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“It seemed stupid to distract you with ordinary household matters,” he went on. “As it was, you were undertaking the impossible. But that’s so like you, to undertake the impossible. Clara’s gown. Stalking me in Paris. Who on earth would think to do such a thing? Who on earth could imagine she’d succeed? If you had asked my opinion, I should have told you it was a harebrained scheme—”
“And you’d be right,” she said. “It was a mad scheme.”
“But it succeeded.”
“Yes. Yes, it did.”
Except for one slight miscalculation. She felt her eyes filling. She blinked and forced a smile. “I’m happy,” she said. “I couldn’t be happier. Everything I wanted.” She gestured. “And more. A fine shop in St. James’s Street. Scope for my imagination, my ambition.”
He looked about him. “I’m not sure it’s big enough. I’m not sure St. Paul’s Cathedral would be big enough to contain your ambition. Are there bounds to your ambition? Ordinary, mortal bounds, I mean?”
He knew her so well. She laughed. It hurt to laugh, but she did it.
He turned sharply toward her. “Noirot?”
“I was only thinking,” she said. “It’s all turned out as I’d imagined. No, better than I’d supposed. And yet ... Oh, what a joke.”
She shook her head and moved away and sat on a chair and folded her hands and stared at the floor, at the rug he’d chosen. Crimson poppies intertwined among black tendrils and leaves on a background of pale gold ... with a subtle pink undertone.
The colors of the dress she’d worn to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball.
Then she realized: This home he’d created for them was his goodbye gift.
How ironic. How fitting.
She’d hunted him and she’d caught him and she’d got what she’d set out to get.
And she’d bollixed it up, after all.
What a joke.
She’d fallen in love.
And he was saying goodbye, in the time-honored fashion of men of his kind, with an extravagant gift.
“Noirot, are you unwell? It’s been a very long day, and we’re both overwrought, I daresay. It’s no small strain, even for you, trying to do the impossible—all this racing from one place to the next, buying, frantically buying. And I—shopping with a woman—it’s possible my sensibilities will never recover from the shock.”
She looked up at him.
They had no future.
Given who he was and what he was, she couldn’t be anything to him but a mistress. And that she couldn’t be. It wasn’t because of moral scruples. She barely understood what those were. It was for business reasons, for the business that supported her family, the business she loved, the great passion of her life.
She could keep her feelings to herself. She could suffer in silence. She could say thank you and goodbye, and really, there was nothing else to do.
The trouble was, being who she was and what she was, noble sacrifice was out of the question.
And the real trouble was, she loved him.
And so she made her plan, quickly. She saw it all at once in her mind’s eye, the way she saw all of her plans. She saw what she needed to do, the only thing to do.
She stood and walked to the bed and pointed. “I want you to sit there,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
She untied her bonnet ribbons.
“Noirot, maybe you failed to understand why I was in so great a hurry to have you out of my house,” he said. “I don’t care about talk, if it concerns only me. But you know the talk will hurt someone else.”
