“Joanna—”
“You will be ruined, Alice. You know it as well as I do. The ton will not forgive a young woman who has kissed a duke in the middle of a ball and then left him days before their wedding. You know I love how much you care for everyone in your life. I love it. I have loved it since the first day I met you. But if you ruin your own life so that your sister can be happy, I will not forgive you. Do you hear me? I will not. You deserve to be happy too.”
Alice did not answer. She only put her gloved hand over Joanna’s bare one on the counter.
“Mrs. Hatcher,” Joanna called loudly, “Lady Alice and I require, in addition to the lace, a great many other things.”
“Of course, Lady Joanna.”
“We require chemises. Three. Two for travel and one for, ah?—”
“Joanna.”
“—for the wedding night.”
“Joanna.”
“And we require stockings. White silk. Six pairs. And we require—Mrs. Hatcher, you know what I mean. The proper things.”
Mrs. Hatcher, who knew exactly what Joanna meant, inclined her head. “My Lady.”
“To the back room. And Mrs. Hatcher?”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“If you would be so kind, pretend for a quarter of an hour that Lady Alice is not getting married to my brother.”
“Of course, My Lady.”
“It is the only way either of us will survive the next quarter of an hour.”
Mrs. Hatcher inclined her head a second time. She had heard a great many things in her shop over the years and proposed, as a rule, to comment on none of them. “My Lady.”
She led Alice, who was now scarlet at the throat and was beginning to be scarlet at the cheeks, through a small, paneled door at the back of the shop.
Joanna remained at the counter where Alice assumed she meant to look at the lace some more and not be subjected to whatever Mrs. Hatcher was going to subject Alice to.
The paneled door closed. The back room was smaller and warmer than the front with a long mirror on one wall, a screen in the corner, and a low chest at the foot of the screen. Mrs. Hatcher, whose soft, efficient hands had been dressing brides for half her life, lifted a folded bundle from the chest and laid it out across a small velvet stool.
Alice looked at it. She looked at it for some time.
“Mrs. Hatcher.”
“My Lady?”
“This is…”
“For the wedding night, My Lady.”
“There is…”
“There is not a great deal of it, no, My Lady.”
“I see.”
“It is the fashion among ladies who have particularly admiring husbands.”
Alice did not say anything for a moment. Before this morning, she had imagined that she had a fairly clear sense of what a respectable young lady wore to her wedding night. She had imagined a nightgown. She had imagined, in particular, a long nightgown of a sober white linen, like the one her mother had given her at sixteen with the instruction that she wear it when she had a chill.
