“Byron was a very good idea,” Henrietta said, with a nod of self-congratulation.
“Not that, the pheasant last year. Cook’s a genius.”
“That too,” Henrietta said. If one had to snare a royal duke by food, she was willing to do it. “You have to wear a mask, Freddie.”
“A what?”
“A mask!”
“Oh. All right.”
Another marital disaster averted, Henrietta made a brief tour of the downstairs. Hundreds of masks, all stitched from black silk (for men) or rosy silk (for women) waited at the entranceway. Candles were lit and footmen stood ready to replenish them. Three hundred bottles of champagne lay waiting, stuck haphazardly in pails of cold water. All ready. The house hummed gently, an empty tidewater pool about to be filled to the brim.
And then, abruptly, it all began. She heard the high, excited tones of Countess Mitford at the door. Within an hour there was a snarl of carriages that stretched for blocks in every direction. The butler was holding up marvelously, not allowing anyone in without a mask firmly attached to his face. In truth, as soon as people entered the house and saw that everyone was wearing masks, and gained a sense of the possibilities, there was no complaining.
Chaperones grew rigid with alarm, but it was too late. Daughters strained forward like young whippets eager to race. Mothers clutched their arms, whispering instructions, but every girl in the room knew that the rules were off for the night. Anyone might dance a waltz if she were masked. Any girl might dance with the worst rake in the room, if they were both masked. How could she know who she danced with? How could she be responsible for her actions? And yet, each person had the prickling sense that the most important person would surely find him.
Wives held their heads high and glanced roguishly to the left and right, looking for their lovers. Husbands trotted off to the card room, knowing that for once their expression wouldn’t betray their hand, or moved in a slow prowl toward one of the two ballrooms, searching for a memory, a girl they once loved, a youthful evening.
There was no one who greeted the masks with more joy than Miss Josephine Essex, formerly known as the Scottish Sausage.
She handed her pelisse to the footman without blinking an eye. In the past month she had almost had to wrench her sheltering, comforting pelisse from her body, so uncomfortable was she with her figure. But that very afternoon Madame Rocque had delivered the first of her evening gowns, and Josie was wearing it. Rather than being seamed to follow the lines of a corset, this gown was wrapped to fit Josie’s own body. It was a kind of indigo violet, far too dark for a debutante, but Josie didn’t care.
“My goodness!” Griselda had said that afternoon. Which was enough. Josie dressed more happily than she had in her life.
True, when she looked at herself in the mirror, wearing only the smallest corset designed to support her breasts, she had an agonizing pulse of anxiety. She could actually feel silk swishing around her unbounded hips. Surely she looked too large, too undisciplined, too bulky?
But then she took a deep breath and walked toward the glass, walking the way that Mayne had taught her. Even thinking of his lithe muscled body wearing the rags of her pink dress made her giggle. And watching the way the dress gave her a woman’s shape—a shape she’d had all along—made her eyes narrow.
He was right.
Mayne was the veteran of a hundred affaires, if all the stories were true. How had Imogen described him once? As having a Lucifer-like exhaustion. Josie couldn’t help grinning at herself. His mouth had lost that dissolute droop when he was bound up in sparkling pink silk and undulating across the floor toward her.
Now she adjusted her rosy mask—luckily, a color that went perfectly with her gown—and glanced around for Griselda.
Griselda was wearing the daring crimson gown that Madame Rocque delivered for her. Actually, in some ways Josie hardly recognized her chaperone. When they first met, several years ago, Griselda was the quintessential pretty, English gentlewoman. She dressed with the exquisite propriety of a widow interested in two kinds of reputation: that of sexual propriety, and that of good taste. She was a merry, adorable person who showed little interest in the opposite sex, other than a fervent wish to discuss their foibles. In point of fact, while she generally had a beau or two hanging in her train, they were often foolish young men, good for nothing but bleating poetry and providing an arm on the way into supper.
