“Yes, well, they can be touchy and get hot at the drop of a hat, the good ones can anyway. And then, I really do feel that once you have given over some of the household’s rooms to staff, you cannot just march into them at will. The kitchens, pantries, servants’ quarters, the servants’ hall, the valet’s wardrobes, butler’s closets, the cellars—all are forever off limits.”
“Oh yes, I see, that is very true,” Lady Felicity said thoughtfully.
Percy hoped that if she did plan on invading the kitchens, she’d smooth it over with the cook first.
“And then I heard another thing I could not really decide on,” Lady Felicity said.
Gad, where was she going next? The stables? If she intended on imposing on the stablemaster, that would be another thing entirely.
“I heard of a lady who became dissatisfied with her given name. She wished to be called another name. In the privacy of her own house, of course.”
Percy had rather strong feelings on that subject. “Lady Felicity, I have very decided opinions on that question.”
“You do?”
“I do. It is one of the great injustices that a person is given a name before they have the faculties to rail against it. My own name was my grandfather’s and so I do not like to disparage it, but I do not care for it.”
“Percy. It is Percy.”
Though he did not in fact like his given name much, it was very affecting to hear Lady Felicity speak it.
“So youdothink that a person ought to be able to change their name at will?”
“I do think it,” Percy said.
“And what would you have chosen if you could have picked for yourself?”
“Henry. Or Jonathan. Or Charles. Something very usual.”
“Hmm. I will admit that I did not initially like the name Percy.”
There, she’d said his name again, even though she did not like it.
“I thought, at first,” she said, “that if I had a goldfish, I might name it Percy.”
A goldfish. Was he to be relegated to a goldfish? He’d not thought the name as bad as that.
“But over time,” Lady Felicity said, “it really has grown on me. I do not think I would like you to be a Henry or Jonathan or Charles. It would not suit.”
“Well then, I will stay as I am.”
“Yes, and if I ever decided I would wish to be named Tulip, you would not be against it?”
Percy laughed. “Tulip, Daisy, Marigold, Violet, whatever flower strikes your fancy.”
He could not work out precisely why, but Lady Felicity seemed enormously pleased to hear it.
Chapter Fifteen
Felicity’s sisters, andMrs. Right too, had been anxious to get her alone to hear about Lady Llewellyn’s ball. She’d been out very late, and so by the time she rose and went downstairs, her father was in the breakfast room.
While she did not like to keep too many secrets from him, she wished to have a strictly womanly conversation regarding her thoughts about the previous evening.
In any case, the breakfast was taken up with her father’s amusing descriptions of their aunt’s outrage over Mr. Sykes-Wycliff’s departure and then the report that the duke had showered Lady Albright’s great hall with coins and then broken her window.
Lady Marchfield had claimed that if she had the power, she would commit him to the care of a doctor. A doctor, preferably, who endorsed the use of a locked room where the Duke of Pelham would only have the opportunity of harassing himself and not anybody else.
Felicity got the feeling that her aunt would not soon recover from so many close encounters with her father. For years, they had only communicated by letter—Lady Marchfield would write one and the duke would read it, scoff at it, and toss it into the fire. They had got on better when they’d not been in such close quarters.
