In the dark, tossing fitfully enough to tangle her sheets, she had imagined his hands hot against her back, pulling her up against his body, and felt such a rush of blood to her head and to her nether regions she nearly swooned from it.
All of these sensations were new to her, but clearly not to him.
Had he delegated her to some far corner of his mind now that he had accomplished his allegedly altruistic mission of waltzing with her?
There were any number of logical reasons to believe this.
Except that not once—not once between the time she’d waltzed with him and now—had he met her gaze directly.
He had not even looked directly at her during dinner this evening, even when he’d politely passed the peas.
They were now all gathered in the sitting room, waiting for Mrs. Pariseau to return from dining out with a friend so they could resume readingThe Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, which she was thoroughly enjoying. Catherine, Dot, Angelique in one corner of the room. Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt sat nearby. Mr. Delacorte’s back currently obscuredher view of Lord Kirke. The two of them were at the chessboard.
Catherine gasped when Mrs. Pariseau at last swept into the sitting room. “Oh my goodness—your dress is so beautiful!”
“Thank you, Miss Keating.” Miss Pariseau smiled and pirouetted, and the soft sitting room light danced over the purple silk of her dress, which was shot through with rose threads. It shimmered like a hummingbird’s throat. The long, fitted sleeves and square neckline and the slim rows of quilting at the hem perfectly suited Mrs. Pariseau’s generous curves and set off her dark hair. She looked marvelous. Everyone sighed and murmured in admiration.
And for a flashing instant, a potent envy, shot through like the silk with wistfulness, stole Catherine’s breath. She was not in the habit of coveting anything. But it was almost inconceivable that she would ever own such a beautiful, expensive thing. She was ashamed that this abraded her heart.
Mrs. Pariseau settled gracefully into a chair near Delilah and Angelique. “I’ve not had a new dress in a year or so and when I saw this particular bolt of shot silk at Madame Marceau’s... well, you know how it happens. It was acoup de foudre.” She clapped her hand over her heart. “It spoke to me. I feel it makes me look like a hibiscus.”
As it was unclear whether this was her hoped-for outcome, this declaration was greeted by a cautious silence. Mainly because at least half the people present didn’t know what a hibiscus was.
“Is that anything like a proboscis?” Catherine touched her nose. Part of being a doctor’s daughter was that she often looked at people and thought things like “clavicle” instead of collarbone, even if she’d never heard of Scheherazade until recently.
Mrs. Pariseau gave a happy shout of laughter. “Do forgive me—a hibiscus is a flower, my dear! A frilly pinkish tropical sort. I saw it in an orangery one day and didn’t it make me daydream of warmer climes! I never forgot it. Though I love the idea of flowers shaped like noses.”
“A flower that can smell you back,” Catherine said, and everyone listening laughed.
“There might actually already be a nose-shaped flower, you know,” Mr. Delacorte volunteered. “I’ve seen flowers like all sorts of unusual things. Like trumpets, for instance.” He’d traveled all about the Orient, and he had seen quite a bit of interesting flora and fauna, some of which were incorporated into the various ground-up powders and pills he carried about in his case. “That might be the sort of flower I’d be. A trumpet flower.”
“You might be interested to learn, Delacorte, that apparently there’s a gigantic flower that blooms only once every few years in the forests of Indonesia and smells shockingly, unforgettably bad when it does,” Lord Bolt volunteered. “I read about it in Mr. Miles Redmond’s books.”
Mr. Delacorte slapped the table happily, causing the chess pieces to rattle. “Yes!That’sthe flower I am.” He loved being teased. And he mostly confined his flatulence to the smoking room, for which everyone was grateful. But no one at The Grand Palace on the Thames had been completely spared it.
“Oh yes, of course, that’s perfect for you!” Mrs. Pariseau said excitedly. “It’s known asAmorphophallus titanum, which is Latin for ‘enormous misshapen phallus.’”
Shock sucked the sound from the room.
Mr. Delacorte’s smile plummeted from his face.
He eyed Mrs. Pariseau balefully. Faintly wounded.
Catherine had never been happier that she knew what a phallus was, because she was now both delighted and scandalized.
“I thought we’d agreed that the fancy words for jar words are still jar words,” Mr. Delacorte said indignantly. He was none too pleased to be compared to an enormous misshapen phallus.
“What is a phallus?” Dot whispered to Angelique, who reliably answered all of her vocabulary inquiries.
Angelique squeezed her eyes closed.
“If Mrs. Pariseau doesn’t put a penny in the jar, I think I should be allowed to say the other version of that word out loud in the sitting room,” Mr. Delacorte insisted. “The one that rhymes with clock.”
He directed this appeal to Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy.
Controversy crackled like lightning in the room.
Lord Bolt and Captain Hardy were smiling so broadly their eyes nearly vanished.
