A Masquerade in the Moonlight(4)
“Very well, Papa, if you want to be stuffy. I shall do as ordered.” Marguerite scrambled onto her knees to beam down at her papa. “I see before me now the most handsome, the most wonderful, the most kind and positively brilliant gentleman on this entire earth, in this entire universe.” And then she frowned in sudden confusion. “What don’t I see, Papa?”
Geoffrey Balfour smiled up at his daughter. The smile was somehow sad, and tugged at her heart. “Now you’re beginning to understand. You see only that which I deign to show you. Like the man in the moon, kitten, I might keep very disparate parts of myself hidden. Or possibly I do not possess any other parts and am as shallow as our Chertsey streams in the midst of a blistering summer. But, no. I’ll answer your question. I’ll tell you what you don’t see, so that you learn nothing is as it seems. You don’t see inside my very pretty, yet also very empty purse, Marguerite—that object I spoke of a moment ago. You don’t see my flaws, my laziness, my failures. Neither, Lord bless her, does your dearest mama. Your grandfather—ah, well, he tolerates me, doesn’t he? But, then, I am always a scintillating conversationalist at table, and I don’t pick at my teeth with my dinner knife. In short, I do my best to please. So you see, kitten, if you look carefully, look deeply, you will find the goodness and the flaws as well. When you love you can overlook the flaws, but when you have need, you can use those same shortcomings to your own advantage. Perhaps that’s why the man in the moon hides most of himself from view. To protect himself. God knows we all have something to hide.”
Marguerite lowered herself to the ground once more, again taking up the position of stargazer. Her papa had shared something important and intensely personal with her, and she felt she had to return the favor. “I have a most terrible temper, Papa,” she said as the silence between them grew to be uncomfortable, the first such interlude Marguerite could remember. “But I take especial care to hide it very well.”
“So you have, kitten, and so you did—until this moment,” her father pointed out. “Not that I was ever unaware of that particular failing. Remember, I have known you forever, and it’s difficult for a small child to hide her temper, especially when she is shrieking and kicking and launching her toys at her loving papa’s head. But you’ve learned to control your ferocity these past years, for which, might I add, your mama and I are endlessly grateful, even if we know that terrible force could be roused if the right pressures were applied. Loving you, we don’t employ those pressures. But an enemy, someone who wished you ill or was searching for a way to best you—”
“—would go looking for the body the man in the moon hides so well,” Marguerite finished for him, feeling slightly smug that she had digested this latest lesson so well.
“If the man in the moon truly has a body,” Geoffrey said, confusing her once more, but only for a moment.
“Ah, Papa, yet the lack of a body is a weakness in and by itself,” she countered as Geoffrey helped her to her feet. “Real or imagined, everyone has a weakness that can be seen, used to our own purpose, if we but look closely enough. Isn’t that right, Papa? Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to teach me? To look for the obvious, yes, but also for that which is concealed?”
Geoffrey gathered his daughter close against his side, then pressed a kiss on her smooth forehead. “You’re quick, kitten—almost too quick for me—and you have yet to put up your hair. Heaven help the young bucks once we take you to London—you’ll dance rings around them.”
“And I’ll have none of them,” Marguerite pronounced flatly, lifting her faintly pointed chin defiantly, so that her long, wrist-thick pigtails slapped against her elbows. “There is only one true love for me, and that is my own dearest papa!”
Geoffrey threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Ah, kitten, you still have so much to learn. And learn it you will.” He flung out his right arm, as if declaiming to the world, and said, “Ladies, good milords! Behold before you Miss Marguerite Balfour—she may not set the world ablaze, but she most assuredly will make it smoke!”
Two years later, without warning, Geoffrey Balfour was gone.
It had been left to her grandfather to tell Marguerite after she skipped down the stairs in her riding habit early one sunny April day, eagerly calling for her papa to accompany her in a gallop across the fields; her mama, cursed with a frail constitution, had already collapsed and been put to bed, to be cared for by Maisie.