She had not imagined the thing Mrs. Hatcher had just laid out across the velvet stool. She had not imagined that the owner ofa respectable shop on Bond Street would, at the request of her future sister-in-law, produce such a thing.
She put her hand on it. The fabric was a thin pale silk that had been worked at the neck and the hem with fine cream ribbon. There was very little of it. It would, Alice estimated, cover her from a little above the bosom to a little above the knees, and it would do this with deliberate inattention which was the entire point of the garment.
“Mrs. Hatcher.”
“My Lady.”
“I shall try it on.”
“Of course, My Lady.”
Mrs. Hatcher withdrew behind the screen for the small interval required to leave Alice with her own buttons.
Alice removed her morning dress and then her stays. Now left in her chemise and her stockings and the very particular nerves that came upon a respectable young woman of five-and-twenty contemplating for the first time the reality of a wedding night, she lifted the pale silk over her head and pulled it down.
It settled.
It settled at the bosom and the hip and the thigh in the places Mrs. Hatcher had clearly designed it to settle, and Alice, looking at herself in the long mirror, felt something she had never felt in front of her own reflection.
In her twenty-five years, she had looked at herself in a great many mirrors. She had looked at herself in the small mirror above her dressing table while her maid had pinned her hair. She had looked at herself in the long mirror at home while her mother had pulled at a stitch. She had looked at herself in the gilt mirror at Madame Lavalle’s while a seamstress had marked the hem of a ballgown. In each of those mirrors, she had been, in her opinion, a young woman of moderate height and ordinary features and reasonably tidy hair who would on her better days pass for handsome.
This morning, she did not look like that woman.
This morning, she looked like a woman a man might, in the particular wording Cassian had used in the orangery four days ago, want to mark as his.
She did not know what to do with this knowledge.
She put her hand on her throat and turned away from the mirror.
“Mrs. Hatcher,” she said quietly, “I shall take this one.”
“Very good, My Lady.”
“And several others if you have them.”
“I have several others, My Lady.”
“Then several others.”
“Yes, My Lady.”
She was about to put her morning dress back on when the small bell at the front of the shop rang, and a deep voice that she would have recognized in her sleep said something to Mrs. Hatcher’s apprentice in the front room.
Alice went very still.
She heard Joanna’s voice, raised slightly in surprise. She heard the deep voice again. Then she heard Mrs. Hatcher say, “Oh, Lady Joanna, I shall tell him,” in a tone that conveyed no such intention.
Then the deep voice said something else very quietly, and the door of the back room opened.
It was, of course, Cassian.
CHAPTER 19
At first, he did not say anything.
He stood in the doorway of the back room, with his hat in his hand and his coat still on his shoulders and the street dust still on the toes of his boots, and looked at her.
He looked at her steadily and slowly and in a particular silence. When he had walked into the shop one minute ago, he had known what he was about to see. He was now obliged to do some quick interior rearrangement on the subject.
