Regency Pleasures: A Model Débutante

The last man paused and Tallie could hear his voice clearly. It was the sardonic tones of the man the others had called Nick, the man who had found and protected her hiding place. ‘Good day, Mr Harland. I trust we have not caused any of your household too much disturbance.’ The cool voice did not sound as though it was overly concerned, but Tallie was left with a strong impression of a gentleman who regarded his companions’ behaviour with fastidious distaste.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, unheard. She felt she had been rescued by him as surely as though he had plucked her from a burning building.

But he had not been unaffected, she knew. This man was no Frederick Harland, impervious to the female form. The sudden, soft sound of that intaken breath when he had opened the closet door and seen her, the very control of his stillness, told her that. The sensation that he was inhaling the scent of her body was a disturbingly sensual memory that shivered through her.

Her mind probed the hideous scene that would have followed if one of his companions had been there and instead decided that it was simply too horrible to think about yet. She needed to be safe at home with a hot cup of tea, a warm fire and some reassuring feminine companionship.

Frederick Harland came up the stairs, a look of surprise on his face when he saw Tallie standing there fully clothed. ‘Are you going already, Miss Grey?’

Tallie knew him far too well to be surprised that he appeared to have already forgotten the peril she had been in. ‘The light is going, Mr Harland,’ she said simply. He gave an exclamation of irritation and continued up the stairs to the attic studio. With a sigh Tallie followed him. ‘Did the gentleman have an interesting commission for you?’ She needed her money for the day’s sitting; although he never prevaricated when asked, or quibbled about how much she told him he owed her, the artist seemed to vaguely suppose money was of as little interest to her as it was to him and always had to be reminded.

‘Hardly that. A Society dowager, Lady Agatha Mornington. Her nephew Mr Hemsley is paying for it. He doubtless sees it as an investment,’ Mr Harland added suddenly, showing a surprising awareness of those around him.

‘How so?’ Tallie asked, pulling on her gloves. Mr Harland’s portraits were hardly dagger cheap.

‘He is none too plump in the pocket and I have heard from reliable sources that he has taken out a post-obit loan on his aunt’s life. He is no doubt investing in a portrait because he needs to keep her sweet so she does not change her will.’ He noticed Tallie was holding her purse and the discussion about money jogged his memory. ‘And how much do I owe you, Miss Grey?’

‘Two guineas, please, sir. Today, and three days last week, if you recall.’ She took the coins with a smile and thanks. ‘Do you think Lady Agatha knows he has a post-obit on her? Would she not be upset to think he was borrowing against her death?’

‘She would cut him out, I should think,’ the artist replied, beginning to scrape down his palette with a frown of concentration. ‘He is a wild rake, that one. He’ll end up having to rusticate to escape his debtors if he doesn’t have some luck soon.’

‘How dreadful that anyone could regard the death of a relative as good fortune,’ Tallie observed, thinking that any relation, even a formidable dowager, would be pleasant to have in one’s life. ‘Who were the other gentlemen?’

‘Um? Pass me that rag, would you be so kind? Oh, Lord Harperley and young Lord Parry.’ Tallie bit back a gasp. She knew Lord Parry’s mother and it was even possible that his lordship would also recognise her, for he had seen her once or twice. She swallowed and made herself concentrate on Mr Harland as he continued. ‘I did not recognise the quiet gentleman. He may have been abroad, he had a slight tan.’ Tallie smiled inwardly—trust Mr Harland to notice skin tone and colour. ‘Striking-looking man,’ he added dispassionately. ‘I wonder if he would sit as Alexander.’

Tallie said her goodbyes and slipped downstairs, leaving Mr Harland musing aloud on his chances of enticing a member of the ton to model for him naked and brandishing a sword. As she stepped out onto the narrow street she found that she too was musing on that image and was finding it alarmingly disturbing. Home and tea for you, Talitha, she reproved herself. And time for some quiet reflection on a narrow escape.

