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“I know you care dearly about etiquette, Laurence, but isn’t this—” The words melted on Granby’s tongue, ice-cold against the flaming sparks of his friend’s splendid attire. Was there any possible answer that would not be insulting? “—a bit much?” he concluded lamely.
Flirtatious, is what it was, and were it coming from anyone other than Laurence, Granby would surely have thought the man was trying to seduce the Emperor of the French. Laurence whirled round in front of his mirror, his face a mask of marble quietude: his coattails of midnight-blue velvet flogged the air behind him. It turned the pure white of his silk breeches into a tender shade of cream where a fistful of artful creases dipped them in shadow. His Hessians, polished to perfection, spoke of a military bearing which the iron wall of his spine reinforced. Crisp as fresh-fallen snow, his stark white neckcloth almost blinded Granby. His hair, tied back in an old-fashioned but elegant queue, fell in liquid gold over his proud neck; it had never been so well kept.
Tharkay prowled on the other side of the room. Granby could hear the grinding of his teeth from all the way to the door.
“I have been invited to a ball,” Laurence said, slipping a ring—a ring!—on his middle finger. “It is a matter of mere decency to look the part.”
“For decency, of course, stands at all times at the forefront of your mind,” Tharkay hissed from the shadows.
Laurence smiled to his reflection: a bright, tentative thing full of glinting teeth. “I see you have found your way out of Iskierka’s most princely gifts, John. You are ready, then? What about you, Tenzing, shall you be coming?”
Tharkay opened an angry mouth, closed it before Granby’s aggressive wiggling of his eyebrows, and opened it again. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
The sight of Bonaparte’s mouth falling open upon Laurence’s arrival was indeed one to behold, if not particularly thrilling. While Tharkay took it upon himself to plunder the entirety of the buffet’s stores of champagne, and Granby made a show of waving his hook about awkwardly to dissuade any enterprising French ladies from approaching him, the Emperor and his British captain leaned towards one another, their heads held close together as they discussed matters known to them only. The claret alone, of course, could explain the flush clinging to Napoleon’s cheeks. And Laurence’s glove slipping off his fingers to let them brush against Bonaparte’s own bare hand could only be called an accident.
Beside Granby, Tharkay downed another glass of champagne.
“I’m letting you be the best man.”