Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
The street outside the milliner’s shop hissed with wheels and rain, even though the sky had spent its storm hours ago.
London never dried; it merely rearranged its damp.
Christine adjusted her grip on the walking stick and stepped down from the hired carriage while Blanche Waldron fluttered beside her like a small, determined flag.
“Lean on me if you must,” Blanche said, “or on the stick, if you insist on being picturesque.”
“I insist on neither,” Christine answered, though she did lean lightly on the polished walnut. A bruise had risen on her ankle from the lane at Duxworth. “We shall be quick.”
“You say that in every shop,” Blanche murmured, smiling as if into a confidence, “then you discover a bolt of ribbon that speaks to you, and I resign myself to solitude by upholstery. I shall be friendless, I tell you, abandoned forever in favor of textiles!”
The bell over the door chimed. Inside, the air smelled of starch and violets.
Rows of bonnets tilted their brims like gossiping ladies.
Behind the counter stood the proprietress, a woman with a nose like a knitting needle and two shopgirls whose faces arranged themselves into politeness with the speed of a fan snapping open.
The proprietress took in the cane, the travel-dust, the modest pelisse, and smiled the way a cat might smile upon a saucer of milk that wasn’t for it.
“Good afternoon,” Christine said, “we have come from Duskwood to inspect samples for an engagement ball. Lantern ribbon, cornice drapery, and something in dove-grey silk to soften oak.”
At Duskwood, the shopgirls’ eyes flared. The proprietress’s smile sharpened.
“Indeed,” she said. “Your Household has particular tastes, I am told. What one might call ‘rustic’.”
Blanche’s lashes fluttered. “What one might call charming,” she corrected. “Now, be so kind as to show my friend the ribbon with the narrow hemstitch. Her Grace has a mind to festoon an entire county.”
“Not quite the entire county,” Christine said mildly, moving to the table where swatches lay in sober rows, “only the bits that will come when invited. Lord knows I have precious few opportunities to glorify in adornments before now.”
The proprietress laid out the ribbons with fingertips that avoided contact, naming prices. Christine asked questions, touched and weighed, calculated how many yards of blue would do for the stairs, and whether the yellow looked like sunlight or jaundice.
She was used to the dance. How shopkeepers tested, how they softened when the coin appeared. But dealing with greengrocers and butchers was different from this breed of shopkeeper.
“And for the lanterns?” she asked.
The woman’s lips thinned. “For the lanterns,” she echoed, as if Christine had requested cloth to wrap a scandal, “yes, well, these lengths might serve. I would not advise anything too refined. Smoke will have its way even with good ribbon.”
“We shall take the smoke and the risk both. Send thirty yards of blue, twenty of cream, to Duskwood. I will have our steward settle accounts.”
Outside, the rain had begun again, very fine, embroidered almost invisibly upon the air. Blanche took Christine’s arm as they stepped out.
“That one would curdle milk by breathing in its general direction,” she said cheerfully. “Forget her. We have a linen-draper to terrify.”
They did not terrify him. The linen-draper—broad, pink, with a neckcloth—let them examine damask and lawn, listened with polite ears to the description of an outdoor supper, and then found himself suddenly engaged with a gentleman who had strolled in and wanted thirty yards of Irish on the instant.
He did not say that ladies come after coin, but his actions showed it, and when he returned, he looked through Christine as if he had nearly remembered where he had seen her scrub a floor.
“We require tablecloths,” Christine said, keeping her voice even. “For three trestles and two small tables, and napkins.”
“Very pretty,” said the draper, “very lofty.” He turned the pages of his order book too quickly to read. “And who exactly is to be responsible for repayment if the weather turns and the ball is… deferred?”
“Duskwood,” Christine said, “naturally.”
He glanced at the cane, at her hem, mud spattered by London’s thousand wheels, and made a small, dismissive noise in his throat.
“Naturally.”
They left without ordering.
“Another saint of commerce,” Blanche said, linking arms. “We shall petition Rome.”
“I do not mind indifference,” Christine said. “Indifference is a blanket, scratchy, but warm. This is different.”
