks and the noise of carriages, horses, and dogs—a deep, cultivated voice uttered an oath. The muscular arm came away from her waist and the arm’s owner stepped back a pace. She looked up at him, more up than she was accustomed to.
His face seemed familiar, though her brain couldn’t find a name to attach to it. Under h
is hat brim, a single black curl fell against his right temple. Below the dark, sharply angled eyebrows, a pair of cool grey eyes regarded her. Her own gaze moved swiftly from his uncomfortably sharp scrutiny down his long nose and firmly chiseled mouth and chin.
The day was warm, but the warmth she felt started on the inside.
