Free Minuet by Joan Smith

rouges. You’ll want to contact some of them to make up the party.”
    “Fox is looking after it. He is handling all the details.”
    “Mérigot can give you names. He is acquainted with all the émigrés. Might as well make use of him.”
    “He’ll want to go himself if I approach him. I would prefer to keep Mérigot out of it.”
    “Don’t you trust him? I thought he was a relative of Marie’s.”
    “He is, and that is exactly why I do not wish to place him in jeopardy. She’d never forgive me if anything happened to him. He is a nobleman—too dangerous.”
    “They’re all noblemen, or claiming to be. I expect she puts her own and her son’s safety first.”
    Harlock shook the question away with a frown, stating again that Fox was handling the whole. He would foot the bills, of course, but Charles Fox was in charge of the operation.
    Charles Fox was known to be one of the wiliest men in the country, and Degan, with no real authority in the matter, was forced to accept this. He looked around the room, asking, “Is Lady Céleste not in this evening?” For some reason, he felt foolish calling her Mademoiselle Sally in front of the father.
    “She is gone out to a little do with Mérigot.”
    “Some French party, I suppose?” Degan asked, uneasy.
    “No, just an ordinary party.”
    “The Casselmans’ rout?” Degan asked unconcernedly, thinking he would have to waste time going home for his own invitation.
    “No, the Pantheon,” Harlock answered.
    “The Pantheon!” Degan howled, on his feet. “You’ve never allowed Sally to go off to that brothel!”
    “Pooh! Nothing of the sort. Everyone goes. Marie used to like it herself.” Marie also used to be forced to avoid the place, but a new set of rules was being devised to ingratiate the venturesome daughter. He had been too strict. There was just the trouble.
    “Who is with her?” Degan asked.
    “Just Mérigot.”
    “You place too much faith in that scoundrel. He is only after her money.”
    “I have told you he is not a suitor.”
    “You’d better tell him. He acts mighty like one.”
    “It is only the French way. There is nothing of that sort between them. I am her father. I know what I’m doing.”
    “You don’t know what they’re doing. You’re being a good deal too lax with the girl. I’m going after them. What is she wearing?”
    “A sheet. She hadn’t a domino, and had the servants running around to fix up a sheet for her to wear.”
    “Good God, from curtains to sheets. She’ll be taking to the streets in a tea towel next thing we hear.”
    “She wore one for a hood,” Harlock told him, laughing.
    Degan was beyond speech. He dashed back the two blocks to his own home, to send servants scouring the house for a domino worn six years previously to a private masquerade party. It took them an age. He had half a mind to rip a canopy off a bed himself, but before he was put to such shifts, the domino, smelling of camphor and creased in wrinkles, was handed to him. He threw it on over his evening clothes, took up the half mask, and was off in his waiting carriage, without realizing he wore an anticipatory smile, which broadened into a grin of satisfaction as he envisioned Sally caught in some dreadful situation, where his sword was required to extricate her.
    A white sheet and a tea towel were not so very hard to pick out at a masquerade where stylish silk and satin dominoes in a variety of bright colors were the more usual costume. She was in no worse strait than standing up with a rather awkward dancer, and if the tall, elegant black domino standing with his arms crossed watching her was not Mérigot, Degan would have been much surprised.
    He stood observing the scene for several minutes, noticing her dainty steps, her slipping tea towel that gave a peek at her curls, which gleamed like polished copper under the hanging chandeliers, and confirmed beyond a doubt that the ghostlike costume concealed Mademoiselle Sally. Even in a sheet