“I am pleased to make your acquaintance at last, Mrs. Breen,” Lady Donner said, taking her hand. “I have heard so much of you.”
“The honor is mine,” Mrs. Breen said, smiling.
But Lady Donner had already turned her attention to Mr. Breen. “She is lovely, Walter,” she was saying, “a rare beauty indeed. Radiant.” Lady Donner squeezed Mrs. Breen’s hand. “You are radiant, darling. Really.”
And then—it was so elegantly done that Mrs. Breen afterward wasn’t quite certain how it had been done—Lady Donner divested her of her husband, leaving her respite to take in the room: the low fire burning in the grate and the lights of the chandelier, flickering like diamonds, and the ladies in their bright dresses, glittering like visitants from Faery that might any moment erupt into flight. Scant years ago, in the era of genteel penury from which Mr. Breen had rescued her, Mrs. Breen had watched such ethereal creatures promenade along Rotten Row, scarcely imagining that she would someday take her place among them. Now that she had, she felt like an imposture, wary of exposure and suddenly dowdy in a dress that had looked little short of divine when her dressmaker first unveiled it.
Such were her thoughts when Lady Donner returned, drawing from the company an elderly gentleman, palsied and stooped: Mrs. Breen’s escort to table, Mr. Cavendish, one of the lesser great. He had known Mr. Breen for decades, he confided as they went down to dinner, enquiring afterward about her own family.
Mrs. Breen, who had no family left, allowed—reluctantly—that her father had been a Munby.
“Munby,” Mr. Cavendish said as they took their seats. “I do not know any Munbys.”
“We are of no great distinction, I fear,” Mrs. Breen conceded.
Mr. Cavendish seemed not to hear her. His gaze was distant. “Now, when I was a young man, there was a Munby out of—”
Coketown, she thought he was going to say, but Mr. Cavendish chuckled abruptly and came back to her. He touched her hand. “But that was very long ago, I fear, in the age of the Megalosaurus.”
Then the footman arrived with the wine and Mr. Cavendish became convivial, as a man who has caught himself on the verge of indecorum and stepped back from the precipice. He shared a self-deprecating anecdote of his youth—something about a revolver and a racehorse—and spoke warmly of his grandson at Oxford, which led to a brief exchange regarding Sophie (skirting the difficult issue of an heir). Then his voice was subsumed into the general colloquy at the table, sonorous as the wash of a distant sea. Mrs. Breen contributed little to this conversation and would later remember less of it.
What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food—not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.
It was delicious.
“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it—more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.
She took a sip of wine.
“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.
Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more—really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate—only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”
Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.
“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.”
“Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”
“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.”
“Well,” Lord Donner began—but Mrs. Breen had by then lost track of the conversation as she deliberated over whether she should risk one more bite.
The footman saved her. “Quite done, then, madam?”
“Yes,” she said.
The footman took the plate away. By the time he’d returned to scrape the cloth, Mrs. Breen was inwardly lamenting the fact that hers was not the right to every year partake of such a succulent repast. Yet she was much consoled by thoughts of the Season to come. With the doors of Society flung open to them, Sophie, like her mother, might marry up and someday preside over a First Feast herself.
The whole world lay before her like a banquet. What was there now that the Breens could not accomplish?
Nonetheless, a dark mood seized Mrs. Breen as their carriage rattled home. Mr. Cavendish’s abortive statement hung in her mind, all the worse for being unspoken.
Coketown.
Her grandfather had made his fortune in the mills of Coketown. Through charm and money (primarily the latter), Abel Munby had sought admission into the empyrean inhabited by the First Families; he’d been doomed to a sort of purgatorial half-life instead—not unknown in the most rarified circles, but not entirely welcome within them, either. If he’d had a daughter, a destitute baronet might have been persuaded to take her, confirming the family’s rise and boding well for still greater future elevation. He’d had a son instead, a wastrel and a drunk who’d squandered most of his father’s fortune, leaving his own daughter—the future Mrs. Breen—marooned at the periphery of the haut monde, subsisting on a small living and receiving an occasional dinner invitation when a hostess of some lesser degree needed to fill out a table.
Mr. Breen had plucked her from obscurity at such a table, though she had no dowry and but the echo of a name. Men had done more for beauty and the promise of an heir, she supposed. But beauty fades, and no heir had been forthcoming, only Sophie—poor, dear Sophie, whom her father had quickly consigned to the keeping of her nanny.
“You stare out that window as if you read some ill omen in the mist,” Mr. Breen said. “Does something trouble your thoughts?”
Mrs. Breen looked up. She forced a smile. “No, dear,” she replied. “I am weary, nothing more.”
Fireworks burst in the night sky—Mrs. Breen was not blind to the irony that the lower orders should thus celebrate their own abject place—and the fog bloomed with color. Mr. Breen studied her with an appraising eye. Some further response was required.