A Royal Likeness (2 page)

Her real emotions were focused on two-year-old Francis, who was too young to make such a journey with his mother. She clutched him tightly, and whispered in his ear that when she returned to France it would be with a full purse and dozens of playthings for him. Unaware of the import of the moment, her son chirped and giggled and gave her a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

With eyes full of tears threatening to spill forth, she was glad enough to turn away and board the carriage that would take her and Joseph to their ship.

The Channel was choppy and unkind, and most of the passengers were simply relieved to finally see the white cliffs of England. Marie, though, was ecstatic. She had done it. She had survived the Revolution, slipped past Fouché, avoided her husband’s reproaches for leaving him, and was now determined to remake her wax salon into a breathtaking attraction like no other.

What matter that she now had to face a customs official who was sure to faint dead away after opening one of her vast packing cases to find a glass eye peering up inquisitively at him?

London, January 1803.
“Ow! Nicholas, I need another bandage.”

Marguerite’s husband rushed into the workroom with a bundle of muslin strips.

“You’ve hurt yourself again? I’m going to send those new carving tools into the Thames. This is the third time this week a knife has slipped in your hands.”

“I know. And look what happened.” Marguerite held up her latest creation, a fashion doll commissioned by a local dressmaker who intended to show off a new ball-gown design on it for several of her select clients. But the doll’s head would have to be redone, as there was now a deep gash across the left side of its face.

“Why don’t you let Roger handle the carving?” Nicholas asked.

“I probably should, but I’m so frustrated with trying to perfect wax heads that I wanted to retreat back to the familiarity of working with wood. I’m good at that. At least, I used to be.” She held up her left thumb, the muslin hastily wrapped around it now beginning to seep blood.

Nicholas put his arms around his young wife and lifted her up onto the large worktable, which was littered with scraps of fabric, bundles of straw, blocks of wood, and other materials of the trade.

“Sweetheart, you are the best dollmaker in London. Wax is still a new medium. I’ve no doubt you will eventually be the best wax dollmaker in all of Europe.”

“I’ll never be as good as Aunt Claudette.”

“No, you’ll never be your aunt Claudette.” He wrapped his arms around his wife and kissed the tip of her nose. “Much to my great relief. I couldn’t bear to be married to a woman of lesser talent than you.”

“Mr. Ashby, you’re very fortunate that I am of such a forgiving nature that I can overlook your insult to my beloved aunt and mentor. Otherwise, I might be forced to employ my shrewish tone of voice.”

“Is that so? And what does a lady shrew look like in her natural state?” He scooped her off the worktable and cupped one hand around the back of her neck while using the other to pull her thick auburn hair out of the knot she employed to keep it out of her face while working. It slid down her back like the flow of warm brandy from a decanter.

“Now I remember the fair young maiden I fell in love with at Hevington a decade ago. She was covered in wood shavings even back then.”

Bells jangled as someone entered the front door. Marguerite disengaged from her husband’s embrace and went from the back workroom out to the front of the shop.

It was Agnes Smoot, returning from an errand.

“Letter just come for you, Mrs. Ashby.”

Marguerite took the proffered folded square from the shop’s seamstress with her unhurt hand. “Thank you, Agnes. Has Roger returned yet from making deliveries?”

“No, mum, not yet. D’you want to see him when he gets back?”

“No, I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear of my epic battle with a carving knife.” She held up her bandaged thumb.

“Again, mum?”

“Yes, again, unfortunately.” Marguerite returned to the workroom where Nicholas was busy arranging some scraps of wood according to size, while whistling softly under his breath. She held up the sealed correspondence.

“Speaking of Aunt Claudette, I have a letter from her. Would you like to read it with me?”

Nicholas stopped what he was doing and lit a small lamp to better
illuminate the letter. Claudette Greycliffe’s writing tended to be faint and spidery, and it could take them an entire evening to decipher her longer missives.

“Aunt Claudette sounds a little lonely, Nicholas.”

“Lonely! How could she have time to be lonely? She manages a careful and virtuous household, contains three noisy and active children, and hosts numerous fashionable parties, yet the woman is still inexplicably graceful. No wonder Uncle William adores her.”

“Why, you foolish man! Not ten minutes ago you were glad I wasn’t Aunt Claudette.”

Claudette Laurent, the daughter of a great French dollmaker, had been orphaned in France at the age of sixteen, but found ship’s passage to England and worked as a domestic servant for several years under a harsh mistress before finally risking all to start her own doll shop. Marguerite’s widowed mother, Béatrice du Georges, had become friends with Claudette aboard the ship bound for England and so, along with five-year-old Marguerite, the three had lived, worked, and survived together. Although her mother had been involved in the shop, it was the young Marguerite who had shown a talent for dollmaking. Claudette encouraged her interest and the two became close, with Marguerite referring to the older woman as “Aunt” Claudette.

William Greycliffe was a man of minor aristocratic connections who had pursued Claudette relentlessly despite her initial disdain of him. Even now Marguerite loved to hear stories of their courtship told for the thousandth time.

When Béatrice died suddenly, Claudette and William brought the teenaged Marguerite to live with them at their Kentish estate of Hevington and Claudette made Marguerite her de facto heir in the doll shop. As time passed, Claudette turned more and more of the responsibility for the shop over to Marguerite as she became involved in raising her three children and managing the estate with William.

