“I have been a chaperone for the past few years,” Griselda said, “but as it happens, I did think that gown might suit me, Madame.”

Madame looked over and met Griselda’s eyes. A small, knowing smile curled her mouth. “Indeed?” she said, returning to those quick, brief touches by which she was measuring Josie. “I am most happy to hear that. Now this young lady cannot wear crimson, but I think we might choose violet. Violet and periwinkle. No pink, no white.”

“White makes me look like a bleached elephant,” Josie said. Of course, she had bought a number of white gowns from Madame Badeau, but they were for wearing with the corset.

“Nothing I design will make you appear to be a circus animal,” Madame said. “I do not think white for you, because your skin is of a lovely sort, the cream of the dairy, this. We accent it, we do not kill it. Now…” and she fired out a rapid list of instructions to one of the girls. “I have a gown that we might try. When would you like to appear as your new self?”

“The Mucklowe ball,” Josie said before Griselda could open her mouth. “Would that be possible, Madame? It’s the end of this week.”

“I shall manage, I shall manage,” Madame muttered. “I shall create something exquisite.”

“I want to look slender,” Josie said, feeling a wave of bravery.

“Poor Josephine has had a difficult time this season,” Griselda said to Madame.

Madame stopped in her flutter of measurements. “Not—the Scottish Sausage?”

Josie swallowed. It seemed that everyone in the world knew.

“There was a mention of it in a gossip column,” Madame said, “but no description. I promise you that once you appear in one of my creations, no one will ever think of sausages again in your presence. You do not wish to appear slender, Miss Essex. No indeed.”

Josie chewed her lip. This was just what Annabel, and Griselda, and finally, Mayne, had told her.

“You want,” Madame said, pausing impressively, “to appear seductive, not like a dried-up little stick from a tree!”

Griselda was nodding and clapping.

Then Madame’s attendant came in with a gown and she snatched it up. “For you,” she said to Josie, “I would make this up in a deep blue-violet. Just young enough, the color, to pass for debutante, and yet not so insipid.”

Josie stared at the gown. It was made of soft gathered swaths of silk, so slight they looked almost like net. They came across both shoulders and then crossed under the breasts. “You see,” Madame said, whipping the gown around, “in the back this darker color becomes long sashes that fall almost to your feet.”

“I can imagine it in a tawny yellow color,” Griselda said.

“Perhaps,” Madame said. She threw the gown over Josie’s head. “This is only a sample that I made up for my own satisfaction. I prefer to work with cloth rather than on paper, if you understand.”

The gown seemed to fit. It felt sinuously comfortable, luxurious and sensual.

“You must look,” Griselda said, smiling at her from the side of the room.

Josie swallowed, turned, and looked in the large glass to the side of the room.

“Yellow is not what I would choose,” Madame was saying. Clearly there was no going against her opinion, even in the smallest details. “As I said before, I—”

But Josie wasn’t listening. The glass showed a young woman whose rounded body breathed sensuality, whose hips and breasts were in perfect proportion—and both looked as if they were made to be fondled.

“They’ll be at your feet,” Griselda observed.

“You were right,” Josie said in a stifled voice. “You were right all along, and I didn’t listen to you.”

“You were infatuated by that corset,” Griselda said rather smugly. “Now, Madame, we need at least four evening gowns, and of course an assortment of morning and promenade gowns. Have you other gowns to show us, or perhaps sketches of those that aren’t made up?”

11

From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the Eighth

And so began, Dear Reader, a new period in my misbegotten life. It was the first time that I had entangled with an actress; I shall protect her name by calling her Titania, after the immortal Shakespeare’s creation. She was truly a queen of love; and she expressed herself in prose as well as kisses. One letter that I will always treasure was sent to me after, dare I say it, we spent an entirety of three days and nights without leaving our bed…

L ord Charles Darlington went to Hyde Park driving the little phaeton that his father had given him for his birthday.

“If you’d gone into the Church as I told you to,” his father had said, his jaw working furiously, “the Church would have taken care of you.”Charles had snorted. “Just think how much fun I would have had, riding in all those funeral processions for free.”

“You’ll be the death of me.” Since that was usually the end of any given conversation with his father, Charles had turned to leave, but his father had one parting shot. “For God’s sake, get yourself a wife and stop infuriating every person who matters.”

Driving up and down the paths in Hyde Park, and around and around the great walk looking for an exquisite little cream-pot of a widow who wouldn’t consider marrying him wasn’t the way to find a wife. But it did give him time to realize just how many young girls first blushed when he glanced at them and then shot panic-stricken looks at their mothers.

It was becoming bitterly clear to him that he’d turned into a toothy bastard when he wasn’t looking. It would have been nice to blame it on bad company. He caught sight of Thurman waving furiously at him from a racing vehicle twice, but both times he cut sharply in the opposite direction. But the truth was that he’d done it himself, out of the bottomless pool of anger and venom he seemed to carry around with him.

And if that wasn’t a precise confirmation of his father’s many summings up of his character, he didn’t know what was. He’d taken all his rage and directed it against young girls whose only fault was to be born to a wool merchant or eat a few more Scottish pasties than the rest.

At least, he thought to himself, self-loathing is a break from making cynical, supposedly witty remarks.

Lady Griselda was nowhere to be found. Obviously, she didn’t mean it when she said she would see him in Hyde Park. In fact, now that he thought about it, it was obvious that Lady Griselda—who was, after all, Miss Essex’s chaperone—had only flirted with him so he would stop calling Miss Essex such unpleasant names.

Why he didn’t see that last night, he didn’t know. But somehow it hurt more than it should have after a ten-minute banter. He drove home in a furious mood and dashed off a note to Lady Griselda Willoughby. He used stationery that was as luscious and expensive as she was.

She used him; he’d use her. He’d threaten her.

I feel my newfound ethics slipping away. Encourage me tomorrow evening.

He paused. If he were truly daring, he would simply fix an appointment at a hotel. But she would never come. Never. Of course she wouldn’t. A lady of her reputation and stature likely had never entered a hotel. Well, the hell with that.

Ten o’clock at Grillon’s Hotel, he wrote, and signed it, Darling.