Midnight Masquerade Read Free

maid left without realizing she had been put in her place. Even Bertie’s most cutting voice was not very sharp. Dick had gotten his mellifluous tone from her. His papa had barked like a dog.
     

Chapter 2
     
    At eleven o’clock on the night of December the thirty-first, Baron Belami disentangled himself from the warm arms of a compliant widow friend and said, “I should be shoving off, Bess, before Bertie’s ball is over. I ought to put in an appearance, or the old girl will cut up stiff.”
    “You’ll never make it,” Bess answered, lounging back on the pillow and running her fingers through a cloud of black hair that had recently been likened to a Stygian snare. “It’s eleven already.”
    “It’s only ten miles. I’ll make it for the midnight revels, with time to spare,” he assured her, hopping out of bed. “Damme, it’s snowing!” he exclaimed, looking out the window.
    “Stay; maybe we’ll be snowbound,” she tempted, stretching like a cat.
    He considered this appetizing suggestion, but in the end shook his head and put on his clothes. “Pierre will get me through. He knows snow.
    “Knows snow?” she asked in forgivable confusion.
    “He is an expert on snow,” he told her. “Pierre is from Lower Canada. He tells me that in the winter there he has often had to burrow his way from his cottage. He also possesses a pair of snowshoes that allow him to walk on deep snow drifts. I’ve been praying for a good snowfall to try them.”
    “It looks as if your prayer has been answered,” Bess said lazily.
    “That’s a change. God usually ignores me.”
    “And vice versa,” Bess answered with laughter in her voice.
    “Saucy pedantic wretch,” he said in his sweet, mellifluous voice, which belied any displeasure with her pertness. He leaned down and placed a kiss on her cheek while shoving a wad of bills into her reaching fingers. “Maybe I’ll be able to drop in again on my way back to London. Are you free—say, a week Wednesday?”
    “Try me,” she invited, reaching for the flint box to count her take. She waited till Belami closed the door before lighting the taper. She smiled in satisfaction at the denomination of the bills, shoved them beneath her pillow, and went to sleep, dreaming of the scarlet gown she would order from her earnings.
    Pierre Réal, Belami’s French-Canadian groom, liked nothing better than to put his master firmly in the wrong. As soon as he saw the snow begin to fall, he had melord’s grays hitched to his curricle and the rig drawn from the stable. When Belami came out the door, over an hour late, horses, carriage, and driver were all covered in an inch of snow.
    “I hope you had a good time,” Pierre said. He spoke with a heavy accent, but his actual words and syntax were taking on an English flavor, unless it had been decided between his lord and himself to speak French, which they frequently did. At times of excitement he might lapse into an admixture of the two languages, but he was not excited now. He was happy. It put him metaphorically as well as literally in the driver’s seat, to have been kept waiting an hour in the freezing snow while melord took his pleasure in a warm bed. Melord was missing his mother’s ball, he was fornicating with a woman of pleasure, and he had kept Pierre and, more important to them both, the grays, standing in the cold, to look entirely pathetic as they waited patiently. Oh, yes, Pierre was in a prime mood.
    “Go to hell,” Belami growled, glaring at the exposed nags. Guilt and shame conspired to put him out of humor. “Don’t you know any better than to leave these bloods out in the middle of a howling storm? Damme, it’s cold. I wish I had brought my closed carriage.”
    “I suggested the closed carriage, me,” Pierre reminded him, snapping the whip and urging the animals forward. “I know snow. I saw the snow forming in the clouds. ‘The curricle,’ you told me.”
    “Yes, yes, you’re a bloody genius and I’m a