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disdainful sniff. “Is that all? My girls can run up something like that in an hour. It’s hardly worth half a crown, let alone a sovereign.”
    The seamstress folded up the paper. “Well, then, let them do it if they can,” she said. “I’ve made notes on the back about how it’s done, but I’m sure your clever girls don’t need any help working out how to keep those folds the way she has them, or how to make those bows. And you don’t need to know which ribbon she uses and who she gets it from. No, indeed, you don’t want any of that. So I’ll take this in with me, shall I, and throw it on the fire. I know how it’s done, and Madame knows how it’s done, and one or two of our less clumsy girls know the trick.”
    This particular seamstress spoke dismissively of the others, deeming herself superior to them and not half-properly appreciated. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been standing in the street, late at night, when she was hungry for her supper. She certainly wouldn’t be talking to the competition if Some People valued her as they ought to do.
    “No, madam, you don’t need a bit of it,” she said, “and I wonder at your coming out at this hour, wasting your valuable time.”
    “Yes, I’ve wasted quite enough,” Mrs. Downes reached into her reticule. “Here’s your money. But if you want more, you’d better bring me something better.”
    “How much more?” the seamstress said as she pocketed the money.
    “One can’t do much with scraps. One dress at a time. The book of sketches, now that would be worth something.”
    “It certainly would,” said the seamstress. “It would be worth my place. It’s one thing to copy a pattern. But the book of sketches? She’d miss it right away, and they’re sharp, those three, you know.”
    “If she lost her book of sketches, she’d lose everything,” Mrs. Downes said. “You’d have to find another place then. And I daresay seeking new employment would be a more agreeable experience, were you to have twenty guineas to ease the way.”
    A lady’s maid in a noble household might earn twenty guineas per annum. That was a great deal more than an experienced seamstress was paid.
    “Fifty,” the seamstress. “It’s worth fifty to you, I know, to have her out of your way, and I won’t risk it for less.”
    Mrs. Downes drew in a long, slow breath while she did some quick calculations. “Fifty, then. But it must be everything. You’d better note every last detail. I’ll know right away, and if I can’t make an exact copy, you shan’t have a penny.” She stalked away.
    The seamstress watched her retreating back and said, under her breath, “As if you could make any kind of copy, you stupid hag, if I didn’t tell you every last detail.”
    She chinked the coins in her pocket and went into the house.
    Paris, the same night
     
    S ince the Italian Opera was closed on Wednesdays, Clevedon took himself to the Théâtre des Varieties, where he could count on being amused as well as treated to a superior performance. Perhaps, too, he might find Madame Noirot there.
    When she failed to appear, he grew bored with the entertainment, and debated whether to cut his stay short and proceed directly to Frascati’s.
    But Clara looked forward to his reports, and he’d failed to give her an account of Tuesday’s performance of The Barber of Seville, one of her favorites. Now he recalled that he’d come away from Longchamps with nothing as well—nothing, that is, he chose to describe to Clara.
    He stayed, and dutifully made notes in his little pocket notebook.
    Its pages held none of Madame Noirot’s remarks about Clara’s style—or lack thereof. At the time, he’d dismissed them from his mind. Or so he’d thought. Yet he found them waiting, as though the curst dressmaker had sewn them onto his brain.
    When last he’d seen Clara, she’d been in mourning for her grandmother. Perhaps grief’s colors did not become her. The style . . . Confound it, she