Teaspoon

“You call this a dress…!”

At the boutique, standing for the fitting of her custom-made gown, Gloria cleared her throat with a hurried ahem, ahem to cover the way her true manner of speech had slipped out before she could stop it.

“To think this is the best you can manage. What a great disappointment.”

Living as Marienne was exhausting. Even now, of all moments, she had to swallow her temper and spoon out sweet, gracious words. Fury rose all the way to the crown of her head, and still there was nothing for it but to speak on calmly, evenly, in a composed voice.

“I’m quite certain I asked you to make me a dress that showed off my figure. Does this look, to your eyes, as though it flatters me in the least?”

Gazing at her reflection, Gloria could scarcely hold back the horror rising in her. To stand before others in a dress like this would surely see her named the worst hostess of the whole social season. The sight of herself in the mirror was maddening, unbearable, awful.

The gown the modiste had brought was grave and severe in its restraint. The lace climbed all the way up beneath her chin, so that she looked like a woman who’d snapped her neck and had it trussed in bandages, and her cleavage, her single greatest pride, lay buried behind thick silk, not an inch of it to be seen. She’d ordered a dress to show her figure off, and they’d brought her one that wound and swaddled her from head to toe.

And what’s this pointless hat, then? It makes my head look enormous!

As if the dress alone weren’t enough to strike her dumb, now there was this hat shaped like a chicken wing.

The boutique’s owner, Madame Katarina, dabbed without pause at her sweat, unable to smooth the fluster from her face. How many gowns had she cut and sewn with her own two hands this season? And not one of the ladies who wore them had ever breathed a word of complaint. Yet here was Countess Drake, who had always favored her with such graceful smiles, casting doubt on her skill in words so insulting that she could scarcely believe her ears.

“I have only made it in keeping with the feel of the gowns you have always ordered, madam. And I reflected your wishes as faithfully as ever I could, besides.”
“And what, precisely, have you reflected? Look at this. Do my slender wrists show? My full bosom? Neither one.”
“B-but you have always been so very averse to that sort of exposure, have you not. So I kept the bare skin to a minimum, and worked instead to bring out the line of your figure—”

Madame Katarina was exactly right. Marienne had always chosen the most tiresomely old-fashioned gowns and nothing else, owing in no small part to Cedric, who disliked his wife baring so much as an inch of skin. Which was surely how a dress this absurd, this dreadful, had come to be born in the first place.

As if it weren’t enough that the dress clung tight to every line of her, there was that enormous hat piled on top, and…

I look exactly like a teaspoon!

It was as though her head alone had come loose and gone bobbing about in the air. Nothing but that grotesque, outlandish hat registered to the eye at all.

The Madame explained in a rush. Skirts that fell full and abundant had gone out of fashion as of last season, she said; these days it was gowns like this one, falling close and snug against the body, that were all the rage.

What tacky nonsense is this, to be the fashion?

Gloria went over the dress inch by inch, stamping her feet in agitation. Nowhere on it could she find so much as a glimpse of her silken skin. Dressed like this, how was she ever to seduce Herman Ernst? Flinging off every last scrap of cloth and hurling herself at him would scarcely be enough as it was.

If I had my way, I’d lop the skirt clean off and show these perfect legs of mine, at the very least — but…

Do that, and by the next morning some wretched piece would be splashed across the front page of the tabloid: The Countess Drake, Afflicted with a Severe Case of Exhibitionism.

Gloria closed her eyes gently, as if to swallow her anger back down. But rack her brains as she might, there was no time now to have the dress made over. The ball was tomorrow, of all things.

In that case, there’s no help for it.

With a piercing glare, Gloria fixed Madame Katarina in a look fit to fire a beam of light straight from her eyes.

“Fetch me a pair of scissors.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did you not hear me? Fetch me scissors this instant!”
“I— I’ll fetch them at once.”

Shoulders drawn up tight, Madame Katarina hurriedly signaled her assistant with a flick of her eyes, and a moment later the girl was holding out a pair of sharp tailoring shears in trembling hands.

“Hah. Honestly.”

No matter which way she looked at it, the whole thing was absurd. Snatching up the heavy shears, Gloria gave a prim little snort and lifted the front of the gown at the bust. Then, as though the sharp blades held not the least terror for her, she slit into the fabric at her chest in one clean stroke.

“…Good heavens.”

