“You haven’t even asked for the price.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She looked at him. “William.”
“Cecily.”
“The attention it will draw–” she tried.
“Is the point.” He looked at her squarely. “If the ton is going to speak of my Duchess—it has, and it will continue—then I would prefer it speak with admiration. There is no other acceptable version.” He paused. “The gown will be right. You will wear it. That is all.”
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had when she was deciding whether to argue. He waited it out.
“You are very decided about this.”
“I am decided about most things.”
“You are decided about everything.”
“Not everything,” he said. And then, because it was simply true and the room was private and Madame Voclain was behind a curtain, he reached out and tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “Some things I have found considerably more difficult to decide than I expected.”
She looked at him and swallowed. He looked back.
Madame Voclain reappeared with three bolts of fabric over her assistant’s arm.
“Sit, Your Grace,” she told William with the authority of someone who had been directing dukes for thirty years and found them manageable if handled correctly. “This does not require your intervention.”
William sat.
He watched Cecily move to stand under Madame Voclain’s direction. The measuring tape was produced, and the fabric was held against her in different lights as low, rapid French rose just out of earshot.
He watched Madame Voclain hold a length of deep blue silk against Cecily’s shoulder, step back, and look at it as if she had found what she was looking for.
He saw it, too.
He looked at the floor. Then at the window. Then at a point on the opposite wall that had nothing of particular interest.
He had brought his wife here to make a statement to Society. That was true, and it remained true.
It was also true that he had wanted—with a specificity he had not examined until this moment, sitting in a chair in a Bond Street modiste while his wife stood twenty feet away in the afternoon light—to see her dressed for something.
Dressed for an evening that was hers. Dressed in a way that had nothing to do with scandal or management or the ivory composure of a woman enduring the circumstances she had been handed.
Dressed simply as herself.
He looked at the window.
This isuseful information.
He was not sure what to do with it.
Madame Voclain said something emphatic in French. Cecily replied in French with the easy fluency of someone who had grown up with the language and the slight edge of someone who was not going to be managed without their consent. Madame Voclain looked at her for a moment and then laughed briefly and approvingly.
“This will do,” Madame Voclain told William, as though he had asked.
“Yes,” he said.
But he wasn’t talking about the fabric.
