And what was worse was that people didn’t want to speak to me. Each time, hearing my French, they asked: ‘Are you English? Yes, of course one can tell. What is your title? You have no title? Is your father in the army, a general? My goodness, what is he, a lawyer?’ When foolishly I explained that he was in shipping, they would instantly turn away to another companion. ‘As I was saying, Monsieur le Duc de Rochefoucauld was truly very elegant in his response …’ pretending I was not there. Yet whenever I turned to look at Edgar, his brio remained undimmed. He did not seem afraid. He was sure that people would talk to him, and so they did. Did he not tell them that our father was in shipping? Did he tell them, I wondered, that he was a baron with a family pile on a wet Welsh hillside?
I wanted to escape for a moment, away from the silken crush of fine bodies. I stepped out into the quiet courtyard, and sat down on a low stone bench. I closed my eyes, resting my back against the cool wall, breathing in the heady scent of the orange blossom. Soon, the party would be over and the birds inside would be released from their cages and blasted to their deaths. Then we would return to our palaces and boarding-houses, and wait until we all had to meet again. All of us were tied up in our endless social exchange: another party, another conversation, another invitation, and for what? I knew what, of course: for the realisation of my parents’ plan.
‘I say, Mister Bowen, what are you doing out here?’
I opened my eyes: the magnificent Augusta Anson stood above me. Her dress was a shade of lilac so pale it was almost silver, her hair powdered in that same lilac-silver, with strands of ivy, also painted silver, woven through it. Her lips and cheeks were coloured a soft pink. She looked like a theatre-stage ghost: exquisite, ethereal: a beautiful harbinger of some unknown doom. She moved towards me, turning the width of her dress to navigate the orange trees. I stood up.
‘I am taking a break from the conversations, Miss Anson.’
‘Do you find the French to be a strain all day long?’
‘Not the French. I find the conversation a little … repetitive.’
She looked at me with hazy unease, a studied expression that I had previously noticed her assume in a moment of not understanding. She smiled confidently. ‘When do you leave Paris, Benjamin?’ she asked, changing the subject. She used my first name with feline authority.
‘Soon, Miss Anson. Next week, perhaps.’
When she was near, she touched the back of my hand with her folded fan. She then moved the fan to her mouth as if my skin had just touched hers. Its end pressed against her lip, sank deeply into the pink-painted flesh – just as it had that first day at the Tuileries.
‘I shall miss you, Benjamin, when you have left us.’
Her words surprised me. I always expected that she thought of me very little, if anything at all. I wanted to grasp at something one should say in situations like these. ‘Have you enjoyed the party … Augusta?’ I gulped as I said her name. She did not correct me.
‘I think I am growing bored of Paris. Paris is like a big, beautiful wedding cake, whereas London is the kitchen that made it, teeming with those who supply it, I mean the tradesmen’ – she emphasised the word – ‘and the people greedily clamouring to eat it. After all this polite chatter, one rather longs for a riot, don’t you think, Benjamin?’
‘How strange,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking something rather similar.’
She let out a long, humming breath. ‘Is it so surprising, Benjamin, that intelligent people share a view?’
Her blue eyes sparkled as they ran over my face. She opened her fan with a sharp shake and fanned herself a little, though there was no need; the air out in the courtyard was cool enough. ‘Your brother thinks you might be bored in Paris.’
The moment popped around me. ‘Does he?’ I asked. Did I believe Edgar had said that, or did I think she might want me to believe that? She gave a little shrug and sighed as prettily as she could – so very prettily indeed.
‘I am teasing you, Benjamin.’ I waited for her to say that Edgar had not said these things about me, but she did not. ‘I am teasing you, because I know that you could never regret our acquaintance.’
Those blue, bird eyes were watching me. Then she turned and moved off, doing a strange little dance through the pots of orange trees. They were covered in small white flowers, heavy with sweet-sharp pollen, and as she moved, like a huge lilac-silver bee, the pollen collected on the fabric of her dress. Pollen on silk: a catastrophe. But Augusta did not seem to care. The moment was what mattered: there are always more dresses to be bought. Eventually she circled back towards me until she stood only inches away. She looked first into my eyes. Then at my lips. Her eyes focused on my mouth and I could not breathe at all.
‘Should you like to kiss me, Benjamin?’ she asked, still staring at my lips. I felt my chest contract. ‘Should you?’ she asked again. Then, brightly, she looked up at me. She let out a breath, softly, sensually slow. I felt the blood move at once to my cock. Then she snorted cruelly, derisively. ‘Do you presume to even think of it, Mister Bowen? Ha!’ she snapped. ‘Your nasty little father ships his own vulgar type to New York in a rowing boat and yet you imagine that you could kiss me. My father is a hereditary baronet, sir, and you and your brother are vulgar little innocents to think I would deign to do so! Why people like you are even on Tour, truly, I do not understand it! You wonder why those people inside ignore you and cut you? Why, sir, it is because you are most obviously a merchant! Why would those who have been in the presence of the French king speak to you, except perhaps to borrow money at a good rate?’
She stood above me then, a glorious, evil warrior-queen. I was struck mute with terror, with her superiority. ‘Do you know where Gideon and I were before we came here? We went to a luncheon with the Earls of Lincoln and Cardigan. Do you truly think we would have taken you with us? Earls don’t eat with trinket-sellers and boat-rowers – do you and your silly brother not understand that?’ She tossed back her head and started laughing. I glanced sideways, for fear Edgar might have wandered near. It would have crushed him to hear her call him that. Then suddenly we heard shouting from inside. We each looked around, as though we were secret lovers intruded upon unexpectedly. People began to pour out through the French windows into the courtyard. Augusta moved away from my bench, vanishing into the mass of bodies. Footmen mingled among the Quality, holding aloft the cages of songbirds for everyone to see. One cage swung close to my face. Inside, a nightingale had been painted gold. The paint was stuck to its feathers and had got into its eyes. The bird wheezed on its perch; its feathers tarred with poisonous gold. It struck me that in that moment, the bird and I were in some awful community, both of us contaminated and condemned.
Another shout went up. Hoop-la! The marksman from Rambouillet was brought in to begin the shooting. He was enormous, broad-shouldered and tall, dressed in expensive leather boots, linen shirt and an antique hunter’s hat with a long pheasant-tail feather, an aristocrat’s fantasy of the peasants’ garb. A wide grin was spread across his face as he nodded to the silked-and-wigged spectators, who parted before him. As one they began to applaud lightly, while the birds, wheezing and golden, were tipped out of their cages and attempted to fly.