many years, and Wilborough long since gone to his reward, she is no less formidable a presence.
I say this, having found my eyes directed to the Dowager Duchess upon first gaining entrance to her drawing-room. Tho “possessed of fully seventy years, and requiring the support of a stout cane she clutches tighdy in one hand, Her Grace commands immediate attention. Her narrow features and shuttered aspect recall the face of her son, Lord Harold; but where the effect is often forbidding in the latter, it may be declared devastating in the former. A lesser man than the Duke of Wilborough—accustomed as he was to the power of doing as he liked—would have braved greater scandal in pursuit of such a woman.
And scandal there was. His Majesty George II is said to have interceded in the match, which condescension was stoically declined. The Duke's political fortunes may subse-quendy have suffered. Certain of his acquaintance may have cut him dead. But others, made more valuable through the passage of time, accepted his bride; and accepted no less the heirs she pragmatically produced.
Bertie, who succeeded his father, bears the greatest fidelity to the Wilborough line, in character as well as countenance; Lady Caroline Mulvern, nee Trowbridge, is the unfortunate picture of her Trowbridge aunts; but in the face of Lord Harold, the impertinent among society's loquacious have gone so far as to question paternity. Lord Harold is so clearly Eugenie's son, that the late Duke might have had nothing to do with his fashioning.
The Dowager stood in the midst of her fashionable rout last e'en arrayed in the form of Cleopatra—an Egyptian robe and a circlet on her brow, with a velvet mask held before— and beside her stood a girl so very much of Eugenie's stamp, albeit some fifty years younger, that I knew her immediately for the Lady Desdemona, Lord Harold's errant niece. She was robed to perfection as none other than herself, having ignored the general command of fancy dress; and her quite ordinary appearance amidst the general excess of baubles and plumage rendered her as exotic as a sparrow in Paradise. I could trace no hint of her mother, Honoria, or her apoplectic father, Bertie, in her narrow and elegant face, and wondered whether her character was as French as her countenance.
“Jane,” Eliza cried, her visage incongruously marred by the mask that covered fully half of it, “Henry witthave me to dance; and though I confess the heat and crush make the prospect an indifferent one, I cannot find that sitdng down should be so very agreeable either. Can you forgive us our desertion?”
“Go, my dear, and make as frivolous a figure as your murdered Queen may support. I shall do very well in idleness here. I find I have an excellent prospect of Lady Desdemona.”
“Where?”
“She stands beside the Duchess.”
“Ah,” Eliza said, with the driest satisfaction, “in die figure of an ingenue. She might readily be Cecilia herself, and prepared to thwart a cavalcade of admirers, whose costumed obscurity can only encourage impertinence. Let us call her Virtue, and have done.”
“Indeed? I had thought her merely to disdain all pretence or disguise. And burdened as I am with so hot and ungainly an outfit—” I surveyed my multitude of muslin underskirts with a shake of my bonneted head—“I cannot in justice criticise. I fairly long for an exchange.”
“Perhaps. But does her abhorrence—or wisdom—reveal a niceness of temperament and taste? Or may we judge her merely to spoil sport?”
“I cannot undertake to say, without a greater knowledge of the lady.”
“Then find her out, my dear Jane, and I shall be content to think as you do. It saves me a vast deal of trouble in thinking for myself.” And with a smile and a care for her overpowering headdress, Eliza left me to Lord Harold's business.
I began by surveying the company—a torrid blend of the comely and the grotesque, their colours garish and their accents brazen, relieved somewhat by the solitary interval of an elegant figure, composed against a doorframe or supporting a distant wall—engaged, it seemed, in an activity similar to my own. A Harlequin I espied, resplendent in a suit of black and red, in the closest conversation with a stately Queen Elizabeth; and a fearsome Moor, all flowing capes and harshly graven features—though not in attendance upon my particular Desdemona. More than one visage I detected, that when deprived of its domino might daily grace the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine, or one of Gillray's drawings for