Chapter Six
Nathaniel would have liked to beg off the outing to the dressmaker’s shop the next day, but he had committed to this course, and it was his clear duty to see it through. Accordingly, the following morning found him perched stoically on an overstuffed chair that felt entirely too small to support his frame, surrounded by bolts of costly silk and fine cotton muslin.
The fitting room of the shop was decorated like an odd cross between a formal drawing room and a courtesan’s boudoir, all uncomfortable furniture and sumptuous velvet draperies. Nathaniel observed as the modiste, a Mrs. Lister, and her gaggle of assistants fluttered and twittered around the motionless, slump-shouldered figure of his half-sister.
They were a constant whirl of activity, pinning hems and marking seams and tossing bits of lace and other fripperies across Lucy’s shoulders to see how they fared against her complexion. There was a lot of shrill, high-pitched chatter that Nathaniel did not attempt to follow.
He couldn’t. Not when more than half of his attention was absorbed by the woman seated silently beside him against the wall of the salon, looking no more at home than he upon her dainty, gilt-edged chair.
But he was determined not to notice Mrs. Pickford. No matter that every tendon and sinew seemed attuned to the slim, gray woolen shape of her at his side, just at the edge of his line of sight.
Instead, he concentrated on the fact that amidst the excited whispers and sidelong glances of the seamstresses, who had likely never seen an actual duke in person before, the sounds Lucy was making were more like sighs of impatience. Sighs that were steadily increasing in both volume and frequency.
“That looks charming,” Mrs. Pickford murmured encouragingly.
Lucy, the ill-mannered baggage, merely snorted in response. “If I must have new frocks, why may I not have some with the longer waist, like the ones I saw in La Belle Assemblée?”
“Because you are neither a highflyer nor a daring young matron,” said Mrs. Lister in the brisk tones of a woman who was unused to having her recommendations questioned. “All debutantes still wear the empire waist. Showing purity, clean lines! Only ladies of the first stare experiment with the longer waists. And the French, of course.”
Another sigh, this one gusty with frustration. Without intending to, Nathaniel echoed it, which drew a cool sidelong glance from Mrs. Pickford.
“You needn’t stay, Your Grace, if you are restless.”
Nathaniel stiffened and did not look at her. “I’m not in the least restless.”
“As I told you last evening, you had no need to come with us in the first place.” A note of tension turned her melodic voice brittle. “I know I’m no arbiter of fashion, but Mrs. Lister seems perfectly capable of outfitting Lady Lucy without your help. I have a list of what she needs, furnished by the dowager duchess.”
It took more self-control than he liked to keep his sentiments off his face.
She huffed. “If you think me so incapable that I can’t be trusted to manage a single outing to the dressmaker’s, I wonder that you bothered blackmailing me into serving as Lucy’s chaperone at all.”
Nathaniel could avoid temptation no longer. He turned and looked at her.
There she was, the beautiful Bess Pickford, in the same dress she’d worn the day he first saw her, cleansed of the stains from that scuffle on the Thames riverbank. That same bonnet with its small, cheerful cluster of cherries.
Her smooth countenance was slightly downcast, the sweep of her honey-brown lashes hiding the deeper amber of her eyes. Her antique gold hair was in a loose braided configuration that allowed gleaming strands to brush cheeks that were rosy with embarrassment, or perhaps annoyance. Her mouth…
The mouth he’d come within a heartbeat of taking in a savage, claiming kiss in that carriage, a kiss that would have given the lie to any pretension to honor he’d ever had.
“You mistake me,” he said gruffly, turning his gaze forward once more with an effort he chose not to acknowledge. “I would far sooner trust in your taste than in my stepmother’s.”
“The dowager duchess dresses beautifully,” Mrs. Pickford argued in a fierce undertone.
“The dowager duchess.” He couldn’t help the disdain in his voice as he echoed the undeserved honoric. “She dresses expensively. Not at all the same thing.”
“Oh, and I suppose this place sells its gowns for cheap?”
“Good taste usually comes at a high price,” Nathaniel said drily, “but just because something is expensive, it does not follow that it is in good taste.”
“I suppose I can’t speak to the topic of taste. It doesn’t interest me much. I find your stepmother and her daughters to be very beautiful, indeed. For ‘beauty is truth, and truth beauty,’” she quoted. “And they are, very much, who they appear to be.”
Nathaniel paused, arrested. “You read Keats?”
The roses in her cheeks deepened, but that sweetly rounded chin tilted up in a challenging way that Nathaniel did not permit himself to admire. “I read a lot of things.”
She said it as though she expected him to disbelieve her, though he remembered suddenly that she’d referenced Goethe during that electrifying exchange in the carriage.
Perhaps it wasn’t often he met a woman who casually sprinkled poetry and philosophical treatises into her conversation, but well-read ladies weren’t that far out of the common way, either. Especially these days, with the influx of these romantic writers overrunning the sensible, rational authors of the past decade. More and more young ladies, and the young swains hoping to impress them, were reading Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, that awful Shelley.
