CHAPTER TWO
Remy didn’t know what to do about Laurell.
Putting her in the room next to his had been pure insanity.
He didn’t need the temptation, and yet he’d felt the need to keep her close.
There was something about her that called to him.
It had been a long time since he’d been drawn to a woman.
Since his wife passed, he’d gone into Storyville to ease the ache when needed, which seemed to be more frequently of late, but it wasn’t the same.
He enjoyed his time with those women, but he missed having one in his home.
Even now, knowing that Laurell was here, there was almost a change in the air.
His home felt lighter than it had before.
He didn’t know what it was about having a genteel woman in the home that made things different.
Despite Laurell’s current circumstances, she’d been brought up a proper lady, and would have made an excellent wife for someone of his standing.
He was still curious if she’d gotten in the family way because of her own doing or because some cad had taken advantage.
She’d been quiet at breakfast, and he hadn’t known what to say in order to draw her out.
When she’d risen from the table, he’d watched her leave.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to call her back, to ask about her plans for the day, but he’d refrained.
He hadn’t thought to tell her that the seamstress would arrive shortly to measure her for a new wardrobe.
She couldn’t very well make-do with only the clothes on her back, and while the items he’d purchased for his late wife, all things she’d never had a chance to wear, would possibly fit Laurell, he wanted her to have things that belonged only to her.
Perhaps a small part was that he didn’t like the thought of his wife’s clothing on another woman.
His sweet Mary had been dead and gone a long time.
Over two decades. She’d never even set foot in this home, and yet he’d brought her things with him, placed them in the room that should have been hers.
All these years, he’d carried her in his heart, but he was starting to realize that he needed to let her go.
If he didn’t move on, then he’d never have a family, and would one day die alone with nothing to show for his life except his work ethic.
While for some that might be enough, Remy had always dreamed of having children.
He’d just always seen those kids as belonging to him and Mary.
Perhaps that was the trouble. He’d spent twenty-one years waiting on a life that had already been buried in a churchyard in Baton Rouge.
Meanwhile, a young woman with hazel eyes and a child growing beneath her heart slept in the room he’d furnished for a wife who had never seen it.
Remy pushed back from his desk and went in search of his housekeeper. He found Mrs. Curry in the dining room, directing a maid at the sideboard.
“Send word to Mrs. Stratmore,” he said. “Tell her I’ll pay double her usual fee if she comes today.”
Mrs. Curry’s brows rose. “A seamstress, sir?”
“An entire wardrobe. Day dresses, evening things, a coat. Whatever a lady requires.” He hesitated, feeling like a fool. “And tell her to allow for… alterations. Later on.”
The housekeeper’s expression softened in a way that made him distinctly uncomfortable.
“Yes, sir. I’ll send Josie round straight away.
” She paused at the door. “She hardly touched her breakfast, sir. She was watching you the whole while you read your paper, like she was waiting to be told what she owed for the eggs.”
“She owes nothing.”
“I know that, sir.” Mrs. Curry smiled. “She doesn’t.”
Remy stood alone in the dining room for a long moment after the housekeeper left, staring at the chair where Laurell had sat. He’d bought and paid for a good many things in his life. He’d never once had a purchase look at him with such careful, quiet fear.
LAURELL was in the library when the seamstress arrived, curled in a window seat with a book she wasn’t reading, watching a gray drizzle bead against the glass.
She hadn’t dared explore much of the house.
It seemed presumptuous, wandering through rooms that belonged to a man she barely knew, so she’d found the one place where a person could be still without being in anyone’s way.
“Miss?” Mrs. Curry stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Stratmore has come to measure you. She’s waiting upstairs.”
Laurell’s stomach dropped. “Measure me for what?”
“Your wardrobe, dear.”
“I don’t need a wardrobe.” She rose, smoothing her ill-fitting skirts with hands that had gone cold. “I have this.”
“You have that,” Mrs. Curry agreed placidly, “and it don’t fit you, and it come from that woman’s house. Come along.”
The pink room had been transformed. Bolts of fabric lay draped across the bed—wool in a deep forest green, a blue so dark it was nearly black, a soft dove gray, muslin and lawn and something shot through with a rose sheen that made Laurell’s throat ache to look at.
