Chapter 12
The clock had just struck ten, too early in the day for a nobleman to be in the process of getting dressed, but recent events compelled Tristan to summon fast-fading military habits and rise at the hours of the working people. The desk back in his bedchamber bore evidence of his matutinal productivity: a stack of formal letters to London and India, already sealed. Now he was observing his valet as the young man did whatever he deemed necessary to his jacket sleeves with a clothing brush.
“Avi,” he said. “You are from Calcutta.”
“I am,” confirmed Avi.
“Now, knowing what you know of my person, and of Calcutta, and of the British as a whole—do you think a British lady and myself would find life more pleasant in Calcutta or in Delhi?”
For a beat, the brush continued its work as smoothly as though he hadn’t spoken at all, and then Avi’s dark lashes lifted. “The lady would certainly find life more pleasant in Calcutta. His lordship, neither. He would be best suited for Hyderabad.”
“Right. Hyderabad,” Tristan said, his tone bemused. “Write me a list of all the womanly things an English countess would require for her comforts in Calcutta, and another list of the families she should call on there. Then I require the same for Delhi. I need the lists by next Tuesday.”
“Of course.” Avi put the brush back onto the tray and picked up a cuff and the emerald cuff links.
“Not these,” Tristan said. “The plain, chained ones today.”
“Certainly. Milord, are you planning to take us back to India?”
Avi stoically ignored the rule of staff not speaking until spoken to, which made for entertaining, less lonely mornings.
“If I were, what would you say?” he said. “Be frank. Should you miss England terribly?”
This time, there was no pause. “No, milord.”
“No?” He found himself intrigued. “Whyever not?”
Avi looked him in the eye while his slim fingers expertly secured his left cuff. “Because the climate is cold, and the food is bland,” he said. “And I find that many of the ayahs of my acquaintance here are poorly paid by their English masters. I shall not miss England much at all.”
This surprised an amused huff from him. “Cold, bland, and exploitative,” he said. “There is an obvious line between frankness and insolence, Avi, and I’m impressed by how boldly you cross it.”
“Thank you, milord. May I ask you to raise your chin, please?”
While Avi fixed his cravat with a silver pin, Tristan said to the ceiling: “Many of the ayahs of your acquaintance, hm? Am I paying you enough to entertain multiple women?”
Avi stepped back and assessed his handiwork. “I’m an economical man.”
“I see. Remind me again why you agreed to follow me to this cold, bland island?”
Avi’s smile revealed perfectly straight teeth. “I wanted to study at Oxford.”
“Oxford—but I was taking you to London.”
A shrug. “Oxford, London, all the same, when you are from Calcutta.”
He supposed it would feel like that—the distances in India made the length of Britain look puny. “It is not easy to gain admission to Oxford,” he said instead.
“I hear Rabindranath Tagore studied in London, and Brighton,” Avi said. “Great poet.”
“Well, damn. To think you crossed an ocean in the hope to enroll, while I just squandered my time here.”
Avi shook his head. “There were other reasons, too. Trouble with a girl’s family in Calcutta. More importantly”—he picked up the other cuff—“it is a pleasure to dress you.”
Tristan arched a brow. “It is, is it.”
“Yes. You are perfectly proportioned.”
“I see.”
“Your build does justice to fine clothes. A dreadful thing, a beautiful, exquisite waistcoat which is wasted on its wearer. No garment is wasted on you.”
“Well,” Tristan drawled. “Fortunately, then, these charming proportions are attached to my person regardless of where we set up house.”
“Yes, milord. When will we leave?”
As soon as I have seduced the Lady Shrew.
What an absurd thing to first spring to mind.
He brushed it off with a shrug; after all, on the list of things presently requiring his attention, from protecting his accounts and business from Rochester to surviving travel with a melancholic woman, bedding Lucie was the only task that appealed.
“We leave no later than six weeks from today, possibly sooner,” he told Avi. It would see them leave England well before exhausting Rochester’s three-month ultimatum. Admittedly, it was ambitious timing for seducing a woman like Lucie. She would resist out of spite alone, and unless she was in the London offices often, there were few occasions to woo her.
“One way or another, she will surrender,” he murmured.
“Milord?”
“Never mind, Avi.”
