Page 75 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

I had twice gotten as far as the inkwell to cancel it. Then Chrissie had come down to the morning room with her chin up and her eyes swollen and asked, in the voice she uses when she has resolved to be brave about something, whether she ought to write to Madame Delacroix and cancel the appointment. I put the pen down and ordered the carriage.

Steele’s arrangements had multiplied in the night. A man on our steps from six in the morning, another at the mews, a third at the railings. On our way to the modiste, Bowen rode beside the coachman, while Finch was somewhere ahead of us in the traffic. I counted four more before we reached Bond Street.

The bell above the door chimed as Chrissie and I entered, and the shop closed around us, warm and smelling of lavender. Bolts of satin and moiré stood stacked to the picture rail. Half-finished gowns waited on their forms with pins bristling at the shoulders. A young assistant curtsied and vanished through the curtain at the back.

Chrissie drew off her gloves one finger at a time, which is what she does instead of fidgeting.

“Nine days,” she said. “The Liddell ball is in nine days and I am to walk into it and be looked at.”

“You are.”

“Everyone will know about Cosmos.”

“If we stay away, they will say the Rosehavens have gone to ground, and by the next day that will become the Rosehavens have something to hide.” I took her bonnet from her and set it on the chair. “So we will go. You will dance every dance you are asked for. And you will look magnificent doing it, because it costs them more when we are magnificent.”

Her mouth twitched. “That is a dreadful reason to buy a gown.”

“It is an excellent reason. It simply isn’t a nice one.”

“And if nobody asks me?” she said lightly, to the wall of moiré. It took the ground out from under me for a moment. Eighteen. Belle of the season since April, with a card that filled itself before she had crossed a room. And now she stood in a modiste’s shop on Bond Street asking whether anyone would dance with her.

“They will ask,” I said. “And the ones who do not will be a very useful list.”

She laughed. It came out damp, but it came out. “You always sound so certain.”

“I have years of practice preventing my sisters from making spectacles of themselves in public.”

“Name one occasion.”

“I removed Holly from a fountain in Hyde Park.”

“That is a public service, not an accomplishment.”

“I intercepted a hedgehog on its way into the drawing room, in Ivy’s muff, during a call from the Bishop’s wife.”

“You are on firmer ground there.”

“And I once talked a girl of fourteen out of putting her mare over the park hedge sidesaddle.”

Chrissie shut her eyes. “You did not talk me out of it.”

“No. I ran after you shouting, which I maintain was the correct approach.”

“I landed in the duck pond.”

“You did.”

“Half of Yorkshire has never let me forget it.”

“Half of Yorkshire is still telling it,” I said, “and the ducks have not recovered.”

Madame Delacroix came through the curtain with ivory silk over one arm, shot through with silver where the light took it, and made her small foreign noise of possession at the sight of Chrissie. My sister went behind the curtain looking, for the first time in several days, like a girl of eighteen.

I settled into the upholstered chair with a fashion journal I had no intention of reading and focused my attention on the view out the window.

Across the street, a broad man in a brown coat was giving a stationer’s window the sort of study one gives an old master. Finch had a great many talents, but he couldn’t blend with a Bond Street scene if his life depended on it.

Farther along the pavement a younger man drifted, stopping at nothing, arriving nowhere. A third stood at the corner with a newspaper he was not reading.