A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,1

rump down on the floor, a rapidly melting swan in his lap as all the ladies and lords stood around him clucking their tongues and commenting on the clumsiness of the hired help in today’s world while Snipe, who was a most fainthearted and generally useless person, had only stood by, to wring his hands and cry.

But there was nothing else for it; she would simply have to remain here, bored to flinders, until the vicar had done with his sermon and the choir had sung yet another dozen dreary hymns. Only then would she be set free.

How would she ever survive it?

“Hello?” she breathed, sitting forward. Something about the elderly woman in the pew in front of Marguerite had caught her attention.

The woman was most exceptionally unusual, even in this gaggle of rara avises. Her heavy gown smelled somewhat of bacon left too long in the smokehouse, and she sported an outdated coiffure that climbed a foot or more into the air. The latter was an immense creation of greased wool and horsehair and false curls overlaid with a paste of white powder—the whole of it crowned by a large feather hat in the shape of a bird. A molting bird.

Marguerite thought the woman looked silly in the extreme and did not suppose that anyone could possibly believe such a creation worth the trouble of sleeping with her head in a box in order to maintain it. But Maisie, one of the upstairs maids, had explained that the old woman had precious little hair of her own left after years of wigs rubbing at her scalp. She refused to give up the style that took hours and hours to weave into that sparse hair, so that it was most often kept intact for weeks on end before being “broken out.”

Maisie had also only yesterday sneaked Marguerite into the lady’s guest chamber to show her the pretty silver wire cage that the woman wore over her head at night, a trap guaranteed strong enough that no hungry mouse or rat could gnaw through it to sneak inside the creation and feast on the grease.

Or so Maisie had said.

Now Marguerite’s mouth opened in a small O of wonder as her hands flew to her cheeks and she blinked, then looked once again at what she thought she had seen. Yes! She hadn’t been mistaken. There it was again! As Marguerite peeked through her spread fingers at the lady’s head, a tiny, pink-nosed field mouse peeked back at her from inside the woman’s tower of fake powdered curls!

Poor little creature, Marguerite commiserated silently, imprisoned in a mound of hair, stuck in church, and forced to listen to the vicar prose on and on of everlasting damnation. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—trapped inside a nest of greasy curls by day and locked up all night by the silver wire cage.

Obviously, something must be done!

Marguerite tucked her bottom lip behind her top front teeth and quickly slid her eyes to the left. Grandfather was sound asleep, as usual, his chin propped on his broad chest, his deep breathing ruffling the lace at his neck. Marguerite shifted her gaze to her right. Mama, delicately wielding an ivory-sticked fan whose panels depicted the martyrdom of Saint Peter in horrifying detail, appeared to be oblivious to all but the nasal droning of the vicar’s voice.

As for her papa, well, he might tell Marguerite how to behave in church, but he did not attend services himself, preferring to take up his pole and seek “heavenly quiet” at the stream behind the spinney, saying the best way to keep God in his heart was to keep his immortal soul as far removed from organized religion as possible.

Not that Marguerite would think about such things now, even if she had almost weekly wished that she had been born a boy, so that she could have a pole of her own and spend her Sunday mornings with Papa, sprawled on a grassy bank, her stockings wadded into balls beside her, dangling her bare toes in the deliciously cool water.

But now, for the moment, she would concentrate on the mouse.

If she were quick about the thing, she opined with the sure conviction of her four years—and very, very lucky—perhaps she could do it. Perhaps she could liberate the adorable, pink-nosed rodent.

Marguerite counted to three and then wriggled off the hard wooden pew to stand directly behind the woman, holding her breath against the odor of spoiled bacon. Reaching up her hands,