The Shadow and the Star Read Online Free PDF

truly was.
    Each time Leda spread out a new bolt for view, he pulled the previous one out of her hands as she began to roll it, and turned the fabric back onto the bolt himself, hefting the unwieldy weight easily. And he didn't make a fuss over it, either; he just kept up his translation from the Japanese to English and back again as he worked alongside her, while Madame Elise held each fabric up to the window and explained its properties and how it would show by candlelight and gas.
    When Leda dropped her silver scissors, he picked them up for her. She accepted them with a mumble of thanks, feeling painfully bashful, as scatterbrained as a fluttery old maid when his bare hand brushed hers.
    Leda was so absorbed in surreptitiously watching him that she started when the footman murmured in her ear from behind. She looked down and saw in his gloved hand a monogrammed letter sealed with a coronet.
    "For Mademoiselle Etoile." The servant held it out to her.
    Everyone glanced toward her except Madame Elise, who went on talking without a pause. Leda felt her face go to a scalding color. She plucked the letter from the footman and held it behind her, wishing desperately for a pocket.
    Madame Elise's phony French voice droned on, but suddenly she raised her eyes and stared directly at Leda for a moment. Leda dropped the letter to the floor behind her, standing so that her skirt covered it. She swallowed and looked down, fumbling blindly at the fabric on the counter.
    She had no need to open the missive. She'd no need even to look closely at the coronet. It made no difference to which peer the seal might belong—such a note could mean only one thing, and have but one end.
    This
was how Mrs. Isaacson was to "arrange something." Leda felt appalled and humiliated, furious with Mrs. Isaacson, and then chagrined to think that perhaps it was what her employer had thought she was requesting. Many of the girls did walk out with men… but no… no—it did not have to be done this way, in the showroom, in front of the other girls and the clients.
    She was publicly branded—her position made crystal-clear. Sold for the price of a silk plaid showroom dress and cockade.
    Business had gone on around her. When she found the nerve to look up, the Japanese ladies were engaged in appointing a time for the first hand to go round to their hotel for the measurements. In the midst of it, Mr. Gerard translated. He would have seen the letter, too. They had all seen it, but of course no one was paying any attention to the affairs of a dressmaker's showroom woman.
    The Japanese ladies rose to leave. Leda had no choice; she was forced to move away from where she'd dropped the letter so impetuously and attend to the Hawaiian party while Madame Elise ushered the others to the door. Mr. Gerard went with them out to the carriage. Before Leda could discreetly retrieve the letter, Lady Catherine called her name, eager to begin her own choices. Leda had just produced the rose swiss for her and an emerald glazed silk for Queen Kapiolani when he returned.
    "Now do tell us, Mano." Lady Catherine spread the swiss across her throat and struck a coquettish pose. "How does this take your masculine fancy?"
    As he crossed the room, he had to walk right over the stretch of carpet where the letter lay. He did not glance at it, or at Leda.
    But Lady Catherine just then had noticed, and pointed out his omission to him. "I believe Miss Etoile has mislaid her note." Her sociable American smile at Leda held nothing but innocence. "Won't you retrieve it for her?"
    He turned and bent down. In misery, Leda accepted the envelope. He gave it to her with the face up, though the coronet had been showing clearly where it had fallen.
    She could not even thank him. She could not look up. When Lady Catherine gaily drew his attention to the rose swiss again, Leda wished herself deceased and beyond humiliation, hidden beneath a nameless headstone in some obscure churchyard leagues away.
    But