My dear, old friend, so lovely to see you!”
“Now, don’t you dare call me old,” Lillie Langtry said with a smile as she swept into Lucile’s private office, “but I know what you meant.”
Lucile was greatly cheered when her longtime idol Lillie Langtry stopped by the shop in New York for several new frocks. Though Lillie was sixty-four now, Lucile thought she still looked fabulous, and she told her so.
But how, even without reminiscing, Lillie’s mere presence brought back powerful memories: Lucile pictured herself and Elinor as girls, hiding under a dressing table to catch a glimpse of their shining star from Jersey. And when they had heard she was the mistress of the Prince of Wales—well . . .
“Keep looking forward, not back, that’s my motto,” Lillie said as she stood on the fitting platform while Lucile draped satins on her to see which colors she preferred. She had instantly known what her friend would want for an evening gown, or so she thought, though Lillie had said to forget some of the silk roses and what she’d called “froufrou.” Lucile frowned at herself in one of the many mirrors in the room. However she had complimented Lillie, it was amazing how time passed, how people aged. She herself had silver hairs threaded through her hair. And Cosmo—she hadn’t seen him for several years. Would he have silver in that handsome mustache?
“Hard to believe America’s finally thrown her might and her men in with dear, old England,” Lillie said, drawing back Lucile’s attention.
“If we could only have that horrid war end before Americans lose their lives too,” Lucile muttered through her mouth of pins. She almost never did fittings or suggested samples anymore, leaving that to her ample staff, but with Lillie, it was different.
“A dreadful business! But on this skirt, a bit less swag and sway, I think. I must keep up with the tighter, straighter skirts now, though at least we’re out of that terrible hobble skirt style. Women need more freedom today, not to totter along as if we must have someone to lean on.”
“I never could abide those, as they made the silhouette so choppy and broken—no grace and flow. But we designers are trendsetters, not followers,” Lucile insisted, after taking her pins from her lips and sticking them in the pin cushion on her wrist.
“Another goal is to never look my age!” her friend said. “Never have and never will. That’s been one lovely thing about your styles over the years, they just floated along, but now there’s more hustle and bustle to life, more—well, plain reality than some of your frocks show.”
Lucile almost felt as if Lillie had slapped her. “I—I guess my heart belongs to the past and nothing plain. We need romance and escape and beauty, especially, in these trying times.”
“Of course we do, but the trappings are different in different times. Those sleeve ruffles you sketched—can we smooth them out too? Oh, I hope my skin stays tight for all the sleeveless frocks that are so in style now. I swear, I work on lifting books each day to firm up, and I adore those shiny jet beads in place of those heavy ropes of pearls. No way I shall advertise I belonged heart and soul to an older generation and age, so . . .”
Lucile froze inside as she chattered on. For one strange, shattering moment, she felt so depressed she’d just as soon be dead.
“Is she dead?” Elinor whispered to Officer Presque in the dim cellar.
They had run into an underground haven of a bombed-out house that still had parts of four walls, half a ceiling, and rickety cellar stairs. The remnants of the remaining structure reminded her of a skeleton, and they had not expected to find anyone inside.
But a young woman lay on a hemp sack with another one pulled over her for a meager blanket. They could not make her out well as dusk fell above them until their driver produced an electric torch and turned it on.
“Not dead,” the officer whispered. “Sleeping. With something stuffed in her ears, maybe to mute the bombs.”
The girl heard them or sensed the light. She woke and sat up, cowering against the damp wall, hands to her throat, shrieking. The officer tried to quiet her and assured her they were French. Elinor knelt, pushing him away with her shoulder and tugging pieces of rags out of the girl’s ears. As she had hoped, the sight of another woman halted her hysteria. Elinor spoke to her in French, telling her they had come out from Paris, that a battery of guns was nearby to protect them and shoot down any more planes.
The girl wore a dress that reminded her of more ripped-up rags. Had she no coat or hat? When she calmed, Elinor asked, “What is your name?”
In a small, shaky voice, she said, “Fleurette, madame.”
