Marquesses at the Masquerade(4)

“Don’t listen to him,” Alice said to the dog, having coaxed him to a sitting posture at his master’s feet, from which position he gazed upward adoringly. “Just because someone is a marquess doesn’t mean he knows much of anything.”

Marcus did not dignify this with a response.

“Have you decided on a name yet?” his mother asked.

“I think you should call him Rex,” Alice said.

“Brute,” Jack suggested.

“No,” their mother and sister said as one.

Marcus looked down, thereby receiving the full effect of the devoted canine gaze directed up at him. “Socrates,” he pronounced. “Let us hope he grows in wisdom.”

“Perfect!” Alice said. “You ought to bring him to the ball, dressed in a little toga. It would be the very thing.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it?” Jack said gleefully. “And Marcus could go as Caesar. I should pay handsomely to see him sporting this fellow about the ballroom in matching togas.”

Marcus reflected that, though he was on the whole glad he was no longer fourteen, there were times when he wished it would not be considered unseemly for him to pummel his brother.

“About the ball,” their mother said. “I am a wee bit concerned, because we’ve had quite a response to the invitations. Of course I’m delighted that so many are eager to attend our ball, but I do hope it won’t become a terrible crush.”

The siblings all shared glances of affectionate exasperation. Overcrowding at ton events was a perennial concern of Lady Boxhaven, who felt that a hostess ought to be occupied with her guests’ ability to circulate freely and drink a cup of lemonade without being jostled.

“It will be fine, Mother,” Marcus said kindly. “Boxhaven House is quite up to the task of hosting everyone we know all at once.”

“I do hope so,” she said, not sounding convinced. “I would hate for anyone to feel hesitant to attend because it would be an uncivilized crush.”

“Some of the people you invited are people I would not mind in the least being discouraged by the idea of a crush,” Alice said, abandoning her efforts to secure Socrates’s attention and standing up. “Tell me again why we had to invite Lord and Lady Winstonhurst and the Monroes.”

“The Winstonhursts are friends of friends. And we can hardly avoid asking the Monroes, as we’ve asked everyone else in the neighborhood.”

“But they’re so incredibly tedious,” Alice said.

Marcus, who had been cornered by Mrs. Monroe at a concert a few weeks before and subjected to a disquisition on the magnificence of her two daughters, whom he had not seen for some time, was inclined to agree.

“If the ball is as much of a crush as Mother fears it may be, perhaps they’ll find the event inhospitable and leave early,” Jack observed. “Perhaps we should invite more people to ensure that that happens.”

“You just don’t want to dance with Florence Drummond,” Alice said.

“Does anyone?” Jack asked.

“Don’t be a beast,” their mother said. “Florence Drummond is a sweet young lady.”

Jack sighed. “I know she is, as sweet as treacle. But she talks constantly. It’s like a river of words rushing over a person, drowning you before you can either respond or escape.”

“She only does that when she’s nervous,” Alice said. “Kate says Florence is actually a very interesting person. I believe those were her very words.”

“Where is Kate, anyway?” Marcus asked, surreptitiously trying to nudge the dog away from his boots, which were in grave danger of being besmeared with drool. Kate, the elder of the two sisters, was twenty-three.

“Shopping,” their mother said. “She said she needed some ribbons for the ball.”

“More likely she just wanted to sit in Gunter’s watching people,” Jack said. “Ever since she attended that lecture on poetry, she’s been ‘making sketches of ideas.’”

“Well, I hope she buys some ribbon as well, because the gown she means to wear is decidedly prim,” Lady Boxhaven said. “Despite its reputation, I don’t think poetry has brought as many people together as a pretty gown. Not, of course, that I am suggesting that a pretty gown is of ultimate importance.”

“Of course not,” Marcus agreed reasonably.

“But primness is rather discouraging to suitors. Now,” she said, looking around the room speculatively, “I’ll just go have a word with Hendricks about chair placement for the ball. That is, if you don’t mind, Marcus.”

Lady Boxhaven had been the mistress of Boxhaven House until she moved, with Marcus’s younger siblings, to a town house two blocks away the year Marcus turned twenty-eight. Though he’d told her it wasn’t necessary, she’d insisted that a man of twenty-eight deserved his own lodgings. Marcus suspected her design had also been to leave him to his own devices so he might be more motivated to find a bride.

“By all means,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to take Socrates with you, to show him about the house?”

His mother merely laughed as she swept out the door.

It had not escaped Marcus’s notice that his family had been hosting more balls than usual this year, increasingly on very thin pretexts. He was not unaware of the reason for this, which was that his mother wanted to see all her children married and married well, and not one of them had yet obliged her.