Vanquished (22 page)

She nodded. "A benefit ball to raise funds for the Tremayne Dairy Farm Academy. I don't suppose you've heard of it, have you?" When he shook his head, she elaborated, "The school is located in the countryside, but most of its pupils are fallen women from the London streets. They are taught how to read, write, and cipher as well as a trade so that they may make a fresh start in life."

He swallowed hard, throat muscles working. "No, though I have some knowledge of a similar sounding establishment that operates as an orphanage," he finally said. "Those who engage in such noble work have my heartfelt respect, but I must be honest and say I haven't the funds at this time to make a proper donation." He looked down to his folded hands, and she gathered the admission pained him.

Following his gaze, she took note of the chemical stains on his right thumb and forefinger and the loss of pigment marring the broad back of the other hand; the latter looked to be scarring from a nasty burn. Although she knew little enough about photography, she suspected most professionals hired an assistant to take on the more mundane, menial tasks to do with the development process. Despite his fashionable address, it was evident Hadrian St. Claire was hurting for money, which explained his shop's spartan and somewhat shabby interior.

"On the contrary, Mr. St. Claire, I am not here to solicit a donation but to ask you to attend as my guest and," she paused, "my niece's escort."

He looked sharply up. "Perhaps it would be best if Callie asked me herself."

She looked at him. Really, men could be so terribly obtuse. "Of course, but she likely never will."

Settling back in his seat, he met her gaze, and she fancied a look of understanding passed between them. "Too proud?"

"On the contrary, too shy."

She was determined Callie should make a splash at the benefit ball to overcome the disaster of her come-out when countrified couture had caused her to be branded a wallflower. Callie's mother, no fashion plate, had dressed her tall, curvy daughter in watery pastels and fussy frills that made her look and, Lottie suspected,
feel
like an ungainly girl rather than a lovely young woman on the brink of a bright future.

She hesitated, wondering how much more, if anything, she dare say. "If she seems prickly at times, I only caution you not to be put off by it. It's her way of armoring herself against getting hurt again."

"Again?"

She slanted her gaze to the door. "I really should be on my way. I've taken up too much of your time as it is." She pushed back her chair to leave.

Hadrian St. Claire was on his feet in an instant. Holding her chair for her, he said, "On the contrary, I'm honored you called as I will be honored to accompany you both to the ball . . . that is, if you're quite certain Callie will want me there."

Rather than give answer to the highly delicate question hidden in that statement, Lottie said, "Before I go, I'll risk speaking out of turn yet again and admit to your being a pleasant surprise from what I was expecting."

One dark blond brow edged upward. "And that was?"

She fixed him with an open, unwavering stare. "You are an exceedingly handsome young man, Mr. St. Claire, and charming as well, a combination I suspect serves you well with the women you encounter. Yet I also sense there's more to you than good looks and dash, that you are one of those rare men possessed of the gift, the
vision,
to spot a diamond and know its true worth even if it may not appear on first glance to be as smoothly polished as other stones aglitter with false luster."

"Why is it I don't think you're speaking of gemology?" he said, tone touched with irony.

Lottie did not deny it. Looking him in the eye, she answered, "My niece may think and speak and at times even dress in a mannish manner, but never doubt she has a woman's heart. And a woman's heart, Mr. St. Claire, can be a very fragile thing particularly once it's been broken." She snapped open her reticule and took out the gold-embossed invitation. Leaving it on the table, she started for the door. "I know it's customary for the gentleman to do the calling, but I've purchased a new carriage, very well-sprung, and I'm positively mad to show it off." A tactful way of settling the dodgy subject of transportation, for she knew full well the best he could have provided was a hired hansom. "May Callie and I call for you around seven o'clock tomorrow evening?"

Smiling, he accompanied her to the door. Opening it, he stood back, sketching a bow worthy of a Buckingham Palace courtier. "Seven o'clock shall suit me most admirably, Mrs. Rivers."

Callie looked over the stacks of papers topping her desk to see her aunt sailing into her office, turned out in a fur-trimmed carriage dress with leg-o'-mutton sleeves, their maid, Jenny, in tow. Smile bright, Lottie announced, "Callie, dear, I knew I would find you here. I've come to drag you away from duty for an hour's jaunt to the shops."

Callie fitted a hand over her brow where the beginnings of a headache had begun to pulse. "Auntie, I can't leave now. With the meeting with Lord Salisbury scheduled for this Friday, shopping is the very last thing I've time for."
Or mooning over a man I can't have,
she added to herself.

In truth, her feelings for Hadrian were growing every day. Worse still, she was beginning to suspect that those feelings went considerably deeper than mere animal lust, although there was certainly that in abundance. Though they'd left off touching since the week before when she'd come perilously close to letting him tumble her in a whore's bed, it was there all the same, hot enough to melt wax and thrumming between them like electrical current.

Lottie dismissed her protests with a wave as if meeting with the prime minister was of trifling consequence. "Fiddlesticks, you have a secretary, don't you, and a staff of able volunteers?" She glanced about the office to the half-dozen women, all brisk and busy. "Surely Harriet can mind the shop for the few hours we'll need to find you a proper ball gown, is that not so, Harriet?" When the secretary had only nodded and gone to fetch her coat, Callie had known her ship was as good as sunk.

Their carriage turned the corner of Bond and Oxford Streets, and Lottie directed her driver to let them out at Maison Valen, a fashion house in operation since Napoleon's time. Well-known as one of the few older ladies willing to spend the money required to dress a la mode, she had no difficulty in catching a shop clerk's eye the moment they crossed the threshold.

