And Harmony.
I dashed back to the dire date and read the passage before it.
Dear Diary,
Another house party starts tomorrow. Everyone belowstairs jokes that the duchess is making up for the lost time of the war. It seems like we have dinner parties every night and house parties every weekend.
I don’t find it funny. Dresses to iron, shoes to brush, stockings to wash, it’s all a bother.
And my Lady Harmony is in no mood.
Especially since that odious (as Lady Harmony refers to him, but her opinion is just) Arthur Hughes-Davies telephoned to say he was coming.
He wasn’t even invited!
Lady Harmony detests him. Even Lady Unity doesn’t like him, and she’s boy crazy.
I fear the duchess has her sights set on him to marry Lady Harmony. Which, frankly, is a slap in the face, disallowing my lady that lovely American man, and expecting her to bear the ring of that bellend (but in the end, Lady Harmony will get the last laugh).
The duchess will be sorely disappointed, considering Lord Bishop dislikes him almost as intensely as my lady does, and the duke can barely countenance him.
Why they had a room prepared for that man is the mystery, when only the duchess seems to care for him.
But a lot of what these people do is a mystery to me.
She didn’t sign the entry, or any of them.
Among many things that passage shared with me was an explanation of why The Downs had footmen far longer than other great houses did. If the duchess did that amount of entertaining, they’d need them.
I skipped past the ominous X to the next entry, which was dated several days later.
And this one wasn’t any less ominous.
Dear Diary,
Tenterhoooks, tenterhooks, tenterhooks.
I am sworn to secrecy.
And for my lady, who has lost everything, I will never breathe a word.
That was it for that entry, and the next wouldn’t be for over two weeks.
I read it, and it was studiously, even painfully, about the frustration of mending a tear in one of Lady Unity’s dresses in a way that wouldn’t show, and a flirtation escalating between the milkman and the cook.
I put the diary down and picked up a clipping that had another picture of the viscount. In this one, he was wearing a tuxedo with a white double-breasted dinner jacket that had serious shoulder pads. He was holding a coupé glass of champagne.
Mr. Smooth.
But it was all wrapping.
He wasn’t at all handsome and he had a receding hairline.
“By damn, whatever happened to you, it happened here. You crashed a party, told no one you were coming, and because of whatever happened to you, no one shared word one that you were at The Downs.”
What was it that Tempie said?
Outside of learning to hold our liquor, aristocrats are dab hands at holding our secrets.