Friday noon bathed Oxford in sunshine and birdsong. Stained-glass windows sparkled, swallows flitted. The breeze carried the scent of the wisteria cascading down the façade of Somerville Hall. Lucie was marching down Woodstock Road, tight-lipped, her skirts snapping around her ankles.
The night had been short, fraught with pondering how to proceed with London Print and unwelcome erotic dreams of Ballentine’s tattooed chest. By the time dawn had winked through her curtains, two things were clear: one, Ballentine had the power to make her life hellish. As much as society pretended to be shocked—shocked!—by him, he was a war hero, a peer of the realm, and next in line for a wealthy earldom. In Darwin’s words, he presided over the food chain, which had led to the second realization: she now needed every social and political ally she could muster. Her position in society had long been tenuous at best, but over the years, she had achieved a status which had allowed her to advance the Cause despite her outspokenness. Now the moment she had secretly dreaded had come—she had to try to . . . be nice. She had to pick up the weapons of a good woman: Demureness. Gracefulness. A benevolent management of contrarian males. Very well, it was too late to be credibly demure and graceful, but a more benevolent approach to males was still within reach. She had sent a missive to Annabelle, requesting an urgent meeting at the Randolph this afternoon. Now she was about to fulfill the second point on her battle plan: order a whole new set of dresses.
The shop window of Mrs. Winston, the most recommended dressmaker on Oxford’s High Street, displayed three mannequins which she supposed were fashionably dressed. The interior beyond was small but neatly organized, with tightly spaced rolls of fabric affixed to the walls and a gleaming cherrywood counter at the center of the room.
She entered, and a deafening clanking sound nearly made her jump out of her walking boots.
“Good gracious!”
She glared up, her hands covering her ears. A large . . . cowbell was swaying menacingly right above her face. It was most definitely a cowbell because it looked exactly like the ones she had seen on cows in Switzerland when visiting there as a girl.
“Good morning, missus. How may I help you today?” From the corridor leading to the depths of the shop’s back room emerged a tall, thin woman with a measuring tape coiled around her neck. A pair of glasses was hanging on to the tip of her nose. Already her brown eyes were moving over Lucie from head to toe, taking mental notes—height, notably short; waist, notably small; bosom, largely absent.
Lucie placed her card on the countertop. “I require seven dresses after the latest fashion.”
Mrs. Winston frowned at her, confounded by an accent announcing a lady while the card introduced a plain Miss Morray. Well, she could never be certain where she ran the risk of being recognized, and whether she would be served. Today, she had no time to waste.
Mrs. Winston picked up a pen and a wooden board with a sheet of paper attached to it.
“One morning dress,” Lucie said. “A carriage dress, three walking dresses, and two evening gowns, complete with matching gloves. These are my measurements.” She slid a note toward the scribbling Mrs. Winston.
Mrs. Winston side-eyed the note. “I prefer to have my assistants take the measurements.”
“I’m rather pressed for time. The figures are accurate.”
The seamstress put down her pen, her expression grave. “With all due respect, it is my experience that measurements tend to fluctuate greatly between a customer’s measuring tape and the tapes we employ here.”
Fluctuated greatly between reality and desirous thinking, rather.
“I suffer no illusions in regard to my size,” Lucie said. Her skin itched at the thought of being stripped and measured and turned to and fro. The sooner she could go to the Randolph to plan her next moves, the better.
“Very well.” Mrs. Winston’s eyes flitted between the figures on the paper and Lucie’s torso. “These measurements do not seem to account for a proper corset.”
“They do, but it laces down the front and I prefer it to be quite loose.”
Mrs. Winston’s brows nearly reached her hairline. “I suspected this was the case.”
“I expect it shall pose no problem for a seamstress as acclaimed as you?”
“None at all,” Mrs. Winston said coolly. “We are proud to deliver outstanding elegance no matter the challenge. Have you any preferences regarding the fabrics and colors?”
She eyed the fabric bales on the walls. Pale hues of pink and blue and sunshine. Gatherings of ladies everywhere resembled baskets full of Easter eggs this season.
“Cotton in lemon yellow for the morning dress,” she said. “Tafetta silk for the walking dresses in light blue, powder blue, and mauve. Cerise silk for the evening gowns. Finest new wool in dove gray for the carriage dress.”
