I shook my head.
“You will,” he said, but the conversation was interrupted by Sir John rousing himself to offer a long series of toasts to the health of the King and Queen, the Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, and each of his unmarried guests and their future spouses, to be determined by him.
It occurred to me that Sir John was likely responsible for Marianne marrying Colonel Brandon, since the Colonel is one of his closest friends. While love didn’t bring them together, I must admit that they are well matched.
Toward the end of the meal, Marianne bored everyone to tears by declaring that her second daughter, Delphinium, was showing clear signs of genius along with her first tooth. The Colonel didn’t precisely agree with her, but he did pat her hand and make approving noises.
Hugh whispered that when he had children, he expected them to have all their teeth at birth because they would be that brilliant. In fact, they might rival the birth of Venus and come out fully formed.
“Babies are not meant to have teeth,” I pointed out.
“Why not?”
“Because they are fed from the breast,” I said, before I thought better of mentioning body parts. Once I realized, I felt myself turning pink.
His eyes did fall to my “chaste bosom,” almost entirely ondisplay thanks to my tiny bodice. But then he looked directly back into my eyes. Maybe his color heightened. Slightly.
“I didn’t think about that,” he said.
The whole conversation was improper, but we ended up discussing an article from theTimesthat argued that most wet nurses addle babies’ brains by drinking too much beer.
“It may explain why arguments in the House of Lords are so turgid,” Hugh said.
“Will you take up your seat in Lords?”
“After my father passes away,” he said. “Until then, I mean to travel.”
I couldn’t help sighing.
Hugh looked sympathetic. “Remember how you loved that old atlas they had in Norland Park?”
“I was just thinking about it,” I said. “I’ll never forgive my aunt for insisting that every single book must remain in the Norland library. She was critical of ‘foreign parts,’ so she had no need for an atlas.”
“Like body parts,” Hugh said, nodding. “Ones she found improper.”
Exactly.
But we were dangerously close to breasts and bodices again, so I turned to Lord Boucheron.
After the meal concluded, Sir John ushered us all into the ballroom, where he spent the evening pacing around the dance floor, squinting at the dancers. He was clearly playing the part of a bee and deciding which of us to pair off.
Hugh said that he was reminded not of a bee but of a trout, a fish that rises to the surface of the water to eat flies. The way Sir John lurked by the wall reminded him of a trout lurking at the side of a Scottish stream.
Apparently, Scottish lakes are called “lochs.” I would love to throw out my line on a foggy morning to catch a fish. Colonel Brandon uses stew ponds to house fish over the winter, and I used to enjoy scooping out a fish with a net. Lochs sounded much more sporting. To tell the truth, I felt sick with envy. Before I could confess as much, the dance concluded, and I found Roderick at my elbow.
“I’ll escort Miss Dashwood in this country dance,” he said to Hugh (notto me).
Hugh said negligently, “Do just as you wish, old chap. I’ve no claim on Miss Dashwood.”
Which he didn’t, of course.
To make up for a lowering feeling in my belly, after dancing with Roderick I allowed Lord Dulloch to draw me to the side of the room and recite his poem instead—which still included a reference to my bosom, by the way. In an amusing turn of events, later in the evening I encountered Feodora in the lady’s retiring room, waiting while a maid sewed up her hem. A simple inquiry led to the revelation that she, too, had been praised for her “chaste bosom”—her poem was a match to mine!
She didn’t like her bosom being described as “chaste” any more than I did.
“Lord Lewes went on about pig-breeding until I was ready to collapse from tedium,” she said sadly, “and Lord Boucheron was insulted because I didn’t know he’d written a novel. Did you realize that his subject is a merchant who murders people because he can’t get enough fat for his soaps? Any large person on the street was in danger of being dragged off to his basement and boiled down.”
I shuddered.