She steered them into a narrow lane where a stationer kept a window full of copperplate labels for favors and cards.
“Let us try a man who sells pretty words. He should like us.”
He did not like them. He liked Blanche for two minutes and three compliments, and then he liked a lady who entered on the arm of a Viscount even better.
He promised samples. Christine, suppressing a laugh entirely void of amusement, let Blanche tug her into a confectioner’s for fortification.
The sugar smell curled around them like a memory of childhood.
The girl behind the counter wore a ribbon so pink it ought to have been illegal.
“A dozen marchpane roses,” Blanche announced, “and two of those… alarming…clouds.”
“Almond kisses,” the girl chirped. She looked past Christine and added, sotto voce, to her companion arranging trays behind the partition.
“It’s the Scullery Maiden. See the stick? Must have tripped over a broom.”
The words came neat as pins. And stuck as fast.
Blanche’s head turned. Christine reached for her sleeve. “Let it pass.”
She lifted the little white bag and paid with more coins than the kisses deserved.
“Thank you,” she said to the girl, and left before she could say anything less gracious.
On the pavement, Christine thrust the bag at Blanche.
“Eat one. It will stop your mouth from saying something beautiful and cutting and unwise.”
“It is outrageous!” Blanche said around the confectionery.
“Technically true. I did work in a scullery, and I am to be a duchess.”
They stood a moment beneath the shop awning and watched London jostle itself along.
“It will be everywhere,” Blanche said gently, “you know that. The whispers, the sneers. You are walking a very narrow plank over an ocean of envy.”
“I know,” Christine pressed her hand to the head of the cane until the ridges impressed themselves into her palm, “I told myself I could bear it.”
“And can you?”
She looked at Blanche and made herself smile. “I can bear much.”
“Which is exactly how women break,” Blanche murmured. “On the things they can bear.”
They went on. At a chandlery, they ordered extra oil for lanterns; the tallow-woman wanted cash in hand.
At a warehouse near the docks, Christine inspected crates of glass shades and discovered, mysteriously, that Duskwood’s order had been placed twice and cancelled twice.
The clerk shrugged as if the facts were utterly unworthy of notice.
In the Strand, a footman in a famous modiste’s livery held a door for a countess and let it swing shut on Christine’s shoulder.
By noon, the little white bag was empty, and Christine’s patience had worn a hole fine enough to thread a needle through.
They stopped at an eating-house for a plate of cold beef and toast. Blanche chose a table in the window and made a show of being amused by everything.
Christine, who had not eaten properly since breakfast, discovered that hunger could forget itself when humiliated enough times in a row.
“I have a very vulgar thought,” Blanche said, when the toast was almost gone. “Would you like to hear it?”
“I should like a whole choir of vulgarity.”
“Very well. To hell with them,” she said it like a benediction, “you have a man who sees you when he is trying very hard not to. You have children who sing off-key at you adoringly. You have a duchess for an ally and a housekeeper who could fell an oak by looking at it. Are you happy with the man? If yes, the rest is varnish on a door you aren’t going to use. ”
Christine looked at the toast and discovered her eyes had filled. Blanche sat back at once, as if she had stepped on something painful in the dark.
“There. That was the wrong door. I am sorry.”
“No,” Christine said, swallowing. “No. It was the right one. I have been closing it with my foot for a week.”
Blanche did not touch her hand; she merely set her palm on the table, close enough that the warmth of it crossed the small gap.
“Then tell me the true thing.”
Christine folded her fingers around the head of the walking stick and let its solidity anchor her. She had held the lie like a glass bauble, careful and bright. The impulse to keep it glittering rose up, habit, protection, but the day had abraded her until she could feel the raw truth beneath.
“The marriage is not a marriage,” she said quietly. “It is an arrangement, a fiction, a bridge. When Charles…” Her voice snagged.
She cleared it. “When my brother is found, the bridge is meant to be dismantled. I will be…set aside. Kindly, I suppose. But set aside. There will be no vows. No name. Nothing to keep Lady Gillray from dragging me back into her house and calling it duty.”
