Free A Song Twice Over by Brenda Jagger

either.
    â€˜From Paris, Miss Dallam – from the rue Saint Honoré. The establishment of Madame Juliette Récamier, a milliner of great talent, who passed on so much of her knowledge to me – so many of her designs. May I show you?’
    â€˜Madame Récamier , did you say?’
    Gemma, smiling, did not believe a word of it. But Cara, smiling back at her, had already lifted the lid of her hat-box, nimbly undone the complicated fastenings of her carpet-bag, and began to fill the room with a rainbow swirl of fabric and colour, a white silk shawl intricately embroidered with white and silver flowers, another with blue forget-me-nots, which she threw carelessly but oh so becomingly across the back of a chair; quilted silk petticoats and starched muslin ones all differently flounced and frilled and trimmed with lace of a quality and design to which Cara referred with enormous reverence and no regard for the truth whatsoever as ‘Chantilly’, ‘Valenciennes’, ‘Point de Venise’ – ‘One can always tell quality. Don’t you think?’
    â€˜I dare say,’ murmured Gemma, to whom lace was only, and somewhat tediously, lace .
    And then the hats. A natural straw ruched with pink silk inside the brim and covered with pink silk roses without. A demure cottage bonnet with bows and a lace frill. A dashing wide-brimmed confection of black velvet ribbons and white feathers.
    â€˜Just samples, you understand, of the work I do – the stitches – the style – which is what really matters. Something a little out of the ordinary. Only a small selection, of course. As much as I can carry. But anything else you might require, I should be only too happy – from lace-edged night-caps to ballgowns – a trousseau?’
    Gemma smiled again, understanding the rapid professional assessment this other girl – this girl from a different universe of experience to her own, surely? – had made of her. Rich. Not much to look at. Over twenty. Therefore certain to be thinking of marriage. True enough, she conceded, wondering what assessment she could make, in her turn, of Miss Cara Adeane, once one got beyond the beauty? Bold, certainly. And glib. Neither too scrupulous nor too honest, for which Gemma – having been told that honesty, among the lower orders, must needs operate at a correspondingly lower level – did not feel able to blame her. Younger perhaps than she looked and sounded. A strumpet, her father would have said, his face stern as befitted his rank of industrialist and paterfamilias, but with that glint of humour in his eye which only Gemma – never her mother – understood. While her mother would have been likely to treat this girl with the outward show of superiority, the inner timidity and suspicion one might accord to some exotic jungle animal, expecting it to be tame enough but never quite certain.
    And what did Gemma herself really know of the streets of Frizingley – the natural habitat of ‘persons’such as these – beyond the observations made from an open landau in summer whenever her mother, who was nervous of crowds and noises and the way the hot air might stir up a riotous populace or a crop of infectious diseases, could be persuaded to visit the shops. Or from an occasional visit to her father’s mill when she would be shown over the counting houses and the pattern rooms, never the weaving sheds.
    She was twenty-two years old, well-read and exceedingly well-mannered, capable of handling servants, keeping household account books, issuing accurate commands for the restocking of food cupboards and linen cupboards, organizing dinner and appropriate entertainment for any number of guests. She knew French, Italian, Latin and German, had a working knowledge of mathematics, and – although her mother had begged her never to refer to this in ‘company’ – was acquainted with the aims of Her