Aldrin held her charcoal and looked at Eugene with uncertain eyes. Her large brown eyes were asking, What would you like me to do? Eugene folded his arms and paced slowly around her for a moment.
Did he really need to remove Lucian from the picture? For the time being, the first face Eugene put to whatever trend he proposed would have to be Lucian Highwinter’s. And the first person who would need to see these illustrations — at least for now — would also be Lucian Highwinter.
“Aldrin, from here on out you’re going to be drawing the Duke of Highwinter, standing. However, he shouldn’t look exactly like him. He needs to be subtly similar — close enough that one might be reminded of the Duke, but not so close that the resemblance is immediately obvious. Can you do that?”
“I will do my very best.”
“Good. Keep it as simple as possible, but it must be clear.”
Only then did Aldrin answer with a note of confidence. Having a defined subject actually made the work easier. To begin with, Aldrin had never seen Lucian Highwinter in person. She had painted him based on a portrait someone had once commissioned her to copy. And for all she knew, even that portrait she’d worked from might have already been a version passed through several hands and altered in the process. So she simply needed to do what she had always done — paint Lucian Highwinter in the way she always had.
As Aldrin turned Eugene’s requirements over in her mind and began drawing the first lines on the paper, Eugene called out to her before she had even finished the second stroke. He had nearly forgotten the single most important instruction.
“Aldrin — and he needs to be drawn unclothed.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Aldrin, with a boldness she rarely showed toward her employer, looked directly at him and raised her voice. Her face twisted into a baffled, stupefied expression — as if she’d been told the most outlandish thing imaginable — and the sound that escaped her lips was less a question than a shriek.
Draw the Duke unclothed — seeing Aldrin’s face freeze in shock at the request, Eugene smiled with an awkward, self-conscious wince. He was well aware of how strange his demand must have sounded.
“As I said, there’s no need to render the details precisely. I’m not asking you to paint something obscene. The idea is simply to establish a basic physical framework — an unclothed torso and limbs will be sufficient.”
In name it was a portfolio — but what Eugene was actually creating was something closer to a paper doll. He would make a mannequin in the likeness of Lucian Highwinter and try dressing it in a variety of new and different garments.
Once a base template was properly established, Aldrin’s working time could be reduced, and it would also be far easier to print or compare different styles of clothing. It was also meant to help Aldrin understand — since this kind of illustration was entirely new to her.
Everything he was attempting was being done for the first time in this world, and so Eugene needed to find a way to try many different things without wasting time and at as little cost as possible.
Calling on Aldrin every time a new idea came to him would be impractical, and he couldn’t afford to spend days on a single outfit. Which meant the original template — the mannequin based on Lucian Highwinter — needed to be firmly established now. Done this way, even without immediately producing a physical prototype, a simple additional illustration could serve as a visual aid for persuasion.
In the end, Lucian’s face would disappear from the template entirely — so that anyone could imagine themselves in the picture.
“Aldrin, what we’re going to do from here is dress it. In all kinds of different clothes.”
Right now it was for the purpose of winning Lucian over — but if this proved effective, Eugene had no intention of stopping there. He planned to eventually compile Aldrin’s work into a lookbook. Illustrations of the garments Lucian had taken a liking to — and had worn. Bind those together into a single volume on fashion and dress, and if it gained traction and enough people sought it out, the next step would be to produce something more complete in the manner of an editorial spread, with one polished illustration added at a time.
He hadn’t actually thought this far ahead until now — the idea had been sparked by something Aldrin had mentioned moments ago, about having sold a portrait of Lucian.
In other words, this was the beginning of a medieval fashion magazine. One featuring editorial spreads of this world’s very own idol — Lucian. Naturally, unlike in the modern era, the spreads would have to be produced entirely by hand, and that work would fall primarily to Aldrin. Though of course, that was still a very long way off.
All of it, naturally, depended first and foremost on Lucian’s cooperation. The Eugene who had briefly lost his confidence was gone — his hand balled into a fist. One way or another, he had to bring the Duke of Highwinter over to his side.
