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The nervous energy of the shop staff didn’t dissipate with Enzo’s entrance. Indeed, the whole haberdashery—as had the tailor’s—seemed on tenterhooks at his arrival. Apprentices peered around corners to catch a glimpse before ducking back into the shadows just as soon as Fiore caught them in the corner of his eye.
Once inside the parlor done up in pink and white with gold trim, matters progressed much as they had at the tailor’s. Though this time Fiore kept his clothes on. Measuring for a hat went far more swiftly than measuring for a full suit, as there was but one body part to keep in proportion. Then there were enquiries regarding what Fiore wanted the hat to look like. Or rather, enquiries the haberdasher made to Enzo, who then turned to Fiore for the answer and did so in an increasingly pointed fashion with every repetition, until at last the haberdasher took the hint and lowered herself to speak directly to a scarlet-sashed courtesan.
Fiore accepted all this with a bland pasted-on smile. In truth he had few opinions on how the thing ought to look. He didn’t oft bother with a hat, and when he did he wore a round cap not unlike Artemisia’s, as much to play into his own wistful artistic daydreams as to keep warm. He’d certainly never attempted a tricorn, much less one done up with feathers and trim like Enzo’s. But he delighted in the opportunity to dress up for an enchanted occasion, and a tricorn would suit best to blend into a crowd of aristocrats. Beyond that he merely wanted it to match his suit. Which ought to prove easy enough, as Enzo had arrived with a leather portfolio provided by the tailor and filled with copies of his sketches and swatches of the suit fabric and trim. This they left with the haberdasher, who promised to delight them with her work within the fortnight.
“Are they always so anxious to please?” Fiore asked Enzo as they departed the shop arm-in-arm. He kept his tone light and teasing though his curiosity remained genuine.
Enzo took rather longer to answer him than Fiore thought the question warranted. When at last he spoke, he did so in a bashful manner. “They’re always deferential. But I think I may have put them on edge today.”
Fiore’s heart plummeted. Of course. Enzo had never brought a courtesan into their shop before. And the haberdasher, unable to reveal to the duke himself how this had insulted her, had covered over her indignation with an excess of flattery. Fiore worked to keep his tone light and airy even as he asked a question he already knew the answer to. “How so?”
Enzo inclined his head. “I’ve never met them in the shop before. Usually they come to Ca’ Scaevola.”
“Oh.” Fiore’s relief mingled with self-deprecation. He’d been an idiot to not realize that, of course, one of Enzo’s rank would never stoop to wait upon an artisan; they must go to him. He caught himself before he asked why they hadn’t met him at Ca’ Scaevola today. The secluded hunting lodge in the wilderness had been quite another thing. And he hadn’t even been invited there on purpose. Obviously a courtesan wasn’t worthy to enter the ancestral palazzo of one of the most powerful noble bloodlines in the whole city.
A shy smile glimmered in Enzo’s eyes beneath the mask. He knew nothing of Fiore’s inner turmoil, for which Fiore withheld a sigh of relief. He endeavored to match that glimpse of a handsome and heartwarming expression with a broad smile of his own.
From there Enzo and Fiore proceeded to the cobbler. Again, Fiore encountered a familiar process made unfamiliar by the presence of a withdrawing room for clients. Under normal circumstances he merely stood in the midst of the workshop for measuring or just knew his size and asked for the respective prefabricated pair plucked off the shelf behind a counter. To say nothing of the attentive behavior of the staff. The cobbler didn’t fawn quite so hard as haberdasher, but she did grant Fiore a degree of respect that he didn’t think he’d have received if he hadn’t arrived on the arm of a duke.
The cost of a typical pair of shoes—for Fiore, at least—came about equal to the daily wage of a journeyman. The cost of the pair proposed by Enzo’s cobbler was never spoken aloud. Enzo simply left her with an identical portfolio to the one he’d given the haberdasher. Then he wound his arm through Fiore’s own and they went on their merry way with the cobbler’s promise to have the shoes ready within the fortnight.
Still, as they strode down the street together arm-in-arm, something about the shoes raised the faintest hint of a concern in Fiore’s otherwise untroubled mind.
“I’ve never worn a heel before,” he confessed after a few minutes had passed.
Enzo glanced down in surprise but didn’t halt his stride. “No?”
Fiore confirmed this with a shake of his head. He supposed the notion must seem astonishing to an aristocrat. Even Enzo, at his already incredible natural height, had an inch or two more of assistance from his modest black heel. “Not for lack of desire. I’d be delighted to stand a touch taller.”
What he didn’t say was that heeled shoes were an aristocrat’s purview for good reason. A highly impractical choice that served only to enhance the wearer’s appearance whilst hobbling their ability to move or perform any sort of manual labor. An artisan with a heeled shoe would rapidly become a figure of ridicule in their circle.
And yet, Fiore had found it more elating than otherwise to have a pair ordered for him. While the scant inch the cobbler had proposed would bring him nowhere near Enzo’s towering height, it would be something, and would mark him out as one worthy to attend an aristocratic entertainment. There remained just one problem.
“But I don’t know how to walk in them,” Fiore concluded. “Much less dance.”
The few clomping steps he’d taken with the mocked-up pair in the cobbler’s shop had proved humiliating enough.
Enzo’s gaze turned thoughtful. “We might practice. At your convenience,” he added. “I don’t wish to keep you from your work.”
Fiore chose not to remind him that, technically, Enzowashis work. Instead he smiled up at him and replied, “I’d like that.”
~
The following afternoon, Enzo arrived belowdecks at theKingfisherwith a brown paper package.
Fiore accepted it from him with a cocked eyebrow and a curious half-smile. He hadn’t the first idea what it might contain. Nothing they’d commissioned in the past few days could possibly be finished already.
And yet, when he untied the twine and peeled back the paper, what did he find but the self-same pair of plain brown mock-up shoes that the cobbler had built for him just yesterday. Or, no, Fiore realized as he examined them in disbelief; rather, a second mock-up pair, for the cobbler required the originals to make the final fancy shoes Fiore would wear to the ball. Enzo must have commissioned these specifically for practice.
Enzo, meanwhile, swept off his hat with one hand and his mask with the other, leaving his beautiful face bare for Fiore to admire when he glanced up in astonished elation.
Fiore sat on the edge of his bed to slip the shoes on. No sooner had he done so than Enzo knelt before him.
“If I may?” Enzo murmured, glancing up for permission with a hopeful gleam in his haunting dark eyes.
Fiore, stunned by his submissive posture as much as by his gaze, could only nod.
He ought to be used to this by now. Plenty of men had knelt before him for one purpose or another.
