#i'm flyign out the door as i post this and i'm so late but HERE IT IS I HOPE YOU LIKE IT THANK YOU FOR YOUR ENTHUSIASM SO FAR

[monstersandmaw]

Laces for a Lady - 18th century, poly, shifters x human romance - Chapter Seven (sfw)

Disclaimer which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me. 

Contents: some passing comments comparing two different female body types in a negative way, and some measurement taking and a dress fitting that leaves Nel a little breathless. Who knew Mr. Nancarrow had it in him to be so smooth. Mr. Darcy hand-flex fans, be warned...

Wordcount: 3931

Catch up here: Part One (sfw), Part Two (sfw), Part Three (sfw), Part Four (sfw), Part Five (sfw), Part Six (sfw)

Edmund flushed at Nel’s boldly obvious compliment, but was saved any further embarrassment by Mr. Fordyce announcing that it was Nel’s turn, and that he would have to take Nel’s measurements since he didn’t have them in his records as he did Winnie’s.

This time it was Nel whose face turned hot, but she met Edmund’s gaze again as he stepped forwards, rested his cane against the nearby table gently enough not to cause the arrangement of dried flowers in the centre even to quiver, and then he carefully passed the ribbon of paper around her waist. He kept his eyes down, but his long, delicate fingers moved with nimble grace as he held the paper and snipped the tailor’s marks in it which would correspond to the various locations of the measurements.

“And now inhale,” he murmured, and she obliged, letting her ribs inflate naturally. She could feel his knuckles pressing ever so slightly against her body through the fabric of the thinner, less structured dress she’d chosen for that day, and she tried not to shiver.

They had begun at her waist, but a moment later she found herself scowling at Mr. Fordyce when he made Edmund kneel down on the hard wooden floorboards to measure the length of her leg.

Edmund got down alright, if stiffly, but he gasped and sucked in a sharp breath as he pushed himself upright with his cane, and he went rigid with another sudden inhale, eyes screwed shut and head bowed forwards as he breathed through a stab of pain. For a lurching moment when he raised his head again she thought he was going to pass out as all the colour drained from his face.

Clearly mortified, he looked like he was going to struggle through it despite the fact that he seemed to have been robbed of his faculties for a moment, but Nel abruptly turned to Mr. Fordyce and made a calculated assumption about the egotistical, self-important little man. "It must be such work for you to keep up with constantly changing fashions when you’re so far from Town here in Polgarrack," Nel said, and Mr. Fordyce immediately puffed up like a show pigeon under scrutiny, and graced her with a condescending smile.

"Oh, indeed, Miss Bywater, it is certainly not without its challenges. But!” he went on, brandishing his forefinger in the air as if lecturing a small and rather resentful child, “A successful tailor must be a true artist, and he must find something new and extraordinary at every turn for his patrons. So, I do make frequent journeys to Town to make my observations. That way, you see, the nobility situated further from Town are still provided with the very latest in taste and elegance without the inconvenience of a journey so long and arduous."

He pursed his wet lips and then went on while Edmund's face was a blank, porcelain mask of pain beside her, his shoulders turned slightly to hide his face from Mr. Fordyce who was currently standing perched on a small footstool near the window for a vantage point to ‘better view the proportions of the lady for whom he would have to work a miracle’. Or so he claimed. Nel just thought he felt short and didn't like pontificating at someone who was taller than him, even if only by an inch or two.

She tried not to let her face show her distaste at the master tailor’s outrageously overblown opinion of himself, but in this case, it was buying Edmund time to recover. “What a sacrifice you make for your art,” she said flatly, and he missed the sarcasm entirely.

"Indeed. A tailor ought to have a quick eye; to steal the very cut of a sleeve in passing at the merest of glances, Miss Bywater,” he intoned in an almost sing-song voice, conspiratorially leaning a little closer from his little footstool. She hoped he toppled off it. “Any common bungler may cut out a shape when he has the pattern on the table before him, but a good workman will take it by his eye in the merest passing of a carriage…" He flourished his hand as if he’d magicked something spectacular into existence at that very moment. All she saw was spittle and hot air.

