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Chapter Four
“Lord, what fools these mortals be.”
—Puck, Act 3,A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Victorian England. Lady Watham’s Ball, London.
Brigid sat contentedly with the other Wallflowers along the neglected periphery and in the shadowed nooks of the ballroom.
She stood the requisite amount of time with her family and friends in the beginning so that she did not seem entirely impolite.
One by one, her cousins were spirited away in an endless slew of dances. Even Annie, or perhapsespeciallyAnnie, was swamped with invitations.
Somehow, Lord Larkin avoided stepping onto the dance floor with any young lady thus far. As a man, he could afford not to. Though plenty of well-known families of thetonapproached the Rathbournes for introductions, and practically every pair of female eyes in the room had coveted his golden perfection more than once. Which was only emphasized by his fashionably dark attire.
Brigid suspected that Lord Larkin didn’t know how to dance any of the numbers being played. In addition, his attention seemed elsewhere. Neither was Annie focused on the ball itself, despite that she had hardly a moment of quiet concentration, swarmed by admirers as she was.
Brigid’s two new friends seemed to be hunting for something. Their keen eyes meticulously scanned the ballroom for new arrivals, and if she was not mistaken, they only paid attention to the men.
Were they truly searching for the Pale Prince?
Brigid thought they’d simply been having a bit of whimsical fun when they shared their quest with her at the book shop.
The reality was, there was no such person.
Not the way Brigid imagined him, in any case. No real man could possibly look like that. Even if there was royalty in attendance tonight, including handsome fairytale princes, they could never match Brigid’s fantasy.
The Pale Prince of her dreams wasn’t real.
But that didn’t stop her from continuing to pretend, in her private moments, that he was. She’d watched him from afar all her life, it seemed. Just a distant figure surrounded by a halo of light. Even though there was interaction in her dreams between the prince and Titania, her alter ego, those encounters were fleeting and elusive.
As if she were trying to pin down smoke.
But recently, her dreams had started becoming more “real.” She didn’t have to try very hard to remember them anymore. They stayed with her upon waking, instead of ghostly memories that sometimes haunted her.
She wanted to lose herself in dreams even now, surrounded by so many people in a crowded ballroom.
A few of the debutantes and spinsters situated nearby attempted to engage her in conversation, but they shared no topics of interest.
Brigid had little knowledge of where to procure the finest ribbons, who was purported to be the best milliner in Town, or the various charitable societies that were all the rage. (It seemed rather ironic to Brigid that the women focused more on the membership of such congregations instead of what they were established to do.)
And of course, when they discovered with whom she had arrived, she was bombarded with questions about Lord Larkin and Annie.
“A Marquess, you say?” a young woman ventured. She reminded Brigid of a rabbit for the way she twitched her nose.
Brigid hummed in confirmation.
“I have never heard of the Avondale estates. But they must be old and grand. Theysoundthat way, to be sure.”
If the value and truth of things were measured by the way theysounded…
“This must be the first Season they’ve attended,” another girl, barely out of the schoolroom, observed. Her large, limpid eyes reminded Brigid of a doe.
“This is my third, and I have never seen them before. One would have remembered.”
Hmm, perhaps the woman was older than she appeared.
“Lord Larkin is so very dashing and…tall,” a woman close to Brigid’s own age sighed and fluttered her lashes as though she had something in her eye.
