The Domino Effect, Chapter Four

The predictable, conventional, socially acceptable aspect of Lady Wilfer’s ball allowed men and women in masks and dominos or fanciful costumes to dine and dance to the strains of a small string orchestra on the terrace behind the main house, in the warm, crimson glow of high-flaming torches. What happened in the maze beyond the terrace was quite another matter.

The maze, the heart of Lady Wilfer’s gardens, was a nine-foot-high hedgerow sculpted into little rooms and alcoves. In fair weather, the maze was the delight of Her Ladyship’s ten children and the orphans from her favorite charity. At night, however, the place purportedly became a many-faceted hall for gamesters of less-innocent pursuits. Deeply cloaked persons were said to alight from carriages that rolled up to the house with curtains drawn and lamps extinguished. And a former Wilfer maid recalled seeing pale forms writhing in the moonlight as she discreetly searched for a child’s toy horse. “The noises they were making!” Phyl recalled her saying with a shudder. “I could never do something like that in the open. Sound carries, you know.”

It was quite a few days before Phyl realized that the girl’s shame lay not in fulfilling her desires anywhere other than in her bedroom, but in placing herself in a position where the sound from that position entertains a world where ordinary noise has stilled for the day.

Phyl was thankful that she had no interest in that sort of activity. In fact, she reflected, it all seemed rather repulsive. Cradling the warm champagne flute in her hands, discreetly roaming through the crowd, she imagined and re-imagined the white-blue blob of humanity rolling upon the lawn, gathering dirt and grass upon their smooth, gleaming buttocks and within the deep, damp creases of their glistening nether regions. “Disgusting,” she thought, entranced by the sensation of something poking apart her own crevices. Assured that she would never permit herself to be used for somebody’s sordid pleasure, she studied the masqueraders, divining who among them would cast off their clothes in the false privacy of a leafy wall.

A servant appeared at her side. She thought he was extending a tray of refreshments. She saw, instead, that he carried a sealed paper on a small silver plate. “Excuse me, ma’am. This fell from your cape.”

“My cape?” Phyl asked. How could the paper be hers? She carried nothing, not even a reticule.

The servant was most courteous and eager to unite the lady with her property. “Do forgive me, ma’am, if I am mistaken. But it was seen to drop.”

Baffled, Phyl took the letter, sidled closer to the light of a torch, broke the seal, and eyed the unfamiliar hand:

“Word is that a certain earl’s estate was not sold to satisfy his gambling debts. Word is that the estate had been lost to the earl and his family long before his death, the shameful prize of a wager gone awry. If you would like to hear more, dance the allemande with me. Have no fears about appearing in the line by yourself. I will find you.”

Phyl’s head burned, and her knee shook with such severity that she forced herself to walk lest the tremors show through her skirts. Her shock was twofold: First, there was the possibility that her mother had lied about the loss of the estate, and her father really had gambled it away. Second, there was the reality that the writer knew she was at the ball, though she wore a mask and domino, and she had not spoken to anybody other than the servant.

How, then, did the writer know who she was? Nobody except Ma’am and Penelope knew she was there. She had sent word to her mother that she would be delayed at Ma’am’s, finishing a gown needed the next morning for a ceremony related to the Parliament. What the ceremony was, neither she nor Pen had the smallest notion, as the event was the creation of Ma’am herself, who had provided Phyl with both the domino and the means of getting to Lady Wilfer’s.

No, something was horribly wrong. Phyl’s anonymity with Lady Athol-Hight’s Society Paper was the only thing that had saved and assured her position among the ton for the past six months. Discovery would expose her as the daughter of a wastrel. It was bad enough that she had her father’s name. She had no desire to endure the legacy of his reputation.

She hastened along the gravel path that led to the safety of the public road. The sound of quickening footsteps behind her revealed a masked man in a domino. Fearing she was being followed, she turned sharply between two waiting carriages and ran across the lawn to the maze, heedless of who and what she would find amid the prickly green labyrinth.

The place where she had entered brought her to a shrubby corridor. Running, she thought she heard laughter coming from the other side of the hedge. A young woman in a flimsy, white gauze gown darted out of the maze to her left, followed by a panting, sweaty young man who carried coat and breeches over his shoulder.

Knowing without thinking that that particular spot promised a hiding place, Phylidda turned left. She expected another corridor with a hedge-alcove nearby. But the turn proved to be the alcove itself. She bounced back into the corridor she had just abandoned. Her pursuer stood before her.

She started as though intending to run past him on her right. As she anticipated, he reached toward her right. At the same time, she darted left. She was quick, but not quick enough to miss the faint scent of cow he exuded as he moved.

The Gentleman Dairyman! He had arrived at the ball, after all, and it was he who wrote that letter about her father. Too curious not to wonder what he looked like or who he could be, Phylidda shot a glance over her shoulder. At the same time, her foot struck a hedge root, and she fell full-length on her face, her arms straight beside her. As the ground approached, she considered how stupid and vain she was. What was the importance of learning the identity of a dairyman who attended balls when compared to the possibility of being taken by a stranger who would stop at nothing to get what his body demanded? She would have screamed had she not been afraid of being caught in so humiliating a position. In an instant, terrified as she was, she also understood that people who had gone to the maze to enjoy that particular kind of exercise would find her fear laughable.

She had no sensation of landing upon the turf. She trusted that everything she feared would be over by the time she regained her senses.