“Are you alone here?”
“I came back from Paris. My family’s house—gone. The village gone. I thought I could help. I cannot. No one can.”
“Perhaps we can. We will take you back to Paris with us when we go.”
Fleurette was slender and shaking. Even in the dim, reflected light, which their driver no longer shone in the girl’s face, Elinor could see she was beautiful, with shoulder-length auburn hair and a classic face with high cheekbones, perfectly arched eyebrows, and Cupid-bow lips. When she tried to cover her torn, filthy clothes with the hemp sack blanket, Elinor shrugged out of her coat to wrap it around her, and Officer Presque gave Elinor his big, warm coat.
“Madame, I used to be a mannequin and wear the most lovely fashions for women—before the war,” Fleurette said, starting to cry again, though she must know she was quite safe with them now.
Elinor drew in a sharp breath. “Not—not for Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon’s shop?”
“For Monsieur Worth,” she told her, swiping tears from her sooty cheeks that made gray streaks, yet still looking heartbreakingly lovely. “But I had to come home, to see my people, my family. How could I stay in the famous fashion world when all this was going on? But then, they were not here,” she repeated as she collapsed into sobs.
This girl was a gift from God. While Fleurette cried on her shoulder, Elinor held her tight and thought of another way to prod Lucile to champion the war effort and not just hide behind her own mannequins.
Lucile had not mocked or ignored Elinor’s next letter. With all your brilliant talent in fashion, cannot you do something for this girl we’ve brought back to Paris? Or beyond that, something to raise money for displaced, broken people like her?
Elinor’s lengthy description of Fleurette and her past had haunted and inspired Lucile. Grateful and glad to have a cause—one that could combine promoting fashions with the war effort—she had leaped into action with all sorts of schemes. Charity shows were de rigueur in the city, so why not design one around the story of Fleurette?
Calling her creation Fleurette’s Dream at Peronne, Lucile presented a short drama she wrote herself with a prologue and eight scenes. Elinor, she told herself, could not have done better. She hired a small orchestra for background music to set the various moods. In the show, while the pitiful girl slept in her cellar, she dreamed of her dear Paris and the clothes she used to wear for her designer—not Worth, of course, who had criticized Lady Duff-Gordon designs as passé from time to time, but her own Lucile fashions.
“I adored the dream scenes,” a reporter—a female, fashion-only reporter—had told Lucile at a party. “Especially the one where she dreamed she took a walk with a friend and the one where she went to a dance with a beau. Did you create those scenes from your own past or memories?”
“I chose universal events, ones we all can recall,” Lucile told her. But the truth was, as she had created the scenes and designed garments for them, they did come from her own memories. Times with Elinor when they were young, but especially thoughts of Cosmo. He’d written he was proud of her for raising money for the war effort, but that she could surely do that in England and Scotland, too, that she should come home to present Fleurette’s Dream there.
She was besieged by other women who had seen the presentation and wanted to order the fashions. She reminded them that a part of their orders would go to the war effort as did the ticket prices for the show she intended to take on the road at least on the East Coast and Midwest, first to Chicago.
But her thoughts still clung to Cosmo. He had not said he still loved her, but at least he had only warned her once in his latest note about too much spending. True, she had paid for all this herself, so that every penny could go to the war effort. But, for the first time, she seriously thought about his request that she come home. Whether he lived in a castle or a cellar, yes, wherever Cosmo was—really, wasn’t that home?
If she’d been completely truthful with herself, Lucile thought as she strode through the lobby of her Washington, D.C., hotel a month later, she would have admitted she hoped to see how Bobbie was doing while she was here, where he was now stationed. Everyone else with the show was excited that President Wilson would be in the Fleurette audience this evening, but she had hoped Bobbie would attend.
She and Franks were heading out to take Lucile’s dogs to a park for a walk. Lucile had her big chow, Mahmud, and two Pekingese, which she always traveled with, but she kept thinking of Bobbie.
