packed with ice in the winter. While freezing isn’t a problem at this time of year, the sheer effort of churning ice cream in these quantities is a feat, and I pity the staff.
William also makes good on his promise: the one about sneaking off to an unused room, hiking up my skirts and getting down on bended knee. Yep, that’s an entirely different sort of historical romance scene, but I’ve certainly read and enjoyed those too, and I enjoy this enactment even more.
Whatever fears I had about being here, whatever trepidation, it evaporates after we leave the earl and his snarky insults. I’m sure others make some, but I don’t hear them. I thoroughly enjoy my evening.
At one point, as the ball begins to break up, William is snared by a man I don’t recognize, who wants to talk business. I excuse myself, and I’m heading to fetch another glass of punch when a familiar calico tail swishes from under the table cloth.
Surrey.
I glance around. Thankfully, no one else has seen her. The earl is not a Surrey fan, and this will be just the excuse he needs to ban the kitten from Courtenay Hall. I hurry to another table to grab a scrap of fish and then, with my back to the guests, I coax Surry out, scoop her up and scamper out the nearest exit.
Once in the hall, I pause to get my bearings. Voices waft over from my left, a trio of women by the sounds of it. I clutch Surrey to my chest and turn a corner to avoid the small room where they’re chatting.
I make it three steps before their voices reach me with a word that catches me up short.
“—Thorne.”
I slow.
“I don’t know what anyone sees in the man. He’s brutish.”
“He might seem it,” another says, “but I’ve heard he’s an absolute gentleman between the sheets.”
As they titter, I smile. When I first fell in love with William at fifteen, I’d have been horrified to hear such a thing. Perhaps that’s the advantage of age and maturity. I’m glad William found pleasure elsewhere and that he pleased women doing it. He may have been a recluse, but he was not a monk.
The women giggle amongst themselves, and I’m about continue on when one says, “That wife of his, though. I’d heard she was of an age with him, but did you see her? The size of her?”
“I know,” another says. “I didn’t appear in public once people could tell I was with child. It’s not seemly.”
“I don’t mean the pregnancy,” the first woman says. “Even without a child in her, she’s going to need her gowns specially made. Lord Thorne may be a man of some size, but his hands still won’t span her waist.”
My cheeks heat. I should walk away. I know that. Yet I stand there, rooted to the spot, and I’m fourteen again, ignoring girls sniping as I buy a cookie from the cafeteria. I’m twelve, overhearing the boys snicker about the size of my breasts. I’m nine, when my ballerina mother canceled my beloved lessons, finally acknowledging I was never going to be ballerina sized.
Oh, I hear other voices, too. William ogling my figure as he plies me with scones. My father telling me I inherited his size—tall and broad and never “thin.” My stepmother marveling over how strong I am, how toned from my dancing.
I am big. Tall, big-boned and carrying extra weight even without a baby. I’ve come to terms with that. I’m healthy and fit and active, and if being a size eight would mean giving up my treats, I’m not doing it. Life’s too short.
Yet this still stings. Stings all the more because this is a world where concepts of beauty are shifting. In the early Victorian era, women were more likely to be mocked for being too slender. It was considered unhealthy. By the end of the nineteenth century, fat-shaming and diets will be in vogue. Even now, attitudes are changing, and in a time when the average woman is a size six, I very obviously do not fit that norm.
So their words sting, but I’m hardly going to let them ruin my evening. I continue down a side hall and find the sitting room we’d used earlier. I deposit Surrey there with more fish, and I promise August will return her to Edmund as soon as possible. Then I ease the door shut behind me and wait to be sure she doesn’t howl.