Louise Allen - The Disgraceful Mr Ravenhurst

‘Your clothes. And she was never my mistress—a term that implies some kind of arrangement. I am too careful of my life to entangle myself with that dangerous creature.’

‘Tell me about her.’ Elinor folded the sketches safely away in her pocket and regarded him hopefully.

‘No! Good God, woman, Aunt Louisa would have my hide if she had the faintest idea what we are talking about. I don’t know what has come over me.’

‘We are becoming friends, I think,’ she suggested. ‘I find you very easy to talk to, perhaps because we are cousins. And I am not the sort of female you are used to.’

‘That,’ Theo observed with some feeling, ‘is very true. Would you like anything else to eat? No? Then let us go and consult Madame Dubois.’

After five minutes with Madame, Theo was amused to observe that Elinor stopped casting him embarrassed glances and dragged him firmly into the discussion, even when he judged it time to retreat and began to edge towards the door.

‘Come back,’ she ordered, sounding alarmingly like her mother for a moment. ‘My French is not up to this, I do not have the vocabulary for clothes.’

‘What makes you think I have?’ he countered. She slanted him a look that said she knew all to well that he had plenty of experience with French modistes and turned back to wrestling with the French for waistline .

Between them they managed well enough and Madame grasped the principles of the radical divided skirt very quickly. ‘You could start a fashion, mademoiselle ,’ she remarked, spreading out the sketches and studying them. ‘Your English tailors say we French cannot produce riding habits to their standard—let us see!’

They agreed on the riding skirt with a jacket and a habit-shirt to go beneath it, a morning dress and a half-ress gown. ‘Now, this is the fun part.’ Theo began to poke about in the bales of cloth and had his hand slapped firmly away by Madame.

‘Zut! Let mademoiselle choose.’

‘No, I trust Monsieur Ravenhurst’s judgement,’ Elinor said bravely, apparently only half-convinced of the wisdom of that assertion.

‘That for the riding habit.’ Decisive, he pulled out a roll of moss-green twill. ‘And that, or that, for the morning dress.’ Elinor submitted to having a sprigged amber muslin and a garnet-red stripe held up against her. Madame favoured the amber, he the red. Elinor wrinkled her nose, apparently unhappy about pattern at all.

‘No, look.’ Theo, carried away, began to drape the cloth around her. ‘See? Pinched in here to show your waist off, and here, cut on the bias across the bosom—’ He broke off, finding himself with both arms around Elinor, his nose not eight inches from where her cleavage would be if it was not swathed in fabric.

‘It is my bosom,’ she pointed out mildly. He felt heat sweep through him, dropped the fabric and stepped back abruptly. She caught the falling cloth, plainly amused at his discomfiture. ‘I like this garnet stripe, I think, and I agree with Monsieur Ravenhurst’s suggestions about the cut.’ She tilted her head provocatively, disconcerting him by her agreement.

‘ Alors .’ Madame appeared to have become resigned to her mad English clients, or perhaps she was simply used to him and inclined to be indulgent. ‘The evening gown. Amber silk I have. A nice piece.’

‘Violet,’ Theo said, pointing. ‘That one.’

‘With my hair?’ Elinor asked in alarm. He grinned at her. There would be no hiding in corners in a gown of that shimmering amethyst.

‘Definitely.’ She was not going to prevail this time. And he felt as though he had found a ruby on a rubbish tip and had delivered it to a master jeweller for cleaning and resetting. It was really rather gratifying.

A price and a startlingly short delivery time having been agreed, Elinor found herself outside with Theo, feeling somewhat as though she had been caught up in a whirlwind and deposited upside down just where she had been originally standing. ‘I came out to look at a church,’ she observed faintly, ‘and now I’ve driven a gig, had my clothes insulted, eaten at an inn and bought three outfits.’

‘You may express your gratitude when you see the effect.’ Theo placed her hand in the crook of his elbow and began to stroll. ‘A walk along the river bank before we go back?’

‘I did not say I was grateful!’ Elinor retrieved her hand, but fell into step beside him.

‘Admit that was more fun than drawing capitals all day.’ He turned off the road and began to walk upstream.

‘It was different ,’ she conceded. ‘Oh, look, a kingfisher.’ They followed the flight of the jewelled bird as it fished, moving from one perch to another. The water was clear with long weed streaming like silk ribbons over the mosaic of pebbles and here and there a weir broke the smooth surface into foam and eddies.

There did not seem to be any need to speak. Sometimes Theo would reach out and touch her arm and point and she would follow the line of the long brown finger up to where a buzzard soared overhead or down to a yellow butterfly, unnoticed almost at her feet.

She picked a tiny bunch of wild flowers—one sprig of cow parsley, one long-stemmed buttercup, a spray of a blue creeping thing she had never seen before—and tucked them into his button hole. He retaliated by capturing her straw hat, which she had been swinging by its ribbons, unheeding of the effect on her complexion, and filling it with dog roses, won at the expense of badly pricked fingers.

The path began to meander away from the riverside. Then Theo pointed through a tangle of bushes to where a shelving stretch of close-cropped grass ran down to the water. ‘Rest there a while, then walk back?’ he suggested.

Elinor nodded. ‘I could wander along here all afternoon in a trance, but I suppose we had best go no further.’ It was the most curious sort of holiday, this day out of time with the almost-stranger she could recall from her childhood. Restful, companionable and yet with an edge of something that made her not uncomfortable exactly…

‘You’ll have to duck.’ He was holding up a bramble. Elinor stopped pondering just how she was feeling and crouched down under a hawthorn bush, crept under the bramble and straightened up. ‘Careful—too late, stand still.’

Something was grasping her very firmly by the net full of hair at her nape. Impatient, she shook her head and felt the whole thing pull free. ‘Bother!’ She swung round, her hair spilling out over her shoulders, only to find Theo disentangling the net from a blackthorn twig. ‘Thank you.’ Elinor held out a hand.

‘Torn beyond repair, I fear.’ Theo scrunched it up in his hand and tossed it into the river where it bobbed, forlorn, for a while, then sank, soggily.

‘Liar!’ Elinor marched up until she was toe to toe with him. ‘It was fine. It is just like my gowns.’

Theo dropped to the ground, disconcerting her as she stood there trying to rant at him. ‘I wanted to see your hair. Would you like a drink?’

‘Yes, I would, but I’m not drinking river water—look, cows. And you did not have to throw my hairnet away.’

Theo was fishing in the satchel she had thought contained only sketching equipment, emerging with a bottle, a corkscrew and two horn beakers. ‘I did. What would you have said if I’d asked you to let your hair down?’

‘No, of course.’ Exasperated Elinor sat down too, hugging her knees. Hair was in her eyes and she blew at it.

‘I rest my case. Here, try this. It really ought to be cooler, but never mind.’

‘Do you always get what you want?’ Elinor took the beaker resentfully. The first mouthful of wine slid down, fruity and thirst quenching. She took another, her irritation ebbing away. It seemed impossible to be cross with Theo for very long.