Instead he said—without any smile at all—“My dear Charlotte, hello-hello-hellooo!” and kissed the air to the left and right of her ears. “I heard what’s happened, it is simply in-cred-ible! All those years of training, so much talent gone to waste. Terrible, a crying shame, and so unfair.… Well, so this is the girl, is it? Your understudy.” As he inspected me from head to foot, he pursed his fat lips. I couldn’t help it—I stared back, fascinated. He had a peculiar windblown hairstyle which must have been cemented in place with huge amounts of gel and hairspray. Narrow black strips of beard crisscrossed the lower half of his face like rivers on a map. His eyebrows had been plucked to shape and then drawn in with some kind of black eyebrow pencil, and if I wasn’t much mistaken, he had powdered his nose.
“And that is supposed to fit seamlessly into a soirée of the year 1782 in the very near future?” he asked. By that he obviously meant me. By soirée something else. The only question was what?
“Hey, looks like Puffylips has hurt your feelings,” said Xemerius. “If you’re looking for a nasty name to call him back, I’ll happily prompt you.”
Puffylips wasn’t bad for a start.
“A soirée is a boring evening party,” Xemerius went on. “Just in case you didn’t know. People sit together after supper, play little pieces on the pianoforte, and try not to go to sleep.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said.
“I still can’t believe they’re really going to risk it,” said Charlotte, draping her coat over a chair. “It’s against all the rules of secrecy to let Gwyneth go into company. You only have to look at her to see there’s something wrong.”
“My own idea exactly,” said Puffylips. “But the count is famous for his eccentric notions. Her cover story is over there. Hair-raising. Take a look at it.”
Charlotte leafed through a folder lying on the grand piano. “She’s to play the part of Viscount Batten’s ward? And Gideon’s going to pretend to be his son. Isn’t that rather risky? There could be someone at the soirée who knows the viscount and his family. Why didn’t they pick a French viscount in exile?”
Giordano sighed. “Because of her poor command of foreign languages. The count is probably just testing us. Well, we’ll show him we can magically transform this girl into an eighteenth-century lady. We must!” He was wringing his hands.
“I guess if Keira Knightley could do it, I can do it too,” I said confidently. I mean, Keira Knightley was about the most modern girl in the world, and still she was terrific in costume films, even wearing the craziest wigs.
“Keira Knightley?” The black eyebrows almost touched his hair extension. “That may pass muster in a film, but Keira Knightley wouldn’t last ten minutes in the eighteenth century without being unmasked as a modern woman. Even the way she keeps showing her teeth when she smiles would do it, or the way she tosses her head back and opens her mouth wide when she laughs! No woman would have done that in the eighteenth century!”
“You can’t know for certain,” I said.
“What was that, may I ask?”
“I said, you can’t know for—”
Puffylips flashed his eyes at me. “We had better get one thing settled right away: you don’t question what the master says.”
“And who’s the master—oh, I see, you are,” I said, going a bit red, while Xemerius cackled. “Okay, no showing my teeth when I laugh. I get that bit.” I didn’t expect any problem there. It wasn’t likely I’d find anything to laugh about at this soirée thing.
Slightly mollified, Master Puffylips cranked his eyebrows down again, and as he couldn’t hear Xemerius up under the ceiling shouting, “Silly old fool!” at the top of his voice, he began taking stock of the sad state of affairs. He wanted to find out what I knew about politics, literature, and habits and customs in the year 1782, and my answer (“I know what they didn’t have then—flushing toilets, for example, and votes for women”) made him bury his face in his hands for a couple of seconds.
“I’m falling about laughing up here,” said Xemerius, and unfortunately he was beginning to infect me. It was only with a great effort that I managed to suppress the laughter bubbling up from deep inside me.
Charlotte said, gently, “I thought they’d explained to you that she really is completely unprepared, Giordano.”
“But I … at least the basic principles, surely…” The master’s face emerged from his hands. I dared not look, because if his makeup was smeared, it would finish me off.
“How about your musical skills? Can you play the piano? Can you sing? Perform on the harp? And then there are the dances usual in polite society. I suppose you will have mastered a simple menuet à deux, but what about the other dances?”
Harp? Menuet à deux? Oh, sure! I just couldn’t control myself any longer. I began giggling helplessly.
“Glad to see that at least one of us is enjoying herself,” said Puffylips, baffled, and that must have been the moment when he decided to torment me until I didn’t want to laugh one little bit.
In fact it didn’t take him long. Only fifteen minutes later, I was feeling like the greatest idiot and worst failure in the world. Even though Xemerius, up under the ceiling, was doing his best to encourage me. “Come on, Gwyneth, show those two sadists that you can do it!”
There was nothing I’d have liked better. But unfortunately I couldn’t do it.
