Mistress of Sins (Dredthorne Hall #3) - Hazel Hunter Page 0,15
glow. He looked so resplendent in that moment she forgot her manners, her sensibility, everything.
“Where have you been?” she murmured, although her own words made absolutely no sense to her.
He looked all over her face. “Trying to find you.” He sounded as dazed as she felt.
The music and voices from within the hall dwindled away as William matched her silence and stillness with his own. Looking at him made Jennet wonder why she had ever bothered to do anything else. She imagined standing in that spot and gazing at him for years; she would not consider the time wasted. It could not happen this way, she thought in some distant corner of her mind, and yet it was. It had.
“You look so much like your father,” Jennet finally said, shocked again by how her voice sounded now, as if it came from her heart rather than her throat. “And yet, you are nothing at all like him.”
“You could not have offered a more perfect complement,” he said, smiling a little. “I miss your braids, but not the lace. Will you come and dance with me, Miss Reed?”
“I am not inclined to, Mr. Gerard, and with you…” She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Perhaps it would not be wise.”
“I would agree, but I cannot help myself. You bewitch me.” William took hold of her hand, bowing down to press his mouth against her knuckles. “Shall we be foolish, then?”
The memory of meeting William Gerard for the first time faded as the straw man straightened, and Jennet came back to her senses.
“You are an unrepentant cad, Mr. Pickering.” She turned and marched after Catherine into the reception room.
As the assembled guests milled around them, Jennet took in her surroundings. The oval room’s curving walls had been repainted a snowy white, but she could see hints of older, slightly foxed paint in the nooks and curls of the ornate molding. The hundreds of crystals on both of the grand chandeliers had been cleaned, but a few dusty cobwebs still decorated the upper tiers between the sparkling prisms, likely left for the haunting effect. Long tables draped in damask and linen held punch bowls filled with spiced cider, and pitchers brimming with mulled wine encircled by rows of polished silver goblets.
“You look splendid, my dears,” an older woman told Jennet and Catherine, and then leaned closer to say in a much lower voice, “If you mean to imbibe, you should know our host has prepared a retiring room on the second floor.” She hurried off to speak to another group of new arrivals.
“Ah, the rustic nature of country manners.” Catherine gave her a rueful look. “In London no one at a ball tells you where you may find a chamber pot. I suppose that is why we ladies refrain from imbibing.”
Jennet smiled. “Now that you know, you may drink as much as you like, but I would advise you keep to the cider.”
“If you find me in my cups, then you may send me home.” Her friend looked over at a group of young men and giggled. “But not too soon, please.”
They took a turn around the reception room so that Catherine could attempt to guess which of the guests they knew. Jennet silently corrected her speculations as she used her talent for observation to determine their identities. The vicar and his wife, both short of stature and staying well away from the wine, had dressed appropriately as a shepherd and shepherdess. The Brexley spinsters Jennet recognized from their costumes as Selene, goddess of the moon, and Eos, goddess of the dawn, also sisters. They had also retreated to a corner where they might watch and whisper to each other, which is what they did at every party they attended.
“I cannot believe that Rose Abernathy thought to dress as Marie Antionette,” Catherine complained as they finished their circuit, and glared back at the lady in question. “It is positively traitorous—and to wear a robe de gaulle to a ball, of all things. That dress is little more than an over-long chemise.”
Jennet surveyed Miss Abernathy, whose airy white cotton gown looked quite comfortable compared to the stiff silk of her own costume. She had also foregone the expected powdered wig in favor of a wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with a few silvery plumes. Yet she knew what lay beneath all that finery, thanks to the unpleasant encounter she’d had with her at the haberdasher’s shop.
“I believe she imitates a rather famous portrait of the queen,”