Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
A Gown Fitting
The appointment had been made three weeks earlier, when the largest calamity in our lives had been the length of Madame Delacroix’s waiting list.
I had twice gotten as far as the inkwell to cancel it.
Then Chrissie had come down to the morning room with her chin up and her eyes swollen and asked, in the voice she uses when she has resolved to be brave about something, whether she ought to write to Madame Delacroix and cancel the appointment.
I put the pen down and ordered the carriage.
Steele’s arrangements had multiplied in the night.
A man on our steps from six in the morning, another at the mews, a third at the railings.
On our way to the modiste, Bowen rode beside the coachman, while Finch was somewhere ahead of us in the traffic.
I counted four more before we reached Bond Street.
The bell above the door chimed as Chrissie and I entered, and the shop closed around us, warm and smelling of lavender.
Bolts of satin and moiré stood stacked to the picture rail.
Half-finished gowns waited on their forms with pins bristling at the shoulders.
A young assistant curtsied and vanished through the curtain at the back.
Chrissie drew off her gloves one finger at a time, which is what she does instead of fidgeting.
“Nine days,” she said. “The Liddell ball is in nine days and I am to walk into it and be looked at.”
“You are.”
“Everyone will know about Cosmos.”
“If we stay away, they will say the Rosehavens have gone to ground, and by the next day that will become the Rosehavens have something to hide.” I took her bonnet from her and set it on the chair.
“So we will go. You will dance every dance you are asked for. And you will look magnificent doing it, because it costs them more when we are magnificent.”
Her mouth twitched. “That is a dreadful reason to buy a gown.”
“It is an excellent reason. It simply isn’t a nice one.”
“And if nobody asks me?” she said lightly, to the wall of moiré.
It took the ground out from under me for a moment.
Eighteen. Belle of the season since April, with a card that filled itself before she had crossed a room.
And now she stood in a modiste’s shop on Bond Street asking whether anyone would dance with her.
“They will ask,” I said. “And the ones who do not will be a very useful list.”
She laughed. It came out damp, but it came out. “You always sound so certain.”
“I have years of practice preventing my sisters from making spectacles of themselves in public.”
“Name one occasion.”
“I removed Holly from a fountain in Hyde Park.”
“That is a public service, not an accomplishment.”
“I intercepted a hedgehog on its way into the drawing room, in Ivy’s muff, during a call from the Bishop’s wife.”
“You are on firmer ground there.”
“And I once talked a girl of fourteen out of putting her mare over the park hedge sidesaddle.”
Chrissie shut her eyes. “You did not talk me out of it.”
“No. I ran after you shouting, which I maintain was the correct approach.”
“I landed in the duck pond.”
“You did.”
“Half of Yorkshire has never let me forget it.”
“Half of Yorkshire is still telling it,” I said, “and the ducks have not recovered.”
Madame Delacroix came through the curtain with ivory silk over one arm, shot through with silver where the light took it, and made her small foreign noise of possession at the sight of Chrissie. My sister went behind the curtain looking, for the first time in several days, like a girl of eighteen.
I settled into the upholstered chair with a fashion journal I had no intention of reading and focused my attention on the view out the window.
Across the street, a broad man in a brown coat was giving a stationer’s window the sort of study one gives an old master. Finch had a great many talents, but he couldn’t blend with a Bond Street scene if his life depended on it.
Farther along the pavement a younger man drifted, stopping at nothing, arriving nowhere. A third stood at the corner with a newspaper he was not reading.
Steele had told me. Wherever you go, I go, or a man I would trust with my own life goes.
Never again from a distance. Never again alone.
I had gone up my steps last night with my heart going like a bird in a box.
And now here, on an afternoon in July, the whole of it had resolved into three men and a newspaper.
Let him come, then. Let a man who arranges brewers’ drays try Bond Street at two in the afternoon with Caleb Finch on the pavement.
The curtain parted, and a shop assistant stepped through it. “Milady? Lady Chrysanthemum would like your opinion.”
Chrissie stood before the long glass with her hands held away from her sides. The lilac silk hugged her waist, swept over her hips, and fell in shimmering folds about her feet. It put every other gown in the room out of the running.
“Well?”
“It is perfect.”
She turned once, watching herself. “Do you think—” She stopped. She has never in her life been able to ask for a compliment outright, which is the only shyness she has. “Will it do?”
“Every unmarried gentleman who so much as glances at you will fall at your feet.”
Madame laughed. Chrissie laughed. The assistant, with pins in her mouth, made a sound like a kettle.
And then the street cracked open.
