A Masquerade in the Moonlight(102)
CHAPTER 15
He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.
— Confucius
“Well now, Tommie, would you take a look at this!”
Thomas, who had been lying full length on the couch once again, silently trying to figure out why he was allowing Marguerite—his Marguerite—to run rampant all over London causing trouble with the men he had been sent to deal with, and most probably getting herself into a mess of her own trouble, raised his head a notch and opened his eyes. “Will I look at what, Paddy? I’ve clapped eyes on your face a thousand times since we’ve been stuck in these rooms, and I have to tell you—Bridget must be a saint to see you before noon and still love you.”
“Hell! Scrape a bit of hair off his upper lip and he thinks himself a gentleman!” Dooley stood, still holding the morning newspaper, and shoved it in Thomas’s face. “Look here, you vain peacock—it says here that looby Totton is about to make himself a discovery.”
Thomas was on his way to the Tower within the hour, Dooley sitting beside him in the hack, still grumbling about having to shave and dress so fast that he’d all but sliced his own neck with the razor—and he still wasn’t quite sure he’d put his boots on the right feet.
Although Thomas had no idea precisely where inside the high stone walls he would locate the Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula, it wasn’t difficult to fall into place behind the snaking line of fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen who were parading in the same general direction, some of them with servants in tow, the latter carrying chairs and picnicking baskets and, in case the gray, overcast day should turn wet, umbrellas.
“Sir Peregrine must think he’s died and been lifted to heaven on angels’ shoulders, Paddy, to have nearly all the ton here to witness his triumph,” Thomas commented, seeing that the Prince of Wales himself was in attendance, seated in a large, gilded chair that must have been brought outside just for him, His Royal Highness surrounded by giggling ladies of indeterminate age and one especially well-dressed gentleman Thomas immediately recognized as Beau Brummell himself.
“Let’s go over there, Paddy,” he said, motioning toward the prince and his entourage. “I have a feeling they’ve picked out the best vantage point for Sir Peregrine’s show.”
Dooley, who had just purchased a meat pie from a wide-awake peddler who had brought himself and his tray into the grounds, spoke around a bite of hot pastry. “Are you sure, Tommie? I see Miss Balfour over there, with her prune-faced chaperone. Sir Ralph is with her, and Lord Mappleton and his golden pigeon. Don’t you want to join her, or are you afraid you can’t be within ten feet of her without pouncing on the poor child?”
Thomas shook his head, pushing his way through the crowd toward the prince. “This is her party, Paddy, and since she didn’t send me an invitation, I think I’ll keep my distance. We’ve made a promise to each other, you see.”
“A promise, is it? As I recall, you promised me not so long ago that you’d explain why we had to go chasing down that chambermaid at four in the morning and beg her for clean linens. I’m still waiting, boyo, although I don’t think I want to hear it. I’m too old and feeble to have m’ears sullied with any more of your whopping crammers.”
Smiling and tipping his hat to a trio of ladies he could remember having met early in his visit to London, Thomas took up a position several yards from the prince’s entourage and shaded his eyes with his hand, for it was nearing eleven, and a watery sun had belatedly crept out from behind a near solid blanket of clouds just at precisely the correct angle to shine overtop the tall stone walls and into the courtyard. “There’s Sir Peregrine now, Paddy,” he said, watching as Totton, dressed in sober brown—his shoulders almost half again as wide as Thomas remembered them, his shirt points dangerously high—strutted into the middle of the circle formed by his observers and swept an elaborate leg in the direction of the prince.
“There’s a whacking mass of sense outside that man’s head, Tommie, I’m thinking,” Paddy said as a group of about a dozen poorly dressed men carrying spades and picks on their shoulders gathered around Sir Peregrine. “He hasn’t turned a shovelful of dirt, and he’s primping and preening like he’s just discovered diamonds in his morning porridge. Heading for a fall, he is—I can feel it in m’bones.”
Thomas didn’t answer, for he was busy watching Marguerite, who was dressed this morning in a lovely pale blue gown, the shadow cast by the wall and the brim of her fetching straw hat decorated with bluish purple grapes hiding her expression from him. She was clutching her unfurled parasol with both hands, though, and he could almost feel her tension. “Little she-devil,” he whispered under his breath. Oh, yes, this wasn’t Sir Peregrine’s party, he concluded, this was Marguerite’s, and he had a feeling he was going to enjoy it very much.