more honorable, kindly, loving companion for my dear friend. May we be friends? Pace?'
Hoare felt a lump rise in his throat.
'Pace,' he echoed. Even had he not been mute, he could not have summoned more than his whisper. Mute, he bowed over Miss Austen's hand. Then, after a pause, 'May I invite you to join this quadrille?'
'Of course, sir. With pleasure.'
'She has kindled, you know,' Miss Austen said as they set to in the first figure.
'What? Who?' Hoare nearly missed his step.
'Your Eleanor, of course. Did you suppose I referred to myself? Or your daughter?'
'But she has told me nothing of this.'
'She probably does not know as yet, herself.'
'But, then, how do you know?'
'It is hard to explain, sir. Something in the expression, I suppose. In the way she looks at your Jenny.'
'Dear me,' he whispered.
Hoare and Miss Austen came into one figure and passed on to the next.
'You have done it again, I see,' he whispered as he sighted two dignified children who, knowing themselves deemed still too small to join their elders, performing their own private pavane, quadrille, or volta off in a quiet corner of the ballroom.
'Sir?'
'Your matchmaking. I do not understand how you do it. First my lieutenant and the Honorable Anne… now Mr. Prickett and my daughter.'
'It is my metier, Captain Hoare, as it is that of every woman. I cannot help practicing it. I am a woman, and it is the sworn duty of every woman to find a husband for every friend she owns. Besides, I am far from certain I made that match without the help, perhaps unwitting, of another. Or, in fact, that that person was a female. If I recall, you played an equal part with me in the more mature of the two affairs to which I must believe you refer.'
'And, ma'am, if as you say, it is a woman's duty to find husbands for all her friends, what then is the duty of a man?'
'Why, sir, to let himself be found. What else?'
Now, at last, Hoare burst into laughter. His laugh could not be heard, for it, too, was mute; a fascinated, poetically inclined maiden, fresh from the schoolroom, had once described it as 'like a pair of waltzing snowflakes.'
At this point, the little orchestra at the end of the ballroom struck up a cheerful little tune that Hoare remembered from his days on the North America station. It had been quite the rage then, back in '81. until it had been cast into disrepute as the air to which the British garrison of Yorktown marched out to make their surrender to Mr. Washington:
'If buttercups buzzed after the bee,
If boats were on land,
Churches on sea,
If ponies rode men,
And if grass ate the corn,
And cats should be chased
Into holes by the mouse,
If the mammas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown,
If summer were spring
And the other way 'round,
Then all the world would be upside down'
In a glow of mutual forgiveness, Captain Bartholomew Hoare and Miss Jane Austen tripped on down the set behind Mr. Clay and Miss Anne Gladden, to the merry lilt of 'The World Turned Upside Down.'
