“Thebleu céleste,” Madame sighed, signaling an assistant to bring forth a half-finished walking dress. “It requires only the shortening of the hem and the addition of the velvet piping. It will bring out the blue in her eyes. So striking.”
Mary, meanwhile, had found a dark violet spencer that required only a minor shoulder adjustment. She held it against herself with a look of grim satisfaction. “It has no ruffles and no lace. It is entirely logical, and I believe I shall take it.”
“And for Miss Darcy?” Madame asked, her eyes gleaming. “The white crepe with the blue cornflowers? It is finished, save for the sash.”
“If… if the Miss Bennets are satisfied,” Georgiana whispered, “I should like it very much. It matches the ribbon Mary chose for her hair.”
“A musical pact!” Allegra cheered from her gilt chair. “Madame, work your miracles. The Comtesse’s losses are our gain. Pin them, tuck them, and send the first delivery to Grosvenor Street by Saturday, or I shall tell everyone your French accent is actually from Yorkshire.”
“Miss Courtenay! Such cruelty!” Madame laughed, though her hands moved faster.
Elizabeth turned on her pedestal, emerald silk swirling at her ankles. She looked expensive, formidable—finally, a woman who might hold her own in a London ballroom.
“The green suits you,” Jane said, when Elizabeth emerged from behind the screen. “Lizzy, you look?—”
“Expensive,” Elizabeth said. “I look expensive. Which is apparently the objective.”
“You look like a woman who belongs in every London salon,” Allegra corrected, tilting her head. “And that is entirely your doing, not the modiste’s. The gown only learned its elegance when you put it on.”
Elizabeth caught her reflection. The emerald silk was a sea of trouble, and memory stabbed sharp: Longbourn’s drawing room, where a new bundle of ribbons from Meryton was cause for celebration. She could picture Kitty and Lydia pressed to the upstairs window, sighing over the mud and dreaming of this very scene. She would send them the finest ribbons Madame could produce.
“Madame,” she said, “the green. And three morning dresses. And the celestial blue for Jane, because I refuse to attend a ball where my sister outshines me in borrowed muslin. The light-purple silk for Mary, and a packet of your best Belgian ribbons for my mother and two youngest sisters.”
Madame Delacroix permitted herself a small, satisfied smile, and Allegra laughed. The afternoon settled into the warm, giddy camaraderie of women embarking on the ancient and honorable ritual of spending money together.
They took the carriage to Bond Street, where Allegra led them on a whirlwind tour of the city’s finest mercers. She guided them through a glove-maker and a milliner—whose bonnets Allegra declared essential, and Elizabeth declared structurally implausible—before finally stopping at a haberdasher’s, where Mary became unexpectedly animated over a shade of ribbon thatmatched, she explained with scholarly precision, the binding of her favorite Clementi edition.
“Your trustee authorized four hundred pounds,” Allegra observed, glancing at the stack of parcels in their arms as they emerged into the afternoon sun. “You have spent precisely forty-seven. At this rate, the Season will have concluded long before you manage to make a dent in your budget.”
“In Hertfordshire, forty-seven pounds would sustain our household for two months,” Elizabeth murmured, a ghost of a smile touching her lips.
Allegra linked her arm through Elizabeth’s, steering her deftly around a lingering street performer. “You are not in Hertfordshire, my dear. You are in London, surrounded by a fortune and a Season, under the eye of a trustee who seems remarkably determined to ensure you are properly equipped for it.”
“Mr. Darcy is thorough about everything,” Elizabeth said, her tone dry. “He is possessed of an unwavering conviction that efficiency is a moral virtue.”
“You make him sound terribly dull.”
“He is not dull,” Elizabeth began, then paused, finding that the sentence she had started required an ending she was not quite ready to provide. “He is… reserved.”
“Reserved, yes. But not dull. He is quite handsome, you know.” Allegra said this with the casual, breezy authority of a woman stating an observable fact. “The brooding sort. Tall with that jawline. His looks appeal to the ladies, and he dances well when he can be persuaded to dance, which is rarely. Godmama has spent the better part of a decade trying to make him smile at parties, and she considers every successful attempt a personal triumph.”
Elizabeth, who had made Darcy smile across the desk that very morning without the slightest effort, tucked the realizationaway to be weighed against all she already knew of him. “He scowls too much.”
Allegra turned to look at her, her brows knitting in genuine puzzlement. “Scowls? I have known Mr. Darcy since I was nine, and I cannot recall a single scowl. He is a man who holds his cards very close, but his manner has always been perfectly civil, if somewhat difficult to read. Godmama says he was a shy boy who never quite grew out of it.”
“At the Meryton assembly, he declared—within my own hearing—that there was not a woman in the room handsome enough to tempt him.”
Allegra’s eyebrows rose. “That does not sound like Mr. Darcy.”
“And yet, it was precisely Mr. Darcy who considered himself above the company of country gentry and could not be bothered to disguise it.”
“When was this?”
“Last October,” Elizabeth said, the date etched in her mind as clearly as the insult itself. “He was looking directly at me when he said it.”
Allegra slowed her pace, her parasol tilting as she studied Elizabeth’s profile. “I do not know the particulars, but I suspect he was going through a rather difficult period. Family matters, I believe. Georgiana had been unwell, and the strain told on him.” She chose her words carefully, her gaze searching. “I am not excusing rudeness, but the Darcy I know does not make a habit of insulting strangers at assemblies. He is simply the sort of man who would rather stand in a corner and wish he were at home with a book, which is not the same thing as being cruel.”
Family matters. Georgiana had been unwell.
