A Tall Dark Stranger by Joan Smith

Author:Joan Smith [Smith, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency Romance
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 1996-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

It was a ghastly party. The Murrays, with more money than taste, decided to show the provincials the proper way to entertain. The table looked like a silver-shop display, with a half-dozen epergnes parading down the center and silver candlesticks crowding the dishes off the board. The food served looked like works of art and tasted rather like paint and canvas as well. The meat was as dry as leather and the rancid butter sauce tasted quite like linseed oil.

I could see Auntie frowning in confusion at a dish of shrimp arranged in the shape of a whole shrimp, with ruffles of parsley sticking out on the tail end like lace on a gown. Olives provided buttons along the front of the gown.

“It looks so pretty I hate to disarrange it,” my aunt said when it was passed to her.

The fowl wore not only lacy anklets of shaved paper but waistcoats of ham and buttons of capers. Another fowl dish had the creature’s feathers reassembled and stuck into its tail piece. I personally would have enjoyed the ham more without the boiled pig’s head sitting on the same plate. As to arranging little cauliflower teeth around the beef tongue! But enough.

I would probably have found it amusing were it not for the fact that both Maitland and Renshaw sat at the table, one on either side of the hostess, vying for her fickle attention. It was no surprise that Maitland was there; he was a neighbor after all. But how the deuce had Renshaw got himself invited? He hadn’t glided in on Beau’s coattails, either. Beau wasn’t there.

I was seated halfway down the board. Mrs. Murray, with no real social graces, gave me my own brother for a partner on my right side and Mr. Lazenby, a retired solicitor, on my left. The only other young lady there was my friend, Addie Lemon. Her partners were Mr. Davis, the vicar, and her uncle. She and Lollie were usually placed side by side.

When Mrs. Murray rose at the dinner’s end to lead the ladies to the saloon while the gentlemen enjoyed their port, she said playfully to her husband, “Don’t keep the gentlemen too long, Archie.”

Then she waved a kiss in the general direction of her two partners and we followed her out. I had refrained from looking at Renshaw during dinner—one of the epergnes had impeded my vision in any case—but I couldn’t control my eyes as we left. He was looking at me in a most guilty fashion. His ears were bright pink.

“Some hostess!” Addie scolded as we left. “Keeping both the young gentlemen for herself, I wonder she didn’t have Lollie sitting on her lap.” Did I mention Addie has a tendre for my brother? I am all in favor of the match, in a few years, when Lollie has matured. “But the dinner was fine, was it not?” she added.

Mrs. Murray received numerous compliments on her cook’s ingenuity.

“I brought my French chef, Pierre, down from London with me,” she said.

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