"Extraordinary indeed," she said blandly, studiously keeping her eyes off Mr. Nancarrow while trying to gauge whether it was necessary to indulge Mr. Fordyce's nauseating pomposity any further. He still looked like he might appreciate a few minutes more, so she pulled out a rather higher card from her metaphorical hand. "You must truly be a master of your craft then, Mr. Fordyce, if the rose-petal gown you made for Lady Penrose's birthday in August is anything to judge. Truly, I had never seen its like before, not even when I attended the Russells’ Christmas Ball with Lord and Lady Mercer and their son last year in London." She wondered if she’d taken her flattery a step too far with that last, but he drank it up like sweet summer wine.

His watery eyes lit up at the mention of Lord and Lady Russell’s exclusive gathering, and, as she had suspected, Nel rose just a fraction in his estimation by mentioning such connections. Not that she gave a single one of Old Flint’s trumpeting farts what this man thought of her and her station in Society, but it was buying Edmund time, and he seemed to be breathing a little easier now.

"Oh," Fordyce said in a different voice, simpering just a little. “The… The Russells’ Christmas Ball? And… Lord and Lady Mercer you say?” His eyes practically glinted. “Their young son is a most eligible bachelor, I believe,” he said, apparently unaware of the impudence of such a comment. “And you were with them in Town?”

She nodded. “They’re close family friends.” Never mind that said eligible bachelor had spent the majority of that particular night scandalously secreted away in an upstairs bedroom with an Admiral’s nephew when he’d promised to dance with Nel instead. The cad, she thought with a fond and barely-disguised smile. She knew William would get a good laugh out of hearing all about the ridiculous Mr. Fordyce, and she made a note to herself to include an account of this exchange in the letter she’d intended to pen to him that afternoon.

"Yes, well, the gown I made for Lady Penrose’s birthday is one of my finer pieces, I’ll admit,” Mr. Fordyce blustered, returning to her original compliment. “Perhaps a little too fine for someone of your particular… stature," he added with a vague gesture at her figure, and she bit back a sudden, wild urge to laugh indecorously. "The young Lady Penrose does have such exceptionally delicate wrists, after all," he said, and consulted his notes rather ostentatiously and unnecessarily in order to add, "And such a minuscule waist. Still, a tailor such as I must be able to cut out not only for the handsome and well shaped, but to bestow a good shape where nature has not designed it quite so to suit the fashions of the day."

If Nel hadn't been keeping half an eye on Edmund, who now looked far more horrified by his master's words than by his own physical discomfort, she might have taken offence, but what a conceited little man like Fordyce thought of the proportions of her waist was of relatively little importance to her in the grander scheme of things. If Will had been in the room, she’d have met his eye and the two would have dissolved into uncontrollable hysterics.

All that mattered now though was that her plan to distract the master tailor for a time had worked. Stoking the already puffed-up man’s ego had kept him occupied long enough that whatever pain had been exacerbated by being forced to bend Edmund’s bad knee to the hard floorboards had dissipated back to something more manageable, and a minute later, he very lightly touched Nel at her elbow as he moved around her on the pretence of taking another measurement.

‘Thank you’, he mouthed, blinking rapidly and barely meeting her gaze. He was still the colour of fresh parchment, but he was no longer clenching his teeth like he thought he might be sick. She hoped she hadn’t embarrassed him by acting so presumptuously.

“Forgive me, Mr. Fordyce,” she smiled sweetly to the older man. “I do believe I interrupted the proceedings with my questions.”

“Oh, yes,” the man chirped, blinking like an owl surprised by the arrival of daylight. He’d clearly not noticed at all. “Yes. Well, if you could hold out your arms while Mr. Nancarrow passes the tape around your chest.”

