A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,2

she crooned soft cooing noises to the mouse, hoping to lure it from its sure-to-be uncomfortable home.

But the mouse proved to be most odiously stubborn and quite possibly brick stupid. Its head disappeared abruptly (it looked to Marguerite as if some elf inside the wig had yanked on its tail) only to poke out again a moment later, a little lower, just beside the woman’s right ear.

Silly creature! Marguerite thought. Didn’t it know she meant it no harm?

She concluded that she could not allow the mouse to disappear a second time, for only the good Lord knew where it would show up next!

Marguerite jumped as high as she could manage, launching herself against the top rail of the pew, her hands outstretched to grab at the mouse before it could dive back into the greasy center of the woman’s coiffure.

The small rodent, seeing itself under attack, belatedly attempted to engineer its own escape, its small, sharp front paws digging furiously at the powdered curls, until it had pulled itself free. It then scampered hotfoot down the woman’s withered, faintly dirty throat and into the bodice of her low-cut gown—Marguerite’s eager hands almost immediately following where the mouse had led.

In an instant all was bedlam.

The old woman screeched worse than the wheezing pipe organ as she catapulted from the pew to claw at the front of her gown as if she had gone into a fit and was attempting to strip herself bare in the middle of services. Marguerite screamed straight back at her, telling her not to be such a queer goose and hurt the little mouse who, after all, hadn’t done anything all that terrible.

As the mouse burrowed its way back up through the narrow valley between the woman’s mountainous cleavage to stare her straight in the face, its small pink nose and whiskers twitching furiously, the woman shrieked once more, then fell sideways in a dead faint, all but toppling the elderly gentleman next to her out into the aisle.

Marguerite saw her chance and took it. Her waist-length carroty curls flying every which way and her undergarments very much in evidence, she hiked up her skirts once more, agilely hopped over the back of the pew, scooped up the mouse as he sat perched on the seat and, happy to have effected the rescue, then proudly held it up for all the churchgoers to see.

This action quite naturally resulted almost immediately in the swooning of a half dozen fainthearted ladies in the nearby pews, a near stampede of gentlemen volunteering to remove the pesky scrap of vermin (eager as they most probably were for any interruption that might save them from the remainder of the vicar’s sermon), and, lastly, the loud guffaws of her grandfather, who had awakened just in time to witness the undeniably hilarious sport of the thing.

Even Marguerite’s mama—who had earlier confided in her daughter her secret hope that today, for just this one, single day, Marguerite would go through the hours without causing a catastrophe—only smiled with vague benevolence while discreetly tugging the child’s skirts back down over her exposed rump.

Within the hour Marguerite had been released from her too-tight shoes, her lovely but uncomfortable palest pink merveilleuse frock, and all constraints as to the behavior expected of grown-up young ladies of four, and was on her way to the stream, eager to regale her beloved papa with the story of her glorious rescue of one badly misplaced country mouse.

Geoffrey Balfour greeted her with a smile and with a pole of her own as his private birthday present to her, so that she could catch herself a fish or two Cook might then poach and garnish with fresh lemon for her dinner in the nursery. Then, later, her papa took her into the fields to meet with the Gypsies that camped there every spring, and she danced with them around the fire.

All in all, Marguerite would always remember, it was one of the most excruciatingly wonderful birthdays she’d ever had.

“Papa? Is it true there’s a man who lives in the moon? I know I can see a man’s features if I scrunch up my face and look very, very hard—two eyes, a mouth, even a nose—but where does he keep the rest of his body?”

Marguerite turned her head to the side to see her father, who was lying next to her on the soft ground, for the two of them had been gazing up into the starlit sky. Both of them had their arms