“I have been busy planning tonight’s dinner party and making sure Cook ordered plenty of pumpkins for the soup Lady Montague especially loves.”
Suddenly, Mrs. Pettifer and Miss Plim gasped in unison. MissPlim dropped the sandwich she was about to not eat; Mrs. Pettifer laid a hand against her lace-swathed bosom.
“Is something the matter?” Charlotte asked as she anxiously returned their stares.
“I think you are the one to tell us that,” Miss Plim said.
“Dear,” Mrs. Pettifer whispered, “you have just poured the milk into your cup—before the tea!”
Charlotte looked into her cup and blanched. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “It has been a difficult—which is to say, a boring morning that has quite dulled my senses.”
“Ahem.”
The three ladies looked up to see the imperious form of Woollery, the Pettifer butler, possessing the doorway. “Miss Gloughenbury,” he announced.
Miss Plim and Mrs. Pettifer exchanged a glance. Although neither spoke, the former’s pained smile and the latter’s leaping eyebrows provided eloquence enough. A middle-aged woman sailed past Woollery in a magnificence of lace, ruffles, stripes, and beads. She carried a small white poodle also dressed to within what would have been an inch of its life were it not actually dead and taxidermied.
“Darlings, how lovely to see you,” the woman declared. Her voice was so cultured, every vowel had its own bustle and feathered hat. Her face was a rictus varnished with the sort of glossy health obtainable only from jars.
The three ladies murmured in response.
“Although I fear I cannot entirely see you with all this light.” She raised a gloved hand to shield her eyes. “How brave you are to keep your drawing room curtains open. Alas, my own complexion is too refined for me to risk doing such a thing.”
“You do use adjectives in the most charmingly obverse way, Maud dear,” Miss Plim replied.
“Darling! And you—”
“Won’t you have this seat, Miss Gloughenbury?” Charlotte said, standing. “I must be getting on.”
“Do stay,” Miss Gloughenbury said, and Charlotte was obliged to stop halfway to the door or else be rude. “You will want to hear what I have to tell your mother and aunt.”
“Oh?” Charlotte smiled in mild inquiry.
“Yes, I rushed here straight from St. James’s to share it!”
“Why, Charlotte was on St. James’s Street just this very hour,” Mrs. Pettifer said delightedly.
“Darling girl!” Miss Gloughenbury stretched her smile to show fretfulness. “How could you? I say, how ever could you do it?”
“Um,” Charlotte said.
“Surely everyone knows St. James’s Street is not the place for nice ladies after noon. Hm? Hm?” She looked about the company for agreement, although showed no actual interest in the results. “All those gentleman’s clubs corrupt the feminine soul.”
“Nonsense,” Miss Plim interjected. In fact, she agreed about the unsuitability of St. James’s Street for lady pedestrians, but Miss Gloughenbury might have said Plims were equal to queens and she’d have declared it nonsense. The two ladies had been in dispute ever since attending a soiree in the same dress (that is, not together in the same dress, which would have represented a whole different kind of rivalry, but each in a copy of the other’s) and for the past several years had only refrained from maiming each other by instead using charities in a proxy war of spiteful generosity and benevolence. That it had inadvertently led to lives being saved, and each lady being awarded medals, was a consequence neither regarded, except to ensure their next donation was even more medal-worthy than the other’s had been.
Miss Plim produced from a secret pocket a red-handled device from which she extracted a tiny broom and proceeded to sweepimaginary crumbs from the tea table. This both calmed her feelings and gave her an excuse not to look at Miss Gloughenbury. “I believe a modern, independent woman should go wherever she pleases,” she lied.
“Including into the air?” Miss Gloughenbury asked.
Miss Plim’s broom flicked a teaspoon from the table. “Well of course not that. One cannot condone piratic behavior.”
“Exactly, darling. Which is why I came at once to tell you—”
Suddenly Charlotte coughed. Miss Plim looked up in time to see a bronze statuette on the mantelpiece behind Miss Gloughenbury become liberated from its position and speed toward the lady’s head. Only a heroic dash by Woollery, who grabbed the statuette mid-flight, prevented the lady from being brained.
“I do beg your pardon,” Charlotte said.
“That’s all right, dear,” Mrs. Pettifer replied, smiling at her daughter. “Who amongst us hasn’t accidentally coughed the incantation?”
