A Difficult Disguise by Kasey Michaels Page B

the banquet, the butterfly’s dead!’ ”
    “What?” Billy looked toward the bottle of wine Fletcher had been sipping from all evening, wondering if the man had grown bosky. “What on earth is that?”
    “That, my little friend,” Fletcher responded, turning onto his side and raising up his head on one propping hand, “is ‘The Butterfly’s Funeral.’ Beau wrote it about a dozen years ago, when he wallowed in some muse-ridden frame of mind, I suppose. There may be more verses, I cannot quite remember now, but that much has always stayed with me. I have wondered many times if he had some premonition about his falling out with Swellfoot and wrote the poem in order to be ready for it. Of course, just whom he intended cast in the role of Butterfly remains his secret.”
    Billy found herself interested in spite of herself. “Why doesn’t the Prince Regent like Mr. Brummell anymore? They were the greatest of good friends for a long time, weren’t they?”
    Fletcher puffed on the cheroot, remembering all the tales he had heard about Beau and Prinny. He chuckled aloud. “Almost twenty years, if I’m right, dating all the way back to Beau’s time in the Tenth Light Dragoons.” He shook his head. “I doubt the dragoons ever recovered from the insult.”
    “Insult? I don’t understand. What did Mr. Brummell do?”
    Fletcher held the cheroot in front of him, gazing into the red tip. “No more than he had to, actually,” he said, chuckling once more. “As a matter of fact, poor Beau got himself so caught up with the social whirl of London and Brighton that he had difficulty finding his place for the parade, having been unable to commit his troop number to memory. Luckily, the man Beau stood directly in front of for parade was the possessor of a lovely—and quite enormous—blue nose, making it a simple thing for Beau to locate his place in line. Then misfortune struck and the game was up.”
    “The blue-nosed man died?”
    “No, much more than that,” Fletcher explained. “The blue-nosed man had gotten himself transferred to another group. Of course, as the blue-nosed man moved, so too did Beau, only to be informed by his superior officer that he had positioned himself in the wrong place. Beau, with, I am told, just the merest elevation of one eyebrow, turned to see the blue nose to his rear and stated firmly, ‘Non-sense. I know better than that. A pret-ty th-ing, in-deed, if I did not know my own tr-oop.’ ”
    Billy laughed aloud at the mental picture Fletcher’s words conjured. “Is that how he sounds?” she asked once her giggles were under control. “What an odd way of speaking.”
    “An affected drawl, I grant you, but although I should dislike it terribly in anyone else, Beau has always been able to bring it off beautifully.”
    “And his dress,” Billy pursued. “Is it true that he is copied by every man with any pretension to good grooming and fashion?”
    “I have copied his simplicity most outrageously,” Fletcher admitted unashamedly, for he had long admired his friend’s unstated elegance and predilection for cleanliness, “although I have not gone so far as to spend hours tying a cravat or taken to bathing in milk. I can say that the air in London, never particularly healthful, has been greatly improved by Beau’s oft-copied prescription for daily bathing and sparkling clean linen.”
    Billy, scratching at yet another itch, silently agreed with Beau’s prescription. “Yet now he and the Prince Regent are quarreling. Poor Mr. Brummell. He must be terribly unhappy.”
    Fletcher, after tossing the remains of the cheroot into the flames, moved to recline against the trunk of a nearby tree. “He’s resigned to it, I’d say,” he said, reflecting on Beau as he’d last seen him. “Although he is gambling too high of late. He always did make a fine art of folly. I don’t foresee a happy future for Beau, to tell you the truth, now that Swellfoot is known to no longer favor him.