Girls certainly seem to run in our family,” Lucile told Elinor as the Glyns’ new nanny took two-month-old Margot back to her nursery at Sheering Hall. “And she’s a darling, growing fast.”
“If only I felt better to enjoy her,” Elinor admitted and reached back to punch at the pillows plumped up behind her on the divan in her sitting room. “This fever has laid me low too long. But,” she said, reaching for Lucile’s hand, “it was so kind of you to bring me that lovely traveling suit. Clayton’s promised me a trip to Egypt when I’m able, but then he’s also promised me the moon. Thank heavens, Clarissa was willing to come see me and amuse him with a walk on the grounds to tend to his precious game birds today.”
“She bought one of my riding outfits a week or so ago. She’s stuck rather close to you, hasn’t she? I hardly see any of my bridesmaids anymore, except you, of course. I noticed Clayton has started to smoke cigars. I haven’t seen it but his clothes reek of it, so keep smoke away from that new outfit and your other gowns.”
“As if I could. Cigars and brandy, brandy and cigars.”
She heaved a huge sigh, and Lucile tugged her hand free. Elinor was surprised she still held it. They’d had some spotty times lately—different lifestyles and financial positions hadn’t helped.
“I’m still writing, you know,” she confided. “If I can’t travel right now, I shall travel through my heroine’s adventures, some of that my memories of people and places, of course.”
“I’m glad writing helps,” Lucile said. “I suppose it’s a kind of escape. And speaking of traveling, remember the doctor said that you are to get your strength back by walking. Come on then, we’ll stroll this room you’ve decorated so beautifully. Let me help you up.”
Lucile half-propped her, half-pulled her to her feet. Elinor’s Lucile Ltd. printed silk robe that had been a wedding gift swirled around her feet and she nearly tripped, but Lucile held her steady. Slowly, they walked the length of the room Elinor had worked so hard to decorate to suggest the days of the old French kings with its brocades and gilt and Louis-style furniture—and the chinoiserie statue of a stalking tiger that was her pride and joy. Early in their marriage, Clayton had told her to spend whatever she wanted on the decor, to buy whatever clothes she wanted from Lucile, but lately he’d been touchy about spending money. It all sounded entirely too familiar—and foreboding—to Elinor, because Lucile had suffered through such in her own marriage. Clayton had also still insisted they live here at Sheering instead of at the Durrington House she had her eye on.
They walked back across the flowered carpet toward the divan, but Lucile wheeled her around for another turn.
“So are you going to accept help from that Scotsman, Clayton’s acquaintance he recommended last year?” Elinor asked.
It helped to talk to shift her thoughts from how tired she was. Little Margot’s birth, then the energy-draining typhoid fever that had followed, had nearly done her in. Clayton’s delight was to tramp all over the estate, let alone shoot and travel. Even when she was healthy, it was hardly, as they say, her cup of tea, and she struggled to find time to write. But his promise they would see Egypt, see the Sphinx, that half lion, half woman . . . see exotic lands . . . none of that had materialized and she feared it never would.
Lucile was saying she was trying to watch her finances better, that she hadn’t seen Lord Duff-Gordon again, but Elinor wasn’t really listening. Her thoughts drifted. She was recalling that tiger she’d seen at the Gardens in Paris years ago and how her romantic beau had tried to talk her into running away with him and had whispered to her, Belle Tigress! How far she had come from that romantic dream, but she would live it through her book.
With a glance out the window on the next turn around the room, Lucile gasped and Elinor muttered, “Damnation!” Because there was Clayton, heading back through the flower garden from visiting his precious pheasants with Elinor’s friend Clarissa. And he was kissing her. Hard. On the mouth!
Elinor’s knees buckled, but Lucile held her up, got her to a chair.
“He—how dare he! But—but it’s the world we live in,” Elinor declared, bending over her knees as if she’d be ill. “Oh, you should see how lovers pair up at the country houses, but I thought—I thought . . .”
“Will you say something to him?” Lucile asked, kneeling by her chair.
“I don’t know. I surely haven’t been a wife to him—well, physically—since several months before Margot was born. But it’s the way they all act, my new friends. My dear Daisy Warwick has a long liaison with Prince Edward, her Bertie, others, too. I shall write about it, but I’ll not succumb to it.”
Lucile was startled at first, but it was the way of the world, at least among the so-called uppers, especially the noble and royal set. She gave Elinor’s shoulders a one-armed hug and whispered more to herself than her sister, “I’ll not succumb to it either, for I am never getting entangled again that way.”
“Famous last words,” Elinor told her and swiped at tears on her cheeks. “But then, I prefer that other old adage, I shall have the last laugh, though I don’t feel like laughing.”
Lucile kept ahold of Elinor while she wept.
Cosmo Duff-Gordon had not called on Lucile again, and, she fretted, he probably thought her a rude shrew with an empty head who could not control her own finances. The truth was, even with Edith’s help, she really couldn’t. It took a year for her to take his advice and hire a small, trustworthy lad to deliver most of her new creations to their owners. Mostly, she kept designing and fitting women, providing endless work for her staff and herself.
Fittings were taking longer now that her reputation had spread. Mamas with money, both English and American, were coming to her for debutante gowns, then later, wedding dresses and honeymoon garments. They expected Lucile herself, not Edith, to do the fittings and, to her amazement, she’d become not only a couturiere but a counselor, too.