But somehow, in the last few months, Griselda had changed. Josie couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Yet as she glanced back, she was fully aware that her chaperone would be the least chaperonelike woman in the room. Madame Rocque’s crimson dress was fashioned in such a way that swaths of dark crimson came over the shoulders and crossed—but they didn’t actually meet until almost Griselda’s waist. Now that was a gown that a debutante could not wear.
But, of course, Griselda was a widow. “I will certainly not wear a pink mask,” she was saying. “I’ll take one of the black ones, if you please.”
The footman seemed to be bleating something about Lady Mucklowe’s instructions, but it was of no use. Josie could have told him that. Within two seconds Griselda was happily tying a black band around her eyes.
“You look wonderful,” Josie whispered to her. “That black makes your hair look positively silver.”
“Silver!” Griselda squealed.
Josie laughed. “I didn’t mean it that way. It looks like moonlight. I do like the fact you didn’t put ringlets in your hair tonight. They wouldn’t suit the gown.”
“I thought it was time for a change,” Griselda said with some satisfaction. “Now, darling, just because we are wearing masks is no reason for improprieties.”
Josie opened her mouth but Griselda held up her hand. “Josephine, I am not a fool. I am as aware as you are that many a marriage is made under the threat of a lost reputation, and likely a few fathers will burst out of these doors demanding that some reprobate offer marriage by the morrow. But you, my dear, have no need to resort to subterfuge. Just wait and see.”
“I don’t mean to engage in subterfuge—” Josie began.
But Griselda interrupted again. “Only once has one of your sisters knowingly done such a thing, and that was in the case of Imogen’s first marriage. I’d ask you to think about that marriage carefully, Josie. Were Imogen and Maitland happy?”
“Obviously not.”
“I rest my case,” Griselda said magnificently. She twitched her shawl so it fell to her elbows and provided a frame for her gown. “Shall we enter?”
They paused for a moment on the threshold of the first of Lady Mucklowe’s two ballrooms. A footman sprang forward and offered them glasses of champagne. Before Josie could even stretch out her hand, three gentlemen bowed before them.
“I am,” one of them said magnificently, “the Prince of Purpalooseton.”
In the flurry of laughter that followed the revelation that Lady Mucklowe had decreed that no one was to use his proper name, Josie became aware of one important thing. Those three gentlemen had not sprung to their side only because of Griselda and her crimson bodice. Within a moment they were joined by two more gentlemen, and for the first time in her life—and with a feeling of dizzy pleasure that was all the more intense for being so new—Josephine Essex found herself flirting simultaneously with four men. Griselda waltzed off in the arms of the Prince of Purpalooseton, but she herself was too happy to dance.
Plus, she knew quite well she was a terrible dancer.
Sometime later she found herself in an animated circle, discussing the most sought-after book in London, Hellgate’s Memoirs. “I may not know who wrote it,” said a gentleman in an orange waistcoat, his mask sitting rather rakishly on his large nose. “But there’s no question whose memoirs we’re reading. The moment I read the chapter about the woman he met at Almack’s.” He lowered his voice. “’Tis Lady Lorkin and Mayne, obviously.”
“Absolutely not,” said a tall, willowlike man with a fair mustache. ??
?The memoirs are a disgrace, but that chapter could not possibly refer to Lady Lorkin. I thought the pertinent point was the water spaniel.”
“How so, sir?” Josie asked.
“Water spaniels,” he said. “Don’t know a woman who can abide the breed. Always in the water, aren’t they, and then they shake themselves, and then hey! Presto! The lady is wet. Splattered with water. Wet.”
“An obscure point,” the orange waistcoat said. “What’s that got to do with Mayne or Lady Lorkin?”
Another gentleman strolled up to the circle and joined them. Josie glanced, and then looked again. There was no mistaking those shadowed cheekbones and straight eyebrows, mask or no mask. Nor, for that matter, his clothing. Mayne was wearing a garnet-colored jacket that fit his muscled body as if it had been sewn on that evening.
She gave him a huge grin. For a moment she had forgotten her transformation, but then his eyes raked her body swiftly. He had an eyebrow arched, and it didn’t take women’s intuition to know he approved of her current gown as much as he loathed her former corset.