A tall woman with iron-colored hair and a tape measure round her neck was holding a length of the green up to the window, frowning at the light.
“Ah.” Mrs. Stratmore turned. “There you are. Take off that dreadful thing so I can see what I’m working with.”
“Mrs. Stratmore, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“There hasn’t.” The seamstress was already unwinding the tape. “The mayor sent a girl round at nine o’clock this morning offering me double, and I sent my two apprentices home from another job to make room for it. Arms out, if you please.”
Laurell didn’t move. “I can’t accept this.”
Something in her voice must have carried, because Mrs. Stratmore’s hands stilled and her sharp gaze softened by a fraction.
“Child. I’ve dressed half the ladies in this city and a fair number of the women in Storyville, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.
There’s no shame in a dress. The shame belongs to whoever put you in a position to need one. ” She flicked her fingers. “Arms.”
Laurell raised her arms.
It went on for the better part of an hour, and every minute of it made her feel worse.
Six day dresses. Two evening gowns. A walking dress, a coat with fur at the collar, boots to be ordered from a man on Canal Street, gloves, stockings, three nightgowns, a wrapper.
Petticoats. A hat. When Mrs. Stratmore knelt to take the measure of her waist a second time and said briskly, “I’ll leave the seams generous, shall I,” Laurell felt her face go scalding, and knew Remy had told her.
He knew. The seamstress knew. Mrs. Curry surely knew. In a week the whole city would know, and none of them had been paid for their silence, as Mrs. Stratmore had been paid for her thread.
By the time the woman packed her things and swept out, promising two dresses by Thursday, Laurell’s hands had begun to shake.
She found Remy in his study. He looked up from a stack of correspondence, and the pen went still in his hand.
“You mustn’t buy me those things,” she said.
“Good afternoon to you as well.”
“Mayor Vincent—”
“Remy.”
“Remy.” The name still felt too large in her mouth.
“I don’t know what’s to become of me. Neither do you.
You said as much last night. In a month, or a week, you may have found somewhere to send me, and then you’ll have spent a fortune dressing a woman you’ll never see again.
” Her chin came up, though it cost her. “I won’t have it on my conscience. I have enough there already.”
Remy set down his pen. He rose, came around the desk, and leaned back against the edge of it with his arms folded, studying her with an expression she couldn’t read at all.
“Do you know what I paid Giselle?”
She flinched. “Eight hundred dollars.”
“Eight hundred dollars,” he agreed. “Against which a winter coat is a rounding error. Now. Two things, and then we’ll have no more of this.
” He held up a finger. “The first is that you are not going back to that house. Not next week, not in six months, not if the mayor’s office burns down around me.
Whatever else is uncertain, that isn’t.”
Laurell’s breath caught.
“The second”—a second finger—“is that when you do leave this house, whenever that may be and wherever you may go, you will not walk out of my door wearing something Madam Giselle put on your back. I find I have strong feelings on the subject.” He tilted his head.
“Consider it vanity, if it makes it easier to swallow. I’m a public man.
I can’t have it said I let a guest go about in a dress two sizes too small. ”
It was so plainly a kindness dressed up as pride that Laurell felt her eyes sting, and she looked hard at the carpet until the feeling passed.
“Thank you,” she managed.
“You needn’t thank me every quarter hour, either. It’s exhausting for us both.”
She laughed. It was small and startled and the first sound of its kind she had made in a fortnight. Remy’s eyebrows rose, and something flickered across his face before he smoothed it away.
“There,” he said. “That wasn’t so difficult.”
Remy had just settled into the papers he needed to read before Thursday’s council meeting when Winston appeared to announce that Baron and Baroness Kilnworthy had come to call.
Of course they had. Remy had known James Kilnworthy for exactly eight days, and in that time the man had involved him in a kidnapping, a threat against the most profitable brothel in Storyville, and the purchase of a young woman he now had no earthly idea what to do with.
“Show them into the front parlor,” Remy said. “And ask Miss—” He stopped. Laurell had no name he could safely use in front of the servants, and half the staff still believed the woman upstairs was called Rachel. “Ask Mrs. Curry to bring our guest down.”
