AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I come here because nothing must do, Mother says, but I must see for myself what my friend is about,” Longmore went on. “And what do I discover when I arrive? It turns out that the newspapers, not to mention my mother, have sadly understated the case. I find that my friend has settled three unwed women, not in a discreet cottage in Kensington, but in his ancestral home! And along with them another half dozen females—and the servants sweating like coal-carriers, fetching and carrying for shopkeepers! With my own eyes I saw Halliday carrying what looked to be a laundry basket. A laundry basket!”
The house steward oversaw the household. He kept his master’s books and acted as his secretary. He gave orders. He did not sully his hands with fetching and carrying. If he’d carried a basket, then Halliday was doing it for his own amusement—or as an excuse to appease his curiosity about the strangers in their midst.
Longmore was still ranting. “I know you like to play with convention,” he said, “but this— Plague take it, words fail me! Never mind my mother, how am I to look my sister in the eye?”
“Well, that’s amusing,” Clevedon said.
“Amusing?”
“Considering the women are here still only because of your sister,” Clevedon said. “They engaged to make a dress for Clara for this evening, and they seem to believe that nothing—acts of God or man, plague, pestilence, flood, famine, or fire—excuses them from keeping their promise. It is very curious. They seem to view a promise to make a dress in the same uncompromising light you and I would view a debt of honor.”
“The dress be damned,” Longmore said. “Have you been eating opium? Drinking absinthe? Contracted a fever? The clap, perchance? I understand it goes to the brain. That dressmaker—”
“Which one do you mean?” Clevedon said. “There are three of them.”
“Don’t play with me,” Longmore snapped. “By God, you’re enough to try the patience of all the saints and martyrs combined. You’ll drive me to call you out. I will not let you make a fool of my sister. You will not—”
He broke off because the door flew open and Miss Sophia hurried into the room. “Your grace, I wonder—”
She stopped short, apparently noticing Longmore belatedly. Or maybe she’d noticed the instant she came through the door, if not before. Clevedon suspected that both sisters were as well supplied with guile as Noirot. For all he knew, Miss Sophia had interrupted on purpose. They’d probably heard Longmore at the other end of the house.
In any case, he would have been hard for her to miss, not only because he was as tall as Clevedon but also because he was standing in her way.
But maybe she’d mistaken him for Clevedon. People did sometimes, from the back or from a distance. They were both large dark-haired men, though Longmore dressed more carelessly.
Whatever the reason, she appeared surprised and stopped short. “I do beg your pardon,” she said. “How rude of me to burst in.”
“Not at all,” Clevedon said. “I told you not to stand on ceremony with me. We haven’t time for ceremony. This is only my friend—or perhaps former friend—Lord Longmore. Longmore, though you don’t deserve it, I’ll allow you to meet Miss Noirot, one of our esteemed dressmakers.”
Longmore, meanwhile, who’d spun around at her abrupt entrance, had not taken his eyes off her. For a moment he appeared dumbstruck. Then he bowed. “Miss Noirot.”
“My lord.” She curtseyed.
And, oh, it was one of those curtsies, not precisely like Noirot’s, but something equally impressive in its own way.
Longmore’s black eyes widened.
“What is it, then?” Clevedon said.
Sophia’s blue gaze, suspiciously innocent, came back to him. “It’s about the notice we’re putting in the papers, your grace. I write these all the time, and you would think it’d give me no trouble at all, but I continue to struggle, in spite of having quiet.”
She’d heard, Clevedon thought. She’d heard Longmore raging, and she’d stepped in. She was the one who’d written the account for the papers of the famous gown Noirot had worn. She was the one in charge of turning difficulties and scandal to the shop’s advantage.
“It’s the shock,” Clevedon said, playing along. “You can’t expect to recover overnight, especially when everything is in a turmoil.”
“To be sure, I can’t judge my own prose,” she said. “Will you give me your opinion?” She shot a glance at Longmore. “If his lordship would pardon the intrusion.”
Longmore stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.
“ ‘Mrs. Noirot begs leave to inform her friends and the public in general,’ ” she read, “ ‘that she intends re-opening her showrooms very shortly, with a new and elegant assortment of millinery and dresses, in the first style of fashion, on reasonable terms—’ ”
“Leave out ‘reasonable terms,’ ” Clevedon cut in. “Economies matter to the middling classes. If you want the custom of my friends’ ladies, it’s better to be unreasonable. If it isn’t expensive, they won’t value it.”
She nodded. “There, you see? Marcelline would have caught that—but I daren’t interrupt her. If Lady Clara’s dress isn’t finished on time, my sister will be devastated.”
Clevedon saw Longmore shoot the dressmaker a darkling look from under his thick black eyebrows. “If my mother lets her wear the dress,” he muttered.
Blue eyes wide, Sophia turned fully toward him. “Not let her wear the dress? You can’t be serious. My sister is killing herself to finish that dress.”
