The Shadow and the Star (5 page)

"No corset," Lady Catherine said wisely.

Mr. Gerard turned quite a deep crimson beneath his tan. He shifted his glance. All the ladies, of all nationalities, began to smile. Really, men were so charmingly absurd.

"Yes," the princess intoned. "The
mu'umu'u
of Japan silk." She spoke to her sister in yet another language, this one more liquid and lovely than the Japanese.

Mr. Gerard smiled. "Japanese silk, is it?" He spoke to the Oriental ladies again, and received pleased nods and eager chatter. He looked back at the others and translated. "They wish to thank Your Majesty for the honor to their country."

A series of courtesies were exchanged on this point, leaving everyone highly pleased with everyone else. Madame Elise clapped her hands, settling back into her overblown French manner.

"Of course, ze flowing robe of white brocade, cut in ze Hawaiian mode. I see it describe in a page of
Ze Queen
periodical." She fluttered obsequiously. "Perhaps Their
Serene Highnesses wish it to be copied, if Her Majesty should be zo gracious as to permit?"

It seemed that this was the case. Her Majesty showed herself perfectly satisfied to extend the favor to her estimable royal sisters from Japan. A footman was dispatched to escort the gown in question from the hotel; in the meanwhile, the fabric must be selected: it must be a pale brocade, and poor Mr. Gerard, as translator, was well and truly caught in the net of international fashion diplomacy.

Leda hurried off to discover what the storeroom had to offer. She returned carrying five bolts of white and blond silk piled to her nose. As she stepped into the showroom, Mr. Gerard moved next to her, lifting the ponderous weight all at once from her arms.

"Oh, no, please"—she was panting a little—"don't trouble yourself, sir."

"No trouble." He spoke softly as he laid the bolts of fabric across the counter. Leda lowered her eyes, pretending to busy herself with the silk. She glanced up beneath her lashes. He was still looking at her.

She could not fathom what was in his face. The moment she caught him at it, he turned away, and she could not decide if his interest was more than her hopeful imagination. Not that she wished him to take an interest: not here—never here; she could not bear that—not the kind of regard a man would have for a showroom woman. It was all mere whimsy, just an amazingly beautiful man—a splendid sight that she could not but admire.

Still… he seemed, in a curious way, to be familiar to her. And yet that faultless masculine face was unforgettable; even the way he moved was memorable, with a controlled and concentrated grace in his dark, conservatively cut morning coat and winged collar. His broad shoulders, his tall stature, those remarkable dark lashes and gray eyes: already he was burned indelibly on her mind. She could only suppose she'd seen some illustration of a shining hero once, in a book, Prince Charming on his white steed�and here he was in Madame Elise's showroom, standing with pensive composure, surrounded by colorful silk and chattering women.

The other showroom girls were taking whatever excuse they could find to come into the room. Word of Mr. Gerard had spread. As Leda unrolled an ivory brocade over the counter, she intercepted a downcast smirk from Miss Clark, who was making herself inordinately busy straightening up a counter that did not need straightening.

Leda tried to check her by ignoring the smirk. Miss Myrtle had felt men to be something of an imposition on the world, not quite acceptable as topics of civil conversation, with the sole exception of
that unspeakable man
, who had evidently contained, entirely in himself, a complete repository of all the various and assorted incarnations of depravity to which the human soul was capable of sinking.
That unspeakable man
was therefore perfectly suitable as a conversation piece, and had in fact been abused for Leda's benefit and instruction with vigorous regularity in Miss Myrtle's drawing room over the years.

Leda was a little wary of men. But finally she could not help giving a tiny grin back at Miss Clark.

He was just too tremendous. He truly was.

Each time Leda spread out a new bolt for view, he pulled the previous one out of her hands as she began to roll it, and turned the fabric back onto the bolt himself, hefting the unwieldy weight easily. And he didn't make a fuss over it, either; he just kept up his translation from the Japanese to English and back again as he worked alongside her, while Madame Elise held each fabric up to the window and explained its properties and how it would show by candlelight and gas.

When Leda dropped her silver scissors, he picked them up for her. She accepted them with a mumble of thanks, feeling painfully bashful, as scatterbrained as a fluttery old maid when his bare hand brushed hers.

