The street outside the milliner’s shop hissed with wheels and rain, even though the sky had spent its storm hours ago. London never dried; it merely rearranged its damp. Christine adjusted her grip on the walking stick and stepped down from the hired carriage while Blanche Waldron fluttered beside her like a small, determined flag.
“Lean on me if you must,” Blanche said, “or on the stick, if you insist on being picturesque.”
“I insist on neither,” Christine answered, though she did lean lightly on the polished walnut. A bruise had risen on her ankle from the lane at Duxworth. “We shall be quick.”
“You say that in every shop,” Blanche murmured, smiling as if into a confidence, “then you discover a bolt of ribbon that speaks to you, and I resign myself to solitude by upholstery. I shall be friendless, I tell you, abandoned forever in favor of textiles!”
The bell over the door chimed. Inside, the air smelled of starch and violets. Rows of bonnets tilted their brims like gossiping ladies. Behind the counter stood the proprietress, a woman with a nose like a knitting needle and two shopgirls whose faces arranged themselves into politeness with the speed of a fan snapping open. The proprietress took in the cane, the travel-dust, the modest pelisse, and smiled the way a cat might smile upon a saucer of milk that wasn’t for it.
“Good afternoon,” Christine said, “we have come from Duskwood to inspect samples for an engagement ball. Lantern ribbon, cornice drapery, and something in dove-grey silk to soften oak.”
At Duskwood, the shopgirls’ eyes flared. The proprietress’s smile sharpened.
“Indeed,” she said. “Your Household has particular tastes, I am told. What one might call ‘rustic’.”
Blanche’s lashes fluttered. “What one might call charming,” she corrected. “Now, be so kind as to show my friend the ribbon with the narrow hemstitch. Her Grace has a mind to festoon an entire county.”
“Not quite the entire county,” Christine said mildly, moving to the table where swatches lay in sober rows, “only the bits that will come when invited. Lord knows I have precious few opportunities to glorify in adornments before now.”
The proprietress laid out the ribbons with fingertips that avoided contact, naming prices. Christine asked questions, touched and weighed, calculated how many yards of blue would do for the stairs, and whether the yellow looked like sunlight or jaundice.
She was used to the dance. How shopkeepers tested, how they softened when the coin appeared. But dealing with greengrocers and butchers was different from this breed of shopkeeper.
“And for the lanterns?” she asked.
The woman’s lips thinned. “For the lanterns,” she echoed, as if Christine had requested cloth to wrap a scandal, “yes, well, these lengths might serve. I would not advise anything too refined. Smoke will have its way even with good ribbon.”
“We shall take the smoke and the risk both. Send thirty yards of blue, twenty of cream, to Duskwood. I will have our steward settle accounts.”
Outside, the rain had begun again, very fine, embroidered almost invisibly upon the air. Blanche took Christine’s arm as they stepped out.
“That one would curdle milk by breathing in its general direction,” she said cheerfully. “Forget her. We have a linen-draper to terrify.”
They did not terrify him. The linen-draper—broad, pink, with a neckcloth—let them examine damask and lawn, listened with polite ears to the description of an outdoor supper, and then found himself suddenly engaged with a gentleman who had strolled in and wanted thirty yards of Irish on the instant. He did not say that ladies come after coin, but his actions showed it, and when he returned, he looked through Christine as if he had nearly remembered where he had seen her scrub a floor.
“We require tablecloths,” Christine said, keeping her voice even. “For three trestles and two small tables, and napkins.”
“Very pretty,” said the draper, “very lofty.” He turned the pages of his order book too quickly to read. “And who exactly is to be responsible for repayment if the weather turns and the ball is… deferred?”
“Duskwood,” Christine said, “naturally.”
He glanced at the cane, at her hem, mud spattered by London’s thousand wheels, and made a small, dismissive noise in his throat.
“Naturally.”
They left without ordering.
“Another saint of commerce,” Blanche said, linking arms. “We shall petition Rome.”
“I do not mind indifference,” Christine said. “Indifference is a blanket, scratchy, but warm. This is different.”
She steered them into a narrow lane where a stationer kept a window full of copperplate labels for favors and cards.
“Let us try a man who sells pretty words. He should like us.”
He did not like them. He liked Blanche for two minutes and three compliments, and then he liked a lady who entered on the arm of a Viscount even better. He promised samples. Christine, suppressing a laugh entirely void of amusement, let Blanche tug her into a confectioner’s for fortification. The sugar smell curled around them like a memory of childhood. The girl behind the counter wore a ribbon so pink it ought to have been illegal.
“A dozen marchpane roses,” Blanche announced, “and two of those… alarming…clouds.”
