Season for Temptation

Chapter 13. In Which Serious Damage Is Done to the Contents of Pocketbooks

Christmas night passed quietly. Boxing Day was spent at home, too, since Lady Irving had an aversion to, in her words, tipping the entire City of London. But the following day, Julia and Louisa were to venture out upon the City at last.

That morning, Lady Irving breakfasted on a tray in her room and didn’t emerge downstairs until the highly fashionable hour of eleven o’clock. By that time, Louisa and Julia had both woken up, dressed, eaten breakfast (with Julia seizing the welcome opportunity of her aunt’s absence to eat an enormous and definitely unladylike amount of food), collected their wraps and reticules for the planned outing to Bond Street, and kicked their heels for almost an hour waiting for her.

Unusually for them, they waited in near silence. Louisa didn’t seem upset, but she wasn’t much inclined for conversation. Despite herself, Julia felt horribly curious about how the previous evening had gone, but she took her cue from Louisa’s quiet, thoughtful expression and decided not to press her.

“Country hours,” Lady Irving sniffed when she saw them ready and waiting. “Don’t let it get about that you were up before eleven.”

She summoned Simone, and then her carriage, which drew an inquiry from Louisa.

“Can’t we walk, Aunt? We’ve hardly gotten any exercise since we arrived.”

“Packages,” Lady Irving barked. “I like fresh air as much as the next person, but if you think I’m going to stumble through the snow with my arms full of packages, you’re a candidate for Bedlam.”

She thought for a moment, then corrected herself. “Actually, I suppose it’d be Simone carrying everything. How would you feel about that, my girl?” She elbowed the maid jocularly in the ribs.

“I would much prefer to take the carriage,” Simone said calmly.

With what her aunt deemed vulgar curiosity, Julia pressed her nose to the carriage window and studied the London streets as they rolled by. The latest dusting of snow had already been ground into the macadam by the constant churning of carriage wheels, but shop roofs were as delicately frosted as queen cakes. Shop windows had been denuded by parents and lovers hunting Christmas gifts, but greenery and garland swung invitingly across doorways. It was still the season for joy and remembrance, after all.

The sweetness of the sight, the sharp joy of the novelty, banished some of the chill Lady Matheson had imparted to the season.

Too soon, the carriage pulled up at the discreet, elegant shop of Madame Oiseau, modiste. Unlike so many of London’s “French” dressmakers, who were actually Englishwomen with put-on accents, Simone assured them that Madame was vraiment française.

“She is simply the best,” the maid explained. “I assure you, you will be transformed.” She bit her lip in an oh-so-French gesture of uncertainty, and added, “If she will see you, of course.”

Julia was skeptical of madame’s skill at first; the shop was small, and she saw not a stitch of clothing or fabric on display. It was scrupulously clean and looked to have been recently plastered and painted, so at least it was cheerful. But what was all the fuss about? She and Louisa and Lady Irving seated themselves and waited while Simone eagerly darted back into the private portion of the establishment.

Several minutes passed, and Julia’s hesitation grew. Surely they were wasting their time; they had better go. When she began to ask her aunt a dubious question, Lady Irving quickly shushed her, staring raptly at the small woman who suddenly came forth from the back of the shop, followed by a beaming Simone.

A flurried interchange in French followed between the lady’s maid and the dressmaker, a thin woman in late middle age who was simply and elegantly dressed in a dark blue silk gown with slashed sleeves. They both looked Julia over as they spoke — Simone in a rushed, excited voice accompanied with flamboyant hand gestures, and Madame Oiseau in a more subdued fashion punctuated with many nods and shakes of her head.

Julia’s French wasn’t fluent enough to follow their conversation, but they were unmistakably speaking about her. She straightened in her seat and tried to look nonchalant, but her stomach was twisting with apprehension and she couldn’t keep from fidgeting. She had no idea what was being discussed, but she could tell from her aunt’s reactions that this would be momentous. Lady Irving seemed to be hanging on their every word, nodding eagerly whenever madame did, and leaning back in disappointment whenever she shook her head.

Finally, Simone’s gesticulations ceased, and she turned to face her employer, her usually unperturbed countenance beaming with pride. “She says she will accept to dress the blond mademoiselle,” she informed her observers, her accent thickened from a frantic conversation in her native tongue.

