The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(34)
All I manage to stammer is, “You’re Alexander Platt.”
He flips the lid of the snuffbox in his hand, glancing over his shoulder at the room full of gentlemen waiting for him. “Do we know each other?”
“I’m Johanna Hoffman. I mean, I’m a friend of Johanna’s. I’m for the wedding. Here for the wedding.” Am I having a stroke? Not only are all the words I wish to say putting themselves in a random order in my brain, but I’m almost certain my voice is far too loud and my movements far too exaggerated. I’ve gone completely blank, all my planned brilliance with which I was going to win him over washed away at the sight of Alexander Platt in the flesh.
He’s looking at me, and all I can think to say is, “Hullo!” And it comes out much higher than my voice usually is. Perhaps this is how people feel when they talk to someone they fancy—all fluttery and silly and everything tuned to the highest key. I’ve certainly heard Monty’s voice pitch when Percy walked into a room.
I remember suddenly I have Dr. Cheselden’s card in my pocket, stashed there for exactly this meeting, and I start to paw at my excessively large skirt for it.
“Dr. Platt, you join us at last!” Johanna’s uncle calls from the room, and Platt raises a hand. Before I’ve even had a chance to find my damn pocket, he gives me a nod and says, “Have a good night.”
“Wait, no!” I try to chase after him, but the butler catches me again. My arm whips out as he pulls me back, knocking a portrait off the wall. The glass cracks when it strikes the tile. Dr. Platt glances over his shoulder, and I’m not sure if I imagine it or if he actually winces. The butler stares at the broken frame, then at me.
“I’ll show myself to Miss Hoffman’s rooms,” I say, and slink away.
There is a unique sort of agony to entering a party alone.
It is the shuffle in, the survey, trying to spot allies and cracks in the fortress of guests where you might slide into a conversation with such ease that they will think you’ve been there all the while. It is the keen pinch of hanging in the doorway and knowing that people have seen you come in but no one is pulling you over to their conversation or waving in greeting. Wondering if you can sidle up to the fringes of a conversation and laugh at just the right moment and they’ll part.
It is an even more pernicious pain when it comes upon the heels of the social equivalent of vomiting partially digested entrails upon my idol.
Johanna’s apartments are swarming with women from dinner, all with waists tinier and hair taller than mine. The aroma of scent bags and a garden of fragrances crowd the air. I haven’t any powder on—I never wore it at my parents’ house unless a maid managed to catch me off guard and blow a puff in my face—and my skin feels garishly ruddy and freckled in the presence of these girls dusted pale as icing sugar with tiny pox patches spotting their cheeks. Their maids trail them, rearranging trains when they sit upon the silk couches, fetching them flutes of champagne, using a single finger wetted by a tongue to fix a smear of rouge.
There are card tables, where whist and faro are being dealt. Another table is laid with bonbons, silky pink entremets topped with chocolate flakes sculpted like sparrows, gingerbread, and salted toffees wrapped with spun sugar as fragile and translucent as the wings of a dragonfly, along with bottles of champagne and a pot of spiced wine.
Johanna is both literally and figuratively in the center of it all, talking to a small crowd of girls while others wait their turn to kiss her cheeks and offer her their congratulations. She drinks champagne and talks with her hands and speaks in arias. She wiggles her shoulders, points her tiny, perfect feet, sucks in her cheeks to make her face look thinner.
It aggravates me, in the same way it did back in Cheshire, but not because she’s putting on a party persona. It’s because she’s so bloody good at it.
From his spot at the buffet table, Max galumphs over to me, an enormous pink silk bow around his neck. He smashes his forehead into my knees until I consent to massage his ears, then he walks over to the dessert table again and sits with an expectant look, as though greeting me has made him worthy of a treat.
I almost bolt. I want nothing more than to run back to my room and hide in a book the same way I have always done in the face of these gatherings.
But I’m trying to make an impression. I’m trying to pretend I am an indoor cat. I am trying to get to Dr. Platt, and since my impression was so disastrous, the best way to do that will be through Johanna.
You are Felicity Montague, I remind myself. You had your brother tackled into the London harbor and found Alexander Platt and are absolutely going to make up for that embarrassing incident earlier.
Since the knot of women around Johanna is too intimidating to breach just yet, I take a tentative seat on a couch near the door, next to a woman who looks a little older than me. She catches my eye and gives me an obligatory smile over her champagne. I look away, am then mortified that was my reaction to being smiled at, and say too loudly and without introduction, “I like your eyebrows.”
I had spun a mental wheel and picked the least flattering feature to compliment a woman on. She looks surprised. As any person would at such a bizarre statement so loudly uttered. “Oh. Thank you.” She purses her lips, looks me up and down, then says, “Yours are also nice.”
“Yes.” I stare at her for a moment longer. Then I nod too vigorously. Then I ask, “How many bones in the human body can you name?” And dear Lord, what is happening to me? Why don’t I know how to talk politely to other women? “Excuse me.”