Leda was so absorbed in surreptitiously watching him that she started when the footman murmured in her ear from behind. She looked down and saw in his gloved hand a monogrammed letter sealed with a coronet.

"For Mademoiselle Etoile." The servant held it out to her.

Everyone glanced toward her except Madame Elise, who went on talking without a pause. Leda felt her face go to a scalding color. She plucked the letter from the footman and held it behind her, wishing desperately for a pocket.

Madame Elise's phony French voice droned on, but suddenly she raised her eyes and stared directly at Leda for a moment. Leda dropped the letter to the floor behind her, standing so that her skirt covered it. She swallowed and looked down, fumbling blindly at the fabric on the counter.

She had no need to open the missive. She'd no need even to look closely at the coronet. It made no difference to which peer the seal might belong—such a note could mean only one thing, and have but one end.

This
was how Mrs. Isaacson was to "arrange something." Leda felt appalled and humiliated, furious with Mrs. Isaacson, and then chagrined to think that perhaps it was what her employer had thought she was requesting. Many of the girls did walk out with men… but no… no—it did not have to be done this way, in the showroom, in front of the other girls and the clients.

She was publicly branded—her position made crystal-clear. Sold for the price of a silk plaid showroom dress and cockade.

Business had gone on around her. When she found the nerve to look up, the Japanese ladies were engaged in appointing a time for the first hand to go round to their hotel for the measurements. In the midst of it, Mr. Gerard translated. He would have seen the letter, too. They had all seen it, but of course no one was paying any attention to the affairs of a dressmaker's showroom woman.

The Japanese ladies rose to leave. Leda had no choice; she was forced to move away from where she'd dropped the letter so impetuously and attend to the Hawaiian party while Madame Elise ushered the others to the door. Mr. Gerard went with them out to the carriage. Before Leda could discreetly retrieve the letter, Lady Catherine called her name, eager to begin her own choices. Leda had just produced the rose swiss for her and an emerald glazed silk for Queen Kapiolani when he returned.

"Now do tell us, Mano." Lady Catherine spread the swiss across her throat and struck a coquettish pose. "How does this take your masculine fancy?"

As he crossed the room, he had to walk right over the stretch of carpet where the letter lay. He did not glance at it, or at Leda.

But Lady Catherine just then had noticed, and pointed out his omission to him. "I believe Miss Etoile has mislaid her note." Her sociable American smile at Leda held nothing but innocence. "Won't you retrieve it for her?"

He turned and bent down. In misery, Leda accepted the envelope. He gave it to her with the face up, though the coronet had been showing clearly where it had fallen.

She could not even thank him. She could not look up. When Lady Catherine gaily drew his attention to the rose swiss again, Leda wished herself deceased and beyond humiliation, hidden beneath a nameless headstone in some obscure churchyard leagues away.

But she determined to do nothing so coarse as to expire of shame in company. She put her head down and calmly aided Queen Kapiolani in her decision on the emerald glazed. She helped Lady Catherine and her mother choose a suitable pattern for the morning dress. She listened to the easy talk between Mr. Gerard and all the ladies from Hawaii, who would not let him go now that he was in their power. It was obvious that they knew one another as well as any family: even the large and elegant Hawaiian ladies treated him with a motherly air, smiling indulgently when the others scoffed and rode him for his masculine discomfort at voicing aloud his opinion of the fashions. And in an amiable, teasing way, Lady Catherine took his verdict as law, discarding any pattern that he did not approve.

In love
, Leda thought.
Of course. Why not
?

Leda stood by, providing fashion books, changing dresses on the stuffed model, showing Lady Catherine to a fitting room when the girl declared in her stout Americanish way that it was nonsensical to trouble a first hand to go all the way to her hotel "at her convenience," when she was right here to be measured. And then suddenly it was all over, and Leda was curtsying as Mr. Gerard took
Her Majesty's arm and escorted her into the hall. The princess and Lady Ashland followed.

Lady Catherine paused a moment, laid a hand on Leda's arm, and said, "Thank you. Indeed—I've always said that I hate going to the dressmaker's, but this has been quite fun!"

