CHAPTER 24 #3
Elizabeth did not call this revenge. She called it consistency.
Mrs. Gardiner had declared Pom-Pom unfit for Westbrook society, and one could not expect Lord Pomington to extend his confidence where it had not been respected.
Besides, the dressmaker had never objected to Pom-Pom, who had been carried there on several previous occasions and received with all the tolerance due to a patron’s inconvenient relation.
Mrs. Doddridge accompanied Elizabeth, as propriety required. Pom-Pom accompanied them, as justice required.
He wore the blue wrapper, newly altered, and sat on Mrs. Doddridge’s lap in the carriage with an air of solemn restoration. He had plainly understood that, if dinner tables might fail him, dressmakers could still be trusted.
The establishment was warm, close, and full of muted industry: folded silks, tissue paper, ribbons wound upon cards, women moving quietly with pins at their cuffs, and the faint mingled scents of starch, wool, lavender, and coal smoke.
A young assistant took Elizabeth’s pelisse.
Another looked at Pom-Pom, absorbed him into the facts of the day, and said nothing.
This immediately raised the house in Elizabeth’s esteem.
The dressmaker herself was not introduced by name.
Elizabeth had been there before, and names, once not required, could remain comfortably unnecessary.
She was a narrow woman with a measuring eye, a calm mouth, and the professional gravity of one who had seen every form of female indecision and charged appropriately for surviving it.
“A dinner dress, miss?”
“So I am informed.”
The dressmaker gave no sign that this was an unusual way to order clothing. “For next week?”
“For Tuesday.”
A second’s silence followed. It was not censure. It was calculation.
“Then it must be made with sense.”
“I hoped it might.”
“Nothing overworked.”
“Certainly not.”
“Not black?”
Elizabeth, who had expected the question and still disliked it, removed one glove finger by finger.
“Not black.”
The dressmaker inclined her head. That was all. No sympathy, no encouragement, no horrid little smile of congratulation. Elizabeth felt grateful enough almost to forgive the expense.
Several fabrics were brought out. A bronze silk was rejected as too satisfied with itself.
A warm cream was very pretty, but likely to make every sauce at dinner Elizabeth’s enemy.
A soft blue was agreeable and entirely wrong.
Mrs. Doddridge, seated near the window with Pom-Pom on her lap and a piece of mending in her hand, offered no opinion.
Pom-Pom watched the proceedings with dark suspicion, occasionally shifting his paws as if certain fabrics had made personal claims upon him.
Then the dressmaker laid a length of sage silk across Elizabeth’s arm.
It was not bright. It did not announce freedom, youth, gaiety, or any other condition likely to alarm her. It was a soft, living colour, green moderated by grey, quiet enough to be respectable and warm enough, under the light, to refuse mourning.
Elizabeth looked down at it.
“It is very green.”
“Sage, miss.”
“That sounds like green with a moral education.”
The dressmaker considered the silk, then Elizabeth’s face, with the gravity of a woman who had mediated between young ladies and their own complexions for twenty years.
“The sage does not object to you, miss.”
Elizabeth received this verdict with the seriousness it deserved.
“That is high praise, I collect.”
“For sage, miss, yes.”
Elizabeth nodded sagely. “Then we must not object to the sage.”
Mrs. Doddridge looked up from her work. “Very sound, miss.”
Pom-Pom gave a small sneeze.
“Nor does Lord Pomington,” said Elizabeth.
Mrs. Doddridge glanced down at him. “Not strongly, miss.”
And so the dress was ordered.
There followed the usual humiliations of fabric, measurement, discussion of sleeves, and the discovery that fashion had lately formed several opinions about waists without consulting Elizabeth.
The dressmaker recommended a trimming darker than the silk, narrow enough not to fuss, and a warmer ribbon that would improve under candlelight.
Elizabeth submitted to the reasoning because it was reasoning, and because no one had suggested flounces.
By the time they returned to Portman Square, Pom-Pom had forgiven the dressmaker, the sage silk, and possibly Mrs. Doddridge. He had not forgiven Mrs. Gardiner, the Westbrooks, or society.
Elizabeth could not wholly blame him.
She went first to the drawing room, not to sit, but to look.
The workmen had gone for the day. The rust-coloured paper held the afternoon light; the polished floor reflected the bare windows; the condemned table remained in the middle of the room awaiting transportation to some humbler future.
It was still unfinished. It was also, unmistakably, becoming something.
In the hall below, a footman carried something past; somewhere above, Evans was no doubt sorting gowns with the briskness of a servant whose mistress had at last admitted the existence of dinner.
Elizabeth removed her gloves and stood just inside the doorway.
Between Mrs. Gardiner, the Westbrooks, Pom-Pom’s exclusion, Evans’s hidden opinions, and a sage silk that did not object to her, she had been advanced several steps toward society without once consenting to be improved.
It was, she thought, exactly how improvements always began.