Watching, the Madame clutched the back of her neck as though she might faint dead away. To a woman who cherished her own creations above anyone alive, it could feel like nothing so much as the anguish of losing a child.

“Here. Here. And here again.”

Gloria hacked the perfectly good gown to ribbons. When at last she had cut the fabric so that her cleavage sat fully, openly on display, she thrust the shears back at the assistant as though flinging them away, and gave her command, crisp and clear.

“Have it mended to perfection and brought to me by this evening. Should you fail to finish in time, the consequences will fall on you, and you alone.”
“Madam, whatever do you—”
“Should word get out that the House of Drake’s ball tomorrow was ruined by Madame Katarina’s blunder, it would be rather fatal to your name and your boutique both. Would it not?”

The assistant who had witnessed the whole thing stood plainly right there, and yet the Countess spat out the lie without so much as a flicker of her lashes. It was as though some ghost had taken hold of her. The Marienne Drake standing before the Madame was not the noble, high-minded lady she had always known.

In all my born days — in thirty years as a dressmaker, never once have I had a customer so utterly impossible.

But there was nothing to be done. To a modiste, the disgrace of failing to deliver a gown on time was as good as a death sentence. And besides, was not Countess Drake’s sway over society really quite considerable? Even to the Madame’s own mind, the rumor that Katarina had lost her touch would carry far more weight than any rumor that Marienne Drake had gotten up some petty slander.

“I— I shall be certain to have it finished in time, without fail.”
“Yes. You must be certain of it. Without fail.”

Just as she had in passing the shears to the assistant, Gloria pulled off the hat with a gesture careless to the point of rudeness. Then, as if this last were simply more than she could keep in, she rattled it off in irritation.

“Do be so good as to boil that hat up in your soup tomorrow morning and eat it. Oh — and leave the meat out. A thing like that will reek of chicken quite enough on its own.”

With a flutter of her hands, the Madame mournfully gathered up the hat that had been thrust into her arms.

After no end of hardship, Madame Katarina managed, only just barely, to make the deadline. In the early evening, as the sky settled dim and dusky, she cradled the dress box tenderly in her arms in the carriage bound for the Drake manor.

How many hands had it taken, all working over a single dress, to set it right again?

Turn it over how she might, it was strange. Never once, until now, had Countess Drake made so unreasonable a demand of her.

It’s just as though she were a different person.

Around then the carriage rolled to a stop. As Katarina stepped down and made her way to the front of the manor, the butler, waiting before the main gate, greeted her warmly.

“Welcome, Madame. My lady is within.”
“It’s been a while. Do show me in, then, if you would.”

She’d have said she had come to this manor a fair many times, and yet somehow it felt nothing but unfamiliar tonight. Perhaps because the ball was so near at hand, she couldn’t shake the sense that the place had grown grander than before.

“You there. A moment.”

The voice reached her just as she was trailing after the butler, her eyes wandering over the manor.

“What visitor is this, at so late an hour?”

A woman was descending the central staircase, graceful, one hand resting on the banister. The Madame knew her at once and bent swiftly at the waist.

“…The Dowager Countess Drake.”

It was Helena Drake, Dowager of the Drake county house. A gentle smile hung at the corners of her mouth, and yet somehow a prickling severity came wafting off her all the same.

“Why, if it isn’t Madame Katarina. And what brings you to the manor at such an hour?”

Helena gave a soft tip of her chin toward the box in Katarina’s arms.

“Ah — this is the gown Countess Drake is to wear at the ball tomorrow. She asked that I finish the alterations and bring it round before the day was out.”
“Ahh. That child, was it?”

Respectful though Katarina’s answer had been, Helena’s eyes narrowed to slits. The Madame, holding her breath a little, took care not to lift her gaze.

“With your leave, then, elder mistress. I shall see the Madame through to my lady.”

Reading an air that seemed to teeter on the edge of some incident at any moment, the butler moved briskly to smooth things over and made to lead Katarina away. Helena, however, seemed to have no intention of letting the modiste off so lightly.

“A moment.”

Helena, who had somehow already come the whole way down the stairs, stepped into their path and spoke.

“That dress — I should like to see it first.”

Katarina rather thought she’d blundered her way into the middle of a battle of wills between her betters. Beside her, the House Drake butler let out a small sigh of his own.

It had been an unlucky day. Far, far too unlucky a day.