Chapter Two

The walk back to Upper Wimpole Street where Tallie lodged was not inconsiderable, but even with two guineas in her purse she was not tempted to take a hackney carriage. As she walked briskly through the gathering gloom of a late February afternoon she tried to put the frightening events of the afternoon out of her mind by contemplating her finances. She only succeeded in making herself feel even lower than before.

Talitha Grey and her mother had found themselves having to eke out a life of shabby gentility when her father died suddenly five years previously. James Grey had left them with no assets other than some shady investments, which proved to be worth less than the paper they were printed upon, and a number of alarming debts. With Mrs Grey’s small annuity and Tallie’s one hundred pounds a year they managed, although Tallie’s modest come-out was perforce abandoned and her mother sank rapidly into a melancholy decline.

When she followed her husband to the grave three years later, Tallie discovered that the annuity vanished with her mother’s death and she was faced with the very limited options open to a well-bred young woman with little money and neither friends nor connections.

A respectable marriage was out of the question without dowry or sponsor. The choice appeared to be between hiring herself out as a lady’s companion or as a governess. Neither appealed: something behind Tallie’s calm, reserved countenance revolted at the thought of any more time spent entirely at another’s beck and call, cut off from all independence of action or thought. She had loved her mother and had never grudged the fact that her entire life since her father’s death had been devoted to her, but she had no intention of seeing the rest of that life disappear in the same way in the service of those to whom she had no ties of blood or affection.

Tallie had reviewed her talents once again with a rather more open mind. All that it seemed that she possessed was a certain aptitude with her fingers and good taste in the matter of style. Donning her last good gown, she had sallied out and had called upon every fashionable milliner that she could find in the Directory.

The famous Madame Phanie dismissed her out of hand, as did several others. It seemed that impoverished gentlewomen were two a penny and could be depended upon to give themselves airs from which their humbler sisters were mercifully free. But just when Tallie was about to give up, she found Madame d’Aunay’s exquisite shop in Piccadilly, not four doors from Hardin, Howell and Company, the drapers.

Madame was graciously pleased to interview Miss Grey and even more gracious when she had a chance to view Miss Grey’s work. Tallie joined the hardworking team in the back room. But one day, having heard a paean of praise of a particularly fetching Villager bonnet that Tallie had produced entirely by herself, Madame was moved to call her out of the workroom to discuss with the customer the minor changes to the trimmings that were required.

Word spread that Madame d’Aunay’s establishment boasted a young lady of charming manners and gentility who was an absolute magician with a hat, especially one to flatter a lady on the shady side of forty. Soon Tallie had her own clientele. Madame charged a handsome supplement to send Miss Grey into private homes for personal fittings, and, as Madame, once Mary Wilkinson of All Hallows, was a sensible woman, she paid Tallie a good portion for herself.

But it only just made ends meet. Tallie sighed as she climbed the steps to the front door of Mrs Penelope Blackstock’s private lodging-house for young gentlewomen in Upper Wimpole Street. It was not like her to be so despondent, but it was beginning to dawn upon her lately that she was never going to earn enough to do more than scrape by and even that depended entirely on her ability to keep working. And now she had received an all-too-clear warning that one of her sources of income was perilous indeed. If Lord Parry had recognised her, then even her respectable employment would be in jeopardy.

‘Tallie! You must be frozen.’ Mrs Blackstock’s eighteen-year-old niece Emilia, usually known as Millie, appeared from the parlour at the sound of the key in the door, her head wrapped turban-fashion in a shawl. ‘Do come in and get warm by the fire. Aunt has just made some tea and we are toasting muffins.’

Thankfully Tallie dropped bonnet and pelisse on the hall chair and followed her in, pulling off her gloves as she did so. All the residents of the household, with the exception of Mrs Porter the cook and little Annie the maid of all work, were gathered round the fireplace.

Suddenly Tallie’s vision swam and she found she could not find her way to her chair. Her sight was so blurred she had to grip the edge of the table to steady herself.

‘Tallie dear, what is the matter? Are you ill?’ Zenobia Scott, the other lodger, leapt to her feet and guided Tallie to her seat. ‘You are frozen! Please, Mrs Blackstock, may I ask Cook to bring a hot brick for her feet?’