* * *
A considerable stretch of time had passed. The garden visible through the window had dressed itself in soft, pale green, and buds had begun to break open here and there. The full arrival of spring. Today, as always, Eugene finished his etiquette lesson with Ivan — but unlike his usual routine, he did not head to the gallery afterward.
Aldrin, too, was no longer working in the gallery; she was spending her time with the other housemaids in the laundry room. More than twenty completed illustrations were already in Eugene’s hands. The problem was that he had not yet been able to show them to the one person who needed to see them.
For all his boldness in Atrian — carrying on as though he would summon Eugene at once — Lucian Highwinter had not so much as sent word, and the Social Season’s opening was now practically upon them. The illustrations that Eugene and Aldrin had poured their efforts into were still tucked away untouched, quietly resting in the drawer of the bureau, waiting to see the light of day.
I thought too little of this.
That was exactly it. Lucian’s manner in Atrian had been so openly engaged that Eugene had naturally assumed an opportunity would come — and that assumption had been his mistake. Nor could Eugene simply walk up to the Duke and ask, “Have you perhaps forgotten that you invited me?” Lucian was a duke and the Prince of the realm; Eugene was nothing more than a third son of an earldom. That was simply the reality.
He would have to wait for a chance encounter he could dress up as coincidence — but even that was proving difficult. Eugene had no social connections to speak of, having kept entirely to himself, and with the Social Season imminent, no one was hosting private gatherings of any kind.
The opening of the Social Season had to be kicked off with a ball — presided over by the Queen in ordinary times, but as the Queen consort’s seat was vacant, it fell to the Queen Mother. Which meant that until the Queen Mother hosted the first ball, no one would hold any private social function of their own.
Nor could Eugene park his carriage on the road and sit there hoping to happen upon Lucian. There was nothing to be done — precious time slipped away, and there were no alternatives to be found.
It wasn’t that he had missed his opportunity; the opportunity simply hadn’t come. Given the circumstances, Eugene had no choice but to make his peace with the situation. The wide-cut trousers he had prepared on the off chance were folded away in the wardrobe, waiting for another opportunity to arise.
During his etiquette lessons, Eugene had spoken with Ivan about these trousers — close in cut to what he would have called slacks. Ivan informed him that trousers had indeed been fashionable once, long in the past, but with time they had come to be seen as the exclusive province of common folk. He added the advice that unless that association with commoners was stripped away, there would be no escaping the tight-legged style that remained the norm among the upper class.
Undeterred, Eugene had fully intended — for his own comfort, if nothing else — to make new trousers the very first thing he proposed to Lucian when they met. Not the existing trousers as they were, of course. Taking Ivan’s counsel into account, he had had something made at Atrian — similar in silhouette to the existing trousers, but designed entirely differently: something closer to a modern pair of formal trousers. Not so wide that they billowed, not so narrow that they clung — a clean, straight fit with a pressed crease down the front, the kind of trousers a modern man would find the most natural and comfortable thing in the world, both physically and in spirit.
In the hope that the proposal would be accepted immediately, he had gone so far as to have a pair made to order at Atrian, at considerable effort. And yet they had ended up in the wardrobe all the same. He hadn’t thought much of it when he had no other option — but now, with a perfectly good pair of trousers hanging in his dressing room, Lucian’s absence felt all the more provoking. He hoped the day he could finally wear those trousers would come as soon as possible. Eugene quietly tugged at his tight trousers with restrained frustration.
At that same moment, there was one other person equally on edge over Lucian’s continued absence — Ivan Primrose. From the moment he’d had his beard and sideburns shaved clean off, Ivan had been fretting constantly over the possibility that Lucian might have grown his back in the meantime.
And that wasn’t all — his younger brother had spent every day shut away with a housemaid, drawing Lucian in the nude, crying “No, that’s not it — again!” at regular intervals. How could he possibly not be curious about what the Duke was up to? Of course, from Eugene and Aldrin’s perspective, they were not painting anything obscene — but to Ivan, a thoroughly ordinary man, that was precisely what it looked like.
The two brothers awaited the Queen’s ball — with no queen to host it — with unsettled hearts, each for entirely different reasons. And there was one more person whose heart was equally restless. That was Aldrin — who, fearing she might run out of usefulness, was busying herself hunting down extra chores. As though it had somehow sensed the unease stirring in all three of them, spring surged forward with startling speed.
