Jem shrugged, and Lucasta’s eyes followed the ripple of movement across his shoulders. “Poking about. She’s insatiably curious.” His eyes rested on her, something warm and potent in his gaze. “Would you like a look as well?”
At first she thought he meant she might look more athim, and a heat blazed through her face and neck. Then she realized he meant she might see the shop.
“May I? It isn’t open. It feels—illicit.” The word sent a thrill through her, or perhaps the thrill was due to Jem, standing near her, partially undressed.
Lucasta Lithwick had done a daring thing or two in her life, usually provoked to it by one of her fellow Gorgons, but never in her life had she done something illicit.
Jem laughed, the sound rich, deep, smoky, wonderful. “Darling, it’s my shop. We can do whatever we like.”
He held out his hand, a well-shaped, strong-fingered, masculine hand, and Lucasta took it. As she did, she had the strange feeling of completing an action that had been set into motion some time ago and was finally coming to its sure end.
She had the stranger notion that whenever Jeremiah Falstead held out his hand to her, she would take it, every time, and follow where he led.
Where he led her was to the front of the shop, and poor, plain Lucasta Lithwick stepped into a fairytale.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jem could tell from Lucasta’s face that she was seeing the shop as he had seen it for the first time. And found it as entrancing a place as he had.
He’d grown up in rooms above the shop in Holborn and as a child had free run of the Cheapside warehouse. His world from its very beginnings had been a swirling tapestry of color, texture, and fantastic prints. He’d watched over baby Judith, nestled into a basket in the corner, while his mother served customers at the counter or measured yards in the back. He had no doubt he’d taken his own turn in that basket, from birth watching the colors come into harmony about him.
From an early age he’d been taught the trade. There’d never been any doubt that Jem would one day take over the business. He understood his father was a gentleman and thus spent his days and most of his nights absent from the household, engaged in the pursuits of a gentleman, activities supported by the unceasing labor of his wife and her family.
Whatever it was a gentleman did, his father had not cared to teach Jem. He’d been left in the care of the women and clerks, and instead of chums at public school, he had apprentices for hisfellows, boys and girls from poor backgrounds pressed by their families to move their way up in the world.
He’d loved it, and his childhood was happy. Instead of balls and wooden animals, his toys were scissors and measuring tape. Instead of riding ponies and rolling hoops, he’d learned to take apart spinning wheels and fix looms. No Latin or studying classic literature, but he’d learned to keep careful ledgers and balance the account books.
He knew how to budget for when a hot spring blighted a flax harvest, when a shipment was lost due to fire or shipwreck, when a new Parliament changed the customs tax. He’d honed an eye that could tell when a linen had the luster that meant the flax had been harvested on time, when a weaver was mixing his fibers with tow, or when a wholesaler was substituting pure linen with hemp. He could tell whether a red silk had been dyed using the madder plant or the cochineal insect, and he could sniff a dyer’s vat and recognize if the mordant used to fix the color was aluminum, copper, or chrome.
And he’d never felt cheated that he was being raised a draper’s son. Whatever world his father inhabited, Jem hadn’t cared to enter. He’d seen early on that his parents’ marriage involved his father having an income to fund his amusements and a wife he could trot out at formal affairs and trust she would behave adequately. He’d known his mother to dress up and enjoy the occasional gala or dinner, but Constance, like Jem, preferred the happy industry of her trade.
A true daughter of the merchant class, she’d rather invest money than gamble it away, and would prefer to sort and price a new shipment rather than shop for herself. If she wanted a gown made, she went straight to the wholesaler and bargained for the best silk at the best possible price. Instead of a carriage she drove the wagon that carted their wares from the London docks, and instead of a round of country houses in the summer and fall, shetook Jem with her on trips to visit the Irish weavers and Belgian mills that supplied their warehouse.
Far preferable to Jem than the stiff, cold rooms of Arendale House, where he occasionally was compelled to call upon his forbidding grandfather the marquess, were the lofty echoing spaces of the Draper’s Hall in Throgmorton Street, which had seemed a veritable palace to his eyes. The hall had burned in his youth and been rebuilt in fine style, but Jem missed the magic that had disappeared with the earlier building. The original Draper’s Hall had belonged to Henry VIII’s disgraced minister, Thomas Cromwell, and the apprentices spooked each other by pretending to see poor Cromwell’s ghost, dragging chains through the guildhall and carrying his head.
Jem had tried to capture that bit of magic and that sense of medieval wealth when he designed his new shop on Piccadilly. He’d been to shops in the Netherlands that were relentlessly tidy and businesslike, all the fabrics pressed into tight neat bolts, tucked into wooden shelves and organized by color and cost. In the expensive shops in Paris, customers sat primly in a chair while an officious clerk selected fabrics for them and perhaps allowed them to touch a corner of it.
Jem wanted his customers to experience his fabrics, to see and smell and revel in them. He wanted shoppers to fall in love with the cloth they were taking home, and more than that, he wanted patrons of his shop to dress in ways that flattered them. He wanted the clothing supplied by Dixon & Co. to combine function and beauty. It was his small way of embellishing a world that often had too little beauty in it.
And so, he’d draped his shop in luxurious swaths, drowning the place in color and designs. Rich brocades in eye-popping patterns cascaded across the bow window like a waterfall of color. Metal hooks attached above the wooden shelving heldunrolled gauze that swung through the air above their heads like garlands at a market fair.
Swatches of silk dangled from the corners of cabinets, and thick sample books stuffed with scraps of velvet and damask occupied the long counter. Out of habit Jem ran his eyes over the lighting fixtures, ensuring that none of the wall sconces, floor torches, or chandeliers were within distance of any flammable fabrics. The dull clouds outside dimmed the profusion of color that normally met the eye, but the dusky light made the space more intimate.
Lucasta turned in circles, gaping at everything.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “I’m in a palace fromTheThousand and One Nights. A place of enchantment.”
Another piece of literature Jem had never read. “I’m glad you like it.”
He wanted to lay bolts of silk damask at her feet, his finest and rarest weaves of moiré and lampas liséré. He wanted to drape her in bolts of duchesse satin dyed in deepest Tyrian purple and see if the color went with her hair.
“Josie has been doing well by you,” he remarked, moving to a shelf of newer stock. He sensed that Lucasta Lithwick would shy away if he began too boldly. Best to lure her close with small quiet treats and slowly accustom her to the riches she deserved. He ran his fingers over a bolt of indienne, a floral-patterned chintz.
“Who?” She clasped her hands to each shoulder, hugging herself with her arms. Jem guessed the gesture had less to do with delight than with the temperature of the room. With no customers and no attendants, the braziers hadn’t been filled, and it was scarcely warmer than outside. He lifted the bolt of indienne chintz from the shelf to the counter.
“You know her as Mlle. Beaudoin. Or has she asked you to call her Joséphine?”
Orphaned by the smallpox nearly twenty years ago, she’d been logged into the rolls at the Benevolence Hospital as Jo Baker, the last name taken from her father’s occupation. Of her mother or the rest of her antecedents, nothing was known. She’d been raised in the Hospital, determined to make her way in the world, and she had an eye for what flattered a figure almost as good as Jem’s.