Mrs. Winston nodded along with revived enthusiasm; as usual, Hattie’s color choices pleased the experts in the field.
“No trains on the carriage dress or the walking dresses,” Lucie said.
Mrs. Winston stilled. “No trains?”
“Not one inch.”
“Very well,” Mrs. Winston said after a poignant pause. “I do recommend adding some strategic applications to create an illusion of buxomness.”
“You mean ruffles? No ruffles, please.”
“Very well. May I suggest velvet details for the walking dresses? I had some exquisite navy-blue velvet delivered yesterday; it would make an excellent contrast with both light blue and powder blue.”
“Approved,” Lucie said. “I also need three pockets in each skirt.”
Mrs. Winston nearly dropped the pen. “Three pockets?”
“Yes.”
“There is one pocket at the most in the skirts we order in or fashion ourselves, and in the walking dresses only.”
“Well, I need three in each skirt, in convenient reach and quite large.”
Mrs. Winston had a hostile look about her. “It is common to have one pocket, a small one, in the skirts of a walking dress. But three is quite unheard of.”
“I have a lot of items on me,” Lucie explained. “I’m quite discerning, you see.”
“With all due respect, you required dresses after the latest fashion. The latest fashion can be described in one word, snug, but in any case, bulging pockets destroy the lines of any kind of skirt and thus the look of a lady.” Mrs. Winston’s voice had steadily risen and she was quite agitated on the last word.
Lucie reached into her reticule and placed coins onto the counter. “This lady pays extra for them.”
Mrs. Winston picked up her pen again with pointy fingers. “It can be paid for, certainly,” she muttered. “It does not, however, make it any less of a crime against a perfectly innocent skirt. Say, are you part of this new Rational Dress Society?”
“I am not,” Lucie said, but drat it reminded her of the pile of correspondence back at home. Somewhere in the stack lurked her unfinished reply to Viscountess Harberton, newly minted founder of the Rational Dress Society. Should said society dare to postulate a recommendation on women’s unmentionables (no woman shall wear undergarments exceeding seven pounds in combined weight), Lady Harberton had asked. And: would Lucie support a campaign in favor of women riding bicycles? The answer to both questions was yes, and she’d prepare a bicycle petition, but so far, she had not found the time. No thanks to the added work on London Print. Damn Tristan Ballentine, obstructor of women’s progress on every front.
The cowbell exploded behind her as the shop door opened again.
“Good gracious,” came a woman’s aristocratic voice, “have we entered Switzerland?”
Lucie froze.
No.
No, this was not possible.
Mrs. Winston was looking past her at the new customer, her lips moving with a greeting.
She couldn’t hear over the heavy silence filling her head. It had been ten years since she’d last heard that voice.
She glanced back over her shoulder with some hesitation.
An angel had entered the shop. Glossy curls in hazel shades. Large crystalline blue eyes. A mouth poets would have likened to a rosebud. She had never beheld this paragon of womanhood before. But next to the young lady, with her thin brows raised in consternation, stood—her mother.
So she hadn’t imagined it. It was Lady Wycliffe, clad in high-necked pale silk and lace.
She had used to wonder how it would be to see her mother again. Her stomach had plunged at the thought. And now she felt—nothing. Just her heart beating away with eerie calm.
The countess looked thinner; she was stretched tight over her fine bones. Or perhaps it was the shock—first the cowbell, now her daughter.
A footman had accompanied the women; he stood back against the wall, bedecked in bags of varying sizes.
“Lucinda.” Her mother was still staring at her. A lady does not stare.
“Mother.”
Her eyes on Lucie, the countess gripped the angel’s upper arm. “You remember your cousin Cecily?”
For a moment, she remembered nothing.
The young woman, Lady Cecily, tilted her head. “Cousin Lucie.”
At the sound of the sweet voice, she knew. Memories returned, of a six-year-old girl who easily cried. Cecily’s parents—her father one of Wycliffe’s first cousins—had perished in a train accident, so she had come to live at Wycliffe Hall. At now one-and-twenty, she was a beauty, no doubt a toast of polite society.
“May I offer the ladies some refreshment?” Mrs. Winston’s voice was unnaturally bright.
“Cecily excels at watercoloring,” her mother said. “She was immediately accepted by Professor Ruskin for a place in Oxford’s Summer School program.”
“How delightful,” Lucie said.