“Excellent!” Lady Irving crowed, hopping to her feet. “Nice work, my girl.” She clapped Simone soundly on the back, which fazed the lady’s maid not a bit, but drew a startled stare from Madame Oiseau. “Sylvia Alleyneham, with all her money, couldn’t get Oiseau to take on her girls. Earl’s daughters,” she trilled with gleeful triumph. “You should consider this an honor.”

“Indeed,” Louisa breathed in the ear of the nownonplussed Julia. “She wouldn’t dress me last year; our aunt certainly tried to persuade her.”

Surprised, Julia darted her sister a quick look, but the elder girl’s face was smooth and untroubled.

Several excruciating hours followed, hours of pinning, measuring, cutting and piecing of fabric, and frequent conversations in hurried, emphatic French between Madame Oiseau and Simone, on whose opinion the dressmaker seemed to place no small reliance. The older woman was clearly a modiste of formidable talent, but the lady’s maid also came into her own in this environment, with an unerring eye for measurement and flawless taste in choice of fabric and color. It must be a great sorrow, Julia realized, for her to work for a woman with such violent taste in clothing as Lady Irving.

Lady Irving, for her part, looked as excited to watch the fitting as Julia would have been to be faced by a platter full of cream pastries, especially after she had been standing for several hours. Julia thought wistfully of her long-ago breakfast as she stood surrounded by billows of fabric. She should have eaten an extra piece of toast, or perhaps even stowed one in her reticule.

After long discussion, her ladyship finally settled on three ready-made frocks that had been hastily altered to fit Julia — and even so, they still fit better than anything she had ever owned. They also placed an order for a half dozen day dresses in assorted pale colors, a few evening gowns suitable for going out to small events, plus a stunning ball gown in ivory silk.

Lady Irving decided to defer the order of a court dress for the time being.

“Silly garments,” she huffed. “But I suppose we’ll have to have one made eventually so we can present the girl properly to the queen.”

“Not in white,” Madame Oiseau had declared boldly, refusing to allow any of Julia’s gowns to be made in this traditional color. “She should never wear white. Les blondes, they are so light, they need some color in the gown.”

“How much will all of this cost?” Julia wondered quietly to her aunt.

“It’s vulgar to ask,” Lady Irving informed her. “And besides, if you have to ask, you probably don’t want to know the answer.”

She chucked Julia under the chin as they prepared to leave at last. “It’s all right, my girl. I’ll help you out with this one. Consider it a Christmas present. Your parents have simply no idea what it costs for a young lady to look her best.”

At Julia’s answering protest, Lady Irving countered, “Very well, then, it’s an investment. An investment in you, to make sure you take this year.”

Julia stared at her aunt. She wasn’t sure if she should be grateful or offended by her aunt’s combination of generosity or mercenary honesty.

“Be honest with yourself, Julia,” the countess continued. “You haven’t got a title, and your dowry is just this side of pitiful. But you do have looks and spirit, which are not unimportant. And you have me to look out for you, which is an undeniable advantage. And now you have Oiseau, too. With all of us on your side, we’ll have you suitably matched before the season’s over, I guarantee it.”

Julia nodded somewhat weakly at this recital. She hadn’t realized her aunt was approaching the season with so much planning and foresight.

She decided to be grateful, but reserve the right to be offended later on.

“Rich, titled, fills out his breeches well.” The countess ticked off the essential male qualities on her fingers. “That’s what we’ll be looking for. Mind you, girl, there aren’t a lot of those fellows around, and there’s a great deal of competition for them. If we find one starts sniffing around you, we shall snap him up at once.”

And with that decisive statement, the party left the shop, extracting from madame a parting promise that the finished gowns would be delivered in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Lady Irving explained, Julia would make do with her shockingly bland wardrobe, comforted by the knowledge that London was terribly thin of company this time of year. As there would be hardly anyone to see her looking so dull, her chances to make a social success during the season would hardly be blighted at all.

Once they made a few more stops for “essential pieces”—gloves, slippers, bonnets, and more silk stockings than Julia had owned in her whole life — they were ready to head home at last. Julia was exhausted, ready to eat an entire Cornish hen, and reeling from the amount of money that had exchanged hands in the last few hours. Lady Irving was still in a talkative, exuberant mood that had only been heightened by the rash of spending that followed their time at the dressmaker’s.

Good Lord, didn’t the woman ever get hungry? Julia thought irritably as Lady Irving continued to exult.

“Now that you’re on at Oiseau’s, we can come back anytime and have more dresses made up. But I think I may wait until I cross paths with Sylvia before I start planning that one. Perhaps I’ll talk to her about the court dress, just to drop the Oiseau name.”