‘I’ll go.’ Millie was already on her way and Tallie found herself a short while later wrapped snugly in a blanket with the blissful heat of one of the bricks that Cook always kept on the back of the range in the winter glowing by her feet.

She curled her fingers tightly around the teacup and smiled gratefully at her friends, thankful as always for having found this cheerful feminine sanctuary.

‘Have you walked all the way home, Talitha?’ Mrs Blackstock asked. ‘I do wish you would not; it is so cold out there, and dark now. What occurred to upset you so? Has some man offered you an insult?’

‘No, not exactly.’ Tallie made herself think. She could hardly pretend now that nothing had happened—and in any case she badly wanted to talk about it—but although the other women knew she sat for Mr Harland, they had no idea it was in a scandalous state of undress. They knew how she had begun to sit for the portraitist and had unthinkingly assumed that the supply of Society ladies who required someone else to model their less-than-perfect or pregnant figures was constant. But Tallie had failed to tell them that after the first commission, undertaken at the behest of one of her millinery customers wanting a portrait to remind her husband of her pre-childbirth slenderness, she had succumbed to the temptation of far more lucrative modelling.

‘I was at the studio,’ she began, ‘and a party of gentlemen arrived unexpectedly and insisted on coming up. They guessed Mr Harland had a female sitter and began the most dreadful hue and cry, looking for me.’

‘How dreadful!’ Mrs Blackstock and her niece said in one voice. Millie, a ravishingly pretty blonde with a lovely figure and a charming, though light, singing voice, was employed as a dancer at the Opera House. Despite all popular prejudice about her profession, she maintained both her virtue and an endearing innocence, whatever lures gentlemen threw out to ‘Amelie LeNoir’.

‘Did they discover you?’ Mrs Blackstock added anxiously. She kept a concerned eye on her three young ladies, although hard experience since she had been widowed had taught her that no lady of limited means could afford to be over-nice about her employment.

‘No, fortunately the ones who were making such a hunt of it were diverted and all was well. But it was frightening and I was so very cold …’

Mrs Blackstock clucked. ‘Make sure you have a good dinner tonight, Talitha dear, and go to bed early. My goodness, just look at the time! Millie, if we are to take out those curl papers and dress your hair for this evening’s performance, we must bustle!’

She swept her niece out of the room, pausing to pat Tallie’s shoulder as she went.

Zenobia shifted her position to regard her friend closely. Three years older than Tallie, she was a governess who chose to live independently and to go out to households daily. She had a small but appreciative clientele amongst those rare families who took the education of girls seriously and who wished to have their children’s regular learning with their own governesses supplemented by Miss Scott’s tuition in Italian, German and, in two radical households, Latin.

‘Well?’ Zenobia demanded abruptly. Years of dealing with children had given her a sure sense for prevarication and careful half-truths. ‘Who was he?’

‘He? Who?’

Zenobia rolled her brown eyes ceilingwards. ‘The man, of course. The one who was not hunting you.’

‘How did you … I mean, what makes you think …?’

‘Your choice of words was odd, that is all. And I know you very well. There is something about you, some little suppressed excitement. Come on, tell Zenna.’

‘But I did not even see him, Zenna,’ Tallie protested. ‘Only his shadow on the floor. You see, they all came trooping up and I ran and hid in the closet, but the key fell out, and my draperies, er …’

‘Tallie,’ Zenna said, her face a picture of appalled realisation, ‘you do not mean to tell me you were posing unclad?’

‘Um … yes. But you see, Mr Harland is utterly immune to any interest in the female form. Why, I am as safe with him as I am with you; no one will ever see or buy his classical canvases, for they are never finished and, besides, they are vast in size.’

‘Well, one group of men appears to have seen all too much,’ Zenna retorted grimly. ‘Just how many of them were there?’

‘Four. But even if they saw me again, they would never recognise me from the picture, for the pose was from the back.’

A little whimper escaped Zenna’s lips. ‘But what about this closet you hid in? Did none of them find you there?’