One shot. Flat and hard and closer than it had any business being. Then another, and three more on top of it, so fast they ran together.
I raced to the front window as a woman by the fitting room began to scream and could not stop. Out the window the whole pavement came apart, skirts and hats and running men, a bootblack’s stand going over sideways.
Finch was in the road behind an overturned coster’s barrow with his revolver braced across it.
He fired once and a man in the doorway of the stationer’s folded at the knee.
He was shifting his aim when the answer came from somewhere I could not see.
His left arm snapped back, and he went down out of sight behind the barrow.
I ran back into the fitting room, grabbed Chrissie’s wrist and was hauling her toward the back of the shop when the front door burst open.
Two men, and a mountain of another who braced his back against the door and stood there.
I got between them and my sister. Whatever they intended, they would have to go through me.
The first man caught my wrists and dragged them down. I drove my heel into his shin, hard, with everything my weight would lend it. He swore and lost his grip. I twisted loose and took the brass candlestick off the console table by the mirror.
It caught him across the temple and he dropped like a stone.
The second man came on me from behind. He was stronger, and there was nothing to be done about it.
He folded my arms up behind my back until my vision went white at the edges.
The one I had struck got to his knees, took a cloth from inside his coat, shoved it between my teeth, and tied it behind my head while my eyes streamed.
Two men poured in from the back of the shop and grabbed Chrissie. She fought them like something wild. Somehow, she got a hand free and raked it down a man’s face, exactly as I had done. I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
A dress form went over. Then a shelf, and forty pounds of silk came down across the floor in a slow bright landslide. The woman by the fitting room was still screaming, and Madame Delacroix was shouting in two languages at once from behind the counter.
“Enough.” A man’s voice.
The room stopped.
He stood in the doorway, not a hair out of place, as though he were dressed for a soirée. Nothing covered his face. Three lines ran from his cheekbone to his jaw, scabbed dark and drawn a little at the edges. He had made no attempt whatever to hide them.
He looked at the wreckage, at the man on the floor, and last of all at me.
“Lady Rosalynd.” He inclined his head. “I had hoped for kinder circumstances.”
I gave him the only thing I had—a look.
Another volley went up in the street. A man put his head through the open curtain. “We’re wanted away, sir.”
“Bring both of them,” Harcourt said.
They took us out through the ruin of the shop into the back street gone empty. A closed carriage stood at the curb with the door already open and a man at the horses’ heads.
I got my head round once, twice, searching for Finch.
He stood at the end of the alley, one hand clamped over his sleeve, blood to the elbow. One of Harcourt’s men raised his pistol and shot at him, but thankfully missed. A young man in a checked coat hauled at Finch’s shoulders to get him away.
Across forty feet, Finch looked straight at me.
Alive. He was alive. He would see us go, and he would tell Steele.
Then a hand took the back of my neck and put me into the carriage, and Chrissie came in on top of me, trussed up, same as me. The door slammed, and the horses went.
Harcourt sat facing us, his gloved hands resting on the seat and looked out the window at London going past.
I set myself to counting the turnings and keeping the order of them, because they were the only thing in the world I had to carry. Out of Bond Street. West into Brook Street, held up once and then again, the coachman making no more haste than a man carrying his master to his club.
Harcourt watched me do it. Once, he almost smiled.
After a while, the carriage slowed.
He reached across and gently drew the cloth out of my mouth. I would have taken the fingers off at the knuckle if my hands had been free.
The door was yanked open. One of his men stood on the pavement, at the corner of Grosvenor Square. He had brought us home.
Harcourt pointed to Chrissie. "This one. Lady Chrysanthemum, you may go."
“No! I won’t leave Rosie!” Her gown was open six inches at the shoulder seam, her hair was down her back, and there was a mark coming up dark along her jaw.
“Go,” I said.
The man took her arm and put her out onto the pavement. She went down on one knee on the flags and came straight back up. She stood in a torn gown while he untied her with every window in Mayfair to witness it.
“Run, Chrissie, run,” I said.
She gathered her skirts up in both fists and ran.
Somehow, I managed to climb on the seat, and then get my shoulder against the glass. I kept her in sight for as long as I could.
She ran across the grass, across the gravel, straight over the square with her hair coming loose behind her. Not to our own door. She had understood, my sister, in the half second she had been given.
The last of it I had was Chrissie on Steele’s steps with both fists against Steele’s door.
The whip cracked, and the horses took off.
I collapsed against the squabs, as the square slid away, and my wrists went numb behind me.
But Chrissie was free. She would tell Steele, and he would come for me.