“Tour de main, left hand, you silly child, now turn to the right, Cornwallis surrendered and Lord North resigned in 1781, which led to— Turn to your right—no, I said right! Dear heaven! Charlotte, please show her how to do it again!”
Charlotte showed me how to do it again. She danced wonderfully well, you had to give her that. It looked like child’s play when she did it.
And basically, that’s what it was. You walked this way, you walked that way, you walked around in a circle and smiled nonstop without showing your teeth. The music came from loudspeakers hidden in the paneling on the walls, and I have to say it wasn’t exactly the kind of music that made your legs itch to get moving.
Maybe I could have memorized the sequence of steps better if Puffylips hadn’t also been going on at me about history the whole time. “Very well, then. At war with Spain from 1779 on … now the mouline, please, curtsey low, with rather more charm, if you don’t mind. Now, step forward again, don’t forget to smile, head straight, chin up. Great Britain has just lost her North American colonies, good heavens, no, right, turn right, arm at breast height and outstretched, it was a bitter blow, and no one has a good word for the French, that would be unpatriotic … don’t look down at your feet. You can’t see them in those clothes anyway.”
Charlotte confined herself to sudden peculiar questions (“Who was king of Burundi in 1782?”), shaking her head all the time. That made me even more uncertain.
After an hour of this, Xemerius was getting bored. He flew down from the chandelier, waved to me, and disappeared through the wall. I’d have liked to tell him to go and look for Gideon, but there was no need for that, because after another fifteen minutes of torture by minuet, Gideon himself came into the Old Refectory, along with Mr. George. They arrived just as Charlotte, Puffylips, I, and a fourth imaginary dancer were performing a figure that Puffylips called le chain, in which I was supposed to give my invisible dancing partner my hand. Unfortunately I gave him the wrong hand.
“Right hand, right shoulder, left hand, left shoulder,” cried Puffylips angrily “Is that so difficult to remember? See how Charlotte does it. It’s perfect that way.”
Charlotte went on dancing in her perfect way long after she’d noticed our visitors, while I stood there feeling embarrassed and wishing the ground would open and swallow me up.
“Oh,” said Charlotte at last, pretending that she’d only just seen Mr. George and Gideon. She sank into a charming curtsey, the sort that I now knew you performed at the beginning and end of a minuet, and from time to time in the middle as well. It ought to have looked silly, particularly as she was wearing her school uniform, but she somehow managed to make it sweetly pretty.
I immediately felt twice as bad, for one thing because of the hooped skirt with its red and white stripes worn over my own uniform (I looked like one of the traffic cones they put around roadworks and building sites), for another because Puffylips lost no time in complaining of me: “… doesn’t know right from left … clumsiest creature I ever saw … not very quick on the uptake … an impossible task … stupid thing … can’t turn a duck into a swan … no way she can go to that soirée without attracting the wrong sort of attention … I mean, look at her!”
Mr. George did just that. So did Gideon. I went bright red. At the same time, I felt fury gathering inside me. I’d had enough of this! I quickly unbuttoned the hooped skirt and took off the padded frame that Puffylips had strapped around my waist under it, and as I did so, I snapped, “I really don’t know why I have to talk about politics in the eighteenth century. I don’t even talk about politics today—I haven’t the faintest idea of them! So what? If someone asks me about the Marquis of Thingy, I’ll just say that politics don’t interest me. And if anyone is really hell-bent on dancing a minuet with me, which I think is more than unlikely because I don’t know a soul in the eighteenth century, then I’ll smile nicely and say no thank you, I’ve sprained my ankle. I expect I can get that much out without showing my teeth.”
“See what I mean?” asked Puffylips, wringing his hands again. It seemed to be a habit of his. “Not even prepared to show willing! And shocking ignorance and lack of talent in all areas. Then she bursts out laughing like a five-year-old, just because the name of Lord Sandwich is mentioned.”
Oh, yes, Lord Sandwich. Imagine, he really was called a sandwich! Poor man.
“She will certainly—” Mr. George began, but Puffylips cut him short.
“Unlike Charlotte, the girl has no … no espièglerie at all!”
Whatever that might be, if Charlotte had it, I was happy to do without.
Charlotte had put out the sheet music and was sitting at the grand piano, giving Gideon a conspiratorial smile. He smiled back.
As for me, he’d condescended to give me only a single glance, although it said a lot. And not in any very nice way. He was probably embarrassed to be in the same room as a failure like me, particularly when he seemed to know only too well how good he looked himself in his old jeans and a close-fitting black T-shirt. For some reason, that made me even angrier. I was almost grinding my teeth.
Mr. George looked from me to Puffylips in a worried way and back again. Then, frowning anxiously, he said, “I’m sure you can do it, Giordano. And you have an expert assistant in Charlotte. Anyway, we still have a couple of days to go.”
