“Tighter, Your Grace, if you’ll bear it. It’s the line of the thing.” Violet had saidenougha moment before, but Sarah drew the laces tighter regardless, yet the stays still lacked half an inch of meeting, and the boning bit cruelly into her ribs. On a fuller woman the drawing-in would have made the very waist Sarah had been painting. On Violet, it only found the bones and stood them up, and the wool hung off the result with no line to it anywhere.
“There. You’ve the waist for it. Half the ladies in London would lace till they swooned for a waist like that and never come by it.”
Violet looked at herself in the glass while Sarah tied off. With her collarbones standing up at the neck of the grey wool, she thought she looked less like a duchess than like the thing a duchess might frighten her children with.
Sarah scraped back her mistress’s hair and pinned it in a practical fashion that Violet was used to wearing.
“I shall be out this morning.” Violet turned away from the mirror. “The whole of it. You needn’t wait on me.”
“Out, Your Grace?” Sarah’s hands paused on the hairbrush. “I’ll see you into the carriage, then. You’ll want me with you, if it’s any distance.”
“I shan’t need you today.”
“As you say.”
Sarah smoothed the back of her mistress’s gown. Violet was glad her lady’s maid did not insist, and could not, a moment after, have said why she was glad.
The shoes were new and plain, black kid off the same rack. She had never owned a pair that had not first belonged to Poppy who had been taller and bigger than any of her sisters since the day she was born. She turned her foot to admire them then stopped when she saw Sarah watching her with a peculiar expression. Violet turned away from her lady’s maid to hide her blushes.
She rang for Patten and asked him to have a carriage brought round.
“Of course, Your Grace. The town coach?”
“Something plainer. Have you one without the crest on the door?”
A wealthy duke’s household like this one, Violet reasoned, warranted the query.
“There is the old chariot, Your Grace. We send the upper servants in it, and it answers for wet weather. It wants the crest, as you say.”
“That one, then.”
“Very good.” He did not move at once. “Shall I have Miss Baker attend Your Grace? Or send a footman down with you?”
“Neither. I shall manage alone this morning.”
There was the smallest pause. “As Your Grace wishes.”
He inclined his head and went to send word to the mews.
The chariot came round within the quarter hour, plain and dark and unremarkable, Wither up on the box. A footman handed her in at the door, and she put her head to the front and gave Wither the direction herself, low, so that it went no further than the two of them.
The street was being mended at the Holborn end, and the coachman could get no nearer than the corner. Violet told him towait, and stepped down, and her new shoe came down in a rut of black water she had not seen.
She stood on one foot and looked at the other. The kid had gone dark to the ankle. The hem of the grey wool had taken a tidemark of the street.
She had walked the lanes of Hampstead all her life and never once thought of her shoes. Now she had a clean new pair ruined in the first ten yards, and standing in the road with one foot lifted like a heron, she understood finally that ladies did not keep their shoes clean. Footmen did. A lady alone, on a torn-up street, with no one to hand her down, was inevitably a woman in the mud.
She put her foot down and walked to the shop.
The window read RENSHAW, CHYMIST & HERBALIST in faded gold. A bell rang as she went in, and the smell took her at once to her mother’s kitchen and the stillroom. She could have named half the jars on the near shelf with her eyes shut. She got no further than the mat.
The man behind the counter was not alone. Two ladies stood with him in good pelisses and better bonnets, a paper of something open between them, and all three turned to look at her as the bell died away, and all three arrived at the same verdict in the same moment. She knew the verdict. She had worn it on people’s faces the whole of her life. It was only that she had let herself think, lately, that she had left it behind.
“We don’t buy at the back door,” the shopkeeper said, “and we don’t take no custom off the street. Whoever it is you’re selling, we’ve no want of it.”
He said it for the ladies as much as for her, the way some people wipe an already clean counter to show that it is clean.
“I have not come to sell anything. I should like to ask after some of your stock. Egyptian myrrh, if you have it, and a few other things besides.”