Loretta Chase - Regency Rogues and Rakes - Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares

Sophy had got wind of it last night at the party. She’d mentioned it to her sisters. They’d all hoped it was merely the usual idle rumor.

They had quite enough trouble as it was.

“Curse her,” Marcelline said. “We should have been finished with her. She closed her shop. She said it was for repairs, but she dismissed her staff. I was sure she’d slither out of London like the viper she is.”

The viper was Hortense Downes, proprietress of the shop known at Maison Noirot as Dowdy ’s. A few weeks earlier, she and one of her minions had brought them to the brink of ruin. But the sisters had played her own trick against her, thus exposing her to the world as a fake and a cheat.

Or so they’d thought.

Marcelline shook her head. “That business of stealing my designs ought to have finished her.”

“She’s blamed it on her seamstresses,” Sophy said. “She’s told her patrons she’s dismissed the lot and hired all new staff.”

“Plague take her,” Marcelline said. “Who knew that Hortense the Horrible was clever enough to recover her reputation?”

“It’s what I’d have done in her place,” Sophy said. “Blamed the help. Cleaned house. And made sure to tell my clients the ‘truth’ of how I’d been a victim of ungrateful employees. Then I’d send my customers personal notes in advance of the public advertisement.”

“This is very bad,” Marcelline said. She looked at her sisters. “How much business have we lost because of me?”

Sophy and Leonie looked at each other.

“I see,” Marcelline said. “Worse than I thought.”

“Lady Warford is a formidable social power,” Leonie said. “No one wants to shop at a place she’s blackballed.”

“But she dresses so ill!” Marcelline said.

“She doesn’t think so and nobody has the courage to tell her,” Sophy said. “Not that most of them are any more discerning than she is. They’re like sheep, as we all know. She’s a leader, and they follow the leader.”

“And she hates me,” Marcelline said.

“With a pure, white-hot hatred, the sort of feeling her kind more usually reserve for anarchists and republicans,” Sophy said.

Marcelline began to pace.

“It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if Lady Clara had got herself into trouble with the right man,” Leonie said. “She could become a fashion leader in her own right, and she’d help us build a clientele with the younger generation.”

“But she picked the wrong man,” Marcelline said. She returned to her drawing table, pushed the newspaper aside, took up her notebook, and began sketching, in strong, angry lines. “Tell me the truth, Leonie.”

“We’re facing ruin,” Leonie said simply.

No one said a word about Marcelline’s husband, who could buy and sell the shop many times over out of his pocket change.

They didn’t want to be bought.

This was their shop. Three years ago they’d come from Paris, having lost everything. They’d come with a sick child, a few coins, and their talents. Marcelline had won money at the gaming tables. That gave them their start.

Now she must feel as though she’d destroyed everything they’d worked for. All for love.

But Marcelline had a right to love and be loved. She’d worked so hard. She’d endured so much. She’d looked after them all. She deserved happiness.

“We’ve faced ruin before,” Sophy said. “This isn’t worse than Paris and the cholera.”

“We’ve survived a catastrophe here as well,” Leonie said.

“With Clevedon’s help,” Marcelline said. “Which we didn’t like accepting. But we agreed because we hadn’t any choice.”

“And we made sure it was a loan ,” Leonie said.

“Which it now seems we can’t repay,” Marcelline said, her pencil still moving angrily. “We’re so far from repaying it that we’ll have to ask for another one. Or accept failure. Leonie was right, after all. We bit off more than we could chew.”

Weeks ago, when the Duke of Clevedon had found them these new quarters, Leonie had warned that they hadn’t enough customers to support a large shop on St. James’s Street.

“We always bite off more than we can chew,” Sophy said. “We came from Paris with nothing, and built a business in only three years. We set out to capture Lady Clara and we succeeded—although not quite in the way we intended. We wouldn’t be who we are if we acted like normal women. I don’t see why we should start acting normal now, just because our best customer made a mistake with a man, as most women do, or because her mother holds grudges. I for one am not going to lie down and surrender merely on account of a little setback.”

Marcelline looked up from her sketching and smiled, finally. “Only you would call impending ruin ‘a little setback.’ “

“The trouble with you is, you’re in love, and you feel guilty about it, which is perfectly ridiculous in a Noirot,” Sophy said.

“She’s right,” Leonie said. “You married a duke. You’re supposed to be thoroughly pleased with yourself. It’s a great coup. No one else, on either side of the family, has done it, to my knowledge.”

“Not only a duke, but stupendously rich,” Sophy said. “Your daughter has actual, genuine castles to play in.”

“So stop brooding,” Leonie said.

“I’m facing failure,” Marcelline said. “A gigantic, catastrophic failure—which that horrid Dowdy reptile will laugh at. That entitles me to brood.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Sophy said. “She isn’t going to laugh, and we’re not going to fail. We’ll think of something. We always do.”

“We merely need to think fast,” Leonie said. “Because we’ve less than a month until quarter day.”

Midsummer: 24 June. When rents were due and accounts were settled.

Someone tapped at the door.

“What is it?” Marcelline called.

The door opened a crack, revealing a narrow slice of Mary Parmenter, one of their seamstresses. “If you please, Your Grace, mesdames. Lady Clara Fairfax is here. And Lord Longmore.”

There is certainly some connexion between the dress and the mind, an accurate observer can trace some correspondencies; and the weak as well as the strong-minded never cease to be influenced by a good or bad dress.

—Lady’s Magazine & Museum, June 1835

It was sort of a brothel for women, Longmore decided.

The shop even had a discreet back entrance, reserved, no doubt, for high-priced harlots and the men who kept them.

A few minutes earlier, a modestly but handsomely dressed female had let them in that way and led them up a flight of carpeted and gently lit back stairs. Small landscape paintings and fashion plates from earlier times adorned the pale green walls.

He’d been in Maison Noirot’s showroom, but this was another world altogether.

The room into which the female had taken them looked like a sitting room. More little paintings on the pale pink walls. Pretty bits of porcelain. Lacy things adorning tables and chair backs. The very air smelled of women, but it was subtle. His nostrils caught only a hint of scent, as though a bouquet of flowers and herbs had recently passed through. Everything about him was soft and luxurious and inviting. It conjured harem slaves in paintings. Odalisques.

He was tempted to stretch out on the carpet and call for the hashish and dancing girls.

The door opened. All his senses went on the alert.

But it was only the elegantly dressed female carrying a tray. She set it upon a handsome tea table. Longmore noticed the tray held a plate of biscuits. A decanter stood where the teapot ought to be.

When the female went out, he said, “So this is how they do it. They ply you with drink.”