“And it shows! I’m not trying to distract you, I’m trying to help you.”
I knew what he was doing, but I gave in anyway. “I’m only helping you look good by comparison.”
“I don’t need any help to look good. All you’re doing is making it seem like I keep unfashionable company.”
He jumped back before I could swat him.
The street was much livelier than this morning. Wharf rats milled around the esplanade, ready to dive deep after a penny tossed into the ocean, and fishmongers were selling shellfish out of bushels on their backs. Riders cantered regularly down the dirt roads, men and women alike riding astride rather than sidesaddle, with long hair and garlands of flowers streaming behind them. Nearby were the distinctive sounds of a ukulele being played; I scanned the street and found the shop, wedged between a bar and a feed seller. An old man was smiling and strumming, smiling and strumming, while inside the shop, his sons bent their heads over their saws.
This time, we turned away from Chinatown and toward fashionable downtown. Merchant Street was graveled to keep mud off lacy hems and shiny leather shoes. Discreet shingles offered the services of lawyers and bankers, factors and financiers, giving way on Fort Street to more ornate and fanciful signs advertising milliners and engravers, jewelers and dressmakers. Kashmir paused in front of a lovely shop with a bay window shaded by a fragrant jasmine vine, and on the scent rode an incongruous memory of racing through the hot streets of Calcutta.
He took a moment to finger comb his hair and button his jacket; even creased from long wear, it was still quite debonair. “Let me do the talking,” he said then. “I’m afraid if you make any decisions, you’ll end up with a whiskey barrel and a pair of galoshes.” Then he breezed in through the door.
Putting on airs in the most typically outrageous fashion, he ran his hands over every bit of lace in the shop, demanded tea in a perfect imitation of a posh English accent, and then announced I needed a new set of clothes immediately.
“We’ve just arrived from London, where she had an entirely new wardrobe made, and look, look how she grows! What is this, burlap?” He rubbed a piece of cotton between his fingers. “We need a finer weave. Her parents feed her too much. I swear, a girl at liberty to eat what she likes is at liberty to grow as tall as she likes! But do they listen to me? I am only the tutor, they say, they do not hire me to know anything. No, not Chinese silk, it’s too inconsistent. Do you have any from Piedmont?”
The Tutor was a persona he took on sometimes, often in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whenever he and I were alone together in front of others. It was bossy, superior, and very entertaining. Kashmir picked words out of people’s mouths as easily as he did the coins from their pockets, but I had no idea where he’d ever met such a supercilious personality. He was pulling out all the stops. He flounced onto a couch and shook back his curls as the two women hid their laughter behind their hands. The sign outside proclaimed them the Mercier Sisters, Fine Dresses, and I learned their names were Nan and Emily.
Measurements were taken, and much was made of how this lavender trim set off my eyes, or the green would complement my hair. Then, of course, Nan noticed my muddy sandals.
“Simpleminded girl,” Kashmir said, shaking his head and tut-tutting. “She had a lovely silk pair when we left California, but she was battling a touch of mal de mer and an old salt convinced her the cure was to drink tea out of her right shoe.”
Nan, the older sister, shook with laughter, but Emily’s eyes were round. “And what happened to the left?”
“We served biscuits in it, of course.” Kashmir answered. “Only the lowest sort has tea without biscuits. Can you make up a new pair to match?”
We left the shop with the promise of a dimity cotton skirt and an embroidered jacket, a white-and-pink striped silk dress with a “modified bustle” of some description, and a new pair of silk shoes, all to be ready next week. We also had a drastically lighter coin purse, although Kashmir had only put down a deposit, with the balance to be paid on delivery. Once we’d left the shop I shook my head and whistled.
“Don’t worry,” Kash said. “Money is best spent quickly. You never know when someone might pick your pocket.”
“I never knew you had such a fine eye for fabrics,” I said as we continued up the street. “You should have been a tailor instead of a thief.”
“I have a fine eye for all things, amira, which is why I’m a thief and not a tailor.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “I just hope I do those fine fabrics justice.”
He looked at me then, with one eyebrow up, and said something under his breath in what sounded like Farsi.
“I didn’t understand that.”