If the Shoe Fits (19 page)

“When have I ever chastised you, Letty?”

“You’re right, you haven’t, but you remind me so much of your mother, even your voice, especially your voice, and I think of all those lengthy, tedious calls when she used to try to tell me what an irresponsible trollop I was. Betsy was just a little bit better than everyone. Especially me, I suppose.”

Sarah remained silent.

“What is it, darling? Are you in trouble?” Letitia’s voice had the underlying mettle that assured Sarah that
any
trouble could be rectified with the proper pressure applied to the proper authority, celestial or terrestrial.

“I suppose not. But I think I just watched my first love affair come and go, and it was kind of a train wreck.”

“Oh, I’m so
relieved
. Come to Paris. Everyone here is either falling in or out of love. The perfect place to lick your wounds, or have someone else lick them for you—”

“Stop! You are still my grandmother!”

“Did you love him? How long were you together? Was he
délicieux
? Tell me everything. It will make you feel better to start recounting… you can eventually turn him into a wonderful story.”

Sarah smiled despite her misery. Letitia
was
the perfect person to call. She might have had no idea how to relate to a sixteen-year-old runaway, but she certainly had plenty of opinions and advice when it came to raw passion. “Letty, I don’t know if I can talk to you about all this—”

“I forbid you to espouse any false prudery. Your mother was so judgmental when it came to affairs of the heart—”

The involuntary swelling in her throat and bruising pressure behind her eyeballs took Sarah off guard. She was going to start crying again.

“Oh, darling. I didn’t mean to speak harshly about your mother. You know she was just
too
good. So much like her father. And then she fell in love with that stick-in-the-mud. Well, your father has his redeeming qualities. I do believe he adored Elizabeth.” Letitia was speaking as if to herself. “They were such an odd pair: at home, she was all vivacious authority and he just doted on her, and then in business, he ignored her… well, he ignored everyone so she never took offense. But… oh, Sarah, are you
weeping
?”

Sarah laughed and cried. “I just miss my mother and it sounds so juvenile. I’m a grown woman for goodness’ sake, and this man, well, he was kind of wonderful and I thought he really was marvelous and then he became so enraged—”

“Did he hurt you, darling?!”

“No. Well, yes, my feelings of course, but he looked like he wanted to kill me—”

Sarah pictured Letitia looking out over the pale, sparkling evening light that was cast across the Seine at this time of year.

“I remember the first time your grandfather looked at me like that. I was terrified… but I must confess—because, in this above all things, Sarah, you must be honest with yourself—I was perfectly willing to go into that terrifying place as long as he was there.”

Sarah tried to picture Letitia’s younger self… it was impossible to imagine her being terrified of anything.

Now Sarah was sort of hiccupping and crying and laughing. “I know! I was frightened and he saw how he had scared me and he was miserable and apologized like mad and we talked it all through and agreed it was just never going to work—too much too fast and all that—and then I went upstairs where we had been… earlier in the day and the pillows smelled like him and I missed
him
, and wanted
him
to console me…” She gulped and laughed harshly at the absurdity. “I wanted
him
to console me about
him
!”

“Oh, darling. He sounds tremendous. Tell me all about him. Did you meet him in Chicago? New York? And is he fabulously rich and handsome? I’m sure he must be because I don’t imagine you losing your head over anyone who isn’t particularly spectacular… I used to worry that you were asexual or some such thing, but then I realized you might have inherited the
worst
of both worlds: your mother’s discretion and your grandmother’s passion. Oh, poor dear.”

“I think you might be right in a way. I never really looked at anyone before him. But now it’s like Pandora’s box… I seem to be looking at
everyone
… or they seem to be looking at me. Am I making any sense?”

“Of course you are. But back to this one in particular.
Who
is
he
?”

It was such a direct, quintessentially Letitia way of framing the question.
Who
is
he?
The first answer that popped into Sarah’s mind, oddly enough, was that he was an inventor. A fabulist. A fake earl.

Then she told her grandmother the annotated version of meeting Devon at a wedding in England… romantic castle and all that.

“Which castle?”

“Pardon?”