Nicholas was one of a set of twin boys born to James and Maude Ashby, Claudette’s and Béatrice’s domestic employers upon their arrival in England. Nicholas’s heart burned with youthful passion for Béatrice, who gently refused him. He avidly followed the women’s progress after they left the Ashby home and even visited on occasion. Following Béatrice’s death, Nicholas finally took note
of Marguerite and promptly fell in love with her saucy temperament. For Marguerite, Nicholas filled the need for gentle sweetness that her mother’s death had yanked away from her, and the two had been inseparable during the intervening ten years.

“Oh, Nicholas, let’s go for Shrovetide as Aunt Claudette suggests. We haven’t been to Hevington in months. We even missed the lighting of the Yule log this past year. Besides, Rebecca is probably old enough now for a baby house and we could take one to her as a gift.” In the coziness of the warmly lit workshop, full of the smell of freshly shaved wood, she reached her arms around her husband’s neck and pressed her lips to his.

He responded in his familiar way, sliding both arms around her waist and burying his face in her neck.

“Very well, Mrs. Ashby. We’ll leave the shop in the care of Roger and Agnes, and plan for a long visit to Hevington. But before you begin packing trunks, I believe there is some more immediate business that requires your attention,” he said, gently dropping kisses along her exposed neckline.

“Is that so, Mr. Ashby? Pray, what business could be of such consequence that it calls for my
immediate
attention?”

“It’s a very private matter. Come home now, woman, so we can, er, discuss it before it loses the strength of its importance.” He playfully smacked his wife’s bottom and ushered her out of the shop, humming a happy but aimless tune.

February 21, 1803.
The evening before their scheduled departure for Hevington, Marguerite and Nicholas returned to the closed doll shop so she could put together a small box of miniature furniture and other accoutrements for the baby house they had already packed to take to Claudette’s daughter, Rebecca.

Miniature dolls’ houses, called baby houses, were becoming increasingly popular in England. Claudette had once spoken wistfully about the houses her father carried in his doll shop back in France, which led to an expansion in her own shop’s trade in these diminutive pieces. In addition to offering miniature replicas of tables, chairs, beds, carpets, paintings, and dishes, Marguerite had started designing tiny scale-sized families to inhabit them.

She rummaged patiently through a box of petite tissue-wrapped dolls, searching for one painted with Rebecca’s cobalt eyes, eyes that defined her as her mother’s child.

“Marguerite, the hackney will not wait all night for us. Isn’t the house and its furnishings enough for one child?”

“I suppose so, but I know I painted a baby-house doll that resembles her. I want her to have it. Maybe in this drawer? No, not here. I should look on the fabric shelves. Nicholas, would you go back to the workroom and see if you can find any more boxes of baby-house dolls?”

While Nicholas retreated to the back of the shop, she continued her search, the sound of her husband’s gentle whistling floating high over the tops of shelves loaded with every manner of elegantly dressed doll. Marguerite’s stock ranged from the little baby-house dolls all the way up to the
grandes Pandores,
life-sized dolls built on metal frames, which Aunt Claudette had made popular among the aristocratic English. The
grandes Pandores
were Claudette’s favorite dolls, but Marguerite preferred the nimble skill involved in the tiniest of her creations. Besides, the
grandes Pandores
required the wax heads that were so dratted difficult to create as flawless pieces.

A distant shouting from outside overtook the comforting sound of Nicholas’s whistling. She paused from what she was doing to listen, but the noise abated and she returned to her task.

Nicholas returned to the display room at the front of the shop. “Sweetheart, there are no baby-house dolls in the workroom. I’ll go up to the attic and see if Roger may have stored some up there.”

“And I’ll continue looking down here. I’m just certain that we have more of these dolls in the shop.”

Nicholas Ashby’s tall but lanky frame disappeared from view again. He had grown in height as he became an adult, but had never filled out in an obviously muscular sort of way. Still he had the strength of two men, and Marguerite loved watching him haul large planks of wood from delivery wagons into the shed behind the shop. Even Roger, as enormous and barrel-chested as he was, could not out-lift Nicholas Ashby.

But Nicholas’s interest in the shop stopped with physical duties. He was content to let Marguerite deal with customers and manage the financial affairs of the shop, much as her mother had been happy to let Aunt Claudette do years ago.

So engrossed was she with her thoughts and her search that when the projectile came through the window on the other side of the shop she was at first confused as to whether the sound had come from outside or the attic. The growing clamor outside on the street settled her confusion.

“Nicholas? Nicholas! Come quickly!” Marguerite called up toward the attic entrance, but he did not answer. He must have gone into the far reaches of the attic, which spanned the forty-foot length of the shop. She stood up, brushing dust from the sturdy, brown woolen skirt she wore most days when working.

Ever brash as a child and no less so as a woman, Marguerite marched to the front door of the shop and flung it open. The hackney was gone, and she was stunned to see a group of about twenty men, mostly drunk and on the brink of irrationality. They carried torches and clubs and the occasional pitchfork, and were gabbing loudly about a hanging at Southwark.

Why were these drunkards marching on respectable Oxford Street, and why in heaven’s name were they congregating outside her shop with obvious ill will?

“That’s her, Mr. Emmett. She’s the doll lady we told you about, Marguerite Ashby.” Through the smoky haze of the torches Marguerite could not see individual faces well, but the voice was coming from the back of the assembly.

“Yes, I have that figured out, Reggie. Your assistance is appreciated.” A man who could have been one of any number of different merchants stepped forward so that Marguerite could see him. He was as short as Nicholas was tall but built like a bull. He swept an exaggerated bow.