Her heart skipped a beat at that, and while Edmund was methodical and nothing but proper, he did let his dark eyes flick briefly to her face as he closed the tape snugly around her breasts. Her breath caught. Beneath the fabric of her dress, she felt her nipples tighten and she licked her lower lip just a little, sinking her teeth in before resuming a perfectly blank expression. Never in her life had she been touched like that by a man. Her previous mantua maker in Sussex had been a woman after all, as would have been the case here, had Winnie’s not recently relocated.

If Edmund’s gaze had dropped to her mouth for the briefest of moments, she pretended not to have noticed, nor to wonder what it might mean, if anything.

“Inhale again,” Edmund said in a low, sweet voice, his eyes flicking fleetingly back up to her eyes.

Slowly, she obliged and felt the paper tape stretch taut against her bodice as her breasts lifted with her breath. She felt the tension go out of the line as he let the paper slide between his fingertips to measure the slack. All the while, his hands remained steady as a surgeon’s, and she tried not to stare at the elegance of his long fingers where they held the paper securely against her chest in order to snip more little cuts in the paper to mark the dimensions.

“Exhale,” he whispered, and she did, shakily. “Thank you, Miss Bywater.”

“Nel,” she whispered back, but he only inclined his head in a way that said he could, regrettably, never call her something so familiar in such a charged setting. She didn’t know whether to be flattered or frustrated, and found herself oscillating between the two.

Then the moment ended and she almost swayed.

Edmund stepped back, dropped his eyes, and crossed the room to hand Mr. Fordyce the tape. Its coded marks at various lengths indicated that the full set of measurements had been taken, and that the appointment was drawing to a close.

Mr. Fordyce let his eyes flick along the length of it — no doubt noting all the places where her circumference was less elegant than Winnie’s — and folded it carefully up into an envelope. “My thanks, Miss Bywater. I think we can make something with that. Come, Mr. Nancarrow. We must leave these elegant ladies in peace to begin our work.”

Winnie, who had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room the whole time and pretending to work on her embroidery, rose gracefully and thanked Mr. Fordyce with just a little hint of frost in her usually sweet tone, and said that she looked forward to seeing their creations soon.

“I shall work on your dress personally,” Mr. Fordyce said as he bowed over Winnie’s hand. Nel thought that, given half the chance, he might just slobber all over it for the honour of sampling her ‘delicate wrists’ again, and shuddered. Winnie withdrew her hand almost immediately.

The way he had worded his comment though made Nel wonder if that meant that Edmund was going to make her dress, and her eyes darted questioningly to him.

He was watching her, and one corner of his lips lifted.

That was all, but in that moment, she knew it would be the case. His hands would have touched every inch of the dress she would wear to the ball in Plymouth, and her heart skipped and soared as if she would feel the ghost of his touch when she wore the dress itself. In a way, he would be closer to her that night than any man would even if she danced with them, because the fabric would rest against her very skin. Well, against her chemise and stays, but still, it was closer than any other man would get. Her core heated at the thought and she hoped her face didn’t betray her as the gentlemen bowed and left.

In the silence of their departure, Winnie arched an eyebrow at Nel. “Well, that was an interesting morning,” she said.

“Indeed,” Nel replied carefully.

“Since the ball is only a couple of months away, you must learn to dance properly,” Winnie added as she crossed to the window and watched their small carriage draw away from the front of the house. The shapes were made a dark blur by the rain. “I’ll teach you myself.”

“And what if I have no intention of dancing?”

Her chest still felt tight and her lungs seemed full of sea foam after Edmund had touched her, and imagined she could feel the warmth of his hands lingering through the fabric of her dress. It was most distracting.

“And I do know how to dance,” she added petulantly as she flopped into the other chair by the fire and picked up her own embroidery hoop, scowling at the wonky patterns on it. Had that been a strawberry or a carrot she’d been working on? “It was the local dances at the harvest celebrations that left me stumped. I can dance a passable minuet or quadrille as well as the next country gentleman’s daughter. I just choose not to.”

