Chapter 18
Alice had not, in her life, paid very much attention to lace.
To her, lace had always seemed one of the smaller indignities of being a young lady of the ton, a thing that was periodically attached to her at the wrist and the collar and the hem by people who knew what they were doing in such a way that she only ever had to stand still and look agreeable while it was attached.
She had stood still, and she had looked agreeable, and the lace had appeared on her clothes, and she had gone to the ball or the dinner or the morning service in whichever lace she had been provided with, and that had been the end of her involvement with lace as a category.
This morning, she was being asked to have opinions on lace.
She was being asked to have opinions on lace because Joanna, who had appointed herself the sole administrator of her wedding gown, had taken her to a shop on Bond Street whose owner had laid out on a long mahogany counter under a great bay window eleven samples of lace in eleven slightly different shades of cream, all of them indistinguishable from one another to Alice’s eye, and had then asked Alice which one she preferred.
“Joanna.”
“You must choose.”
“I do not see any difference, Joanna.”
“There is a great deal of difference. There is, for instance, the difference between Brussels and Honiton. There is a difference between the very fine and the moderately fine. There is a difference between the pattern with the small lily and the pattern with the small leaf. There is—”
“They are all cream, Joanna.”
“They are not all cream.”
“They are all cream.”
“Lady Alice.” The owner, who had been hovering at a careful distance, came forward.
She was a small, neat woman of about fifty with very clean hands and a careful manner.
She had been dressing the daughters of the ton for thirty years and had not yet been startled by any of them.
“If I may. The Brussels is for the dress itself. The Honiton is for the veil. You might want to have different patterns at the wrists and the throat. May I show you what I have in mind?”
Alice nodded.
The owner moved her small, clean hands across the counter. She drew out three of the samples, set the others aside, laid the three in a particular order on a square of dark velvet, and pointed.
“This for the gown. This for the veil. This for the wrists. Together.”
Alice looked.
They were, in fact, different. Against the dark velvet, they looked very different. She had not seen the difference until the woman had separated them.
The woman, with the calm competence of half a lifetime of doing this, had done a thing for her she had not been able to do for herself, and Alice briefly felt an irrational lift of her heart at being shown a thing about her own wedding gown that she had not known to look for.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, those. Thank you.”
“Very good, My Lady.” The owner moved away.
Joanna, standing beside her, was watching her face. “Alice.”
“Joanna.”
“You like the lace now.”
“I like the lace now.”
“Two minutes ago, you did not see the lace at all.”
“Two minutes ago, I had not been shown the lace.”
Joanna laughed.
Joanna, who had been laughing a great deal more this morning than was warranted by the matter of lace, took her arm and pulled her closer along the counter in the small confidential way she had when she meant to say a thing she did not want the owner to hear.
“Alice.”
“Joanna.”
“You are not eating.”
“I am eating.”
“You are eating two bites of toast and a quarter of an apple, and your maid told my maid this morning, when my maid called for you at half past nine, that you had not finished a single meal since Tuesday. Alice, you cannot starve yourself before your wedding. It is unsisterly.”
“I am not starving myself.”
“You are.”
“I have been busy.”
“With what?”
Alice could not answer that question honestly.
She had been busy with not thinking about her wedding, with not thinking about her wedding night, with not thinking about the orange trees in her parents’ orangery, and with not thinking, above all, about the conversation she had extracted from Cassian at the end of that encounter.
She had been busy with these several not-thinkings for four days. The not-thinking had taken up so much of her attention that she had not had much left over for ordinary things like toast.
She did not say any of this to Joanna.
“I have been busy with letters.”
“What letters?”
“Letters to my aunt in Bath. Letters to the housekeeper at Langton. Letters to—”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“You are not a very good liar this morning.”
“No.”
“You are usually a much better liar than this. I have watched you lie a great deal over the years, and on the whole, you have been very accomplished at it. This morning is not your best.”
“No.”
“Are you well, Alice?”
Alice, who had been holding herself together for four days with the bright competence she brought to most difficult things, looked at her best friend, who was watching her with the particular unsentimental attention she only turned on people she actually cared for, and felt the competence slip about three inches sideways and not quite catch.
She had decided four days ago that she would not, on any account, fall apart in front of her sister, her mother, her maid, or her best friend.
“I am well, Joanna.”
“You are not.”
“I am—” Alice drew in a breath.
She had not meant to say it. In fact, she had not meant to say it to anyone ever.
But Joanna was looking at her steadily with all that unsentimental affection of hers, and Alice, who had been the eldest sister since she was five years old and had not in twenty years told her sister anything that might worry her, found that she could not hold any further this morning.
“I am having second thoughts, Joanna.”
Joanna did not answer at once. She set the small piece of Brussels lace she had been holding back on the velvet square. “Nonsense, Alice.”
“It is not nonsense.”
“It is nonsense. Listen to me. We shall be sisters. We are very nearly sisters now. Cassian will make sure you are well taken care of for the rest of your life. My brother is a great many things, but he has never in his life been a man who did not take care of a thing he had decided was his. And he has decided you are his, Alice, so you will be very well taken care of. If you break off the engagement now, you will be ruined.”
