Madame Z's jaw dropped.
"A royal ball? My lady, this is ready-made attire — meant for light social gatherings. It's hardly appropriate for a royal banquet." Her eyes came up shining like stars, and she gripped her own hands together tightly. "But if it were for a royal ball, I swear to you, I would give my very life to make my lady the most beautiful dress in the world."
Eloise broke into a light sweat under the pressure of that promise.
Then Madame Z remembered something and asked, tentatively, for her lady's opinion.
"This one." She pointed at the red dress. "Might you wear it to Duchess Bolus's seasonal gathering?"
Duchess Bolus. Yes — her parties fell around this time of year.
The image assembled itself out of memory: the Duchess Bolus, a fan held up to hide the lower half of her face, a woman who had ruled high society for decades from behind that fan. Her parties were said to rival the court banquets of the palace in scale and in grandeur. And in the past, even when the invitations arrived, the original Eloise had rarely bothered to show her face at one.
But this year was different, because the thirtieth wedding anniversary celebration of the Duchess Bolus had become the hottest topic among the nobility. Ladies everywhere were whispering about the unprecedented scale of it. And then one piece of news had gone through the drawing rooms of the capital like a struck match.
The princess herself was planning to attend.
Eloise startled at the title, and went digging through her memory for that particular heavyweight, whose presence in any room had never once failed to signal political turmoil.
Ian's half-sister. The only legitimate heir left in the royal bloodline, now that every other sibling's position had been settled one way or another. A formidable rival by any measure. She sat at the very top of the line of succession and held power and status that nobody in the empire dared underestimate.
She was also the strategic card the emperor's faction had thrown its full support behind — the counterbalance, built deliberately, to go head to head with Ian's power base.
And in the original story, the princess had driven a great many of the key turns of the plot. She had been the first to endorse Madame Z's designs, which was the spark that set the whole fashion trend alight. And later she had become a thoroughly unpleasant antagonist who picked fights with Diana at every opportunity she could manufacture.
Just thinking about having to face that woman made Eloise's stomach churn.
"Does the Duchess plan to attend the party?" Madame Z asked.
If she were still the indifferent original Eloise, she thought, she would not have cared in the slightest.
But she was not the old Eloise anymore.
"I'll attend."
It was a golden opportunity to make a strong impression on a great many potential allies at once, and a smart investment in a future only she could see coming.
Madame Z squealed with delight, having guessed her lady's intentions correctly, and immediately promised further adjustments to the dress — more of them, better ones, whatever it took to turn it into the most perfect thing that had ever come out of her shop. She was fired up now, determined to make Eloise the single most striking figure at that party, because this would be the first time one of her designs was worn in public and her own reputation was riding on every seam.
"Truly, there's no need to go to such lengths," Eloise laughed, waving it off.
But since one of her own goals was to make Madame Z famous, she decided to let the woman run entirely wild with her creativity and show the capital exactly what she could do.
Afterward Eloise sat down at her desk and checked the schedule, and confirmed that the party fell on the following weekend. That was very little time to prepare. Everything was happening sooner than she had planned for.
Still, it was time to start appearing in public again and reclaim her standing.
Which left the most pressing problem of all, sitting somewhere in this house with a newspaper: how to smoothly handle her difficult husband.
She went down the hallway with an air of elegance and confidence carefully arranged over her, braced for a confrontation with her nominal husband —
And Ian appeared at the far end of it.
Speak of the devil, Eloise thought. Fated enemies, meeting once again in a narrow alley.
"Good afternoon."
"Good afternoon."
The greetings were bland and perfectly polite and dripped with the formality of two strangers who happened to live under the same roof.
Ian studied her with a puzzled, scrutinising look. He had noticed the change in how she was dressed.
"Are you planning to go out again?"
There was curiosity in the question, and underneath the curiosity, something that sounded a great deal like control.
"I'm not." Eloise turned in a slow circle to show off her new everyday dress. "Well? What do you think?"
She waited, hoping very much that he remembered the lesson.
Ian stood there blankly and gave no reaction whatsoever.
Eloise, internally, clenched both fists and screamed at the ceiling: where did the lesson go? Where did it go? I taught it to you eleven days ago!
She swallowed it.
"Even if you can't manage a sweet look on your face," she said evenly, "the least you could do is apply what you've learned and share a thought or two."
Ian thought it over. His expression grew serious, the way it did when he was working through a problem of logistics.
"It's a calm shade of blue," he declared.
A remark straight out of an engineer's notebook.
Eloise was so floored she nearly went over backward. After everything — after the tea, after the roses, after the model demonstration — that was what he had produced.
She sighed in despair. "In a moment like this, Your Grace, you say something along the lines of it suits you. Or you look beautiful."
Ian only sighed back at her.
Exhausted by the entire exchange, she changed the subject in order to escape it.
"There's something important I wanted to discuss, in any case. I'm considering attending the thirtieth wedding anniversary party of the Duchess Bolus."
She smiled with a hint of mystery and hedged carefully, building up to it.
"So. I was wondering." Then, bold and direct: "Would you accompany me, Your Grace?"
Her eyes were full of hope.
Ian was taken aback. "You want me to escort you."
Eloise nodded firmly, with a confident smile.
"You are genuinely inviting me to attend the Duchess Bolus's party together. Like an ordinary couple."
"I am," she said brightly, without a shred of hesitation.
He frowned, his face full of doubt and irritation, because nothing remotely like this had ever happened in the two years and two months of their marriage.
"Why?"
"It's simply part of the how to be a good husband curriculum," Eloise replied coolly. "You can't shirk this one. And I urgently need a major overhaul of my public image, in case you hadn't noticed my reputation sinking. Nothing in this world works better than a couple appearing affectionately together at a social event. It shuts down every false rumour of discord in the room at once." She tilted her head. "You did promise to show me what a proper husband looks like."
She had backed him into a corner with no exits in it.
Ian closed his eyes and sighed, evidently unable to find any way around his wife's sharp and perfectly reasonable logic.
"Provided it doesn't conflict with my schedule," he said. "I warn you now, I can't change plans that are already set in stone."
Truly, a man married to his work.
Eloise clenched a fist at her side and privately guessed that he was already planning to bury himself in some staggeringly boring business meeting rather than be seen dancing. But she had thought that through in advance.
"Luckily," she said, "it falls on Sunday. And you already promised to give me the weekend. So, like it or not, Your Grace, you're going."
No excuses allowed.
She noticed, as she watched him accept it, that he never once answered her directly. He danced around the point every single time, never saying yes, only arriving eventually somewhere adjacent to yes.
She told herself she did not care what kind of attitude he had toward her, as long as he showed up in the correct clothes on the correct evening.
Though if he ever dared pull this behaviour on her precious Diana — she swore, with something close to a growl behind her calm face, that she would not let him off easy.