“You cannot sit the whole ball out and refuse to dance,” Winnie groaned, turning back to face her. “You’ll draw attention to yourself.” And, by extension, she might embarrass the Lady Winnifred Penrose.

“I’ll draw more attention to myself by dancing,” Nel said with a sullen expression as she began to pick rather savagely at her lumpy embroidery with a tiny pair of scissors. Lord, what if Edmund had happened to see it? He’d have thought it was the work of a small child with a knitting needle and ball of garden twine. “It’ll be like watching a bear in a skirt,” she muttered glumly.

Winnie snorted an extremely undignified laugh into her hand, and the two women promptly dissolved into giggles. “I’ll remind you of that when we’re at the ball,” Winnie snickered.

“Oh you’d better not,” Nel groaned. “If I get the giggles in public, it’s uncontrollable, and it’s even worse when it’s a formal setting.”

“You managed fairly well at the Lammas Dance when Old Flint did his best to reduce everyone to hysterics.”

That just brought back memories of meeting Edmund’s dark eyes again, and the feel of Locryn’s huge, rough palms against hers, and clamping around her waist, lifting her high and laughing in his rich, gruff bass as he turned her, and then of her crushing idiocy in almost letting herself kiss the man in public and in front of his lover. No matter that Edmund had said all was forgiven and forgotten; she would never erase that night from her mind.

When the gowns had been made, Mr. Fordyce returned with Edmund for a final fitting in late November, and Nel tried to ignore the odd fluttering in her stomach at the thought of Mr. Nancarrow seeing her in something that was not only a lot finer than her usual redingote dresses, but in something which he himself had made to fit her body.

As Winnie’s maid helped her into it upstairs, while Winnie was downstairs having any final alterations noted, Nel silently scolded herself. ‘Edmund Nancarrow is not going to look at you with even the faintest whiff of interest beyond that of a professional tailor doing his job. Mr. Nancarrow, like Will, is only interested in men’. The memory of the heat in his eyes made her assertions fracture and crumble like fragile cliffs into the insistent sea below. Mr. Nancarrow was probably not only interested in men, but she could tell herself that for the time being all the same.

With her expression set in a rather sour grimace, she thanked Liddy and walked towards the staircase which would lead her down to the drawing room.

The dress was really lovely, and although it wasn’t nearly as complicated and showy as Winnifred's, it had its own elegance and richness that Nel loved more than Winnie’s. The fabric was a warm, green silk damask that shone in the light like a cut and polished emerald, with peonies and curled leaves and fruits shimmering subtly like frost on a windowpane. The sleeves ended just below her elbow in a soft spray of intricate white lace, and there was a small trim of lace around the low, square neckline that was so delicate and fine, it reminded her of the patterns of sparkling sea foam on the sand. The bodice snugged in around the waist, and fastened almost invisibly up the front in a series of minuscule, gold hooks and eyes, while the skirts fell away in a fountain of heavy, forest green fabric to the floor. It would be finished with a delicate, muslin scarf around her shoulders, secured with a silk peony. There were even matching shoes, which were surprisingly easy on the feet, even if the heel was a little higher than those she was used to.

Nel actually felt comfortable in herself as she moved about in it, which she rarely did when dressing up for dances, and she tried to draw on that confidence as she descended the stairs carefully, one hand on the bannister in case she stumbled.

She met Winnie just coming out from her fitting, wearing her own, cream and peach confection which she somehow managed to make look spectacular. Nel was sure that she would have looked like an upturned peach cobbler if she’d put that on.  

Her friend paused in the doorway when she saw her and gasped. “Nel!” she cried out. “Oh you look beautiful. The fit is perfect! And that colour! Why, I declare that the all gentry of Wessex will be prostrating themselves at your feet!”

Nel shook her head with a little blush, a dark curl escaping from the tight arrangement pinned at the back of her head above the collar and out of the way of the tailors’ fingers, and she continued down the stairs.

