The women wore paler colours; white or washed yellow or delicate blue. Those ladies slim and brave enough to wear the high fashion were ethereal in gauzy dresses that clung to their bodies as they moved. The candlelight glinted from pearls and rubies, diamonds and gold. The room smelt of scents – orange water or eau de cologne, beneath which were the sharper smells of hair powder and sweat. “I don’t know`, the Dowager Countess leaned close to Lucille, “why some of them bother to dress at all! Look at that creature!”
The Countess jabbed her walking cane in the direction of a girl with bright gold ringlets and eyes as radiant as sapphires. The girl was undeniably beautiful, and clearly knew it for she was wearing no petticoat and a diaphanous dress of pale gold that did little to hide her body. “She might as well be stark naked!” the Countess said.
“It’s the fashion.” Lucille felt very drab.
“When I was a girl it took twelve yards of cloth just to make an underskirt for a ball gown. Now they simply unfold some cheesecloth and throw it over their shoulders!” Hardly that even, for most of the womens’ shoulders were bared, just as most bosoms were almost naked. “And see how they walk! Just like men.” In the Countess’s childhood, before the Revolution, and before Belgium had been liberated from Austrian rule by the French, women had been taught to glide along a floor, their feet hidden by wide skirts and their slippers barely leaving the polished boards. The effect was graceful, suggesting effortless motion, while now the girls seemed not to care. The Countess shook her head with disgust. “You can tell they’re Protestants! No manners, no grace, no breeding.”
Lucille diverted the old lady by showing her the supper room which, like the ballroom, had been draped with the Belgian colours of black, gold and scarlet. Beneath the silk hangings the long tables were covered in white linen and were thick with silver and fine china.
“They’ll lose all the spoons tonight!” the Countess said with undisguised satisfaction, then turned as applause greeted the stately polonaise which had progressed from the far side of the house, advanced through the entrance hall and now entered the ballroom to open the dancing formally. Lucille and the Countess sat by the supper room entrance. The uniformed officers and their ladies stepped delicately in the dancing line, they bowed and curtseyed. The music rang sweetly. A child, allowed to stay up and watch the ball’s beginning, stared wide-eyed from a balcony, while the Countess tapped her stick on the parquet floor in time to the music.
After the polonaise, the first waltz brightened the room with its jaunty rhythm. The windows were black with night, but sheeted with the reflections of a thousand candles sparkling on ten thousand jewels. Champagne and laughter ruled the room, while the dancers whirled in glittering joy.
Lucille watched the pretty girl in the diaphanous golden dress who danced with a tall and handsome officer in British cavalry uniform. Lucille noted how the girl refused all partners but that one man and she felt a surge of sympathy because she knew the girl must be in love, just as she herself was in love. Lucille thought the girl and the cavalry officer made a very fine couple, but she wished the girl would smile rather than hold her face in such a cold and supercilious expression.
Then Lucille forgot the girl as the ballroom was swamped by a sudden and prolonged applause, which forced the orchestra to pause.
The Duke of Wellington had appeared with his staff. He stood in the ballroom entrance and acknowledged the applause with a small bow. He was not a tall man, but something about his confidence and reputation gave him an impressive stature. He was dressed in the scarlet and gold of a British field marshal with a tactful Netherlands decoration worn on an orange sash.
Lucille, politely applauding with the rest of the room, wondered whether this man truly was the greatest soldier of his time. Many, including Sharpe, insisted that he was. No one, not even the Emperor, had fought so many battles, and no other General had won all the battles he had ever fought, though the Duke, as every person in the ballroom was aware, had never fought the Emperor. In Vienna, where the Duke had travelled as Britain’s ambassador to the Congress, society had greeted him with outrageous flattery, calling him `le vainqueur du vainqueur du mondi, but Lucille guessed that Bonaparte might have other ideas of the Duke’s military stature.