would be big enough to contain your ambition. Are there bounds to your ambition? Ordinary, mortal bounds, I mean?”
He knew her so well. She laughed. It hurt to laugh, but she did it.
He turned sharply toward her. “Noirot?”
“I was only thinking,” she said. “It’s all turned out as I’d imagined. No, better than I’d supposed. And yet…Oh, what a joke.”
She shook her head and moved away and sat on a chair and folded her hands and stared at the floor, at the rug he’d chosen. Crimson poppies intertwined among black tendrils and leaves on a background of pale gold…with a subtle pink undertone.
The colors of the dress she’d worn to the Comtesse de Chirac’s ball.
Then she realized: This home he’d created for them was his goodbye gift.
How ironic. How fitting.
She’d hunted him and she’d caught him and she’d got what she’d set out to get.
And she’d bollixed it up, after all.
What a joke.
She’d fallen in love.
And he was saying goodbye, in the time-honored fashion of men of his kind, with an extravagant gift.
“Noirot, are you unwell? It’s been a very long day, and we’re both overwrought, I daresay. It’s no small strain, even for you, trying to do the impossible—all this racing from one place to the next, buying, frantically buying. And I—shopping with a woman—it’s possible my sensibilities will never recover from the shock.”
She looked up at him.
They had no future.
Given who he was and what he was, she couldn’t be anything to him but a mistress. And that she couldn’t be. It wasn’t because of moral scruples. She barely understood what those were. It was for business reasons, for the business that supported her family, the business she loved, the great passion of her life.
She could keep her feelings to herself. She could suffer in silence. She could say thank you and goodbye, and really, there was nothing else to do.
The trouble was, being who she was and what she was, noble sacrifice was out of the question.
And the real trouble was, she loved him.
And so she made her plan, quickly. She saw it all at once in her mind’s eye, the way she saw all of her plans. She saw what she needed to do, the only thing to do.
She stood and walked to the bed and pointed. “I want you to sit there,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
She untied her bonnet ribbons.
“Noirot, maybe you failed to understand why I was in so great a hurry to have you out of my house,” he said. “I don’t care about talk, if it concerns only me. But you know the talk will hurt someone else.”
“You’re a man,” she said. “Men are readily forgiven what women are not.”
“I’ve promised myself I won’t do anything I’ll need to be forgiven for,” he said.
“You won’t be the first man to break a promise,” she said.
Still holding the bonnet by the strings, she looked at him, capturing his gaze. She hid nothing. All her heart was in her eyes and she didn’t care if he saw it.
She’d fallen in love, and she’d love for once, openly, without disguise or guile. That was the one last gift she’d give him, and herself.
He came to the bed and sat, his face taut.
She let the ribbons slide through her fingers. The bonnet dropped gently to the rug he’d chosen for her bedroom.
He watched it drop. “Damn you,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said. “This is goodbye.”
“Noir—”
She set her index finger over his lips. “I thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. “I thank you from the very bottom of my cold, black heart. There are some things I can repay but more that I can never repay. I want my gratitude—its depth and breadth—to be clear, perfectly clear…because after tonight, you must never come back here. You must never come to my shop. When your lady wife or your mistress comes to Maison Noirot, you’ll stay far away. You will not speak to me in the street or anywhere else. After this night, you become the man I always meant you to be, the man whose purse I plunder—and no more than that man. Do you understand?”
His eyes darkened, and she saw heat there: anger and disappointment and who knew what else? He started to rise.
“But for this night,” she said, “I love you.”
Something flashed in his eyes, and he flushed, and a brief spasm contorted his beautiful face. It was so quick, come and gone in the blink of an eye. But it was hard to mistake sorrow, however brief the glimpse. Then she knew she hadn’t made the wrong decision.
She began to undress. It was the same dress she’d been wearing on the night of the fire. Though his maids had cleaned and ironed it, it was no longer up to her usual standards. However, she and her sisters had agreed that completing their most crucial orders was more important than replenishing their own wardrobes.
This dress fastened up the back, naturally, but that presented no difficulty. She’d been dressing and undressing herself since she was a little girl. She unbuttoned the sleeves. Then she unhooked the hooks at the back of the bodice, from top to bottom. With the hooks undone, the narrow slit below the waist—invisible when the top was fastened—sagged open and the bodice did, too. Under it she wore an embroidered muslin chemisette that tied at the waist. She untied it and took it off, and let it drop from her hand, in the same way she’d dropped the bonnet.
She heard his breathing quicken.
The top undone, she eased her arms from the sleeves. She pulled the dress over her head, and dropped it.
She unfastened the sleeve puffs and dropped them onto the growing heap of clothing at her feet. She stood before him in her chemise, petticoats, corset, stockings, and shoes.
She stood for a moment, letting him drink her in. She couldn’t be sure what he felt, apart from what men always felt in such cases, but perhaps, just perhaps, he was trying, as she was, to imprint this moment in his memory.
Then she knelt.
“Marcelline,” he said. It was the first time he’d ever uttered her Christian name, and the sound was a caress.
Oh, she’d remember that: his voice, like a caress.
“You made my home,” she said. “Let me make our last time together. Leave it to me. Do I not make everything exactly as it ought to be?”
She tugged off one boot, then the other. She stood them neatly next to her heap of clothing.
She rose. She drew nearer now, and she looked down at him, at his black hair, gleaming like silk in the lamplight. He was looking up at her, his eyes dark, his mouth slightly parted, his breathing faster.
She bent over him, and unbuttoned his coat. She eased it off, as smoothly as his valet might have done. She folded it and laid it gently on a chair. She took off his waistcoat in the same way, only pausing for a moment to let her hand slide over the fine silk embroidery. She untied his neckcloth.
His head was at a level with her bosom. She could feel his breath on her skin above the lace of her chemise. She heard him inhale.
“The scent of you,” he said so softly. “Heaven help me, the scent of you.”
For a moment She paused, her hand trembling on the fine muslin. She remembered the first night, when she’d taken his diamond stickpin and set her pearl pin in