“Which castle? Cendrine and I were just looking at a wedding spread in
Hello!
over breakfast this morning… Duke of Northwood or some such thing… strapping British stock. Tall, dark, and handsome. You know the type.”

“Well, that’s his brother.”

“His brother? So yours is the earl?”

“He is not
mine.
And he is not really an earl at all.” Sarah laughed at the convoluted misunderstanding that had become Devon’s public persona. “He’s a bit… decadent.”

“Ooooh la la! Sarah, I must meet him! He sounds positively divine. A rake! How perfect for you. Oh, he’ll ruin you and you’ll never get over him. It’s just as it should be.”

“I’m trying to be a woman of the world about this, but I don’t see how my ruination could possibly be construed as a positive outcome.”

“Oh dear, because it is so
dramatic
. The last thing you want is something
passable
. I know you miss your mother, and I should have been more sensitive to that over the past few years, all that coming-of-age business, but sensitivity is not my strong point, darling. I was never able to tolerate all those irrational bouts of temper that define adolescence. But irrational bouts of
amour
are most assuredly under my purview.”

Sarah heard her grandmother tell Cendrine to bring the latest issue of
Hello!
and then heard Cendrine’s affirmative, if not particularly respectful, reply.

“Letty, while we are being honest, when are you going to admit that Cendrine is your best friend and stop treating her like a lackey?”

“Of course Cendrine is my best friend,” she whispered, “but I still write her a bank draft every week, so we both agree it’s best to keep up a semblance of professionalism. For appearances. And, in any case, she just looks out of context in anything but those pristine white aprons.”

Sarah laughed at that and realized that her throat-clenching sadness had passed. She had seen Cendrine on her days off numerous times, and the woman had a lovely wardrobe of clothes and was always the quintessentially stylish French lady when she strolled around Paris free from the watchful eye of Letitia Fournier.

“All right, darling, I have the magazine in front of me now. Let me find the pages with the wedding pictures.” Letitia’s voice mixed with the sound of rustling pages and then, “Of course I need my reading glasses, Cendrine…
please
. All right, here we are. Oh my, which one of this handsome brood is yours?”

“He’s not
mine
, Letitia! I mean, especially after last night. But the one that I sort of, ugh, this is impossible. His name is Devon Heywo—”

“Oh my! Haven’t you chosen the cream of the crop? There’s one photo in particular where he’s standing just outside the chapel doors with the bride and groom right after the ceremony and he looks particularly dreamy.”

Sarah’s stomach flipped when she recalled their brief interlude in the small antechamber of the church only moments before that picture must have been taken.

“I think a good bit of terror might be accommodated, Sarah. He is, as we used to say, a dish.”

“You are eighty-four years old—”

“What does that have to do with anything? Just because my body is a wrinkled old husk doesn’t mean that my mind—and heart—aren’t still capable of recognizing virility when I see it.”

Sarah sighed, mostly because her grandmother was correct. He was the cream of the crop. And he was strapping. And he was virile. And he was fabulous. And. And. And.

“I don’t know if this is really the way this conversation should go,” Sarah said. “I was hoping to turn lemons into lemonade and never think about him again.”

Letitia laughed heartily at that. “Oh! Sarah, you won’t be forgetting this one anytime soon.” And then to Cendrine, “I know, isn’t he fabulous? Sarah’s over the moon about him, but apparently he came on a bit strong and she doesn’t know how to rein him in… well, of course I told her that… just because you’re French does not mean you know
everything
there is to know about men…”

“Letitia! I am sorry to interrupt your eternal bickering with Cendrine, but I am a complete novice at all of this over-the-moon business and I’m not really sure it’s what I’m after right now—”

“Oh, darling! It’s not up to you!” Letitia’s laugh was light. “There’s some terribly crass American expression about how something like this bites you in your
derriere
, and I hate to tell you, it’s quite true. You can try to
avoid
it, of course, but if he became as fierce as you implied, I think he might have already fallen into your path, so to speak. Now, if you don’t share his feelings, that’s another matter altogether, but something about missing your mother and all of these other bits and pieces just sort of coincidentally feeling overwhelming all of a sudden… well, it might not be such a coincidence, dear. It sounds as though he may have struck a chord, as it were.”

