‘But you’re the last to arrive by quarter of an hour. We’ve held over starting the dancing so you could be announced. And do call me Augusta, dear.’
‘Ah! Yes, do forgive me on both accounts.’ Eleanor looked around for a change of subject. ‘What… what an exquisite setting.’
Her host’s frown dissolved instantly. ‘Oh, do you like it? It is wonderful to see it filled with swirling gowns and black ties. I keep saying to Harold that we should do this more often.’
At the sound of his name Lord Fenwick-Langham bowled over. ‘Eleanor, my dear, how are you?’
‘Very well, thank you, er, Harold.’ Although she loved them both, Eleanor felt more comfortable around this old coot, with his informal ways, than his high-society wife with her airs and graces.
‘Still in one piece and not too many scorch marks on your pretty frock.’ He turned and patted his wife’s arm. ‘Well done, my love.’
‘Whatever are you waffling about, Harold?’
‘Nothing, flower of my life. Just congratulating you on not giving Eleanor too much of a roasting for being so unforgivably tardy, eh?’
He clicked his fingers at a footman and grabbed three flutes of champagne. Passing one to Eleanor he whispered, ‘Have some bubbles, it will make everything run so much more smoothly.’
Eleanor suppressed her giggles and took the offered glass. ‘You know, it must be such a task arranging an event like this.’
Lady Langham’s eyebrows shot up to meet her hairline. ‘Well, strictly between you and me, my dear, I’ve had the most awful nightmare trying to pull this show off. You wouldn’t believe the list of disasters I’ve averted since four o’clock this afternoon.’
Lord Langham nodded. ‘Isn’t she the most marvellous duck?’
Eleanor struggled to know where to look. ‘Forgive me, “duck”, Harold?’
‘Yes. Serene, perfectly poised on the surface. But below the dress, she’s paddling like billy-oh! That’s why her skirt is so simply enormous!’ He roared with laughter at his joke and plopped an arm round his wife’s shoulders.
To Eleanor’s relief, Lady Langham tutted good-humouredly and patted her husband’s portly stomach. ‘Do go and find Lancelot, dear. Tell him Eleanor’s arrived… finally.’
‘Good plan, Augusta, old fruit. Boy’s been skulking in and out for the best part of an hour pretending he’s not looking for you, Eleanor, my dear.’ Before he could set off in search of Lancelot, he caught sight of Colonel Puddifoot-Barton. ‘Pudders! Your glass is empty, man, shame on you! Still, best lay off the champagne. At your age, too many bubbles will be the death of you. Let’s get you a brandy…’
The elderly, balding colonel saluted him and, catching Eleanor’s eye, pursed his lips and nodded stiffly from a distance.
She returned the less than cordial greeting and turned back to Lady Langham, who took her arm.
‘Don’t worry about the colonel, my dear. He’s simply had military drills coursing through his veins for forty years and no good lady wife to soften him up. Harold really is most fond of him… for some reason. Oh, look there’s Viscount and Viscountess Littleton. You remember them, of course?’
‘Of course,’ Eleanor said more enthusiastically than she felt, they being the couple she had slated to Clifford as the henpecked husband and his rude, fashion-obsessed American wife.
‘Lady Swift, if indeed it is you under your mask.’ Viscount Littleton strode up and took her hand.
Viscountess Littleton trailed behind her husband. ‘Cuthbert, you chowderhead, you can’t say that to everyone. Your joke’s flatter than a tyre nailed to a wall.’ Mangling most words to end in ‘uh’ or ‘aw’, her Bostonian accent caused Lady Fenwick-Langham to stiffen.
Eleanor laughed. ‘It seems I’ll have to wear more than a mask to disguise myself, Viscount Littleton. Maybe I should have come in full costume?’
At this moment, Lady Langham caught the frantic eye of a servant and jumped into martyr mode. ‘I do apologise. It seems I need to save us from another crisis. Must dash.’
Left with the viscount and viscountess, Eleanor tried to make polite conversation. ‘How are you both?’
‘All fine, quite marvellous,’ the Viscount said. ‘Delia’s patience is perhaps a little blunter than when we last met and her allergy of all things countryside has escalated I fear, poor thing, but otherwise quite alright.’
He winced at the slap to his arm.
‘Ignore Cuthbert, Lady Swift. He really was a fine catch in every regard except his manners,’ his wife said.
Eleanor peered round the room, desperate for a lifeline. ‘Would you excuse me for just a moment, I need to… say hello to the colonel. He’ll think me frightfully off if I don’t.’
Viscountess Littleton sniffed. ‘That old goat thinks everything and everyone is off. Do you know I have never actually seen him smile?’
‘Delia, please!’ Her husband shook his head.
‘What? He’s like soured halibut. Stiff as a corpse.’
At that moment the colonel himself appeared. Lord Langham followed, humming loudly while balancing two generously filled glasses of brandy. The colonel was scowling.
‘Disgraceful, this country is in significant trouble. Men mincing about in costumes and feathers. How’s that going to look when the Boche gets up to his old tricks again?’
Feathers? Maybe that’s Lancelot! She wondered about asking the colonel where he saw the feathered guest, but changed her mind. If she told him she was looking for Lancelot, the whole world would know by the end of the next dance.
Lord Langham chuckled. ‘Used to be worse, old boy. What about that Regency mob? All that dandifying themselves with face paint and high heels… What do you think, Sandford?’
Eleanor started. The Langham’s butler had the art all butlers seemed to have of materialising exactly when they were required and appearing as if they’d been there all along.
Lord Langham continued. ‘You butlers, after all, are the arbitrators of fashion downstairs, what?’ He chuckled as he took a large swig from one of the glasses and then spluttered as most of it came out of his nose.
Lady Langham appeared at his side, looking flustered. ‘What are you all doing skulking around here, Harold? Sandford?’
Lord Langham waved his glass. ‘Let the man reply, Augusta. We’re having a most diverting conversation about male fashion. Sandford is about to enlighten us.’
Sandford cleared his throat. ‘Well, with respect, my lord, as you have asked, I believe that those in the Regency period were in fact trying to simplify and refine men’s fashion after the excesses of the Macaronis.’
‘The confounded Maca-whats?’ Lord Langham stuttered. ‘That’s a type of pasta, what?’
‘Macaronis, my lord. A group of gentlemen who frequented the streets of Mayfair in four-inch scarlet heels, sporting two-foot wigs, multiple diamonds and such accessories as muffs and fans.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried the colonel. He turned a disapproving rheumatic eye on Sandford and then back to Eleanor. ‘Can’t stand such prissy affectation, ponsing about in decorations like that.’