The baron came in on a gust of cold air with his wife on his arm, and Remy found himself the recipient of a handshake considerably warmer than the one he’d received at their first meeting.
“Mayor Vincent. I hope we’re not intruding.”
“You are, and I’ve nothing better to do.” Remy gestured them toward the fire. “Baroness. You look a great deal better than the last time I saw you.”
Lilian Kilnworthy laughed. She was small and dark-eyed and rather lovelier than he’d registered, in the chaos of that night. “The last time you saw me I’d been carried out of a brothel over my husband’s shoulder, sir. It would be difficult to look worse.”
“Ann is settled?”
“In the kitchens,” James said. “Cook has decided she’s a personal gift from the Almighty. The child hasn’t stopped eating since Tuesday.”
“And she will not be moved from the kitchen window,” Lilian said. “It looks up the street toward your corner, and she has appointed herself a sort of sentry. She can tell you which of your neighbors goes out at what hour.”
The door opened and Laurell came in, and Remy watched the baroness’s whole bearing change. She was on her feet before Laurell had crossed the threshold, both hands out.
“You’re Laurell.”
Laurell stopped. “I—yes.”
“I’m Lilian.” She took Laurell’s hands as though they’d known each other twenty years. “Ann talks of nothing else. She says you gave her your supper when Giselle wouldn’t feed her, and that you told her stories through the wall.”
Color rose in Laurell’s cheeks. “She’s safe? Truly?”
“She’s safe. She has a bed and a wage and a horrible little cat she found in the alley, which my husband has permitted to live in the house.”
“It catches mice,” James said mildly.
“It catches nothing at all. It’s the laziest animal in Louisiana.
” Lilian drew Laurell toward the settee and sat her down as though the room belonged to her, and Remy, watching from the hearth, felt something in his chest ease at the sight of Laurell’s shoulders coming down from around her ears for the first time since she’d entered his house.
The two women had their heads together within a minute. He caught fragments—the second floor at Giselle’s, the woman called Marguerite who’d been kind, the balcony Lilian had climbed down. Whatever passed between them, it was a language he didn’t speak, and he was glad enough to leave them to it.
James joined him by the fire, warming his hands.
“That’s a weight off her,” the baron said quietly. “Lilian’s hardly slept since Ann told us. She kept saying that girl’s in that house because we got out.”
“The girl is out of the house.”
“And into yours.” James glanced at him sidelong. “What do you mean to do with her?”
“That,” Remy said, “is the question of the hour. She can’t go home.
Her father owes Giselle a gambling debt and would sell her again by Sunday.
She has no money, no husband, and no skill on earth beyond running a household she doesn’t have.
” He paused, then decided the baron had earned the truth. “And she’s carrying a child.”
James went very still. “Whose?”
“Some young buck who promised her marriage in a garden and denied every word of it when the consequences arrived. She won’t give me his name.” Remy heard the edge come into his own voice and disliked it. “She was to be handed to Abelard Gauthier in three days’ time. In that condition.”
“Christ.”
“Quite.”
They stood a while in silence. Across the room, Lilian said something that made Laurell laugh out loud, and Remy realized he had turned his head to look before he’d decided to.
When he turned back, James was watching him with an expression of the most insufferable neighborly interest.
“You know,” the baron said, “I bought Lilian a great deal more cheaply than eight hundred dollars, and I did it purely to save her. I was quite certain about that at the time. I told myself so at least four times a day.”
“It isn’t the same thing.”
“No. Mine wasn’t expecting another man’s child, and I hadn’t a city to answer to.
” James shrugged. “Different in every particular. I only mention it because I remember the exact moment I stopped being able to say the word rescue with a straight face, and I believe I’ve just watched you approach it. ”
“I’m forty years old.”
“And I was a widower who’d sworn off the entire institution.”
“I’m not marrying her.” Remy said it more sharply than he intended, and lowered his voice. “Good God, man. She’s been sold twice inside a month, once by the people who raised her. The last thing that woman needs is another man deciding what’s to be done with her.”
James inclined his head, and had the decency not to smile with his mouth. “Naturally.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’ve said so twice now,” James observed, “and I only asked the once.”