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Hi there! I’m Tipper Allen, and guess what? It’s my turn to write a story, so here goes. Momma read me a book by a lady named Georgette Heyer to help me think of things.
At the Catillion
“Snowbottom!” blared a man in a collar so high it threatened to cut off his own ears and a corset pulled so tight it threatened to bisect him at the waist crowed across the foyer.
Tipper, Lord Snowbottom, elegant in his simple white coat and breeches, his only ornament the pearls on the bows of his white patent dancing slippers, acknowledged the greeting with a slight bow.
“I say, Snowbottom,” the man bleated. “Fancy finding you at one of these crushes! I never thought I’d see the day! Glad I didn’t go to the club today; I would have laid odds against it.”
“How could one miss the first rout of the season?” Snowbottom drawled, lifting his eyeglass to gaze at the crowd. “Especially when it’s rumored Lady Fluffington will make her first appearance since she took up singing?”
The fashionable man sucked in breath. Everyone knew of the bad blood between Lord Snowbottom and Lady Fluffington but none knew the source. It wasn’t romance gone wrong, that was clear, or the fine line between hate and love. The gossip mongers had noses for that like fox hounds on the scent, and even the most imaginative of them couldn’t dredge up a dollop of that sort of thing here.
It seemed to be a simple natural antipathy, like oil and water or cats and mice.
The crowd stirred and moved toward the ballroom. Faintly, a voice in that direction called for attention for Lady Fluffington.
Lord Snowbottom, as one of the highest ranking aristocrats attending, was shown to a chair. He bowed slightly toward his peers and focused on the figure standing next to the piano.
Lady Fluffington was a large woman in a garish gown of white, black, and caramel brown. She had a face that looked as if the doctor had dropped her on it as soon as she was born and it had never filled back out. She caught sight of Snowbottom and sneered. He sneered back.
The crowd whispered itself into silence, the accompanist struck a chord, and Lady Fluffington shrieked the first notes of her song.
Snowbottom tensed. This was no parlor song. This was the war song of the ancients. Lady Fluffington bore down on the hisses, locking eyes with Snowbottom.
Helplessly, he crouched in his chair, ready to leap, and responded with a low growl rising to a scream.
With call-and-response and in tandem, they yowled and hissed at each other, senseless hatred laid bare and on full display for all of society to see.
“Enough!” A commanding voice cut through the cacophony.
A regal figure stepped from behind a curtain where she had been listening unobserved.
It was the queen.
“We will have no more of this,” she said. “If you can’t be nice, stay away from each other.”
Lord Snowbottom stood, bowed low, and stalked from the house.
He slept not a wink that night, vibrating with the energy of that shared song and the thrill of being spoken to sharply by the queen. In the morning, he stretched out on a window seat, finally relaxed.
Queen or no, this wasn’t over, not by a long chalk.
TIPPER’S PROMPT FOR TODAY: True animosity
TA