The air in the shop was suddenly thick as London fog. Had her mother just announced that she and Cecily were in Oxford for the summer?
“Are you often in this part of town?” her mother asked.
“It is a small town, Mother.”
They were bound to cross paths. It was hard to tell who of them resented this more. The countess had finally released Cousin Cecily’s arm, but a displeased flush reddened her cheeks.
“Cecily, we are taking another turn outside. This is a small shop, it cloys easily.”
“Yes, Aunt,” Cecily said softly.
“I was about to take my leave,” Lucie said quickly. There was no need to cost Mrs. Winston an order, as reticent as the woman was on the matter of pockets.
Her mother gave a contemptuous sniff.
Lucie turned back to the seamstress. “Have you any crimson silk?”
Mrs. Winston looked at her sharply over the rim of her glasses. “I do. In the back room. Do you wish to take a look?” She said it reluctantly, no doubt worried the ladies would leave after all.
“Crimson is crimson, I suppose. I need a ball gown fashioned from it by next week. Feel free to embellish it, but no ruffles.”
Mrs. Winston blinked. “By next week?”
“I shall pay double.”
“Well, it’s certainly possible,” Mrs. Winston said, her pen flying over her paper.
“Excellent,” Lucie said, and a little louder: “And do make the waist a few inches smaller, because for this one, I shall tighten the laces.”
She could not remember the route she had taken to the Randolph and was vaguely surprised to find herself standing in the doorway to Annabelle’s study.
Annabelle was seated behind her desk, surrounded by open books, translating something, for her lips were moving silently. The heavy mass of her hair had been pinned haphazardly on top of her head.
She glanced up. “Lucie.” She cast a confused look at the clock on the mantelpiece while rising. “Forgive me, I had not yet expected you—I’m covered in ink.”
“I just ordered a crimson ball gown.”
Annabelle chuckled as she wiped her fingers. “Oh dear. Hattie has finally worn you down, has she not? Do not feel bad, we all succumb in the end.”
“No. It was my mother.”
Annabelle’s brows lowered. “Your mother?”
“The very same. She did not look much changed.”
Annabelle was by her side. “What happened?”
She must have looked rattled, as Annabelle spoke to her in a soft, concerned tone.
“I must apologize—I’m calling on you too early.”
“Nonsense. Come.”
She followed Annabelle into the drawing room, onto the green divan.
“She just walked into the tailor shop on High Street,” she said. “With my cousin Cecily. I understand they are staying in Oxford for the summer so Cecily can improve her excellent watercoloring techniques at Ruskin’s school.”
Watercoloring—one of few pursuits a lady was encouraged to study in depth. Many young women had enjoyed a trip to Europe, even, to perfect painting techniques. Her mother had used to exclaim in despair over Lucie’s lack of finesse with a paintbrush; no tour across Europe would have improved her.
Annabelle had paused the process of ringing for some tea. “Oh Lord,” she said. “They will be in town for the whole summer?”
“It appears so. I reckon they will stay here, in the Randolph—it is the best hotel in town, after all.” Today’s awkward encounter might well repeat itself. And here she had thought the matter of Tristan owning half her business was troubling enough.
“I was petty,” she said. “I ordered a red dress and ensured that they heard about how I wear my unmentionables.”
“It was a shock,” Annabelle said, quick to excuse her pettiness, as a good friend would.
A shock? She refused to admit to anything of such magnitude.
“It could have been worse—she could have given me the cut direct.” Her brows pulled together. “She and Cecily seemed close.”
“Were you close to your cousin?”
Lucie shook her head. “She was still a child when I left home. We never had much in common.” By the time she was eleven and Lucie was leaving, Ceci had had one face and voice for men, and another for the women, and it wasn’t quite clear which was the real one, something Lucie had found disconcerting. “Cecily is lovely, I suppose,” she said. “And she liked Lord Ballentine. She followed him around every summer as if he had her on a string, like one of those wooden ducks on wheels.” And Tristan had indulged her, with comments on her dolls and her ribbons. Sometimes he had made coins dance between his fingers, or toffees had appeared from midair. Even Lucie had been impressed by these tricks.
“If you are ordering ball gowns, may we assume you are coming to our house party?” Annabelle said with a smile.
“You may,” she said, her own smile a little forced. “All four of us will be together. Hooray.”