The buds had barely appeared before warmth began to thread through the wind. That warm, flower-carrying breeze flushed the cheeks of the young men awaiting the Queen’s ball. When the traces of flowers appeared throughout the palace gardens, the Queen Mother’s invitation card was at last delivered to the Primrose residence.
Preparations were complete. Eugene examined his reflection in the mirror from several angles. The first ball of the Social Season, hosted by the Queen Mother in place of the absent Queen consort, had a fixed dress code. Gentlemen who had not yet had a match arranged were expected to wear black dress coats, while ladies in the same circumstance were expected to appear in pure white — that was the unspoken rule.
Officers with a military commission were, naturally, to appear in dress uniform, and ladies making their Debutante were expected to wear white gloves and an elegant white feather ornament in their hair. As the curtain-raiser of the Social Season, it was effectively a formal declaration of — I am unattached. Those to whom none of these categories applied were free of the specific dress code requirements, so long as they dressed to the appropriate standard of the occasion.
“You look absolutely perfect, sir.”
The valet looked at Eugene in his long-tailed dress coat and breathed out in admiration. The dress coat bore a strong resemblance to the tuxedo of Eugene’s modern life — with two notable differences: instead of a bow tie, one wore a gleaming silk cravat, and one’s boots were polished to a mirror sheen so brilliant it seemed one’s face might be reflected in them. The tight-fitting trousers, of course, remained entirely unchanged.
There were a handful of other fairly strict regulations as well, but Eugene had made the most of the few openings available to signal wealth and status within those constraints. For instance, he’d had gold embroidery added to the collar as an ornamental touch — and while the waistcoat had to remain white, it had been made in an elaborate pattern using expensive fabric.
The trousers fit snugly enough to make the front somewhat concerning, and the jacket — while long-tailed at the back — was short at the front. It was nearly a semi-cropped cut, which meant that even the slightest movement of his arms revealed the waistcoat beneath. Eugene kept tugging the jacket downward and smoothing his clothes, unsettled by the combination of the short top and the tight trousers.
It wasn’t a matter of lacking confidence. His figure was close to perfect — the discomfort was simply the unfamiliarity of it. And beyond that, as a man, he simply preferred not to be looking at another man’s center of attention if he could help it. Even when everything was neatly tucked away, there were always those whose particular prominence or shape drew the eye in ways that were simply awkward. Every time he encountered someone like that, he found himself wondering if he was the same, and would end up pulling down his jacket and taking an involuntary check.
No matter how far he tugged, the jacket refused to cover the front. Eugene pressed his lips together in mild dissatisfaction. His now fully dedicated valet failed to read the source of his discomfort and simply continued to offer admiring comments. In truth, every single member of the dressing room staff had the look of people who had never expected to see this day — their eyes bright with something close to wonder.
With every eye in the room on him, Eugene slipped a small notebook into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. It was several of Aldrin’s illustrations, wrapped in a leather cover he’d had made for them.
His heart wanted to seize Lucian the moment he laid eyes on him, drag him aside, spread every last one of Aldrin’s illustrations before him, and deliver a full speech on the spot — but apparently, to approach someone as far above him as the Duke, a man of Eugene’s station was expected to request permission through those beneath him first. Still, not knowing when a chance might present itself, Eugene tucked the illustrations away with the single-minded conviction that he would not let the moment slip past him.
With the inner pocket filled to the brim while still preserving the line of his coat, Eugene felt a reassuring solidity against his chest — like wearing light armor. He patted the area over his chest with his fist, and the stack of papers gave back a muffled thud.
He had prepared enough. His etiquette was beyond reproach, and his dance practice over the past weeks had been diligent. He hadn’t managed to memorize every noble whose face he didn’t know — but he had committed to memory the great lords he needed to avoid or handle with care.
He didn’t expect everything to go without surprises. To be honest, his confidence wasn’t especially high — but he had done what preparation he could, and now it was time to step into the real thing. Every member of the Primrose household staff stood at their post to see the two young masters off. The carriage — bearing the primrose flower that was the mark of the Primrose family — set off toward the royal palace.