“Must be a woman who loves dogs,” the willowy man was burbling on. “Even wet ones. I say that Hellgate is Charles Burdiddle. Mind you, we shouldn’t be discussing such a risqué subject.”
Josie had no idea who Charles Burdiddle was. She glanced at Mayne. “We’re discussing an infamous piece of literature, sir,” she said to him. “The Earl of Hellgate’s Memoirs. Unfortunately I have not had an opportunity to read them, but I have heard enough about them from my sisters to understand that Hellgate appears to have considered intimacy a challenge rather than something to be defended against.”
“Intimacy outside the bounds of marriage is always a challenge, not a defense,” Mayne said. His voice had all the liquid, Luciferian exhaustion of a man who is tired of saying the proper thing.
“But women so rarely think so,” Josie pointed out. “In fact, it strikes me as a thoroughly male point of view. Did no one consider the idea that perhaps the memoirs are utterly false, and written by a woman?”
“That would be a remarkable deception. I believe there are ladies hoping desperately to be the next mistake that Hellgate commits,” the willowy gentleman said with a sarcastic edge to his voice. “Particularly if he would consent to do so in a three folio sequel, handsomely bound in leather.”
The orange waistcoat drew in his breath and said, “There is a young lady present, sir!”
“She doesn’t appear to be shocked,” Mayne observed.
“In the case of a less-than-fascinating man,” Josie said, “a woman should always defend against intimacy.”
“A woman should defend her virtue in every instance,” the orange waistcoat said. “Once a woman succumbs to the kind of disreputable behavior depicted in Hellgate’s memoirs…well, she is nothing more than a thing unworthy. Stained! The woman described under the nom de plume Helena, for example. Shameful!”
“Tsk tsk,” Mayne said. “You speak, sir, as if one’s past were irredeemable. As if one could never compensate for mistakes of the heart.”
“One cannot. Scandals of that nature dishonor the soul. There is no recovering from them. Whoever Helena may be, she will never regain the true heart of womanhood: her sanctity and purity. She is stained.”
“He doesn’t seem to agree that stains come out in the wash,” Mayne said aside to Josie. “Perhaps Helena was his wife. Will you dance?”
“Of course.” And she turned toward him with the new, lithe freedom that came with wearing no corset, with a confidence bred from the hundred admiring glances thrown her direction in the last half hour.
“You wouldn’t dance with me,” pouted the willowy man.
“Count yourself lucky,” Mayne said. “I know what a terrible dancer she is, and so I’ve already braced myself—and my toes.”
“No one who moves with such grace, such elegance, could be a poor dancer,” the orange waistcoat said mournfully, as Josie left on Mayne’s arm.
Which she was pinching as hard as she could. “How dare you say such a thing? Now no one will wish to dance with me!”
“In that dress, they would dance with you if you were using a cane. In fact, I’m only worried that you’ll be stolen from me as we dance.”
Josie giggled. It was wonderful to feel seductive and beautiful, and be here, laughing on the arm of the man whom she thought (privately) to be the most handsome man in the ton.
“Mind you,” he said a moment later, after she trod on his foot again, “you do have two left feet. What’s the matter? Didn’t you pay any attention to that dancing master Ewan lured up to the north country?”
She blushed a little. “I can’t help it. I’m horribly awkward, in truth. I don’t enjoy dancing very much.”
“I’ll come find you later, when they’ve turned to waltzes,” Mayne said, dancing her out of the circle and off the dance floor. “You might want to just stand about and allow your suitors to ogle your bosom rather than dance with them. At least until the waltzes start.”
“I’m even worse at waltzing.”
“Well, you’ll have to merely accept admiration,” Mayne said cheerfully. “I should probably try to find Sylvie, although I suspect that I know her location.”
“Where?” Josie asked, glancing around. “What’s she wearing?”
“Yellow,” he said. “And a black mask.”
“Griselda demanded a black mask as well.”
