Chapter 20 #2
Cecily was across the table, reading something she had brought down from the library, which meant she had been awake early, which meant she had not slept well, which he noticed and was not going to remark on, because remarking on it would require explaining why he had noticed.
He returned to his correspondence.
“An inner life,” Isadora echoed.
“A rich one. Edward says so.”
“Edward is being diplomatic.”
“Edward,” Letitia opined, “let Horatio sleep on the drawing room sofa last month and told Beatrice it was because the dog looked cold, which is either compassion or an inner life by proxy, and I think either counts.”
“It counts as Edward avoiding an argument,” William commented, without looking up.
Letitia pointed at him. “You don’t know that.”
“I know Edward.”
“You know Edward in Parliament. That is a different Edward from Horatio’s Edward.”
Cecily made a sound akin to a snort from across the table. William glanced at her. She was back to looking at her book with the focused expression of someone who was not reading.
“Letitia, you have been discussing this dog for eleven minutes,” Isadora pointed out.
“I’ve been discussing his circumstances. There is a difference.”
“At breakfast.”
“When else am I going to discuss him? You’re in lessons until four, and William is in his study until–” Letitia looked at William. “When do you come out of your study?”
“When there is a reason to.”
“That’s what I mean. You need a dog. Then, you’d have a reason.”
“I have reasons.”
“Estate reasons. They don’t count.” She reached for the marmalade. “Cecily, tell him he needs a dog.”
Cecily looked up from her book. She looked like she had been listening to everything and had been hoping to avoid being called upon.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that a dog is a significant commitment.”
“Thank you.” William nodded.
“That said,” she continued, “the east grounds are very large, and a dog would have excellent use of them.”
Letitia spread marmalade with the triumphant precision of someone who had just won something. “There it is.”
“Cecily,” William warned.
“I said it was a significant commitment,” Cecily reminded him. “I didn’t say it was a bad one.”
She looked at him and shrugged like she was entirely comfortable with where she had left the argument.
He looked back at his correspondence. There was a letter near the bottom of the pile, beneath the tenant reports and the parliamentary notice, that he had been working his way toward. He found it now and opened it.
He read it once, then set it down.
“There is a ball,” he announced.
They all turned toward him.
“The Pemberton winter ball,” he continued. “Friday . We’ve been invited.” He looked at Cecily. “It will be your first significant appearance since the wedding. Half of London will be there.”
Cecily put down her book. “The other half will hear about it by Saturday morning.”
“Yes.”
“And you think we should go.”
“I think we have no choice but to go,” he emphasized. “Avoiding it would say more than attending it. The ton is watching to see what you are. We will show them.”
“What are we showing them?” Letitia asked.
“That the Duchess of Blackmoor is exactly where she belongs,” William replied.
A brief silence followed.
Isadora was looking at her toast with a smile. Letitia was looking at William with one eyebrow raised. Cecily was looking at the table with a composure that told him nothing.
“You will need a gown,” he added.
She looked up. “I have gowns.”
“You will need a new one for this ball.”
“William, I have perfectly–”
“Cecily.” He said it once, quietly, and looked at her. “You are the Duchess of Blackmoor. You will have a new gown.”
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked at her book, closed it, and said nothing further, which he understood as agreement.
Letitia leaned toward Isadora. “I want to come,” she said, in a whisper calibrated to carry.
“You’re not coming,” William declared.
“I could wait in the carriage.”
“No.”
“I could wait outside the modiste.”
“Letitia.”
She sighed through her nose. “You are going to come back with something extraordinary, and I am going to have to hear about it secondhand.”
“You will survive,” Isadora quipped.
“I will survive unhappily.”
* * *
The modiste’s was on Bond Street, a narrow building that announced itself with a single small sign and no other advertisement.
The woman who ran it—Madame Voclain, French by birth and Londoner by thirty years of practice—received them with the grand welcome she reserved for clients whose presence confirmed something she already knew about herself.
She looked at Cecily. “The Duchess of Blackmoor.” A statement of what she was looking at and what it required.
“Madame Voclain,” William greeted. “My wife requires a gown for the Pemberton ball. Friday week.”
Madame Voclain was already slowly circling Cecily, which Cecily was enduring with composed stillness. William tried to hide his smile at the expression on her face.
“The coloring,” Madame Voclain said, to no one in particular. “The eyes. Yes.” She stopped. “What has she been wearing?”
“That is not your concern,” William replied fondly. “What she will wear is.”
“I have gowns,” Cecily said pleasantly. “Several. I wore a very well-received ivory at my–”
“The ball is not a wedding,” Madame Voclain interrupted politely.
“No,” Cecily agreed. “It is considerably larger.”
“Considerably larger, considerably more closely observed, and you will arrive on his arm, and every woman in that room will look at you first and at him second.” Madame Voclain had the directness of delivering these assessments for thirty years and had long since stopped softening them. “What do you want them to think?”
Cecily glanced at William. He said nothing. He was watching her with his hands behind his back, the composed attention he brought to things that mattered, and he had no intention of answering the question because the question was hers.
She looked back at Madame Voclain. “I want them to have nothing to say.”
“Wrong.” Madame Voclain shook her head. “You want them to have only one thing to say.”
She disappeared behind the curtain and began issuing instructions to the two assistants who materialized immediately, as though they had been waiting there specifically for this.
William moved to stand beside Cecily.
“This is extravagant,” she muttered under her breath.
“Yes.”
“You haven’t even asked for the price.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She looked at him. “William.”
“Cecily.”
“The attention it will draw–” she tried.
“Is the point.” He looked at her squarely. “If the ton is going to speak of my Duchess—it has, and it will continue—then I would prefer it speak with admiration. There is no other acceptable version.” He paused. “The gown will be right. You will wear it. That is all.”
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had when she was deciding whether to argue. He waited it out.
“You are very decided about this.”
“I am decided about most things.”
“You are decided about everything.”
“Not everything,” he said. And then, because it was simply true and the room was private and Madame Voclain was behind a curtain, he reached out and tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “Some things I have found considerably more difficult to decide than I expected.”
She looked at him and swallowed. He looked back.
Madame Voclain reappeared with three bolts of fabric over her assistant’s arm.
“Sit, Your Grace,” she told William with the authority of someone who had been directing dukes for thirty years and found them manageable if handled correctly. “This does not require your intervention.”
William sat.
He watched Cecily move to stand under Madame Voclain’s direction. The measuring tape was produced, and the fabric was held against her in different lights as low, rapid French rose just out of earshot.
He watched Madame Voclain hold a length of deep blue silk against Cecily’s shoulder, step back, and look at it as if she had found what she was looking for.
He saw it, too.
He looked at the floor. Then at the window. Then at a point on the opposite wall that had nothing of particular interest.
He had brought his wife here to make a statement to Society. That was true, and it remained true.
It was also true that he had wanted—with a specificity he had not examined until this moment, sitting in a chair in a Bond Street modiste while his wife stood twenty feet away in the afternoon light—to see her dressed for something.
Dressed for an evening that was hers. Dressed in a way that had nothing to do with scandal or management or the ivory composure of a woman enduring the circumstances she had been handed.
Dressed simply as herself.
He looked at the window.
This is useful information.
He was not sure what to do with it.
Madame Voclain said something emphatic in French.
Cecily replied in French with the easy fluency of someone who had grown up with the language and the slight edge of someone who was not going to be managed without their consent.
Madame Voclain looked at her for a moment and then laughed briefly and approvingly.
“This will do,” Madame Voclain told William, as though he had asked.
“Yes,” he said.
But he wasn’t talking about the fabric.