At first, the days crept along at a wretched snail’s pace; her mind’s constant focus on Devon slowed the passage of time to a crawl. It got easier for Sarah to distance herself from her feelings as the weeks accumulated. For the following six months, she was able to avoid Devon—in person if not in her mind—very handily. She was frequently in London overseeing the construction on the new boutique but rarely strayed from the four-block radius in Mayfair that began at her room at the Connaught Hotel and ended at the construction site. Initially, she had narrowed the search for her new store location down to three properties: one was on Walton Street, a chic, upscale snake of a road, near Harrods and Sloane Square, and projected a very respectable, old-world Georgian feel; the next was just off Carnaby Street, near one of Stella McCartney’s edgy boutiques, where the entire row of shops exuded hip, cool fashion; the third was on a tiny lane near Bond Street called Bruton Place, which had a mix of galleries, an upscale pub, and a falling-down former garage from the 1950s.

Sarah was looking for a situation similar to what she had in Chicago (shop below, living above), but it would have felt like too much of a carbon copy if she’d applied it to the Georgian town house on Walton Street. There was no way she could live near Carnaby Street; it was far too bustling twenty-four hours a day and she would have no rest whatsoever. She finally settled upon the Bruton Place garage property.

The location was close enough to the high-end shops of Mayfair (and Bond Street in particular) to give it the proper air of haute couture, it was relatively quiet at night, and the building itself offered an alternative, modern feel that Sarah wanted the London store to possess. The second and third floors had rough original beams and charming exposed brick walls (“More like decrepit,” her father had commented dryly), so she could easily envision converting the top into a modern living space and the middle into an office and storage space, with the shop at street level.

She was finally able to wrest the freehold from the family who had been holding on to it for the past sixty years by assuring them she would not tear it down. For some reason, they were sentimentally attached to their little garage in Mayfair and had yet to meet a buyer who was willing to leave the property intact.

After she had returned from her honeymoon in late October, Bronte was also back in London to help manage the marketing and PR for the new Sarah James store. She and Max lived in an adorable mews house in Fulham that Max had bought and fixed up before they’d met. Bronte’s marriage to Max Heyworth had done nothing to hamper her enthusiasm or talent for the advertising business she had built before she met him. Motherhood, on the other hand, might put a slight crimp in her plans.

When Bronte told Sarah she was expecting a baby, of course Sarah’s first question had been, “What’s your due date?!”

Bronte’s sheepish “April first” had them both laughing at the timing and trying to come up with some good puns about fools and their folly.

Despite Bronte’s initial enthusiastic flurry of questions about Devon and Sarah getting together over the wedding weekend, Sarah’s firm and consistent replies that it was “only a one-time thing” finally wore Bronte’s curiosity down. Sarah also suspected that Max had told Bronte to give it a rest after Devon must have told him the same thing. Sarah never mentioned Devon’s unexpected visit to Chicago, and she was certain Devon wouldn’t have said anything to Max about that ill-fated journey either.

When Bronte and Max asked Sarah to be the baby’s godmother, even Sarah knew it would be the height of immaturity to refuse because Devon was going to be the godfather. Sarah accepted with the requisite enthusiasm (she
did
want to be the baby’s godmother for goodness’ sake; what could be more fun than showering a little boy or girl with all sorts of superfluous gifts… especially a girl baby… who liked shoes…), but Sarah had to admit that the actual christening ceremony, which would take place six weeks after the birth, loomed on her emotional horizon like a guillotine about to drop. Sarah tried not to let her imagination get too grim, but whenever she pictured herself standing around the baptismal font in the ancestral chapel watching Devon hold a newborn, she felt as if she had crossed into a circle of hell. The circle of seeing everything you want right there before your eyes and having it be damnably—fractionally—out of reach.

The reality was even worse than she could have imagined.

Sensing Sarah’s reluctance to talk about the fling with Devon (and whatever had soured what should have led to a perfectly fun London port-of-call romance for Sarah), Bronte made sure the two were never thrown together unexpectedly. Unfortunately, there was no way to conduct a baptism without having the godfather and the godmother in the same room at the same time.

