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Leonora froze. What embarrassment had they committed now? Lady Bucklebury sipped her coffee, then said, ‘Charlotte, your undergarments could be improved. I wish you to pay a visit to Madame Maurice in Bond Street. I have an account there and she stocks the best stays from Paris. So much more flattering, my dear. The English stays flatten the breasts while the French know how to present them higher and better formed. It’s the difference between…’

‘Between a mountain and a molehill?’ Leonora said sweetly.

Charlotte gasped at her temerity but Lady Bucklebury gave an unexpected laugh. ‘Exactly, pert miss! But this is a serious matter!’ Her words were brusque but her face wrinkled with amusement. ‘I have promised my grandson I will find a suitable husband for you, and we need every weapon we can muster.’

‘This sounds like war, Grandmama,’ Charlotte said.

‘Well war it is. And all good wars need discipline and strategy.’

Leonora and Charlotte went up to their bedchambers to collect their reading books and Mrs Priddy followed them to Leonora’s room where the young women threw themselves laughing onto the bed. Leonora put out a hand for her old nanny. ‘Lady Bucklebury is so exhausting! All these things we have to remember to do! Powder our cheeks, place our bosoms on a plate, flutter our eyelashes and never look a man straight in the eye in case he becomes a rabid dog!’

‘My dears, she means well. Don’t forget she’s very old and her heyday was in a different century.’

‘But she makes us feel there’s no hope for us!’ Charlotte climbed off the bed, flopped onto the sofa and sighed.

‘No, Charlotte, not at all. You and Nora are charming as you are and that’s all you can be. Now I suggest we make your great-grandmother happy by buying these fancy French stays in Bond Street this afternoon. Then we’ll walk on to the circulating library at number forty-five to borrow some new reading matter.’

They all set out in the afternoon, warmly dressed and bonneted, with Mrs Priddy wearing a wool tippet over her shoulders for added warmth. The journey was entertaining for two young women just up from the country as it involved walking almost the full length of the New and Old Bond Streets as far as Piccadilly. As this was one of the main areas for shopping and promenading, Leonora and Charlotte gazed wide-eyed from one sight to the next.

The shops alone were like jewel boxes, with their most attractive and brightly coloured goods brilliant in the windows. Displays of parasols, gloves, bonnets and gowns of every fabric and hue added their rainbow charm to the view. They walked past the mantua makers, jewellers and cake shops. The narrow pavements were thronged with young women out shopping with their mamas and chaperones, and groups of finely dressed dandies come to promenade and ogle the ladies.

Leonora pointed out a group of more sombrely dressed men coming and going from an establishment at no. 14. ‘Nanny P, is that a gentlemen’s club?’

‘It is of a specialist kind, I suppose. Although the main gentlemen’s clubs are in St James’s. This is Jackson’s famous Boxing Academy where the nobility spar with the heroes of the ring. I heard that Lord Rokeby and his brother were habitués on the few occasions they were home from the war.’

Leonora noticed a handsome man at the centre of a group of swaggering laughing swells. With a jolt she recognised Captain Ormonde but did not want to attract his attention. She turned away, knowing the brim of her bonnet would obscure her face, even should he have remembered her.

They walked on, attracting some attention from the strutting beaus with their canes and quizzing glasses. Men on horseback and smart curricles thronged the street, splashing mud on the pedestrians’ shoes, and young women hurried past, their maids laden with various bandboxes.

‘Look, there’s Madame Maurice’s.’ Leonora saw the bow window with a yellow and lilac evening robe and an array of lace caps displayed like a bouquet of flowers. They entered, to be met by Madame Maurice herself, a tall, austere woman with clever, calculating eyes. Ushered into a discreet room towards the back of the shop, Madame measured Charlotte and her assistant brought out a selection of three French stays. These were so elegant in their soft seamed cotton and lace that Leonora thought it a pity they would be hidden from general view.

‘Oh! I feel so pretty!’ Charlotte invited Leonora behind the screen to see. ‘Won’t you try one for yourself too?’

Leonora shook her head. ‘You do look very pretty indeed, but we are on a shopping trip for you, Lottie. This whole palaver is to launch you on Society, don’t forget.’

The stays were packaged in pink tissue and tied with cream ribbon and placed in a striped box inscribed Madame Maurice, Modiste of Distinction. They set off down the front steps and hurried on into Old Bond Street. Opposite Stafford Street was a double-fronted shop with the sign Mr Hookhams’s Circulating Library painted the width of its frontage. The bow windows were filled with books, some open at a particularly attractive illustration, displayed on various shelves and in decorative stacks on a variety of small tables, with the painted backdrop depicting a fireplace complete with blazing fire.

Inside was full of books and customers, mostly women, reading books. Leonora walked up to the central desk. ‘Would you have any musical scores for piano I could borrow? Some of John Field’s shorter works, perhaps?’

Charlotte requested The Heroine, a satiric novel that had been a great success, and glanced across at Mrs Priddy who had picked up a magazine. ‘Is that The Lady’s Magazine, Nanny P?’

‘It is, or to give it its proper title,’ Mrs Priddy read out, putting on a mock pompous voice, ‘Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement.’ She examined it and then made her decision. ‘It costs sixpence, I think I’ll buy it. There’s so much to read, we will all find something of interest in it, I’m sure.’

Just as Leonora was signing her name against the loan slip for John Field’s sonatas, she heard a sibilant voice behind her. ‘Miss Appleby and Miss Blythe, how charming.’

She turned to greet the only woman with such a deceptive way of speaking. ‘Lady Livia, what a pleasant surprise!’ Leonora looked up into the pale face of the most disobliging woman she had ever met, only too aware of her own unfashionably glowing cheeks and country demeanour. Was Livia Dearlove’s pallor due to lilac powder, good breeding, or natural malice? Leonora wondered. She certainly looked exquisitely pearlescent in her dove grey pelisse, lined with ermine. Charlotte joined them, all three volumes of The Heroine in the crook of her arm.

Lady Livia lisped, ‘I’m just collecting a book of Mr Pope’s poetry and then meeting a friend in Bond Street.’ Leonora could see Livia Dearlove’s chaperone lurking at the front of the library, and she suddenly had the clear apprehension that the noble lady was set on a clandestine meeting with Captain Ormonde. The women all bade their farewells and Leonora watched Lady Livia’s elegant back sway towards the exit.

She took Nanny P’s arm. ‘Why does she make me feel so unsettled and demeaned?’

‘Come, let’s walk home. The fresh air will blow these unwelcome feelings away. Just remember, my dear, it’s not Lady Livia who demeans you but your lack of appreciation of yourself. Despite what you may think, you have so many more advantages than she.’

‘Oh Nanny P.’ Leonora squeezed her old nanny’s plump arm. ‘That’s easy to say when you care for me as you do.’ Charlotte grasped Mrs Priddy’s other arm, and they left Hookham’s and walked briskly north towards Brook Street, and a different kind of disquiet.

8

THE HEART OF THE MATTER