One of the ladies made a small sound behind her glove. The other looked her over from her flattened hair to her muddled hem and let her lip curl. The shopkeeper, with an audience now and warming to it, came round the end of the counter.
“Egyptian myrrh.” He set down his scoop. “Two guineas the ounce, and I’ve one customer in this parish who can pay it, and you are not her maid, for I know her maid. Off you go now, before you put the gentlewomen off their morning.” He came round the counter briskly as if he was about to lift a cat off a chair and had the door open before she had decided what to do.
She should have gone. She knew, even in the doing of it, that the cleverer thing by far was to go. But the ladies were watching, and she’d never allowed she’d never allowed a stranger to dictate her worth. Not if she could help it.
“I am the Duchess of Iredell,” she said.
For a moment the shop was quite silent. Then the shopkeeper laughed, one short bark of flat disbelief.
The ladies did not laugh in the same way. Violet watched the name register on one of them, watched her turn it over and lean to murmur to her companion behind one glove. The other woman’s eyes came back to her with a fresh and feasting interest, and then they were both laughing, low and pleased.
She knew what they were thinking. The penniless nobody who had cornered the Reaper of Iredell into marrying her. The mad baroness’s madder daughter.
“Try Covent Garden,” the man finally said, wiping his eyes. “They’re easier about your sort down there.”
Violet went out onto the street, leaving behind the bell ring and the laughter taking up again.
Violet came in at the front door. She would not creep round to a side entrance of her own house, however she felt, but she went through the hall fast, fast enough that Patten had time to begin his bow and not to finish it. She did not trust her face to last the length of a civil word. She had held it together the whole way home in the dark of the chariot. She could hold it as far as her own door and not an inch past.
Sarah was in her room, and Violet had forgotten she would be.
Her maid stood at the chest by the window with a drift of new stockings across the lid, silk and fine cotton, sorting them into pairs and folding them away. Presumably, Mrs Greer and Sarah had ordered them. They were the sort of thing that simply arrived now, without Violet’s input. Six pairs finer than any she had owned in her life.
“Your Grace.” Sarah straightened. Whatever she saw, she did not mention it. “You’re back early. Shall I bring something up? You look perished.”
“No. Thank you.”
Violet sat at the dressing table because her legs wished her to, and Sarah went on with the stockings. The small domestic slip of the silk was very nearly more than she could bear after the morning she had had.
“It didn’t go as you’d hoped, then,” Sarah remarked, to the stockings rather than to her mistress.
“It was nothing. An errand that came to nothing.”
“Mm.” A pair folded, set by. “They didn’t know you.”
Violet didn’t respond.
“That’s all it is, Your Grace. They didn’t know you.” She said it gently, and she had it exactly right, which was the worst of it. “It happens to any lady who goes about plain. There’s no cure for it but to be known, and you’ll be known soon enough, Your Grace.”
She came and took the bonnet, her hands careful, and talked while she did it, low and easy, as if she was talking to settle a startled horse.
“If you’d return to Madame Renard, Your Grace, to select the materials and styles, you may avoid this type of misunderstanding. Or there’s Mrs Cole in Bruton Street, who’s quicker, they say, and every bit as good. Once you’re dressed as you ought to be, you won’t have another morning like it.”
Sarah was right, of course. Violet knew that, but she could not do it. She couldn’t listen to another hour of Madame Renard measuring against the ghost of the duchess before her.
“Not this week. Leave it a while.”
“As you say, Your Grace.”
The cards were where she had left them, propped along the chimney piece next door, and the thought of them was almost a relief. It was something she could do sitting still with no one to tell her she was a fraud.
“Sarah. How long have you been at Iredell House?”
“Nearly all my life.” She put away the stockings neatly in a drawer. “My grandmother was housekeeper here, under His Grace’s mother. She took me in when I was orphaned, as a kindness done her, and I grew up below stairs and was trained up to the work. The linen was my very first, then I was made lady’s maid to the first duchess of the current master.”
Making her decision, Violet handed the cards to Sarah.
Her lady’s maid took them and held each one to the light. She was quick and decisive. This one yes, a very good house. This one, Your Grace might leave a week and answer then. It shall do no harm to be a little sought. This one you should attend.” She set it forward. “Lady Carstairs’s set, that. I dressed the first duchess for all the balls in that house.” She said it casually and looked so pleased to be of use that Violet thanked her and set the card down.