We assume . . . our house party. It grated a little, how husband and wife ceased to exist as I and became us. Annabelle had been changing accordingly since her wedding; her country accent was making way for the steeper vowels of the upper classes, and her hand-altered dresses had been replaced by the constraining gowns befitting a duchess. It was reassuring to still see ink stains marking her fingers, even though her study was now located in a plush hotel rather than her little student room at Lady Margaret Hall. Still, as she sat here in Annabelle’s rooms and enjoyed the comforts of their close friendship, she was painfully reminded that some day soon, Annabelle would be lost to their circle of friends and the Cause, because at the end of the day, she was a married woman. And while Montgomery granted her time away from Claremont, he was an excessively dutiful man, and he would soon require his duchess to have his heir. . . .
“Oh.” Annabelle made a face. “I’m scatterbrained these days. The going back and forth between Claremont and Oxford, and learning duchess duties . . . Lucie, I think your mother and your brother are on the guest list. As I believe is one of your father’s cousins, the Marquess of Doncaster.”
Her stomach gave an unpleasant twist. “Don’t you worry,” she said lightly. “I shall be on my best behavior—and avoiding relations during such gatherings is impossible; we are all, more or less, related.”
“I never doubted your behavior.”
“I just ordered a crimson ball gown. Clearly my comportment cannot be accounted for in their presence.”
“Families are complicated,” Annabelle murmured. She knew this from personal experience, judging from the few glimpses Lucie had caught of her friend’s past.
She leaned back into the soft upholstery of the divan, the tensions slowly draining from her limbs. “I never told you why my father banished me, have I?”
“No,” Annabelle said carefully. “I always suspected it was because of the incident with the fork and the Spanish ambassador.”
“Ah. But no. It was because of the Contagious Diseases Act.”
Annabelle’s green eyes widened. “The same act we are still trying to have repealed?”
Lucie nodded. “I was seventeen years old and restless to do something other than just read about the adventures of Florence Nightingale and annotate Wollstonecraft essays. Whenever my family was in London during the season, I had access to newspapers other than the Times—and by chance, I came across Josephine Butler’s manifesto against the act in the Manchester Guardian.”
Annabelle bit her lip. “I imagine it was eye-opening?”
“Spectacularly so. Mrs. Butler had just founded the Ladies National Association to repeal the act and she was touring the country to gain support. Around this time, a factory girl had nearly drowned at the London docks, because she had jumped into the Thames to evade the police. It made headlines; the patrolling officers had thought she looked like a prostitute and wanted to apprehend her. At the time, word had already spread among working women that they would be subject to a forcible examination if caught—sometimes in view of male workers. Oh, I feel angry just thinking of it. Anyways, the girl flew into a panic and jumped to spare herself the humiliation, and Annabelle, I was enraged. Forcing examinations for venereal diseases on any woman struck me as abominable.”
Annabelle visibly shuddered. “And all to protect men who use prostitutes from catching the pox.”
“Indeed. So naturally, I stole away to attend one of Mrs. Butler’s rallies in Islington.”
And there, she had found something remarkable: a woman who had spoken in a loud, clear voice about ugly things. A woman who used words as weapons on behalf of girls who saw no choice but to jump. While the ladies in her mother’s salon drifted over the agony of choosing the correct wallpaper in hushed tones, Mrs. Butler talked about forcibly apprehended women, and injustice, and double standards, and she had hung on every word. A diffuse anger coursing round and round beneath her skin for years had finally found a direction.
“I felt a great sense of relief,” she told Annabelle. “Half my life I had felt strangely asphyxiated in the presence of my mother and her friends. But there, I was at ease. As though I were finally wearing clothes that fit rather than chafed.”
Because these women had mobilized. Fight, she had wanted to tell her mother after the fateful morning in the library. Fight! when Wycliffe’s indiscretions and belittling comments, relentlessly sprinkled over their daily lives, continued. But her mother never fought. She had pressed her lips together, and become thinner, and paler, and haughtier, until she had haunted Wycliffe Hall like a wronged wraith, and the more martyred and quieter she had become, the louder Lucie had wanted to yell. Years later, as her work with the Cause progressed, she had understood that she should have directed all her youthful anger against her father. She had not yet truly comprehended power then, and how treacherously easy it was to side with it, and to ask that the downtrodden ones change before one demanded the tyrant change.