Leda nodded and forced a smile, in terror that this naive girl was going to push a tip into her hand, as if she were a gamekeeper or a chambermaid. But Lady Catherine only pressed her arm in a friendly way and let go, hurrying out after her mother.

Leda turned back to the counter, snapped up the coronetted letter, and hammered upstairs all the way to the empty dormitory hall before she stopped, panting, and tore it open.

My Dear Mademoiselle Etoile:

I admired you from afar at the ball Tuesday last, as you laboured in company with Madame Elise to make your busy repairs to the ladies' gowns. But such a one should have her own pretty toilette, I believe, and I would be honored if you would allow me to serve you with the same, in the way of a dress worthy of you.

Devoutly at your command,

Herringmore

Leda crushed it in her fists and ripped it apart. She would not bear this; she would not be insulted so—"admired from afar"—oh, the indecency of it! She did not even know who this "Herringmore" might be, and most certainly had no wish to be introduced. The common, wretched vulgarity of it, to be ogled as if she were some loose servant girl!

She should have become a typist. All the ladies of South Street had been against it, as being a forward and pushing occupation, unsuitable for a gently brought-up female. But typists were not forced to abide
this
, surely!

Admired from afar, indeed! The insolence!

She drummed down the stairs, tossing the shreds of the note out the open window on the landing. In the bathroom, she pulled the cockade out of her hair and almost twisted her back in her haste to get at the buttons and remove herself from the hateful dress.

In her own skirt and blouse, she marched back to the showroom to confront Madame Isaacson-Elise, that false, revolting hussy—and blow up all bridges sky-high behind her.

The walk from Regent Street to Bermondsey was long enough that Leda had always taken an omnibus or the railway when she was in funds. Her neighborhood now was dreadful, on the outer edge of what she feared she might find was a very great rookery slum if she had ever summoned up the courage to penetrate a few streets farther. But she had counted herself fortunate to find a single room there after she'd discovered that on two pound ten a month, which had seemed a very good wage initially, she was far too poor for the parlor flat she'd taken first in Kensington. It had required a certain amount of time for the reality of her new situation to press in upon her.

For now the attic room in a clump of ancient houses hanging over a tiny canal off the river, with tipsy awnings and broken shutters, was hers—at least until the end of the month, she judged. She paid upon every application, so the landlady approved of her and promptly mended windows and locks, but Leda had the foreboding that she would not be such a favorite if the woman discovered that she no longer had employment.

The situation would not last for long, of course. Leda would visit her ladies in South Street. They would give her the character reference that Madame Elise had denied, and Leda would start over—as a typist this time, which was what she should have done to begin with.

She chose to walk now, until she could unlock her account book from its little tin box and reckon up her situation precisely. Not wishing to arrive too early and arouse suspicion in the landlady's heart, she stopped in the Strand at an A.B.C. Tea-shop for Ladies, where she drank a dish and ate a cucumber sandwich. Then she bought an extra bun, lingering at her table beneath the cheerful lace curtains as long as possible on the strength of threepence. There was no wicker dress basket to lug today, so she tucked the uneaten bun into her purse as she walked along the embankment by the river and joined the flood of pedestrians, canvas-covered wagons, and cabs across London Bridge and into the malodorous industrial districts south of the river.

Here she preferred not to dally at an idle pace, but picked her way among the crowds and delivery vans with vigor. It was awkward to be walking unaccompanied; she wouldn't like to be taken for a lady of questionable character. But Miss Myrtle said that quality would always speak for itself, so Leda kept her chin up and her pace elegant, ignoring, for the most part, the scarecrow figures who lounged in shadowed doorways and lingered at the coffee stalls.

The first wave of odors beyond the bridge was pleasant and interesting: orris root, tea, oil of rosewood and pine from Hay's Wharf, the intermingled scents of the whole vast world come to breathe in a London warehouse. An old man with a queer, blank expression sat huddled against a lamppost. Next to him, a skinny half-grown pup lay panting, staring round with bright canine alertness at the passing flow of shoes and trousers. Leda walked past. Two yards on, she turned suddenly, rummaging in her purse. She marched back, thrust the bun in the old man's hand, and turned to walk on as he mumbled something after her. She could hear the pup whining in eagerness.