“William, I have perfectly–”
“Cecily.” He said it once, quietly, and looked at her. “You are the Duchess of Blackmoor. You will have a new gown.”
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked at her book, closed it, and said nothing further, which he understood as agreement.
Letitia leaned toward Isadora. “I want to come,” she said, in a whisper calibrated to carry.
“You’re not coming,” William declared.
“I could wait in the carriage.”
“No.”
“I could wait outside the modiste.”
“Letitia.”
She sighed through her nose. “You are going to come back with something extraordinary, and I am going to have to hear about it secondhand.”
“You will survive,” Isadora quipped.
“I will survive unhappily.”
* * *
The modiste’s was on Bond Street, a narrow building that announced itself with a single small sign and no other advertisement. The woman who ran it—Madame Voclain, French by birth and Londoner by thirty years of practice—received them with the grand welcome she reserved for clients whose presence confirmed something she already knew about herself.
She looked at Cecily. “The Duchess of Blackmoor.” A statement of what she was looking at and what it required.
“Madame Voclain,” William greeted. “My wife requires a gown for the Pemberton ball. Friday week.”
Madame Voclain was already slowly circling Cecily, which Cecily was enduring with composed stillness. William tried to hide his smile at the expression on her face.
“The coloring,” Madame Voclain said, to no one in particular. “The eyes. Yes.” She stopped. “What has she been wearing?”
“That is not your concern,” William replied fondly. “What she will wear is.”
“I have gowns,” Cecily said pleasantly. “Several. I wore a very well-received ivory at my–”
“The ball is not a wedding,” Madame Voclain interrupted politely.
“No,” Cecily agreed. “It is considerably larger.”
“Considerably larger, considerably more closely observed, and you will arrive on his arm, and every woman in that room will look at you first and at him second.” Madame Voclain had the directness of delivering these assessments for thirty years and had long since stopped softening them. “What do you want them to think?”
Cecily glanced at William. He said nothing. He was watching her with his hands behind his back, the composed attention he brought to things that mattered, and he had no intention of answering the question because the question was hers.
She looked back at Madame Voclain. “I want them to have nothing to say.”
“Wrong.” Madame Voclain shook her head. “You want them to have only one thing to say.”
She disappeared behind the curtain and began issuing instructions to the two assistants who materialized immediately, as though they had been waiting there specifically for this.
William moved to stand beside Cecily.
“This is extravagant,” she muttered under her breath.
“Yes.”
