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.”