Queen of Diamonds by Bárbara Metzger Read Free Book Online Page A

darning needle.
    Her old tutor would have been aghast. Molly would have been proud.
    Queenie found her backbone, and she found a dog, on the advice of the protective, moralistic concierge she was lucky, and well-funded enough, to find. Queenie knew nothing about dogs—she was learning about men and her chosen profession and that was quite enough—but her landlady had a cousin who had maintained kennels for fleeing noblemen. The returning survivors of the wars and the terrors could never know how many animals had been bred in their absence, or how many they now owned. Now Queenie owned a noble beast.
    She called him Parfait because he was perfect. Polite and well-trained, the large black poodle seldom left her side. He listened to her plans without criticism, her doubts with a perked ear, and her fears with a gentle lick on her cheek or hand. Truly he was the perfect companion, a better, more understanding friend than she had ever known. Once he understood who fed him, and to whom he owed freedom from a small cage and a crowded dog run, he gave her his allegiance and his protection. Anyone could approach him or his mistress, but let a man come between them, and the elegant, athletic, carefully bred and refined dog reverted to his wolf ancestors.
    Monsieur laughed, and left Queenie alone. The needlewoman’s competency was more important than a quick tumble, and the poodle was bigger than even Monsieur’s
amour propre
.
    Queenie was content to study from Monsieur’s master seamstresses, handling fabrics Molly could never have dreamed of, learning new methods and new confidence in her own sense of style. She was growing, getting ready to become her own person, not a pawn in some evil scheme, not someone’s adopted waif, nor someone else’s victim. When she had absorbed everything she could, then she would go home to start a new life. Such were Queenie’s plans.
    Until Monsieur started dressing his clients in her designs.
    Oh, the cursing, the tears, and hair-pulling. Monsieur was distraught. How could such an accident have happened? How could one of his assistant’s paltry fashions grace his most eminent patron?
    How? Because he had stolen it from her portfolio, along with three others that appeared, under his name, in the latest fashion journal.
    Ah, the scissor-snipping, the fang-flashing, the promise of lawsuits. Queenie was determined.
    At last the Frenchman conceded. He paid her, not what the designs were worth, but enough to reimburse her apprenticeship. And he had the fashion journal print her new name, under his, of course, but for all to see. Winning was, perhaps, the greatest lesson that Queenie learned in France. Certainly it was the most satisfying.
    Now she could return to England. Of course Queenie Dennis could not go back. Nor was that the name on the fashion plates in the five copies of
Le Grande Ensemble
she carefully packed. Instead she was now Madame Denise, dress designer. She took that name not for the villain Dennis Godfrey who had wrought so much tragedy, but out of memory of Molly, who had taken her brother’s name out of love, and taken Queenie to her heart. The
Madame
was for maturity and credibility.
    Because she was indebted to the House of Carde, and because she was part of their sorrow, she took Lescartes as her surname. Her fate was going to lie in the cards, one way or another.
    Before she arrived in France, Queenie had cropped her long silver-blond waves. Without the heavy weight, her hair took a natural curl, making her look like an Old Master cherub, until she dyed it black. A bit of kohl on her brows and lashes, a bit of powder and rouge, a sultry beauty mark near her lip, and she looked like a very wayward angel, indeed. Molly might not have recognized her, but the gentlemen certainly did.
    And Queenie learned another lesson about power.
    * * *
    Without a quake or a tremble, Queenie and Parfait approached the same London bank where her mother’s