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“A precious waste of time,” he continued. “For charity, indeed. If I’d known, I’d have sent in twice the tickets’ cost and stayed at home, and judged it cheap at the price.”
His wife tried to shush him, again in vain.
“Give me Tom Moore any day,” he boomed. “Or Robbie Burns. Poetry, you call this! I call it gas-bagging.”
Lord Lisburne made a choked sound.
Other men in the vicinity didn’t trouble to hide their laughter.
“It’s a joke, it surely is,” the critic went on. “I could have gone to Vauxhall, instead of wasting a Friday night listening to this lot maunder on about nothing. Bowel stoppage, I shouldn’t wonder. That’s their trouble. What they want is a good physicking.”
Gasps now, from the ladies nearby.
“I never heard anybody ask your opinion, sir,” came Lady Gladys’s musical voice. “None of us prevented your going to Vauxhall. Certainly none of us paid for a ticket to hear you. I don’t recollect seeing anything on the program about ill-educated and discourteous men supplying critiques.”
“Glad to supply it gratis, madam,” came the quick answer. “As to uneducated—at least some of us have wit enough to notice that the emperor’s wearing no clothes.”
Lord Valentine stood up. “Sir, I’ll thank you not to address the lady in that tone,” he said.
“She addressed me first, sir!”
“Blast,” Lord Lisburne said. He rose, too. “Leave it to Gladys. Valentine will be obliged to call out the fellow, thanks to her.”
Men were starting up from their seats. Lord Swanton became aware of something amiss. He attempted to go on reading his poem, but the audience’s attention was turning away from him to the dispute, and the noise level was rising, drowning him out.
Leonie became aware of movement in the galleries. She looked up. Men were leaving their seats and moving toward the doors. A duel would be bad enough, but this looked like a riot in the making.
Images flashed in her mind of the Parisian mob storming through the streets, setting fire to houses where cholera victims lived . . . her little niece Lucie so sick . . . the tramp of hundreds of feet, growing louder as they neared . . .
Panic swamped her.
She closed her eyes, opened them again, and shook her head, shaking away the past. She counted the rows in the hall and estimated the audience size, and her mind quieted.
This was London, an altogether different place. And this was a different time and circumstance. These people were dying of boredom, not a rampaging disease.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if I might have your attention,” Lord Swanton said.
“You’ve had it these three hours and more!” someone called out. “Not enough?”
Other hecklers contributed their observations.
By this time Lord Lisburne had reached his cousins and the irate gentleman, who was growing more irate by the second, if the deepening red of his face was any clue.
Meanwhile, the audience grew more boisterous.
Leonie reminded herself she was a Noirot and a DeLucey. Not nearly as many of her French ancestors had got their heads cut off as deserved it. Hardly any relatives on either side had ever been stupid or incompetent enough to get themselves hanged. Or even jailed.
Marcelline or Sophy could have handled this lot blindfolded, she told herself.
She swallowed and rose. “Thank you, my lord, for your kind invitation,” she said, pitching her voice to carry. “I should like to recite a poem by Mrs. Abdy.”
“More poetry!” someone cried. “Somebody hang me.”
“Hold your tongue, you bacon brain! It’s a girl!”
Lord Swanton cut through the commentary. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Noirot—that is to say, Madame, of Maison Noirot—has kindly agreed to contribute to our poetic mélange.”
Leonie had dressed for the occasion. She knew she’d get the men’s attention because she was young and not unattractive, and the women’s because her dress was beautiful.
She was aware of the argument continuing to her right, and more aware of how hard her heart pounded, and how she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. She told herself not to be ridiculous: She performed every day, for extremely difficult women, and she got them under control.
She began, “ ‘I’m weary of a single life—’ ”
“Why didn’t you say so?” someone called out. “Come sit by me, my poppet.”
“Oh, stifle it!” somebody else said. “Let the lady say her piece.”
Leonie started again:
I’m weary of a single life,
The clubs of town I hate;
I smile at tales of wedded strife,
I sigh to win a mate;
Yet no kind fair will crown my bliss,
But all my homage shun—
Alas! my grief and shame is this,
I’m but a Second Son!
A burst of laughter.
That first sign of glee was all the encouragement she needed. Anxiety and self-consciousness washed away, and the DeLucey in her took over.
She went on, this time with dramatic gestures:
My profile, all the world allows,
With Byron’s e’en may vie,
[—she turned her head this way and that]
My chestnut curls half shade my brow,
[—she toyed with the curls at her ears]
I’m almost six feet high;
[—she stretched her neck, to laughter]
And by my attitudes of grace,
Ducrow is quite undone,
[—she mimicked one of the equestrian’s elegant poses]
Yet what avail the form and face
Of a poor Second Son?
Amid the men’s laughter she heard women giggling.
She had them.
She continued.
For an instant, while the angry gentleman grew more incensed, his complexion darkening from brick red to purple, Lisburne had felt sure the only outcome would be pistols at dawn. The only hope he had was for a riot. Once men started knocking one another about and women commenced screaming, Valentine and the other fellow might stop making asses of themselves.
When he heard Miss Noirot call out to Swanton, Lisburne had wanted to shake her. Was she mad? To offer more of the poetry that was driving every rational man in the hall to distraction? And to taunt them now, when he hadn’t a prayer of getting to her fast enough?
All hell should have broken loose.
But he’d reckoned without . . .
. . . whatever it was about her: the quality, so obvious, and so hard to put a satisfactory name to. The same power of personality that had attracted and held captive his attention at the British Institution seemed to work on a general audience.
Add that compelling quality to her appearance, and the men could hardly help responding. She was exceedingly pretty and a redhead besides, and the green silk dress, insane as it was, was voluptuous.
But the women, too?
Ah, yes, of course. The green silk dress.
Furthermore, Mrs. Abdy had written, along with the usual sentimental claptrap, a number of comic poems, which Swanton would give a vital organ to replicate.
