This post is part of StoryADay May (https://storyaday.org/) #StoryADay #StoryADayMay @storyadaymay #freeshortstory #NailArt #nails #Maniology #HelloManiology #ManiologyAmbassador #MomGoth10discountcode

This is also in memory of my late friend and fellow writer, Jane, whose birthday it would have been today and who introduced me to Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances.

The Purple Fan

by Marian Allen

Lady Claudia Devereau, too slight to be significant in this Season of tall beauties, stood against the wall, watching others dance. She enjoyed dancing, but her fingers itched to snatch the violin out of the hands of the man leading the dance’s string quartet. He played with absolute precision – and a total absence of understanding.

With a sigh, she slipped through the French doors, open to allow air into the overheated ballroom, and onto the balcony.

Her silhouette would have been clear against the blazing tapers of the room behind her, but the dancers cast flickering shadows as they moved, obscuring her small form.

So, by standing absolutely still, she was unobserved by the men creeping across the lawn.

They did not go unobserved by her, though. Her eye, trained by years of ladylike needlework and genteel watercolor painting, picked them out of the gloom as they slithered over the balcony’s railing, keeping their profiles as low as possible. They crouched and crabwalked, like two “funny uncles”, to one of the unlit morning rooms in the front of the stately home. The door swung wide, opened from inside by an unseen hand, and the men slipped into the house. In two moments, they slipped back out again, one tucking something into a jacket pocket. If only she could see their faces!

Lady Claudia darted inside, looking frantically for her host. He wasn’t among the dancers or in the card room or in the buffet room or in the ladies’ card room (she hadn’t expected him to be, but she was becoming desperate).

She grasped the cuff of a gentleman to whom she had been introduced earlier and told him what she had seen.

He, further into his cups than she had thought, crowed in delight and drew the attention of everyone around them.

“Listen!” he cried. “We have a fabulist in our midst! We’ll be subscribing to her novel soon, no doubt!”

Everyone laughed, although most of the ladies eyed her with barely concealed anticipation. Novels by anonymous ladies were too few for their avid tastes. Lady Claudia stored that away for further thought later.

At last, she spied her host coming from the “lounge” set aside for the use of the gentlemen, which, of course, she had been unable to search.

He graciously inclined himself until he could hear her frantic whisper, then straightened with a face much whiter than it had been before.

He unobtrusively gathered three other men and left the ballroom. They did not return for the space of three dances. When they did, their faces were grim.

While they were gone, Lady Claudia, relegated, as always, to the margin of the excitement, observed her fellow guests with a new sharpness.

When the grim men surrounded her and asked, with poorly disguised desperation, what details she could give them about the men, she startled them by saying,

“I can’t tell you anything about the men, but I suggest you search the morning room and the route between here and there, for a purple fan.”

“A purple fan?”

She nodded toward a minor beauty, currently giggling into a lace handkerchief.

“Miss Padget is wearing a dress with just a whisper of lavender to it, with a flower holder of violets tucked into her sash. She was flirting, earlier, with a purple silk fan. If you observe her sash (perhaps gentlemanly conduct forbids you to do so, but I tell you it is so), she has no fan now.”

Lady Claudia was never made privy to what happened subsequently, but Miss Padget retired from Society and she, Lady Claudia, found herself and her Mama and siblings much in demand at balls, routs, card parties, and other jollifications presented by the wives of the men who had looked so very worried at that fateful ball. The men bowed deeply to her whenever she passed, and the honor did not go unnoticed by the rest of the Polite World. Suddenly, petite women were all the rage, and tall beauties could only slouch and wear horizontal stripes in hopes of appearing shorter.

No one was more surprised than Lady Claudia to find that ladylike needlework and genteel watercolor painting were actually useful skills.

Her novel was a great success.

THE END

My nails this week are purple on purple and, when I was looking for inspo for today’s story, looked somewhat fanlike.

MY PROMPT FOR TODAY: Jane and my nails.

MA