Page 1 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Chapter 1

London, November 1810

Constantia had learned through experience the importance of avoiding trouble. In a lifetime of reinventing herself, she had learned when it was time to walk away from whatever name she had claimed, the identity she had built, the place she called her own.

When the note arrived informing her of an urgent meeting of the staff of Mrs. Goode’s Magazine for Misses, she had felt the familiar prickle of apprehension.

She had wanted, unaccountably, to ignore the warning.

Well, not unaccountably. Leaving her present position would be difficult. She would feel the loss. She was six-and-twenty, and the other young ladies who worked for the magazine were the closest she had ever known to friends, though they would undoubtedly be surprised to hear themselves described as such.

Experience had also taught Constantia reserve. She knew better than to trust people. To let them in.

Or perhaps she was prickly and standoffish by nature. At a certain point, it became impossible to distinguish between what she was and what circumstances had forced her to become. At a certain point, such differences ceased to matter.

Nonetheless, she had trusted Lady Stalbridge, the magazine’s founder and editor, at least as far as she had trusted anyone for twenty years. She had made herself vulnerable, shared her art, but explained that her family situation made it unwise for her to reveal many details about herself. She had concocted a new surname, Cooper, on the spot.

And now, almost a year later, just when she had started to relax, to let herself walk out without glancing over her shoulder, the letter had come. A letter about a staff meeting she had not expected, directed to Miss Constantia Cooper at this address, written in a hand she did not know. That single, folded sheet of paper had slipped into the narrow sliver of unguardedness she had allowed to open and cut her to the quick.

Half an hour before the meeting began, she gathered up her meager possessions. Her artist’s tools first, as usual, the brushes, tiny pots, and half-finished pieces tucked neatly in their places inside the cleverly designed wooden box that served as both carrying case and easel. The rest of her things were always already half-packed: her mother’s picture and letter beneath the valise’s false bottom, her undergarments folded neatly on top to discourage anyone who might be tempted to pry.

And then she took what was likely to be her last look around the room she rented from a modiste whose French name, Madame D’Arblay, Constantia suspected would be as unlikely to hold up under scrutiny as her own. The modiste’s shop occupied a former townhome near Oxford Street. The public areas of the shop were on the ground floor; the shop work was done on the first floor; and the modiste lived above that. Constantia paid a pittance to occupy what had once been the housekeeper’s quarters belowstairs, a spacious apartment with one significant drawback for an artist: It had only one window, covered over with bars and a scraggly shrub, and in any case too small to admit more light than just what made it possible to tell night from day. The remainder of the cellar was used for storage.

Out of habit, she counted the stairs as she climbed, so as not to stumble in the darkness. One could not always be carrying a candle; certainly not now, with her artist’s case in one hand and her valise in the other. She considered walking through the door at the top and out of the shop. Away from the meeting and the little life she had managed to build. Best to make a clean break of it.

But the apprehension fluttering around in her chest had a curious way of disguising itself as hope. Perhaps Lady Stalbridge had hired a new secretary, which would explain the unfamiliar handwriting. Perhaps the meeting had been called to share good news, not bad.

As a compromise between those two warring impulses, she left her bags resting on the thirteenth step, one from the top, easy to access if she should have to leave in a hurry after the meeting, but enough out of the way that if Madame D’Arblay should send one of her shop girls down to the cellar for something in the meantime, no one would stumble over them.

After dragging in the sort of breath that could not help but pin back her shoulders and lift her chin, Constantia emerged into the dressmaker’s shop.

She hated the momentary disorientation produced by the sudden transition into light and warmth—the inevitable shiver and spate of rapid blinking, the few seconds of defenselessness, when she might be seen before she could see.

But it was November and the shop was no longer bustling, not even at midday. Madame D’Arblay was directing a woman’s notice to an open pattern book, and two younger ladies, probably the woman’s daughters, were fingering a display of ribbons. None of them paid Constantia any mind as she slipped out the back of the shop.

Navigating the warren of alleys and side streets and mews, deftly avoiding the puddles, not all of which had been left by that morning’s rain, she made her way to the rear of Porter’s Antiquarian Bookshop on Bond Street. Lady Stalbridge had arranged for the staff of the Magazine for Misses to have access to a back room there for meetings. Whenever the shop was open, any one of them might retrieve the key stowed behind the front counter.

Constantia had arranged her own access to the room the rest of the time. In exchange for dusting shelves when the shop was closed, she had been given a key to the back door. Though the room in question was crowded with furniture and books, it—unlike the cellar at Madame D’Arblay’s—had the advantage of a large window. A large, dirty window. Shockingly dirty. But still, it permitted sufficient light to draw by.

While working at the scarred oak table, she had been surprised countless times by the staff of both the bookshop and the magazine. She was aware they all found her odd, but she was indifferent—well, almost—to their impertinent stares and whispers.

Today, as usual, she was the first to arrive. She looked around the room, at the modicum of organization she had been able to impose: less dust, fewer books stacked on the floor, a complete run of the Magazine for Misses along the window ledge. It had grown into a habit with her, this neatening and straightening, something to balance the chaos of her circumstances and a certain wildness in her soul.

Another corner of the little world she had built into a sort of nest and would have to abandon—or tear down.

But it wouldn’t do to give in to sentiment. Slipping a blank sheet of paper from the drawer of a rickety desk and plucking a pencil from the knot of her simple coiffure, she took up her post at one end of the oval table, across from the place Lady Stalbridge usually commanded, and began to sketch.

Out of habit, her pencil swept across the page in the exaggerated style of the magazine’s satirical cartoonist. Her monthly contribution, “What Miss C. Saw,” had been rechristened the Unfashionable Plates by readers, who delighted in her sharp critiques of London’s elite—much to Constantia’s surprise. Surely a fair number of those readers belonged to the very set she mocked?

But she supposed there was a certain entertainment in discovering one’s ballroom adversary had been skewered, a certain relief in ascertaining one’s own fashionable foibles had been spared—for this month, at least.

The pencil was dull and the picture that emerged from its tip equally so. One could only bear to draw so many ridiculously high collars or absurdly tall hair plumes. Ordinarily, she would already have finished a pair of panels for the next issue. She preferred to work well ahead of deadline. But this month, every effort had found itself kindling for the fire.

Still, she supposed she ought to try, as it was likely to be her last contribution to the Magazine for Misses.

Once, she had gone so far as to imagine herself slipping into Lady Stalbridge’s shoes as editor, whenever the countess decided to step aside from that role. But that had always been a foolish dream—not least because Constantia knew better than to plan for a future that could never be anything but uncertain.

Before she could do more than place indistinct figures in a scene, Lady Clarissa Sutliffe arrived, slightly out of breath. “Oh, Miss Cooper. You’re here.” She slid into a chair along one side of the table, her back to the window. “That must mean—oh. Well, I’m not really sure. What does it mean, do you suppose?”