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Ah, yes. Disarming honesty. That was the best tack with this one. Leave it to hardheaded Leonie to strike the right note when her elder sister was temporarily unhinged.
“My sister is right,” said Marcelline. “It’s completely incomprehensible to persons of rank. You never think of money. We think of little else.”
“Well, then, if it is money,” said Lady Clara, “I shall give you as much as ever you want, if only you would go away, without letting him find out, to a place where he can’t find you.”
“This is very dramatic,” said Marcelline.
“Brandy is definitely called for,” said Sophy, entering with the Noirots’ sovereign remedy for all troubles. The brandy glowed within a small crystal decanter that sat, along with a matching glass, on a pretty tray. There she’d set out a delectable offering of biscuits, cakes, and cheese. Some customers spent hours in the shop, and one must be prepared to feed them—and ply them with drink, if necessary.
Lady Clara sipped her brandy without blinking and with obvious appreciation. Given the early hour, this small gesture went a great way in increasing the Noirot sisters’ respect for her—which was highly inconvenient, when they were all trying to maintain a coldly professional and mercenary detachment.
“I know these things are always exaggerated,” she said. “But I know as well that there’s truth in the tales. I’ve seen with my own eyes. He’s changed.”
“With respect, your ladyship has not seen the gentleman for three years,” Leonie said. “Men change. They’re the most changeable creatures.”
“He’s moody and bored and remote,” said her ladyship. “No matter where he is, he’s absent. The only time he was present, truly present, was when we came here. I saw.” She waved her glass at Marcelline. “I saw the way he looked at you, Mrs. Noirot. And so what must I think, when I hear about a dark adventuress who got her hooks into the D—into a certain gentleman. Or that he had pursued this exotic at the opera, at Longchamp, at the gaming hells—with half the world as witness—before he so far took leave of his reason as to bring this object of his obsession—”
“This sounds like something I could have written,” Sophy murmured.
“—bring his obsession to the Comtesse de Chirac’s annual ball. And this was not because his grace thought it a great joke to bring her, but because his—his lover—his paramour had threatened to kill herself if he didn’t.”
“Killherself?” all three sisters echoed. They looked at one another. Their eyebrows went up a barely perceptible degree. This was the only outward sign of their incredulity—this and Leonie’s having to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
“Nor was this the first time this woman had made threats,” Lady Clara went on. “I heard of violent scenes all over Paris, culminating in a duel with the Marquis d’Émilien. This shocked even the most jaded of jaded Parisians. Shortly after grievously wounding the marquis in the Bois de Boulogne, the love-maddened gentleman pursued the young woman from Paris in the dead of night. In the course of this pursuit, he threatened the British consul and every other official he encountered. He was so deranged, it appears, that he believed they were deliberately obstructing his departure from France.”
They were all accustomed to playing cards. This was why Sophy and Leonie did not fall down laughing, and why Marcelline, who was growing increasingly exasperated, had no trouble maintaining her politely interested expression. As though she hadn’t enough problems, with Dowdy actively working to destroy her business. Now Marcelline was to be torn to pieces by the scandalmongers, merely because some people had seen what looked like flirtation! It was absurd—but then, the high ranks were not famous for their rationality.
She ought to be amused, but she was alarmed. Rumors alone could destroy her business. Though it wasn’t hard to seem unmoved outwardly, she was having trouble deciding what to say.
Leonie, who didn’t have her problems, had no such difficulty. “Clearly, members of the higher orders cannot count,” she said. “If they would only count the number of days my sister had been in Paris—let alone the date when she first met the gentleman—they’d realize this is utter nonsense. Their first encounter occurred on the fourteenth of this month. I remember the date, because it headed the letter she wrote to us the same night, announcing the fact. That leaves the time from the night of the fourteenth to the early morning of the seventeenth, when my sister left Paris. How, I ask your ladyship, could all these events occur in little more than two full days?”
Leave it to Leonie to reduce emotion to numbers, Marcelline thought. And how little those numbers seemed. A few days. That was all the time Clevedon had needed to damage Marcelline’s brain and jab thorns into her heart and plant dreams in her mind, so that she was uneasy by day and by night.
She gathered her wits. “Meanwhile he’d had so many months to live among the Parisians,” she said. “They’re the ones you ought to blame, if you want scapegoats. You’ve never been to Paris, I believe?”
“Not yet,” said Lady Clara.
“Then you’ve no notion how different it is from London.”
“I know what Paris is like,” said Lady Clara. “Cleve— The gentleman wrote to me faithfully—until, that is, he met you. It’s no good denying it. When I asked him why he hadn’t written—I could see he had not broken his arm—he told me what had happened.”
“And what, precisely, was that?” Marcelline said. “It can’t have been an incriminating tale. Last week you accompanied him here in cheerful spirits. You didn’t look at all as though you wanted to kill him. Or me.”
“He told me he’d met a vastly provoking dressmaker,” Lady Clara said. “But he’s a man, and as articulate as he can be in letters, his vocabulary, in matters of emotion, is less than clear. What he meant—and pray don’t confuse me with an idiot, as you know it perfectly well—what he meant was that Mrs. Noirot was provocative. What he meant was, he was fixed on her.”
As though he did nothing to fix me on him, Marcelline thought. As though he’s a victim of my wiles—or demonic powers, more like it.
“I asked him directly whether he was infatuated,” Lady Clara continued, “and he laughed and said that seemed the likeliest explanation.”
Business, Marcelline reminded herself. This was business. This was the customer she’d wanted. It was trying to lure Lady Clara into her shop that had led Marcelline into so much trouble. And here the lady was. In the shop.
She said, “How could he help it? Only look at me.”
She gestured in the graceful way she so often did, her hand sweeping downward from her neckline.
Lady Clara looked, truly looked, finally, at what Marcelline was wearing.
Pink and green, one of her favorite color combinations, this time in silk batiste, with a deeply plunging pelerine of the same material, over gossamer puffed sleeves and a delicately pleated chemisette.
