peril in their splendor

There’s something quite bracing about wearing trousers – no wonder that men carry on the way they do, if this is how they feel when they dress themselves each morning. Hips forward and one foot on either side of a seam, as if they’re astride the whole world.

The masquerades of her adult life are hardly a match to the entertainments of her girlhood. For a serious woman northwards of thirty it is only a long cold night spent with aching feet, being jostled by knaves of hearts and bare-armed Romans of antiquity – there are two fellows dressed as Richard III who are resolutely avoiding one another as though the coincidence were a deliberate slight on both of them, and a rather comely Caesar. Jane will allow that the costumes are grander now than they were when she was a girl, and that they make for most amusing watching.

On the balcony, Jane draws steadying breaths through her nose and shifts pins to prop up the drooping feathers of the ornament tucked in her hair. Her pinked and jeweled bodice and the long gauzy skirts worn over trousers mark her off as a Turkish gentlewoman – not a milkmaid or a Grecian miss or any other costume ill-suited to nearly four decades of age, but not a matron either. Married women may do what they like with themselves.

It’s easy to fancy herself unseen, until she is not. A man clears his throat, not indelicately, and Jane makes her most exquisite turn.

“Have I disturbed you, Miss Griffin?”

It is that very same Julius Caesar, looking so trim and august – beneath the laurels it is John Franklin, the widower of her own dear dead Eleanor. Though his appearance is suitably grave, scarlet and white do much to flatter him.

“Not at all.”