Who would have thought that Dodo could land the son of an earl? An Irish earl, but still an earl. He had been a younger son when Dodo snagged him, but a well-placed shell had fixed that. Dodo was now the future Lady Kilkenny. Bryan was shorter than Dodo and short an arm, but he had the best stables in Ireland. He and Dodo spoke an incomprehensible argot of hocks and withers. They had settled at Melton, setting a fashion for being fashionable by being unfashionable.
Meanwhile, Bea had fidgeted and fumed back at Ashford. Always Ashford. Someone was needed to keep an eye on the home farm, her mother had said. Her father had greater matters on his mind and heaven only knew what those land girls might get up to.
Bea knew that was rot. Her mother’s instructions contained an endless list of don’ts. Don’t spend too much time in the sun; don’t get brown; don’t ruin your hands. She wasn’t contributing to the war effort, she was being rolled up in cotton wool, stored away to be taken out after the war, like a precious china figurine or a very old bottle of port, too valuable to be jostled.
This. Bea regarded the ballroom with a decided sense of ennui. They were halfway through the Season and Bea felt as though she had been to the same dance again and again and again—the same people, the same clothes, the same music, the same tired streamers, the same gilt chairs tenanted by the same drowsing dowagers.
This was what they had been saving her for. This was what she had been waiting for all those long years, all those endless hours in the nursery at Ashford. This was supposed to be life! Romance! Adventure! And what did she get? Tepid ices from Gunter’s, girls in droopy pastel dresses, and a ballroom full of graying men her father’s age and boys just out of the schoolroom, pulled in to make up the numbers. The band plunked dispiritedly at a waltz. Even though it had been eight months since the Armistice, London still hadn’t quite recovered from the exigencies of the war. Paper streamers and some dispirited vines hung limply in the place of the flowers that had once filled the ballrooms. The hothouses and flower gardens of five years ago had been plowed up for vegetables while would-be debutantes wilted on the vine, aged past their prime as the war raged on.
Out there, Bea knew, beyond these ice-blue walls, there was music and dancing, real dancing. The few able-bodied men in the room, meekly fetching lemonade, being polite to the dowagers, would bolt before the evening was over, seeking out their real entertainment in smoky clubs in the remote hinterlands of the city where there were no chaperones