“Joanna—”
“You will be ruined, Alice. You know it as well as I do. The ton will not forgive a young woman who has kissed a duke in the middle of a ball and then left him days before their wedding. You know I love how much you care for everyone in your life. I love it. I have loved it since the first day I met you. But if you ruin your own life so that your sister can be happy, I will not forgive you. Do you hear me? I will not. You deserve to be happy too.”
Alice did not answer. She only put her gloved hand over Joanna’s bare one on the counter.
“Mrs. Hatcher,” Joanna called loudly, “Lady Alice and I require, in addition to the lace, a great many other things.”
“Of course, Lady Joanna.”
“We require chemises. Three. Two for travel and one for, ah—”
“Joanna.”
“—for the wedding night.”
“Joanna.”
“And we require stockings. White silk. Six pairs. And we require—Mrs. Hatcher, you know what I mean. The proper things.”
Mrs. Hatcher, who knew exactly what Joanna meant, inclined her head. “My Lady.”
“To the back room. And Mrs. Hatcher?”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“If you would be so kind, pretend for a quarter of an hour that Lady Alice is not getting married to my brother.”
“Of course, My Lady.”
“It is the only way either of us will survive the next quarter of an hour.”
Mrs. Hatcher inclined her head a second time. She had heard a great many things in her shop over the years and proposed, as a rule, to comment on none of them. “My Lady.”
She led Alice, who was now scarlet at the throat and was beginning to be scarlet at the cheeks, through a small, paneled door at the back of the shop.
Joanna remained at the counter where Alice assumed she meant to look at the lace some more and not be subjected to whatever Mrs. Hatcher was going to subject Alice to.
The paneled door closed. The back room was smaller and warmer than the front with a long mirror on one wall, a screen in the corner, and a low chest at the foot of the screen.
Mrs. Hatcher, whose soft, efficient hands had been dressing brides for half her life, lifted a folded bundle from the chest and laid it out across a small velvet stool.
Alice looked at it. She looked at it for some time.
“Mrs. Hatcher.”
“My Lady?”
“This is…”
“For the wedding night, My Lady.”
“There is…”
“There is not a great deal of it, no, My Lady.”
“I see.”
“It is the fashion among ladies who have particularly admiring husbands.”
Alice did not say anything for a moment.
Before this morning, she had imagined that she had a fairly clear sense of what a respectable young lady wore to her wedding night.
She had imagined a nightgown. She had imagined, in particular, a long nightgown of a sober white linen, like the one her mother had given her at sixteen with the instruction that she wear it when she had a chill.
She had not imagined the thing Mrs. Hatcher had just laid out across the velvet stool. She had not imagined that the owner of a respectable shop on Bond Street would, at the request of her future sister-in-law, produce such a thing.
She put her hand on it. The fabric was a thin pale silk that had been worked at the neck and the hem with fine cream ribbon.
There was very little of it. It would, Alice estimated, cover her from a little above the bosom to a little above the knees, and it would do this with deliberate inattention which was the entire point of the garment.
“Mrs. Hatcher.”
“My Lady.”
“I shall try it on.”
“Of course, My Lady.”
Mrs. Hatcher withdrew behind the screen for the small interval required to leave Alice with her own buttons.
Alice removed her morning dress and then her stays.
Now left in her chemise and her stockings and the very particular nerves that came upon a respectable young woman of five-and-twenty contemplating for the first time the reality of a wedding night, she lifted the pale silk over her head and pulled it down.
It settled.
It settled at the bosom and the hip and the thigh in the places Mrs. Hatcher had clearly designed it to settle, and Alice, looking at herself in the long mirror, felt something she had never felt in front of her own reflection.
In her twenty-five years, she had looked at herself in a great many mirrors.
She had looked at herself in the small mirror above her dressing table while her maid had pinned her hair.
She had looked at herself in the long mirror at home while her mother had pulled at a stitch.
She had looked at herself in the gilt mirror at Madame Lavalle’s while a seamstress had marked the hem of a ballgown.
In each of those mirrors, she had been, in her opinion, a young woman of moderate height and ordinary features and reasonably tidy hair who would on her better days pass for handsome.
This morning, she did not look like that woman.
This morning, she looked like a woman a man might, in the particular wording Cassian had used in the orangery four days ago, want to mark as his.
She did not know what to do with this knowledge.
She put her hand on her throat and turned away from the mirror.
“Mrs. Hatcher,” she said quietly, “I shall take this one.”
“Very good, My Lady.”
“And several others if you have them.”
“I have several others, My Lady.”
“Then several others.”
“Yes, My Lady.”
She was about to put her morning dress back on when the small bell at the front of the shop rang, and a deep voice that she would have recognized in her sleep said something to Mrs. Hatcher’s apprentice in the front room.
Alice went very still.
She heard Joanna’s voice, raised slightly in surprise. She heard the deep voice again. Then she heard Mrs. Hatcher say, “Oh, Lady Joanna, I shall tell him,” in a tone that conveyed no such intention.
Then the deep voice said something else very quietly, and the door of the back room opened.
It was, of course, Cassian.