Raising money for the war effort, even though it profited her business, too, had made her forgive him for enlisting. She would track him down, tell him so, give him a ticket for tonight. After the war, she would gladly give him a position again. You might know, the army had realized his talents too and, though he’d been commissioned in the 5th Engineers regiment, he’d been given the job of directing the choir. Good, she’d thought. That would keep him safe.
Despite the demands and triumph of taking Fleurette on the road, she planned to at least visit England soon. She missed Esme and her family—of course Cosmo, too, though he still tried to control her from afar. She needed his advice for business and financial affairs, but since he was sitting tight there, she had decided to find an American partner to shoulder some of that responsibility. If that freed her up to go home, how could Cosmo, Esme, or her attorney son-in-law, who all had a large financial interest in the company, argue with that?
But she had already scheduled six months on the road in eighteen different towns with Fleurette, including here in the nation’s capital city. Surely that would shut Elinor up about her doing nothing to aid the cause.
“Lady Duff-Gordon,” a busboy called as he caught up with them and gestured back toward the lobby desk. “A notice just arrived for you over the telephone from your office in New York.”
Dear Franks went over to get that for her while Lucile held the three leashes. She opened the note while Franks took the two Pekes back.
“Oh!” Lucile cried. “Oh my.”
“Bad news from New York, milady?” Franks asked, coming closer.
“From here, really. I mean, about here—Bobbie’s in a hospital, quite ill with pneumonia. So maybe this is a gift from God that I am here now. Billy Sunday says things like this are not fate, but from God, you know.”
Billy Sunday and his wife were two of Lucile’s most unusual friends, for he was a hellfire-and-brimstone Christian evangelist, but she cared deeply for him. So many different Americans, and here—despite Bobbie’s plight—she was longing for a Scotsman.
Pulling the big dog, she went straight to the desk. “I need to telephone this number at once,” she said. “I need to visit an ill soldier.”
The man dialed the number for her and handed her the receiver. It felt so heavy in her hand. Dear Bobbie, so full of life and song. His voice—she imagined she could hear Bobbie’s beautiful voice, but she could hear Cosmo’s deep, lovely one too.
She learned on the telephone from the commanding officer’s aide what hospital Bobbie was in, weak and very ill with pneumonia, which was the result of serious influenza that had swept the troops.
She left the dogs with Franks. She wouldn’t take the time to call for her own motorcar, but rushed out to find a taxi.
What terrified Lucile the moment they drove up to the side of the hospital, where she got out because of traffic in front, was a simple glimpse into a loading bay. Within were stacked rows of coffins! Surely not with bodies in them, soldiers’ bodies from disease if not war.
She rushed inside to the main desk, claiming to be next of kin for Genia D’Agarioff. She had almost asked for Bobbie, but she was the one who had nicknamed him that. Did they think she was his mother, sister—even his older lover? She didn’t know or care.
Others milled around in the corridors, some whispering, some crying. They sent her up one flight of stairs to a ward with lots of beds filled with young men. How she wished she could have known; she would have arranged a private room, but perhaps in these dreadful times, this was normal. The nurse led her to his bed. She perched carefully on the edge of it.
“Bobbie. Bobbie,” she said louder, “it’s Lucile. I’ll get you out of here, special care.”
He moaned and slitted both eyes open. A good sign, she thought, though he looked so pale, so—almost invisible. She took his hand. His face was flushed so she expected his skin to be hot, but it was cold. His hand was cold and thin.
“Mama,” he whispered so quietly that she had to read his lips. “Mama.”
“It’s Lucile, dear. You must rest and get better, so you can sing again. Bobbie, listen to me. The war surely will be over soon, and now you won’t be sent over there. You must save your strength and get better.”
“Sing. I will sing.” He closed his eyes.
“Sleep, dearest. Sleep and get strong and you will sing again where everyone adored you and applauded and—”
His hand relaxed in hers, and he seemed to slump deeper into the white sheets of the narrow bed. He breathed out in a long, deep sigh. Though she could swear she still heard his voice, she knew he would never sing again. Well, maybe with an angel choir in heaven.