***

The baby, who would one day become the twentieth Duke of Northrop, arrived with the promptness his father was known for, coming into the world—at high noon exactly—on April 1. Charles Conrad William Thomas Carlisle Heyworth, Marquess such-and-such, Earl this-and-that, and Viscount hill-and-dale, was far too small to bear the burden of such an enormous name and so many courtesy titles, so from the moment his squinty, moist, baby eyes opened and gazed into his mother’s adoring face, and Bronte saw replicas of Max’s gray lupine eyes staring back at her, his mother simply called him Wolf.

The name was instantly adopted by everyone except the Dowager Duchess, who insisted on calling him Charles at every opportunity. The christening was scheduled for May 12. Sarah went into full panic mode around May 5.

All that kitchen-table talk about no more sex was all well and good in the abstract. It was easy enough to ignore her feelings when she didn’t actually see him (or smell him or… ugh), but Sarah began to worry that she might actually dive at him across the baptismal font in order to slake her pent-up lust.
It’s just physical
, she kept assuring herself rationally. Like a food allergy. She needed a temporary Devon antidote or lust inhibitor. At one point, she actually considered speaking with a doctor to see if such a drug actually existed.

And, in the midst of all this
not
seeing Devon, there was Eliot Cranbrook. The man seemed to have some sort of GPS device that casually tracked Sarah’s every move. If she happened to go to Paris for the weekend, he would call on Saturday morning and ask if she happened to be in Paris. When she was back in New York for a week or two? Surprise!

She supposed the world of fashion and the luxury goods market followed a certain rhythm—trade shows, fashion weeks—so Sarah didn’t give it too much thought. And, she had to confess, it was a relief to be taken out to dinner and mildly fawned over without any threat of a deeper attachment. Eliot was attentive without being dramatic. Never jealous, never prying. If they didn’t see each other for a few weeks, the occasional email or text sufficed to stay in touch.

Physically, though, she was starting to have to keep him at bay.

The two of them definitely had some chemistry. Even that initial touch at her lower back as they were leaving Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago had proven that. But the frisson of excitement from Eliot was nothing compared to the roiling cauldron from Devon. She tried to convince herself that cauldrons were for witches, not sexually inexperienced shoe designers.

The weekend before the christening, Sarah decided to take the train to Paris to visit Letitia. Of course, her phone rang on Friday afternoon and Eliot wondered if she might be headed to France for the weekend. He was just finishing up a string of negotiations with a young French designer and was going to head back to Geneva, “Unless…”

“I was just thinking that you must have one of those canine chips implanted in me somewhere,” Sarah laughed as she pulled her bag onto the Eurostar first-class train. (Yes, she had finally succumbed to the wheelie bag—a Louis Vuitton Damier Pégase model—but still, it had been a capitulation.)

“Excellent! I will hold on to my room at Le Meurice, unless you want to go out of town? Have you been to Normandy or Giverny?”

“Another weekend perhaps. My grandmother is just back in town”—Sarah grunted as she lifted her luggage to the overhead rack—“and I’m looking forward to seeing her. You’ll finally get to meet the infamous Letitia Fournier.”

“My weekend is yours. Shall I make a reservation for dinner? Does your grandmother have a particular favorite?”

“She’s totally old school when it comes to restaurants, Taillevent or La Tour d’Argent, or if she’s feeling particularly adventurous, she might deign to visit the upstart Alain Ducasse.”

Eliot was laughing lightly and Sarah could hear the sound of papers rustling and street noises in the background.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“In the back of a limo being driven to another meeting.” His voice changed then, from a casual business tone to something deeper. “I’m glad I caught up with you.”

“Me too.” Sarah hoped she sounded light and hoped he wouldn’t choose this of all weekends to try to take their friendship to another level. She dreaded other levels. “Why don’t you come to my grandmother’s around seven thirty?” She gave him the address and continued, “We can have a cocktail, then head out for dinner. I’ll make the reservation after I talk to Letitia.”

