Remember a couple of weeks ago, I posted on Chanel No 5 and the need to use any one of Richard Armitage’s alter egos to sell my favourite perfume?
Do you also remember that the Queen of perfumes, Pat Sweet, said the challenge would be finding the right colognes for each of the alter-egos?
Once upon a time, in an unfamiliar land called Eirie, a young man decided he must find out how far the land and sea stretched from his very feet. Thus began the life of Gervais the Explorer, later in the annals of Eirish history known as Gervais the Cartographer.
(Parthenope seated at her workbench, Bacigalupo in an easy chair by the fireplace.)
Bacigalupo: ‘May I speak?’
Parthenope: ‘One moment. Counting.’ (pause)
Bacigalupo: ‘Is this one of the very tiny ones?’
I am quite over the dramas of the moment. I am sick and tired of my heart flipping back and forth like a fish on the hook every time the door opens. I am seeking out Parthenope and Sarina because when we are together the three of us, we have many laughs and besides I want their advice on my gown. My dressmaker has completed it and it is divine. I was a little concerned that the white wouldn’t become me, but as my hair is chestnut coloured and my maid has streaked it with lemon juice to provide highlights, I am confident that this at least, I can pull off. As to the confidence of having de Fleury as my partner and having Blakeney stalking him like a hunter stalks deer . . . well that is a whole other thing.
‘Percy! My maid didn’t announce you!’ My heart crashed. I now knew things about Percy Blakeney and I felt shocked, uncomfortable. Even scared until I recalled the numerous kindnesses from he and Marguarite when I first moved to Veniche.
Building a Mask, Part Two by Pat Sweet, my inimitable guest blogger . . .
A letter from Signora Neroni!
“….my niece Vittoria, whose first season in Society was not the success her mother could have wished. Vittoria is an amiable child, but still hobbledehoy, and one of those girls who cannot dance a single quadrille without looking as though she has been pulled backwards through a hedge. Annietta has persuaded me to give her a season here in Veniche. We hope it will be like a greengrocer who pulls off the battered outer leaves of a cabbage to give it a crisper look. Vittoria is determined to appear at the masquerade costumed as a unicorn, a delicate compliment, as she sees it, to a youth in whose family coat of arms it figures, and with whom she is besotted. The mask she has ordered would instill a hearty respect in the bravest hero, for the horn’s an ell if it’s an inch, and the end of the animal’s nose extends a good two feet from her own.
I’m still frantic editing Paperweights (again), so I’m leaving my blog in the very capable hands a long-distance friend of mine who is going to be helping me run the Masked Ball. She is a former costumier