Blanche’s eyes darkened, and for a moment, the pretty, sparkling mask she wore to please the world slid aside, and the woman under it looked like someone who could break a jaw for love.
“He told you so.”
“He did not promise me otherwise. I agreed.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It is the same enough,” Christine said.
The admission loosened something in her chest that had been bound tight as a drum. Her voice went hoarse with relief and grief together.
“I told myself I did not care. That a pretense that fed the poor and quieted the village was better than a truth that starved us both. I let myself…” She stopped, because the next word was love, and she was not yet brave enough to say it in a public place behind a plate of beef and toasted bread.
“Let yourself be happy,” Blanche supplied gently, “half-happy.”
Christine pressed her lips together and nodded.
Blanche’s gaze went to the window, thoughtful. “Does he know? That you are…” she waggled her hand at the air, unable to name the shape. “Invested.”
“He knows enough to be kind and not enough to be cruel,” Christine said. “Which is a cruelty of its own.”
Blanche exhaled, long and low. “When this is done,” she said, “if he does not marry you, I shall write a play about him and have him booed at Drury Lane for a season.”
“You cannot put a duke on a stage,” Christine whispered, laughing in spite of the ache, “he would ruin the receipts by glaring.”
“Then I shall put a wolf on the stage,” Blanche said briskly, “and the world shall praise my zoological genius.”
No, I do not wish him to be humiliated, not even in a fantasy.
Christine wiped her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief and only then realized that the table on her left had gone quiet.
A woman in lavender silk, the sort of shade that looked expensive, had turned her head to inspect the street.
In the mirror behind the counter, the angle gave Christine a clean view of the profile she least wanted to see.
Lady Martha.
Lady Martha’s mouth wore its usual composure; only the minute tightening near the eye betrayed that she had heard.
She did not look at Christine; she regarded the rain.
But her companion, a thin-lipped aunt with a cap like a frilled pie, leaned in and said something that made Martha’s shoulders lift in delight.
Christine kept her hand steady on the cane. “Do not turn,” she whispered, “we shall finish the list and return to Duskwood at once.”
“The list is done,” Blanche said, “and we are leaving now because I refuse to give Lady Martha the luxury of watching you tremble.”
“I am not trembling,” Christine lied.
“Then we shall buy more,” Blanche said, rising, “and if Lady Martha stops us, I shall discover an urgent need to spill anchovy oil on her hem.”
They stood. Martha stood at the same moment, too smoothly to be accidental. She laid her glove on the edge of the table and turned at last with a smile that a man might mistake for pity.
“My dear Miss Davidson,” she said pleasantly, “do forgive me—Lady Christine, is it not? I never quite know what to call people who change so swiftly.”
Christine stepped forward.
“Lady Martha,” she said, “how unexpected. One usually hears you coming.”
“I see the walking stick has caught on.” Martha’s gaze dipped, then rose, alight with an interest she did not bother to feign away, “so useful, when one’s balance is uncertain.”
“Good morning,” she said. “If you will excuse us.”
“But of course,” Martha said, moving the smallest distance necessary to make room and the exact amount sufficient to make the passing awkward.
As Christine eased by, the stick clicked on the floor; the sound seemed to surprise Martha with joy.
“How brave you are,” she murmured, too low for the aunt and just loud enough for Christine, “how very brave.”
Christine walked. Blanche walked with her. They did not look back, because there are dignities one keeps even when one has been stripped of all the others.
Outside, the rain had decided to fall properly. Blanche raised her parasol. “We shall go home,” she said. “We have enough ribbon to hang a man, and I have decided I could be the sort of woman who ties a bow with fury.”
Christine let herself be steered toward the waiting carriage.
Only when the door closed and the wheels clattered did she let her head rest briefly against the squabs.
Blanche took her hand then, without fanfare, without comment, and squeezed.
Across the street, beneath the dripping eaves, Lady Martha stood for a moment and watched the carriage go.
The rain sketched her in quick strokes, hat, lavender, stillness, and then blurred her into the rest of London. She turned to her aunt, said something brief and bright that made the older woman titter, and stepped into her own chaise.