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“Alas.”

“Well, I shall do my best,” Felicia told him. “I shall inform everyone. But you know how it is!” she tittered. “Once a rumor starts, it’s impossible to stamp out. It’s not as if we know this Scottish girl, after all.”

Mayne moved behind her. One hand slipped down her throat. “You blind me,” he said softly. “Truly, you do.” He bent over and kissed her cheek. This was the tricky bit; Felicia might well take offense at his presumptuousness.

“I invited them to your ball,” he said softly.

Was that the tip of his tongue touching her throat? Felicia swallowed. “You did what?” she asked quaveringly.

“I took the enormous liberty of inviting the Scottish miss and her fiancé to your ball,” Mayne murmured against her throat. His hand had wandered down and was tracing the shape of Felicia’s breast. “They will be accompanied by the Godwins, naturally enough.”

“Her fiancé,” Felicia said, trying vainly to keep rational. “Godwin’s brother.”

“He is a vicar himself, if you can believe it,” Mayne said, tasting her skin as if she were made of the finest cream. “The brother, I mean.”

Felicia noticed that he had a white streak on his cheek from the rice powder she had shaken over her bosom. But he didn’t seem to notice the taste on his lips.

“A vicar and a vicar’s daughter,” she said dreamily, winding her arms around his neck. “A match made in heaven.”

“Just as are you and I,” he said sleekly. “Will you forgive me, then, for the impertinence of inviting guests to your ball?”

She smiled at him, a smile that combined chastisement and permission. “After tonight, Lady Godwin will be received in every house in the land,” she assured him. “And the Scottish girl as well. I think we know each other well enough, Garret, that I might allow a few…impertinences?”

“Just what I longed to hear,” he said. His smile, in the mirror, was meant both for her—and for his conscience.

Forty

Come to the Ball!

Elsewhere in London, others were preparing for the same occasion. Lady Griselda Willoughby was delicately applying a black patch to the right of her cherry-colored mouth; she had decided that her newest fashion would be to ape the ornaments of her Jacobean ancestors. She wore a gown with a small train, and the tiniest suggestion of a ruff. The Duchess of Girton was having a rather less peaceful time dressing, as her little boy kept wandering through her dressing room. He had just learned to climb down stairs backwards, and therefore he spent most of his time eluding his nursemaids and unerringly finding his way to his mama’s chambers. Lady Esme Bonnington was even further behind in the process, as her husband Sebastian had appeared in her room with an urgent request, and what with one thing and other (some of which involved unbuttoning rather than buttoning), she hadn’t even put on a stitch of clothing yet.

But the most assiduous preparations were taking place at Number Fifteen, Rothsfeld Square. Monsieur Olivier had been to the house and left again: Lina’s glossy brown curls were now a shadow of their former self, thinned, curled and starched into rigid little ringlets that dangled about her ears.

“I’m so sorry!” Helene said again, staring at the glass. “He went too far! What will Tom say?”

But Lina couldn’t stop smiling. She didn’t give a fig for the demise of her hair. “It will grow back,” she said.

“Do you think I ought to add more freckles, or am I overdoing the effect, Madam?” Saunders asked, stepping back.

Helene looked at the mirror and gave a faint shudder. Lina had sprouted a multitude of freckles. First Saunders painted them over the bridge of her nose, which was all very well. But then she went farther afield and now there were battalions of brown speckles marching along Lina’s forehead, making her look far older than her years.

“I’m sorry!” Helene said again.

“Don’t be,” Lina replied. Their eyes met in the mirror and Lina knew that she didn’t have to say the rest of it out loud. She would never stop being grateful for the gift of Tom.

Saunders was mixing a little red sandlewood with chalk. As she painted it onto Lina’s lips they took on a slightly palsied air, as if the color had leached out of them.

“Well, that should do it,” Lina said cheerfully. “No self-respecting opera singer would look like this.”

“No, indeed,” Helene said with some satisfaction. “You look—you look—”

“A proper fright,” Lina finished.

“Not so terrible. Countrified, perhaps?”

“I am a country vicar’s wife,” Lina said, and there was a note of joy in her voice.

“Now for the gown,” Saunders said. She returned from the wardrobe with a gown reverentially laid over her arms.