She, who had felt alone amongst strangers for as long as she could remember, had felt a connection with him that defied explanation.
Surely she had the moral strength to resist the temptation to go away with the first person who had ever made her feel as though she belonged somewhere?
No wonder, she sighed, so many women abandoned honest, hard toil, and took to a life of vice. If she could feel this torn after one fleeting encounter with a man she knew practically nothing about…She shivered. Perhaps her first instinctive reaction to his advent in her life had been the right one. To run far, far away to a place where he could never find her. Because he was dangerous. Dangerous to her.
‘Heavens, girl, what’s to do with you now?’
Mary started, discovering Madame Pichot hovering over her, her lips pursed with disapproval. She had not heard her come into the workroom. Not that that was so unusual in itself. She was often so immersed in her work that hours passed without her being conscious of anything else that went on in the room around her.
What was unusual was that Madame had caught her staring into space, her hands idle.
No wonder Madame looked displeased. Mary had not been herself since the day she had come running home in a panic from her errand to Curzon Street. Her nights were full of disturbing dreams of the dark man. And all day long her thoughts kept straying in his direction. She had to keep yanking them back to her work by force of will. She hung her head, embarrassed to have to acknowledge that for the first time ever, she was behind with her work.
Madame reached down, took hold of Mary’s chin in her strong, capable fingers, and jerked her face up.
‘Stars in your eyes,’ she muttered angrily. ‘You’ve come back from wherever Molly took you last night with stars in your eyes.’ Her fingers squeezed more tightly as Mary squirmed guiltily. She had known Madame would see through Molly’s excuses for taking so long over what should have been a straightforward errand. She had sent the girls straight up to their room without comment, and Molly seemed to think they had got away with it. But Madame’s next words chilled Mary to the bone.
‘Once the gentry start going back to their summer homes, I’m turning that girl off for last night’s work.’ She looked right through Mary as she voiced her thoughts aloud, treating her, as she had done from the first, as though she was a half-wit. Mary could understand how that attitude had originated. She had been in a terrible state on the day she had arrived. Almost beside herself after the rigours of the journey, and what had happened to her before setting out. For weeks, the slightest thing had triggered debilitating episodes of blind panic, which had meant she hardly got any work done.
The other workers had soon learned it was not safe to ask her questions about where she came from. Whenever she had tried to provide explanations, groping back into the unrelenting blackness where the knowledge should have been, she was overwhelmed by such a devastating sense of loss that it brought her actual, physical pain. So severe she could scarcely breathe through it. It was like…drowning.
Pretty soon, the girls stopped asking her. And Mary stopped trying to probe into that maelstrom of darkness and pain. It was a bit like coming to an uneasy truce with herself. She did not deliberately try to provoke her memory, and for the most part, it left her alone.
And Madame, discovering that when Mary was calm she could do far more than merely sew a seam, that she was in fact far more highly skilled with her needle than any of her other workers, had begun to treat her like a pet dog. A dog that could perform amazing tricks, and was therefore worth cosseting, but not quite on a par with a real person.
‘I can get another such as her for the crooking of my finger,’ Madame continued relentlessly. ‘Girls who can sew fall over themselves to work in an establishment such as mine, Mary, where they can get fair wages for an honest day’s work.’
Most girls, yes, but not her. Madame had only agreed to take her on as a favour to the friend who had sent her to London. Mary had her board and food. She got nice clothes, which she made for herself during the winter months, when custom was slack. She had sturdy boots, and attractive bonnets and warm gloves, for Madame insisted her girls looked well turned out when they went to church.
But hard coin never came into her hands.
‘I trusted you to go out and take your prescribed exercise, because I thought you were different from the other girls. That you were so scared of men that you would never idle away my time flirting with footmen in the houses I send you to, or loitering on the streets to see if you can catch the eye of some Bond Street buck. And then you come back here, reeking of the tavern, with stars in your eyes!’
She let go of Mary’s chin then, as though she was disgusted by the prolonged physical contact.
‘I thought all you needed to keep you happy was a piece of satin, and a dish of beads! The longer you worked for me, the calmer you seemed to become. Are you not happy working for me?’
Mary heard the threat implicit in Madame’s question and went cold inside. What would become of her if Madame turned her off? She had no family, no friends outside this workroom. Nor did she possess the survival skills of Molly and her ilk.
Mary stared at her, aghast. She no longer looked like the patient benefactress who tolerated her deficiencies because she had a charitable nature, but like a hardheaded businesswoman who had risen to the top of her profession by sheer determination. With her slightly protuberant eyes, her dark, wispy hair coiled round her head in a plait, and the way she had held Mary’s chin with fingers that felt like steel pincers, she could see exactly how Molly could liken her to a spider, grasping hold of a fly she had caught in her web. Molly and the other girls had always seen this side of her. Because they had their wits about them.
Now she, too, saw how precarious her position was. How totally dependant she was on this woman’s good will.
‘Please don’t turn me off when the Season is over,’ Mary pleaded. ‘I promise I won’t go into a tavern ever again! Indeed, I did not like it!’
Madame glared at her for a few seconds, before apparently coming to a decision.
‘I cannot go on pampering you as I have done, if this is how you repay me,’ she said coldly. ‘A daily walk, indeed! None of the other girls are granted such indulgence.’
None of the other girls worked quite so hard as she did, though, Mary surprised herself by thinking mutinously. They did not get so caught up in their task that they forgot to eat. They chattered, and got up to stretch and peer out of the window, or peek at the titled customers that came into the downstairs showrooms, while Mary kept her head down, and worked relentlessly, exhausting herself so that when she was finally permitted to leave her station, she hoped she would fall into bed and sleep dreamlessly.
‘Well, I shall certainly not permit you to leave these premises again until I can be certain I can trust you not to go making assignations. And no more sitting about, mooning over whoever it was you dallied with last night either. No man ever brought a woman anything but trouble. You must forget him! Do I make myself plain?’
‘Yes, Madame,’ said Mary with heartfelt relief. She was not, apparently, going to lose her job, and her home along with it, for the foreseeable future. Nor was she going to be going outside where she might risk running into the disturbingly seductive dark gentleman, either. And by the time Madame’s temper had cooled down, so would his ardour. People of his class, from her experience of the spoilt débutantes and titled ladies who came into the shop downstairs, did not possess a scrap of patience. They all wanted their whims satisfied quickly, or they grew petulant. And he was a lord, she recalled. Molly had mentioned his title. It was something like Harrison. Something with a lot of ‘s’ s in it, anyway. And a lord would not hanker after one particular seamstress for very long, if she knew anything about it. By the time she next ventured out of doors, he would have tracked down someone else who reminded him of his lost lady, and forgotten all about her.