Interlude:
Avant la Soirée
by Katherine Crighton
"The issue," Sir John said to his family one evening, "is that our ranks are sadly depleted after the Mountjoy debacle, and I have been told—"
—here he raised his bushy brows at his wife, Lady Chesterton, embroidering calmly beside him—
"—that I am to no longer send my daughter and son-in-law on 'scandalous missions' just because I have no one as talented at spy-work to call upon."
His daughter, Mrs. Sayers, affected a wide-eyed horror. In a tone of dread foreboding that suggested she should perhaps spend less time with Gothic novels, she whispered, "Even if our absence should mean that the Corsican monster might return to try and take our shores once more?"
(It should be noted that Mrs. Sayers's dramatic turn was somewhat undercut by the cheerful burbles of her infant son, who was attempting to grab the daisy she was batting across his hands and face.)
Mr. Sayers, who was more than happy to play along with whatever his wife found amusing, clasped her unoccupied hand in his. "Alas," he cried, looking dolefully first to the ceiling, then the floor, then finally the drinks cabinet, which Sir John correctly took as a request for another cordial, "since your father is raising the subject, I can only assume that there is a mission at hand, and we are too tame and proper now to be given it. Since this means that an invasion is imminent I can only hope," said he, "that you have been teaching our William French."
"Si seulement je connaissais le français," said Mrs. Sayers sadly, while simultaneously attempting to hide the daisy behind young William's ear and steal Mr. Sayers's drink from her father's hand.
Lady Chesterton, still determined to work on her embroidery despite the many devilments around her, did not deign to rise to these myriad baits. "Leaving aside how dreadfully amusing you all think yourselves," she said sedately, snipping a wayward thread, "I have not actually heard a plan from any of you as to how to find new members for your little society."
"Well," said Sir John, and then paused, uncertain—it had been his 'academy lecture guests' plan that had been rumbled by the traitor Mountjoy, and in the ensuing excitement and cleanup no new method for recruiting codebreakers for His Majesty's Botanical Society had readily presented itself. Mr. and Mrs. Sayers, who had been two of the more successful members to be taken up through the 'lecture' smokescreen, were equally unclear as to what the Society's next steps ought to be (though, on the more domestic home front, the cordial had been successfully rescued and was now being traded back and forth with the daisy).
Lady Chesterton paused in her work and gave a harried look at her arguably quite clever family. "Oh really," she said, and added, with what in a more lowbred person might be considered sarcastic gusto, another stitch to the fascinating fractal patterns she had recently begun to add to otherwise unsuspecting cushion covers, "you can't think of one single way to unobtrusively find other clever people? My absolute dears, I know you are not terribly inclined toward the social scene, but surely you have at least heard of the concept of party games."
Some time later...
There were certain truths that were known to any young lady striking out upon her first Season in London; these included such wisdoms as "it is impossible to gain a voucher for Almack's"; "the gardens of Vauxhall are best avoided after the lamps are lit"; "those chosen to perform at Countess Birchmere's musicales are sure to be called a rare talent regardless of their actual skills," and further rules, tenets, and cautionary tales enough to fill a library.
To all this, though, this year there was a new truism added: "To be invited back a second time to a Chesterton dinner party is something no ordinary wit can accomplish."
It had been a slow revelation at first. The London Season lasted through the winter months—it was not until well into February that the accumulated whispers regarding the strange evenings at Chesterton house began to bear fruit. From the outside looking in, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about a Chesterton party. Their evenings started as any other: some dancing, some conversation, and a fine meal served à la russe partway through. This, all who had attended could agree, was expected, if a little dull.
And had that been the sum total of the evenings, then perhaps the Chesterton dinner parties would have been considered nothing more than just another invitation to be ignored. But, as Lady Chesterton deftly demonstrated with the assistance of her husband's interesting connections, an easy way to rise above the unremarkable is to court the unacceptable.
As such it came very swiftly to pass that some guests of the early parties, who had graciously attended for the sake of the Chesterton name but had not anticipated anything remarkable, departed in huffs of ruffled manners before the dinner was even served, leaving behind them trails of extremely useful gossip wending through the London grapevine.
It was the November whispers that revealed that Mr. and Mrs. Sayers (only lately welcomed back into Society after their scandalously rushed marriage) were so forward as to play host directly alongside Sir John and Lady Chesterton. Then it was the December guests—those who had made it so far as the dancing before turning tail again—who provided the next boost to infamy by describing the other guests the Chestertons had deemed worth inviting: nobility and gentility, of course, but likewise clerks, students, governesses, merchants, lawyers, spinsters, vicars, persons who made their livings upon the stage and, on one particularly dramatic evening, a young scullery maid who hailed from Devon and had not cared for the fish course.
By January, the bravest of the Ton—that is, the ones who had managed to make it through the early evening and survived the peculiar conversations of drovers and judges at either elbow—were the ones to discover the true irregularity of the Chesterton dinner parties.
It would begin after the final course was removed—when, that is, any who would have been bored by the victuals or shocked by the company had already long departed.
The ladies were not excused to wait for the gentlemen in the drawing room; the gentlemen were not permitted a moment to smoke and contemplate their lofty importance in the dining room. All instead were returned together to the ballroom, where in their absence arrangements of tables and chairs had been set up—sometimes as if replicating an enormous card room, but sometimes in a pattern chosen solely for the evening. Again no division was allowed; the older guests did not glide away to play whist and piquet amongst themselves, and the younger set were not given the opportunity to offer up their own noisy games of forfeit and lottery. The Chestertons, it was said, seemed to delight in denying any sort of separation between the generations and, even moreso, between families of lower birth and higher. They seemed, in fact, to expect (and laid that expectation upon all their guests in turn) that only one thing truly mattered once that portion of the evening had begun...
The playing of whatever great game or puzzle the Chestertons had laid out for their guests to work out among and against one another, and how soon—or how cleverly—its solution might be found.
This was what the February guests related to the eager ears of those who a few short months ago might have been horrified to find a Chesterton invitation in their hand. Some puzzles, they said, ended in less than half an hour; one had, somehow, lasted well past dawn. The winners were not solely found within the upperclasses, and it was Countess Birchmere herself who breathlessly related the evening that found herself, an Oxford don, and the little scullery maid the final players solving a whirligig of cryptograms. The maid had bested the both of them, and neither the Countess nor, she was assured, the don had been invited back to try their luck again.
And it was that very thing, in fact, that was the final move to elevate a Chesterton party invitation from the unacceptable to the utterly desirable: Only those who had solved a Chesterton game would ever receive a second invitation.
As Lady Chesterton had told her intrigued family so many months earlier: With the promise of rarity comes, of course, value—and so it was that, by March, the absolute must-have invite for the young ladies of the Season was that of the near-scandalous Chesterton dinner party.
...And therefore Miss Victoria Ellery, for one, was determined not to waste hers.
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