Annabelle was looking at her with a small smile. “And this was how Lady Lucinda Tedbury as we know her was born.”
Lucie gave a nod. “Mrs. Butler introduced me to Lydia Becker that night who had just founded the first suffrage chapter in Manchester. I should lose my birth family not long after.”
Annabelle’s brow furrowed. “But I understand quite a lot of ladies joined the movement against the diseases acts—and I imagine not all of them were banished?”
“They were not,” she confirmed. “However, I worked with Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Becker in secret. My father found out during a rather unfortunate encounter two years later. I had gone to Westminster with a group of suffragists to confront Secretary Henry Bruce—he had not delivered on any of his promises, much like Gladstone today, hence, a reminder was necessary. Unfortunately, Bruce was with my father and another peer. And I chose not to abort the confrontation.”
“Oh, Lucie. It must have been dreadful.”
She shrugged. “It was that, or try and hide at the last moment, which would have been prudent, I suppose, but it felt as though it would betray the women whom I had worked with for two years. It felt as though I would betray myself. So I made a choice.”
“So you did,” Annabelle said softly.
“He did wait until we were home to let me have it.” And her mother hadn’t intervened. She had hovered at the back of the study, looking pallid and appalled, and had not said good-bye when the earl had sent Lucie from the house with just a trunk full of her possessions. Aunt Honoria had saved her from beyond her grave, having set up a small trust for her in wise foresight, and Wycliffe had not objected to Lucie claiming it before reaching the age of majority. He had considered this a grand concession, she supposed. Granted, he had never publicly denounced her—all the public knew was that she had relocated to Oxford to indulge her bluestocking tendencies. It was the reason she was not shunned by society, and found allies for her work, but she had no doubt that Wycliffe had done so only to spare the family name a scandal.
She shook her head. “Old stories are not why I called on you today.”
“What is it?” Annabelle asked. “Your missive was rather, erm, brief.”
“I meant to ask you to tutor me in feminine wiles.”
A baffled silence followed her announcement. “I don’t quite understand,” Annabelle then said.
Lucie sighed. “If I am to steer us through the current situation with Ballentine and London Print, I need every ally. Ballentine will try and paint me as a harridan who should best be ignored. . . .”
Annabelle leaned forward. “Have you really called on him last night?”
She must not blush now, she must not. “I have,” she said, smoothly, too.
“Do tell?”
He is built like a Greek god and his mind is pure filth, and I dreamt of him all night.
She cleared her throat. “I need hardly tell you that it led nowhere. Under the circumstances, we need to concentrate on garnering sympathies for our report elsewhere—which means I must try and inspire some sympathy in men, at least until Parliament reconvenes in September.”
“This sounds wise, and I would gladly assist you,” Annabelle said wryly. “However, I am the Scandalous Duchess, remember? Before that, I was a scandalous bluestocking. I’m hardly in a position to give advice.”
“And yet you brought the most calculating duke in the kingdom to heel—clearly your strategy works.”
“Hmm. But the truth is, I had no strategy. I didn’t make Montgomery do anything he did not wish to do.”
Lucie’s brow flicked up. “I doubt he longed to become embroiled in scandal.”
Annabelle looked amused. “Let me say this: I was the most stubborn, reticent creature the duke had ever encountered—I just said no to everything he offered.” She gave an apologetic shrug. “I suppose when a man truly wants something, he will do what is required. It is quite simple.”
It might be simple, but it also sounded dishearteningly uncontrollable.
Her stomach snarled into the silence, and Annabelle gave her a pointed look. “How do you feel about taking luncheon together?”
“I suppose some lunch would be lovely,” Lucie admitted.
Annabelle was on her feet and headed to the assortment of bell strings dangling from the wall. “An Indian restaurant has recently opened on High Street,” she said as she rang for a footman. “I’m of a mind to try it.”
“It sounds intriguing.”
“We could then return here and read books together for as long as we want.”
“Splendid idea,” Lucie said. “Though I would prefer to work on my correspondence here instead. And I have to go to the reading room at the Bodleian later, they have the legal works.”
Annabelle smiled. “Whatever puts you best at ease.”
She had an inkling she would not really feel at ease for some time to come.