An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(82)
“I was marveling at the generosity of the good God,” he told me as he took his seat. “To make a woman royal is a gift from the Almighty. To make her beautiful as well, that is an abundance of favor.”
“Is there a Madame de Letellier?” I asked pointedly.
He nodded towards a lushly curvaceous brunette dressed in rose pink taffeta and leaning very close to Stoker, her mouth curved into a smile.
“That is Honorine,” he said. “I will not introduce you, for you will not like her. Other women never do. But the men . . .” He raised his eyes heavenwards and made an ecstatic sound in the back of his throat. Madame de Letellier was a few decades younger than her husband, and I could well imagine how she had come to his notice.
I said nothing but inclined my head a fraction, just enough to set the jewels on my tiara trembling as I reached for my menu card. Inscribed in elegant French, it detailed the courses we were about to receive. I conversed politely with de Letellier for the first course, a clear consommé.
“Is this your first trip to England, madame?” the general inquired as we sipped.
I took a spoonful of soup to delay answering. The longer it took me to reply to his queries, the fewer of them he could pose, I reasoned. And that meant not quite as many opportunities for me to stumble in my masquerade.
I sidestepped the question and posed one of my own. “England is a charming place, I think,” I said slowly. “What do you make of it?”
The general launched into a lengthy speech about his host country whilst I applied myself to my soup, occasionally offering a wide-eyed nod of agreement to encourage his monologue. Most men loved nothing better than holding forth on their opinions, and the general was no exception. He detailed his thoughts on the weather (appalling), the landscape (passably pretty), the politics (incomprehensible to outsiders), and the handsomeness of the women (lacking).
I nearly bristled at the last until I realized I was not, for the purposes of the evening, supposed to be an Englishwoman.
“But,” he added as I spooned up the last of my consommé, “there is an idealism about the English which I find irresistible. We French are pragmatic. We see things as they are, but John Bull, the typical Englishman? He sees things as he wishes them to be. Like children, they play at being empire builders, wanting all the world to drink tea and keep the stiff upper lip. But it can never succeed.”
I looked at him in surprise. The general was rather more perceptive than I had realized. “You do not believe in empires?”
His smile was rueful and deeply attractive. “My dear madame, one cannot build an empire without paying for it, and the cost is always too high, as France learned to her sorrow. Ask them all—Alexander, Caesar, Napoléon—they were authors of empires and what did it profit them? They died as all men must. And their empires crumbled to dust.” He waved his hands. “No, madame. The game of empires is one that cannot be won. That is why I am here tonight.”
“We have that in common,” I told him. “I believe in self-determination, that all peoples have a right to be left to govern themselves as they see fit.”
He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Surely only if they have the education to do so under democratic principles,” he stated.
“You would see the gospel of Montesquieu preached throughout the world,” I teased.
“All men must be schooled to take their destiny in their hands,” he said gravely. I glanced across the table and saw Stoker laughing at some witticism of Madame de Letellier.
“And what of the women?” I challenged her husband. “Should they have no role in shaping the future of their countries?”
The general took a long sip of his wine. “Ladies do not always have the capacity for understanding matters of governance. Excepting yourself, of course,” he added with a gallant little bow.
“All the more reason to educate them as well,” I told him. I pointed to the centerpiece then, a lavish silver epergne stuffed with hothouse roses and lilies and St. Otthild’s wort, a floral compliment to the nations represented around the table. Atop the flowers, in a display of symbolism that entirely escaped me, perched a pair of stuffed birds with bright plumage. “Eclectus roratus cornelia,” I told the general. “The Sumba Island eclectus parrot. You see how one is pale green and the other a brilliant scarlet?”
He nodded. “Of course, the male is so dominant and attractive.”
“That is not the male,” I corrected. “The male eclectus is green, the color of his surroundings, meant to blend in and go unnoticed. It is the female which boasts the glorious scarlet plumage. You, my dear general, have made the very common mistake of believing, as so many others do, that the male of the species is the default. I would like to refer you to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, whose very excellent work, The Sexes Throughout Nature, corrects this error on the part of Mr. Darwin—” I broke off at the expression of bemusement on his face. Too late, I realized that Gisela might converse knowledgeably about stamps or cheese, perhaps even politics, but she most assuredly would not lecture on the subject of natural history.
Luckily for me, the general was more attentive to my face than my topic of conversation.
“How stern you look!” he said. “That I have caused such a lovely face to look so forbidding, I will never forgive myself.”
A sharp retort rose to my lips, but I felt a quick pinch from my other side. Rupert was still talking in a desultory fashion with an elderly Frenchwoman—something about porcelain—but his hand had slipped under the table to nip me hard upon the leg.