“Lady Winnifred,” came Mr. Nancarrow’s warm tenor from the other side of the doorway into the drawing room. “Forgive me, but you dropped —”

He stepped across the threshold and into sight, holding a muslin kerchief between the slender fingers of his right hand, but he looked over to his left and caught sight of Nel on the staircase.

The kerchief fluttered forgotten to the floorboards.

His lips parted and she watched him inhale slowly.

No, Mr. Nancarrow was most definitely not only interested in men.

There was no way Nel could still try to believe it after seeing that expression on his face, and she tried to hide a smile.

Winnie turned to glance at him and artfully hid her own little smile before dropping easily to retrieve the abandoned kerchief. She rose and leaned fleetingly in to whisper something in Mr. Nancarrow’s ear before flitting back towards the foot of the stairs just as Nel reached the last step.

Edmund immediately turned red from his collar to his ears, and swallowed visibly. He shot Nel one last glance and ducked back into the drawing room without a word.

Nel raised an eyebrow. “What did you say to him?”

Winnie just squeezed her shoulder. “Prostrating,” she whispered with feeling, and flitted away upstairs like one of the Fair Folk.

When Nel entered the drawing room, Edmund was standing beside Mr. Fordyce with his eyes on the floor and a lingering warmth to his face, but as she crossed to them and Mr. Fordyce declared that the creation was truly a triumph, Mr. Nancarrow raised his dark eyes at last and offered her a very small smile and a single, slow nod.

That one, gentle expression from him was more affirmation than any amount of twittering drivel from Mr. Fordyce as he paced around her and appraised her like an expensive piece of Wedgewood pottery on a plinth.

She watched Edmund take a step away from Mr. Fordyce as the man trotted around behind her and then went back towards the window to leave Edmund to make any adjustments, since he had been the one to make the dress and not Fordyce himself.

Edmund’s dark cane made a now-familiar clunk on the floorboards, and it sounded unusually loud to her while all the other sounds in the room seemed to fade.

“If I may?” he said to her in a soft undertone while the master tailor paced about near the window, utterly absorbed in the sound of his own voice. Nel had no idea what he was saying or if it was even addressed to her.

Edmund’s dark gaze had snagged momentarily at a piece of lace trim around the neck of her gown and he gestured towards it.

She glanced down and saw the problem, and then nodded.

“Of course,” she whispered, tilting her head a little in the opposite direction. It exposed her throat and collarbones, and gave him all the access he would need to free the lace from where it was folded over on itself. Her heart was beating like a trapped bird in her throat and she was sure that Edmund would see it thudding frantically against her skin.

And while Fordyce blathered on to his own reflection in the window about the fact that the cut of the dress and the padding were more important than the underlying body, and how his assistant had clearly understood this when making the patterns for the dress from Nel’s measurements, Edmund slid his fingertips carefully against the exposed skin of her chest.

Goosebumps prickled to life in their trailing wake.

Her breath hitched and she tried not to gasp.

Gently, he withdrew the tiny fold of lace that had been tucked under between the neckline of her bodice and her skin, and smoothed it flat again with his fingertips.

Nel exhaled shakily, angled a little away from him. If she’d had to look at him in that moment, she wasn’t sure she could have weathered the heat in his dark brown eyes. Her whole body thrummed like the rigging of a ship in a gale, and if he kept it up much longer, she would founder on the shore.

Wearing the dress he had made — had touched in every stitch and hem and seam — Nel did feel as though his hands were on her already, around her waist, on her hips, her shoulders, the small of her spine. There wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t prickling.

His knuckles brushed her collarbones as he withdrew his touch. Nel ached all over for him to linger, but he didn’t, and when he was done, he took half a step back and smiled.

“Perfect,” he breathed, meeting her gaze directly.

___

Nel's dress, for those interested. It's a little early for the period, but shhh. It's gorgeous.

:3

I hope you’re still enjoying it, and I hope you’ll consider reblogging as well as leaving a like if you enjoyed it. Take care of yourselves, and I hope you have a lovely day/night wherever you are, and whenever you read this.

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