Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources by Shelley Adina

devoted to nothing but fun could only be good for them all, especially after the slog of final examinations and the excitement of graduation.
    Eagerly, she ripped open the note enclosed, which ran to only one sheet and was covered in a slapdash hand with lots of underlines and flourishes.
     
    Dear Lizzie—
     
    Are you shocked that I have not Miss-ed you? You know you think of me as Claude and I think of you as Lizzie, so let us dispense at once with these tiresome honorifics, shall we?
    Do prevail upon Lady Claire and the Dunsmuirs to come to Colliford. I shall be in quite the pet if you do not, and then we shall all descend upon you in London like a pack of harpies and she will regret her hard-heartedness!
    Must dash—we’re stopping in Paris on the way back to pick up my new skiff for the races, and I’m in the mood for a jolly razzle at the Moulin Rouge. Are you jealous?
     
    Ever your
    Claude
     
    Laughing, shaking her head, Lizzie folded the letters one into the other and slipped them into the book she had been reading during the Christmas holidays.
    Her friends might not appreciate her as much as they could, but at least there were some people in this world—knowledgeable, powerful people—who did. She was not such an immature fool as to believe the occupants of Wilton Crescent discounted her, or even that they did not love her. She had ample proof to the contrary, and perhaps she had been a bit of a snipe to the boys a little while ago. She would set that right and they would all be jolly again.
    She smiled at herself.
    Claude’s slangy way of speaking was rubbing off. It must be the way the young, rich set spoke in Paris—the way the girls would speak in Geneva, at Maison Villeneuve. That was one more reason why she wanted with every fiber of her being to go to this country house party—she would watch Claude’s friends and learn and practice the things they did and said. She was a good mimic. Not as good as Maggie, but good enough to pass herself off as one of the Paris set, careless and rich and ever so slightly blasé about the world.
    Oh, yes, she could do this.
    All she had to do was convince the Lady.
    *
    Lady Claire regarded the pile of correspondence upon her desk the next morning with some dismay. “Good heavens. There must be a month’s worth of letters and invitations here. Lewis, why did you not forward them to us in Munich?”
    “That lot’s just come in the last week, Lady,” he said. “Once it came out in the papers that the empress had shook yer ’and, it started, and it ent let up yet.” As if to put a full stop to the sentence, the hydraulic system gave a whoosh and another tube dropped into the slot in the library wall behind them.
    “We shall be inundated. Lizzie, call your sister. We must sort the urgent from the mundane at once.”
    Lizzie slipped past Lewis with a smile, and he stood aside a little stiffly, as if he had not quite forgiven her despite the pretty apology she had made to him and Snouts last night.
    Ah well. His feelings always had been a little touchy, probably from the less kind of the boys perpetually calling him Loser, though no one did that now. He had become a sort of general factotum to the Lady, who introduced him as her secretary upon the occasions that called for it. Snouts no longer held that position, having bigger fish to fry at the Morton Glass Works. She would chivvy him out of his sulks and they would be good friends as they had been before, just you wait.
    She fetched Maggie from her unpacking and the two of them pulled up chairs around the great oak desk.
    “We must sort these, girls. Invitations shall go to Maggie, letters to me, and Lizzie, you take everything else and sort it by type.”
    Within the hour, Maggie’s pile was much higher than either of the other two. “How popular we are,” she said in a wondering tone, waving one that possessed engraving and a red seal.
    Lady Claire looked up from a letter that bore a schoolboy’s scrawl