As it turned out, their paths were to cross sooner than she expected, for the Countess of Alleyneham had left her card during their absence.

“Damme, I didn’t even know she was in town,” Lady Irving exhorted. “One of her girls must have taken ill. I can’t think why they’d be so contrary as to bring her back from the country.”

Louisa disappeared as Lady Irving mused aloud about the best time to return the call, but Julia wasn’t about to go hungry any longer. She served herself a large plate from the cold collation that had been prepared. The simple slices of ham and chicken seemed the most delicious things she had ever tasted after long hours of being jabbed by pins.

Hungry though she was, she’d had enough of her aunt’s company for awhile. As soon as Lady Irving sat down for her own repast, Julia decided she’d eaten enough. Craving a bit of quiet, she reflexively headed for the library, where she knew her aunt seldom trod.

As she entered the room, she saw Louisa, and hot shame flooded through her. Her dear sister had sat and waited for hours, with nothing to do as Julia was fitted by a dressmaker so exclusive that she had refused pointblank to wait upon Louisa herself the year before. Julia’s attention had been diverted by her aunt’s eagerness and the attention of those fashionable Frenchwomen. She’d forgotten about her sister, waiting patiently, probably wishing she were anywhere else.

This was what she had come to, after only four days in London. No wonder Louisa thought it a wretched place.

Louisa didn’t seem to think Julia a wretch, though. She was as calm as ever as her eyes skimmed over the spines of Lady Irving’s books.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked Julia. “Goodness, I do believe I’ve read all of these at least twice already.”

“I’m so sorry,” Julia blurted, rushing over to her. “They took so long, and I was so excited at first, and then I was so hungry I couldn’t even think about anything else. Which is obvious, because I didn’t think of you and how boring it must have been for you, and I do hope your feelings weren’t hurt, and I think it was very impolite of Madame Oiseau to refuse to take you on.”

“Slow down,” Louisa admonished and squeezed Julia’s hand, a quiet half smile on her face.

“Don’t worry about it,” she continued. “If you had a good time, I’m happy I went. My aim is to do what I can to help you shine even more than you usually do.

“Although,” she added, her delicate brows furrowed in consideration, “I’m not sure I actually helped at all. They didn’t exactly consult my opinion in the matter of the fitting, not that I would have dared disagree with them anyway.” She smiled, a real smile this time. “Perhaps I should have just stayed home with a book?”

“I’m so glad you didn’t,” Julia said eagerly. “The whole time they were looking me over, I felt like I was a horse being trotted out, only I had no idea what they wanted from me.”

“You need to work on your French,” Louisa said. “Simone was talking about how much spirit you had, which was apparently clear to them both from the way you were fidgeting in your chair.”

Julia gaped at her. “Fidgeting? That’s what impressed the illustrious madame?”

“That, and the fact that she thought you were extremely beautiful,” Louisa said, pinching Julia’s nose affectionately. “She thought you lacked polish, but Simone convinced her that it was charming, and her beautiful clothes would be all you’d need to be the talk of the ton.”

“I am charming, in my own way. And I don’t want to be the talk of the ton,” Julia protested. “I just want one nice man to fall in love with me.”

One specific man. .

Yes, she was indeed a wretch, and it wasn’t London’s fault.

“Well,” Louisa replied, oblivious to Julia’s deeply terrible and wretched nature, “you’ll be wearing Oiseau, so that just got a lot more likely. She has a gift for making women look their loveliest.”

“I’ll probably be glad for the help,” Julia joked feebly. “I nearly screamed when I saw how much silk stockings cost here.”

“It’s all right,” Louisa said. “The shopkeeper probably would have regarded it as a compliment.”

“Seriously,” Julia tried to return to the subject from earlier, “I am very grateful that you came today. I would have felt even more horribly intimidated than I was if you hadn’t been there, and it was just me with our aunt and those energetic Frenchwomen.”

“What a shining example I am,” Louisa teased. “What are the qualities that brought us through this grueling experience? Je ne sais quoi? Joie de vivre? Eau de vie?”

“My French may not be the greatest, but I know perfectly well that last one means ‘brandy,’” Julia replied, stifling a giggle. “By the time we were done, we probably all could have done with a brandy, don’t you think?”

With that ridiculous comment, Louisa started laughing, too, and Julia felt that, in some small way, she’d made things right with her uncomplaining, ever-patient, must-be-so-bored sister.

She hadn’t made things right with herself yet, but this would do for a start.