Beckoning a young girl with a mouthful of pins to her side, Lottie launched into an explanation of the problem at hand. "We need a ball gown for my niece and it is imperative it be ready in time for tomorrow evening."

Eyes widening, the girl gave an effusive shake of her head. Spitting pins, she said, "But
madame,
it is not possible."

From the vicinity of the marble-topped counter on the room's other side, an authoritative voice called out, "On the contrary, Genevieve, for my good friend, Madame Rivers, all is possible."

Lottie turned her approving gaze on the tall, slender woman crossing the Oriental carpet toward them. Dressed all in black and with silvered hair swept into a soft chignon, the modiste was the very embodiment of elegance.

"Hortense, you are kindness itself." She turned to Callie. "Allow me to introduce my niece, Caledonia Rivers." Lottie's smile was a rival for the electric lights shining forth from the crystal chandelier overhead.

If the modiste knew who Callie was, she gave no sign of it. She backed up several paces and ran her gaze over her from head to toe and back again, then motioned for her to remove her coat. Before Callie could comply, Lottie and Jenny were on either side of her, tugging the outerwear free.

"Ah," Madame Valen intoned. A finger to one side of her mouth, she slowly circled as though Callie had no more sentience than one of the dressmaker's forms anchored about the shop floor.

Callie gritted her teeth, perilously close to marching out the door. This was precisely what she'd dreaded: this bloodless, dispassionate appraisal that brought the bad memories flooding back, starting with her court presentation during which she'd tripped over her train and fallen, sending the feathers from her headdress flying and making the Queen sneeze. From that day on, she'd been a laughingstock, an oaf. The "season's leavings," Gerald's friend had called her, and he hadn't been far off the mark. It had been an extraordinarily painful time of her life, and in no mood to relive it scene by scene, she felt her upper lip stiffening.

"Pas mauvaise.
Not bad, not so very bad."

The modiste's eyes were riveted on her breasts, and it took every whit of her hard-won confidence not to cross her arms over her chest. Within the confines of the shop's silk-papered walls, she wasn't a suffragette, she wasn't even a leader. She was simply a plain woman bordering on middle age, with broad hips and a blousy bosom.

She turned to Lottie and whispered, "Truly, Aunt, that navy gown of mine will suffice."

If Lottie heard her, she chose not to let on. To the modiste, she said, "Hortense, you are the expert among us. What do you advise?"

Expression thoughtful, the dressmaker turned back to Lottie, her oval-shaped face weighted with the gravity of a magistrate about to pass sentence. "What we want is something with a minimum of stuff and nonsense, classically simple and timelessly elegant." She craned her neck to look at Callie's behind. "And we will be certain to leave off the bustle."

"A tactful way of saying I'm already so big there," Callie snapped, feeling utterly out of sorts.

Under cover of her coat, Lottie swatted her in the side. "Really, Caledonia, do try to be more positive."

Not Callie but Caledonia. She really must be wearing on Lottie's nerves, which was only fair, she supposed, since she was within an inch of taking her aunt's slender throat in her hands.

The dressmaker's thin lips lifted into a chilly smile. "Such a lovely bottom as
mademoiselle's
requires no embellishment."

Mademoiselle.
Callie hid a huff. Beyond flaring the nostrils of her Gallic nose and tossing out the occasional foreign phrase, Madame Valen didn't look or sound any more French than the rest of them.

Addressing Lottie, the dressmaker asked, "You are familiar with the gown worn by Madame X in the Sargent portrait?"

Lottie thought for a moment. "I believe so. All black with delicately jeweled shoulder straps, nipped-in waist, and narrow skirt?"

"Just so, and I believe I have the very gown. It will need a bit of alteration, of course, but my head seamstress can manage whatever we wish. Come, I will show you."

Arms linked, the two older women disappeared into the velvet-curtained dressing room. Jenny had likewise drifted away to finger the bolts of fabric stacked against the far wall. Accustomed as Callie was to being the one leading the charge, she felt as though she'd faded to invisibility.

Like an active beehive, the sights and sounds of activity buzzed all about her. Female shoppers draped themselves over divans and damask-covered chairs, sipping tea and offering advice to friends posing atop carpeted pedestals and frowning into pier glasses, snapping at harried seamstresses to put a move on. Callie sank down onto the cushion of a velvet-covered settee, an onlooker to the scene much as she'd been in her debutante days. She snatched up one of the several ladies' fashion magazines fanned across a nearby reading table and began furiously flipping through. What she found there was scarcely any comfort. The models depicted in the fashion plates all had heart-shaped faces, neat bosoms, and tiny, nipped-in waists. Closing the magazine, she told herself she never should have allowed Lottie to drag her here, particularly when there was the meeting with Lord Salisbury scheduled for the week's end. Her aunt had been angling to dress her for years and until today Callie had always held firm in her refusal. Why had she weakened?

As was the case with so many aspects of her life of late, the answer came back to one word, one person. Hadrian. The remarks he'd made on her clothing during their first photographic sitting had stayed with her. If she must go to this ball, and given the important guests in attendance it seemed she had little choice but to go, she didn't want to look "positively funerary" as he'd called it. Yet the last time she'd made any effort to transform herself, she'd ended up a laughingstock with poker straight hair curled into fussy ringlets and a frilly pink gown that had proven woefully out of step with London standards. Glancing about the well-appointed shop to the elegantly dressed women milling about, she tried telling herself that this time she was in far better hands, but the old shame was slow to die.