“Definitely not. Don’t you dare sing that!”
Mia grinned. “I feel just like in Pride and Prejudice. The first visit to Lady Catherine de Bourgh … I mean, Boker,” she whispered. In spite of last night’s little outing, she looked fresh and pink-cheeked—the effect was still of a girl straight from the high Alpine meadows. Her pale-blond hair was brushed to fall smoothly over her shoulders; Lottie had just combed the fringe back and pinned it up in a little circlet over her part. I’d happily have changed places with her. And even more happily with Florence, whose chestnut locks flowed over a pale-green dress that Lady de Boker and her friends thought “perfectly charming.” They were right.
Mrs. Spencer sighed deeply when she opened the door to us. “Oh, so you’ve all come,” she said with a note of barely concealed disappointment in her voice. “But at least you’ve left that badly mannered mongrel at home.”
“Buttercup is not a…,” Mia began, but Mom’s elbow landed in her ribs and silenced her.
“Of course none of us wanted to miss your Twelfth Night tea party,” said Mom. “We’re so happy to be here.”
Exactly. So happy that we almost had tears in our eyes.
From the inside, the house was just what the outside promised: full of well-tended antique furniture, with Christmas decorations on the mantelpiece, a spinet (it really was like Pride and Prejudice!), and an impressively spread table covered with plates of little tarts, scones, and sandwiches. I saw no sign of the orange punch that Grayson had mentioned, but there were pretty flower arrangements, plenty of tea in large round teapots, and elderly ladies with friendly smiles and lips painted coral. And—oh no!—Emily, cooing, “Surprise, surprise!” as Grayson stared at her, taken aback. Weren’t we safe from Miss Spoilsport anywhere?
Probably not, if the Boker had anything to do with it. It turned out that she had invited Emily especially for Grayson’s sake, and “because after all, she’s one of the family too.”
Neither Emily nor Grayson contradicted her, which made me roll my eyes again and go on looking around—surely that punch must be here somewhere. I was feeling more and more in need of something to fortify me.
The whole point of this so-called party was obviously to stand around with a cup of tea, sipping it now and then, chatting to the other guests, and smiling. Only people who’d had a lot of practice managed to eat something at the same time. I could do the rest of it all right.
I did find it rather difficult to smile at Emily, particularly when she poked a finger into my hairstyle and said, shaking her head sympathetically, “You know, Liv, less is sometimes more when it comes to style.”
I could have snapped back with at least four crushing retorts, but my jokes were wasted on Emily, anyway. So I turned to the other guests instead. Not that there were all that many of them. The ladies wearing coral lipstick were Mrs. Spencer’s bridge-playing friends, she’d known them since their schooldays, and if I’d heard correctly, they were called Bitsy Bee, Tipsy, and Cherry. (I hoped those weren’t their real names.) Cherry had brought her granddaughter, a young woman called Rebecca who looked as if she was secretly longing for some orange punch as well. No wonder, because Cherry (Sherry? Chérie?) was letting everyone know that Rebecca was only recently divorced and urgently needed a new husband, this time one who would also be acceptable to her granny and her granny’s friends. A dentist, for instance.
The old ladies themselves were all singles again, except for Tipsy, who wasn’t widowed yet and had a husband in tow, a grouchy-looking old gentleman who was talking earnestly to another old gentleman. The Boker introduced the other old gentleman to us as “the Admiral.” The Admiral had a white beard, terrifying bushy eyebrows, and a very military bearing; in fact, he looked as if he might turn to the portrait of the Queen any moment now and strike up the national anthem. But where was the portrait? The only picture above the mantelpiece was an oil painting of dead pheasants picturesquely lying beside a bowl of grapes. While I was examining the picture—the pheasants really did look very dead—Charles came out of the kitchen. I tried to look at him kindly, through Lottie’s eyes, so to speak: broad-shouldered, with bright eyes, dazzling white teeth, little laughter lines around his mouth, sticking-out ears like a tribute to the Prince of Wales, bald patch even though he was only in his late thirties, terrible knitted sweater-vest with a pattern of lozenges.… Okay, right, I’d have to get in some more practice at looking at him through Lottie’s eyes.
Charles was carrying an enormous bowl over to the table, and as I studied his ears, I remembered that I still had his hideous trapper’s cap hidden in my room. I felt a brief pang of guilt.
“Is that the punch?” I asked, to take my mind off my guilty conscience.