“Sounds great”—back to casual, fun Eliot—“I’ll see you then. Ciao.” She heard him launch into rapid-fire Italian with one of his assistants before he had finished disconnecting his phone.

A few hours later, Sarah was happily curled up on Letitia’s chaise longue in an alcove of the older woman’s vast bedroom. Letitia was in her bed, looking like a caricature of a wealthy heiress in her vintage pale blue 1940s quilted-satin bed jacket.

“Letitia, I swear, who in the world has any use for bed jackets, except you?”

“Oh, Sarah darling, you and your generation of beauties are missing out on all the fun. You need to slow down! I love receiving people in my bedroom… not like I have so many callers these days, of course. But it’s delightful to sit here and drink my tea, and spend the afternoon in divine comfort.”

“It is fabulous… I suppose you would have to be born into it.”

“As if you were not?”

“You know what I mean! My mother never would have abided all that
lying
around
. Sometimes I wonder if you two were even related.”

“I knew I should have chosen her nanny with more care. Your grandfather and I had a fabulous six-month trip planned and I just couldn’t be bothered. I know it sounds horribly
un
maternal to your modern ears, but babies were just not part of that picture. Your mother was an angel of course, but that nanny of hers was a tyrant. She adored your mother, but she ran a tight ship. Even I was occasionally cowed.”

“I doubt that,” Sarah said into her teacup.

“I heard that! So tell me what you would like to do this weekend, darling.”

“As a matter of fact, I have a little surprise for you.”

“I hope he is tall and fabulous… and British?”

“Two out of three…”

“Fabulous and British?”

“The other two…”

“Tall and British?”

“Stop! Letitia, he’s tall and fabulous. And definitely
not
British. You’ve got to let that one go. I have told you for months that I am not ready for all that fiery passion or possession or whatever you want to call it.” Sarah waved her hand to dismiss the idea.

“You haven’t listened to a word I have said, Sarah. You are not being honest with yourself. Look at you! Even when you are uttering the words, you sound like you are trying to convince a truth commission… whether you are ready or not, I don’t think you can just
let
it
go
.”

Sarah started to protest, but her grandmother held the floor. “You are too gorgeous and
fiery
, I daresay, to settle for some bland substitute. Do you mean to tell me you have been in London all these past months and you haven’t seen him one time?”

“I am not having this discussion with you, Letitia. You are the only person who has not accepted that my episode of Earl Meets Girl did not have a happily ever after. Please.”

“Oh! So he
is
an earl, then?!” Her excitement was palpable.

“No! That was a joke. Would you quit it already?!” But Sarah laughed despite her irritation, then mumbled, “Let’s just drop it.”

“Oh, don’t go all
maudlin
on me. That’s just emotional blackmail. I shall continue to refer to him as they do in the rags: The Earl… it has such a jaunty ring to it.”

“You are impossible.” Sarah rolled her eyes.

“Very well then, tell me about the American.” But Letitia said it in such a way that made it perfectly clear she had no interest in the man who was obviously an also-ran to The Earl. She picked up her teacup and gazed out the window, as if to say,
Bore
me
with
the
hayseed.

“Oh, Letitia, you are such a fabulous snob! In any case, his name is Eliot Cranbrook and he’s a dishy Robert Redford type. But taller. Much taller.”

That seemed to get her partial attention. “But he is
not
an earl.”

“Neither is the other one!” Sarah laughed. “Trust me. You will like the American.”

And when he arrived—fine clothes, perfectly tailored, a small, exquisite bouquet of spring flowers for Letitia—he had the doyenne’s full attention. Eliot certainly knew how to play it.

Letitia’s husband Jacques also joined them, and the quartet went to Le Grand Véfour.

The conversation, the food, the splendid wine, the centuries-old perfection of the sparkling jewel of a restaurant itself, the fading mirrored panels reflecting candlelight: everything bubbled and sang like the champagne they had with their first course.

Sarah watched as Eliot charmed her grandmother (not very difficult, since Letitia responded quite readily to his mix of genuine flattery of her person and a potent love of French food and wine, though not necessarily French people). When Eliot turned his attention to Jacques, she thought her step-grandfather might not be so easily drawn in.