She swallowed. “Please, your lordship, I was on my way to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females,” she said.
“There’s a mouthful,” Crawford said.
“I work there,” the girl said. “I’m going to be late.”
She gave Longmore the direction, which he relayed to the driver, with strict orders to take the girl to her destination in half the usual time, or Longmore would find him and give him an excellent excuse for moving slowly.
He helped the girl up into the coach, slammed the door on her, and waved the driver away.
He thought about milliners.
One milliner, actually, a blonde one.
Leaving his companions to find another hackney, he continued on foot, on his own, the short distance to St. James’s Street. To get to Crockford’s, he had to pass White’s Club on one side of the street, and a very little way farther down, Maison Noirot, lair of French dressmakers.
He passed the dressmakers’ shop, walking slowly. Then he paused and looked back, up at the upper storeys where, for reasons that eluded him, two of the three Noirot sisters still lived.
He continued to Crockford’s, where he proceeded to lose large sums for quite an interesting while before he started to win large sums.
When, after an hour or so of increasing boredom, he left Crockford’s, it was still prodigious early by Fashionable Society’s standards. Nonetheless, London was coming to life. People going up and down St. James’s Street: a few vehicles but mainly pedestrians. The shops hadn’t yet opened.
Maison Noirot, he knew, did not open until ten o’clock, though the seamstresses—a great parade of them these days—all marched in at nine.
Still, over the past few weeks he had acquired a general notion of Sophia Noirot’s habits.
He waited.
For the last week, the whole of the fashionable world has been in a state of ferment, on account of the elopement of Sir Colquhoun Grant’s daughter with Mr. Brinsley Sheridan … On Friday afternoon, about five o’clock, the young couple borrowed the carriage of a friend; and … set off full speed for the North.
—The Court Journal, Saturday 23 May 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835
Waving a copy of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle, Sophy Noirot burst in upon the Duke and Duchess of Clevedon while they were breakfasting in, appropriately enough, the breakfast room of Clevedon House.
“Have you seen this?” she said, throwing down the paper on the table between her sister and new brother-in-law. “The ton is in a frenzy—and isn’t it hilarious? They’re blaming Sheridan’s three sisters. Three sisters plotting wicked plots—and it isn’t us! Oh, my love, when I saw this, I thought I’d die laughing.”
Certain members of Society had more than once in recent days compared the three proprietresses of Maison Noirot—which Sophy would make London’s foremost dressmaking establishment if it killed her—to the three witches in Macbeth. Had they not bewitched the Duke of Clevedon, rumor said, he would never have married a shopkeeper.
Their Graces’ dark heads bent over the barely dry newspaper.
Rumors about the Sheridan-Grant elopement were already traveling the beau monde grapevine, but the Spectacle, as usual, was the first to put confirmation in print.
Marcelline looked up. “They say Miss Grant’s papa will bring a suit against Sheridan in Chancery,” she said. “Exciting stuff, indeed.”
At that moment, a footman entered. “Lord Longmore, Your Grace,” he said.
Not now, dammit, Sophy thought. Her sister had the beau monde in an uproar, she’d made a deadly enemy of one of its most powerful women—who happened to be Longmore’s mother—customers were deserting in droves, and Sophy had no idea how to repair the damage.
Now him.
The Earl of Longmore strolled into the breakfast room, a newspaper under his arm.
Sophy’s pulse rate accelerated. It couldn’t help itself.
Black hair and glittering black eyes … the noble nose that ought to have been broken a dozen times yet remained stubbornly straight and arrogant … the hard, cynical mouth … the six-foot-plus frame.
All that manly beauty.
If only he had a brain.
No, better not. In the first place, brains in a man were inconvenient. In the second, and far more important, she didn’t have time for him or any man. She had a shop to rescue from Impending Doom.
“I brought you the latest Spectacle,” he said to the pair at the table. “But I wasn’t quick enough off the mark, I see.”
“Sophy brought it,” said Marcelline.
Longmore’s dark gaze came to Sophy. She gave him a cool nod and sauntered to the sideboard. She looked into the chafing dishes and concentrated on filling her plate.
“Miss Noirot,” he said. “Up and about early, I see. You weren’t at Almack’s last night.”
“Certainly not,” Sophy said. “The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t make the patronesses give me a voucher.”
“Since when do you wait for permission? I was so disappointed. I was on pins and needles to see what disguise you’d adopt. My favorite so far is the Lancashire maidservant.”
That was Sophy’s favorite, too.
However, her intrusions at fashionable events to collect gossip for Foxe were supposed to be a deep, dark secret. No one noticed servant girls, and she was a Noirot, as skilled at making herself invisible as she was at getting attention.
But he noticed.
He must have developed unusually keen powers of hearing and vision to make up for his very small brain.
She carried her plate to the table and sat next to her sister. “I’m devastated to have spoiled your fun,” she said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I found something to do later.”
“So it seems,” Clevedon said, looking him over. “It must have been quite a party. Since you’re never up and about this early, I can only conclude you stopped here on your way home.”
Like most of his kind, Lord Longmore rarely rose before noon. His rumpled black hair, limp neckcloth, and wrinkled coat, waistcoat, and trousers told Sophy he hadn’t yet been to bed—not his own, at any rate.
Her imagination promptly set about picturing his big body naked among tangled sheets. She had never seen him naked, and had better not; but along with owning a superior imagination, she’d seen statues, pictures, and—years ago—certain boastful Parisian boys’ personal possessions.
She firmly wiped her mind clean.
One day, she’d marry a respectable man who would not get in the way of her work.
Not only was Longmore far from respectable, but he was a great thickhead who constantly got in one’s way—and who happened to be the eldest son of a woman who wanted