A tall man with appreciative eyes and a lock of brown hair falling over his forehead paused beside them. “Skevington,” Mayne said, “may I entrust you with Miss Essex? I thought I’d poke about and find my fiancée, and of course Miss Essex’s chaperone is lost in the crowd.”
Skevington had a quite charming smile. “Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said, bowing.
“Skevington over-dresses,” Mayne said, waving at the man’s embroidered waistcoat. “But it’s not a mortal sin.”
Josie smiled up at her new companion. “’Tis far worse to be over-opinionated.”
“To be over-enthusiastic is surely a mortal sin,” Skevington said. He showed no pique at the slur to his waistcoat, and Josie liked him the better for it. “At the risk of showing great over-enthusiasm, Miss Essex, may I request a dance?”
“In truth, I would prefer to walk from this room,” she said.
Skevington had a lean, intelligent face with kind eyes. They left Mayne, and Josie did not glance back, just walked with her new sultry sway and hoped he was watching.
Then she couldn’t bear it and turned her head.
He was gone.
17
From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the Fifteenth
I asked Helena to marry me, Dear Reader. She refused. She called me her pearl, her golden one, her cherished dream, and yet she rejected my hand.
Thurman thought masks were a rotten idea. How could he build a reputation if no one knew who he was?
He’d caught sight of Darlington; his features were unmistakable. Darlington was leaning against the wall of the ballroom, and by concentrated attention, Thurman was able to see that he was watching Lady Griselda Willoughby dance with Mr. Riffle. He had to grin at that. Darlington was losing his twig if he thought that Lady Griselda would marry him. True, she had one of the neatest estates on this side of Hampshire, but she would never interest herself in a loose screw like Darlington.
Wasting his time, Thurman thought. But he had no time for Darlington. Darlington was yesterday’s news, and he was bursting with the ambition to make himself into Darlington’s successor. He was already in a good way to doing it. Last night he’d gone to the Covent Garden Theater and surreptitiously written down a number of clever remarks. Then this morning he’d gone to St. Paul’s and hung around the middle aisle, where all the clever inns of court men came to gossip, and he’d picked up even better scraps and fragments. He had them all snugly written down, and he’d already used two to great effect.
Of course, no one knew who he was, so he’d have to t
hink of tonight as something of a practice run. But that was all right. It took timing to get a jest right. When he first came in, he’d told Lady Mucklowe that the only happy marriages these days were to be found among the servants. That line garnered laughter in the theater the previous night, but somehow it didn’t work with Lady Mucklowe, who stared at him, and said, “Young man, I am relieved that I do not know who you are; I should dislike having to reproach myself for inviting you.”
Thurman was relieved by her ignorance as well. But after that, two jests that he’d heard in St. Paul’s had gone over very well to little groups, and one of the men had said, “By Jove, that’s quite clever!”
He had an excellent line to do with courtship in mind, and so he prowled around until he found a large circle of people standing just inside the windows leading to the garden. Thurman didn’t really approve of that; his mother had been adamant that night air might give her darling son a chill of the lungs, and he had always listened to his mother. But driven by an ambition stronger than self-preservation, he strolled up to the circle.
With the mask, it was all very easy. He simply walked up as if he belonged there. He found that the circle was clustered around a young lady who was sitting on the library table in such a way that her ankle was perfectly visible.
It was a nice ankle, Thurman saw with a glance, but it stood to reason that the young lady was not all that she could be. Manners are a lady’s best defense against impropriety, his mother used to say, shutting her lips tight.
Likely this young lady wouldn’t mind a racy joke or two. Thurman took in the ravishing nature of her dress, her vivid chestnut hair, luminous white skin, and lips the color of spring raspberries. She was laughing with a deep, husky chuckle that made it clear she was no chaste maiden.
They were all talking about some Shakespeare play being put on at the Hyde Park Theater. “I shouldn’t want to see it,” Thurman put in. “The very name Shakespeare sends shivers down my spine. Memories of Rugby, you know.”
“I was frightfully idle when I was at school,” Skevington said (for Thurman recognized him due to his height). “I’m afraid I couldn’t recite more than a line or two to save my life.”