“I can’t bear to wed him, since I’m in love with someone else,” a well-bred eighteen-year-old had told her just yesterday during a bridal fitting. “Mama and Papa are thrilled with the match, but he’s widowed and thirty years older. I don’t care if he has a stately home and a title! I’m to be a marchioness someday, but I’d rather live in a mere cottage with my true love.”
Lucile had become a comforter as best she could through such stories, but the most grievous was the tragedy of her client Mrs. Atherton, a beautiful woman who had suffered through a terrible divorce case. Of course Lucile sympathized with her. But the woman’s life had turned even more tragic. One day, when she was standing on Lucile’s fitting platform with chiffon draped all around her, came the word that her little son had been killed instantly when a carriage overturned.
Lucile had broken the tragic news to the woman as gently as she could. She had gone deathly pale and said nothing while Lucile divested her of the half-made garment. She bid Lucile a kind farewell, as she and others stood helpless to be able to comfort her. Then, just after the boy was buried, she took a gun and killed herself by her own hand, arrayed in the black mourning gown Lucile had sent her for the funeral.
After that, Lucile cherished Esme much more. It made her realize that life must not be all work and no play—or, as the nursery rhyme said, Jack would be a dull boy.
Was she dull? she agonized far into the dark, lonely nights. Dull to life? “I love what I’m doing, but the whirl of daily duties threatens to swamp me,” she whispered in her silent bed.
And then, the very next day, she received a note delivered by a messenger that said, I hear you have hired a page boy. Is it time for a new establishment not far from Davies Street and yet so far? Is it time for us to talk again? I will call for you at four o’clock on the morrow to show you an empty shop that is ready to be let for a reasonable fee. Yours truly, Cosmo Duff-Gordon.
She stared at the bold handwriting but only for a moment. “Wait,” she told the boy. “I will send you back with a reply.”
Then she wrote, You are most kind. Yes, I believe and hope it is time. Yours, Lucile.
Like some sort of country dolt, Lucile fussed over what to wear the next day. She also warned her staff to keep away from peeking down the staircase or out windows—they also used her bedroom and the attic now—at her gentleman caller. He was only a business associate, she told them, which, of course, was true.
She had tea served to him this time, high tea, then they set out, for he wanted her to see the building before he told her more about it. “First impressions matter,” he told her with a steady look.
They strolled on a lovely spring forenoon down Grosvenor Street to New Bond Street, then turned down Clifford to Old Burlington Street near Savile Row.
“An area up-and-coming for fashionable shops,” he told her. “Now, as I’ve said before, I want to make an investment in your product and your talent, so no denials or folderol when you hear the price of this. I believe you can well afford this address, because you now have a financial adviser and backer, and don’t argue this time. Also recently, so I hear, you have attracted an international clientele.”
“I’d like to storm the Bastille of French fashion someday, right in Paris, but you mean the word got out about my Russian orders?”
“I heard it from a member of Parliament, no less.”
“As if it were government or men’s business. Well, I didn’t mean that against you, and I accept your advice—your backing, as you say—with gratitude. But as for the foreign orders, I made an array of costumes for Mrs. Willie James to take to Russia with her—ten evening gowns, house gowns, and several coats, all sable trimmed.” She knew she was talking too fast and too much but she was so excited.
“I lost more than a week’s sleep to get everything ready,” she rushed on, “but it was worth it as it brought in orders from Russian women who admired it all, despite the fact I could not do exact fittings for them. Besides all that, I’m doing up a gown for my sister to be presented at court, though I hear Queen Victoria is too weak and Princess Alexandra may do the honors. It’s one of Elinor’s most romantic dreams come true.”
“And your romantic dreams?” he asked as they stopped before a narrow shop with a worn façade and the faded number 23 over its door.
“I—frankly, I’m focused on only business right now.”
He nodded, but she was certain he had whispered, “Pity!”
They stared together at the building. The windows were dusty and the place looked—well, droopy, but she saw the potential in it all. She envisioned gowns in the window and gilded writing on the door with her name.
“It’s quite deep, though it looks narrow,” he told her. “Four rooms and storage at the back.”
“It looks wonderful to me,” she said, clasping her hands together. “I can just see a scripted sign over the door, The Maison Lucile.”
“And I happen to have the key,” he said, producing it. He looked very happy—and so intense.
She couldn’t help herself. She bounced like Esme would if she were offered a sweet.
Cosmo smiled down at her. “The key to a new beginning,” he told her with a wink when she reached for it and they held it together for a moment. Even through their gloves, his big hand was strong and warm. “Let’s see if you like what’s inside.”
As he unlocked and opened the door for them, she gripped her hands tightly as if in prayer. She was trembling, and not only because of the shop. Cosmo understood her. He’d come back to help her, after their awkward, dismal start. Despite the fact she hadn’t seen him for months, it was as if they had been together a long time, standing on the cusp of intimacy, or a relationship to cherish. Before this man, that feeling would have frightened her but now it—it was exhilarating and wonderful.
“Oh yes,” she said as he held the door and she stepped inside ahead of him. “Good gracious, I can certainly make do with this. I can imagine it all freshly painted and carpeted with flowers in vases next to upholstered chairs—the waiting room here, the fitting room farther back, and it isn’t far from Mother and Esme!”
“Too far from Scotland,” he told her, “but we can work on that.”