Vixen In Velvet. Loretta Chase

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СКАЧАТЬ “Clara, I’ve had quite enough of this creature’s insolence.”

      “Jeffreys, kindly assist Lady Gladys with her corset,” Leonie said firmly. The modiste who let the client take charge might as well close up shop and earn her living by taking in mending.

      “You will not, girl,” Lady Gladys snapped. “You most certainly will not. I refuse to be manhandled by a consumptive child who speaks the most disgusting excuse for French to assault my ears in a city grossly oversupplied with ignoramuses.”

      Jeffreys had grown up in a harsh world. This was motherly affection compared to her childhood experience. Undaunted, she moved to the customer, but when she tried to touch the corset strings, Lady Gladys twisted about and waved her arms, practically snarling.

      Like a cornered animal.

      “Come, come, your ladyship is not afraid of my forewoman,” Leonie said.

      “Jeffreys can’t possibly be consumptive,” Lady Clara said. “If she were, she’d be dead, after the ordeal of wrestling you out of your frock and petticoats.”

      “I told you this would be a waste of time!”

      “And I told you I was tired of a certain person’s sly remarks about remembering your dresses from your first Season. And you said—”

      “I don’t care what anybody says!”

      “Ça suffit,” Leonie said. “Everybody go away. Lady Gladys and I need to talk privately.”

      “I have nothing to say to you,” Lady Gladys said. “You are the most encroaching—no, Clara, you are not to go!”

      But Lady Clara went out, and Jeffreys followed her, and gently closed the door behind them.

      Lady Gladys couldn’t run after them in her underclothes. She couldn’t dress herself, because, like most ladies, she had no idea how. She was trapped.

      Leonie drew out from a cupboard an excessively French dressing gown. The color of cream and richly embroidered with pink buds and pale green vines and leaves, it was not made of muslin, as ladies’ night-dresses usually were. This was silk. A very fine, nearly transparent silk.

      She held it up. Lady Gladys sniffed and scowled, but she didn’t turn away. Her gaze settled on the risqué piece of silk, and her expression became hunted.

      “You can’t mean that for me,” she said. “That is suitable for a harlot.”

      Leonie advanced and draped it over her ladyship’s stiff shoulders.

      She turned her to face the looking glass. Lady Gladys’s mutinous expression softened. She blinked hard. “I-I could never wear such a thing, and you’re wicked to suggest it.”

      Leonie heard the longing in her voice, and her hard little dressmaker’s heart ached.

      Lady Gladys wasn’t a beauty. She’d never been and never would be, no matter how much of the dressmaker’s art one applied.

      Yet she could be more.

      “I’m not suggesting you purchase it,” Leonie said. “Not yet. It will be more suitable for your trousseau.”

      “Trousseau! What a joke!”

      “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Leonie said. “We’re going to rid you of that monstrosity of a corset.”

      “You are the most managing, impudent—”

      “I’ll provide you with something more suitable until I can make up exactly what you need.” Corsets were Leonie’s specialty.

      “I will not … You will not …” Lady Gladys blinked hard and swallowed.

      “Your ladyship is never to wear ready-made stays again,” Leonie went on briskly. It never did to become emotional with clients. They could manage that sort of thing more than adequately themselves. “They don’t provide proper support and they make you shapeless.”

      “I am shapeless. Or rather, I have a fine shape if you like b-barrels.”

      “You do have a figure,” Leonie said. “It isn’t classical, but that isn’t important to men. They’re not as discriminating as young women think. You’re generously endowed in the bosom, and once we get that ghastly thing off, you’ll see that your hips and bottom are in neat proportion.”

      Lady Gladys looked into the mirror. Her face crumpled. She walked away and sank onto a chair.

      “Let us review your assets,” Leonie said.

      “Assets!” Lady Gladys’s voice was choked.

      “In addition to what I’ve enumerated, you own a clear complexion, an elegant nose, and pretty hands,” Leonie said.

      Lady Gladys looked down, surprised, at her hands.

      “Of course, the décolletage is of primary importance,” Leonie said. “Men like to look at bosoms. In fact, that’s where they usually look first.”

      Gladys was still staring at her hands, as though she’d never seen them before. “They don’t look,” she said. “They never look at me. Then I say things, and—” She broke off. A tear rolled down her nose.

      Leonie gave her a handkerchief.

      “Your first Season didn’t go well,” Leonie said. She remembered Lady Clara mentioning it—or was that Sophy? In any case, she didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to.

      Gladys blew her nose. “There’s a fine understatement! You know. All the world knows. I was a colossal failure. It was so ghastly that I slunk home to Lancashire and never came back.”

      “Yet here you are,” Leonie said.

      Lady Gladys colored, more prettily this time. “It’s nothing to do with the Season,” she said hurriedly. “It’s nearly over, in any event. But I’d read in the papers that Lord Swanton would be giving a series of readings from his work and some lectures on poetry. It’s—it’s purely literary. The reason I’ve come. Nothing to do with—that is, I won’t run that gantlet again. The balls and routs and such.”

      “A young lady’s first Season is like a prizefight or a horse race, I always thought,” Leonie said. “A great lot of girls thrust into Society all at once, and it’s all about getting a husband, and they don’t fight fair. Your rivals might not take a whip or spurs to you as you run alongside, but they use words in the same way.”

      Lady Gladys laughed. “Rivals! I don’t rival anybody. And there I was, making my debut with Clara, of all people. Aphrodite might have stood a chance. Or maybe not.”

      “I understand the difficulty,” Leonie said. “Still, let’s bear in mind that you made your debut before my sisters and I became established in London. You were not properly prepared.” Among other things, Lady Gladys’s governesses and dancing masters had served her as ill as her dressmaker had done. Her ladyship didn’t walk; she lumbered. And her walk was only one unfortunate trait. “Certainly you weren’t properly СКАЧАТЬ