He folded up the letter, addressed it, and left it in the tray for the servant to take out with the morning mail.
Then, only the heartache remained.
Experience, the mother of true wisdom, has long since convinced me, that real beauty is best discerned by real judges; and the addresses of a sensible lover imply the best compliment to a woman of understanding.
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Advertisements for June 1807
Early afternoon, Sunday 10 May
The Duke of Clevedon blinked at the excessively bright light. Saunders, the sadist, stood looking down at him. He’d opened the curtains, and the sun was as bright as lightning bolts. When Clevedon moved his head, thunder cracked, right against his skull.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, your grace.”
“No, you’re not,” Clevedon croaked.
“Mr. Halliday was most insistent,” Saunders said. “He said you would wish to be wakened. Mrs. Noirot is here.”
Clevedon sat up abruptly. His brain thumped painfully against something hard and sharp. The interior of his skull had grown thorns. “Lucie,” he said. “Is she ill? Lost? Damn, I told her that child needed…” The sentence trailed off as his drink-poisoned brain caught up with his tongue.
“Mrs. Noirot said we were to assure your grace that the Princess Erroll of Albania is well and safely at home doing sums with her aunt. Mr. Halliday has taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Noirot to wait in the library. Being aware that you would need time to dress, he saw to it that refreshment was brought to her. I have brought your coffee, sir.”
Now Clevedon’s heart was pounding, too, along with his brain, but not at the same tempo.
He did not leap from his bed, but he got out more quickly than was altogether comfortable for a man in his condition. He hastily swallowed the coffee. He washed and dressed in record time, though it seemed an age to him, even though he decided not to bother with the nicety of shaving.
A glance in the mirror told him shaving wouldn’t do much to improve his appearance. He looked like an animated corpse. He tied his neckcloth in a haphazard knot, shrugged into his coat, and hurried out of the room, still buttoning it.
When he came in, smoothing his neckcloth like a nervous schoolboy called on to recite from the Iliad, he found Noirot bent over the library table.
She was perfect, as usual, in one of her more dashing creations, a heavy white silk embroidered all over with red and yellow flowers. The double-layered short cape, its edges gored and trimmed in black lace, was made of the same material. It extended out over her shoulders and over the big sleeves of her dress. Round her neck she’d tied a black lace something or other. Her hat sat well back on her head, so that its brim framed her face, and that inner brim was adorned with lace and ribbons. More ribbon and lace trimmed the back, where a tall plume of feathers sprouted.
He, clearly, did not make nearly as pretty a picture. At his entrance she looked up, and her hand went to her bosom. “Oh, no,” she said. Then she collected herself and said, in cooler tones, “I heard about the fight.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, though he knew it was. “I know how to dodge a blow to the face. You ought to see Longmore. At any rate, this is the way I always look after an excessively convivial night with a man who tried to kill me. Why are you here?”
He was careful to keep any hope from his face as well as his voice. It was harder to keep it from his heart. He didn’t want to let himself hope she’d changed her mind. He was fully awake and sober now and wishing he were drunk again.
He could truly understand at last, not only in his mind but in his gut as well, why his father had crawled into a bottle. Drink dulled the pain. Physical pain dulled it, too. While fighting with Longmore he’d felt nothing. Now he remembered every word he’d said to her, the way he’d opened his heart, concealing nothing. It hadn’t been enough. He wasn’t enough.
She gestured at the table. “I was looking at the magazines,” she said. “I’m unscrupulous. I looked at your notes, too. But I can’t read your writing. You said you had ideas. About my business.”
“Is that why you’ve come?” he said tightly. “For the ideas for your shop—the ideas to make you the greatest modiste in the world.”
“I am the greatest modiste in the world,” she said.
Dear God how he loved her! Her self-confidence, her unscrupulousness, her determination, her strength, her genius. Her passion.
He allowed himself a smile, and hoped it didn’t look too sickeningly infatuated. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “How could I forget? You are the greatest modiste in the world.”
“But I’m someone else as well,” she said.
She moved away from the table and walked to the window and looked out into the garden.
He waited. Had he any choice?
“I was tired yesterday,” she said, still looking out. “Very tired. It was a shockingly busy day, and we were run off our feet, and I was in a state, trying not to fall apart.” She turned away from the window and met his gaze. “I was trying so hard that I was unkind and unfair to you.”
“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man, We can still be friends. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.
“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”
Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”
“He’s dead.”
Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.
“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”
“No, I’m well.”
“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”
“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.
She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”
He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.
She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.
She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”
Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.
He tried to imagine what that had been like and his