Cover

MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL is an author, professional puppeteer and voice actor. Mary currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit www.maryrobinettekowal.com for more information about her fiction and her puppetry.

The Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal

Shades of Milk and Honey

Glamour in Glass

Without A Summer

Valour and Vanity

Glamour in

Glass

Mary Robinette Kowal

For Mom and Dad

If not for you, I would not be a writer, nor

have the courage to submit.

Thank you for teaching me that the arts

are important.

Mary wished to say something very

sensible, but knew not how.

– Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

ONE

Dinner Conversation

Finding oneself a guest of honour only increases the presentiment of anxiety, should one be disposed to such feelings. Jane Vincent could not help but feel some measure of alarm upon hearing her name called by the Prince Regent, for though she fully expected to be escorted into dinner by someone other than her husband, she had not expected to accompany His Royal Highness and to be seated at his right hand. Though this was but an intimate dinner party of eighteen, by the order of precedence her place should be at the rear of the line. Yet one could hardly express such doubts to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Faerie, and Ireland.

The only title Jane could claim on her own was that of Mrs. David Vincent, and her entire claim for being invited at all lay in her marriage to the Prince Regent’s favourite glamourist. As they exited Carlton House through a tented hall, Jane felt all the eyes of those assembled fall upon her, and under their gaze the unequal nature of her station magnified. The dove silk which had seemed so fine when she had commissioned it last summer now seemed dingy by comparison to gowns such as Lady Hertford’s rich claret velvet, which had long sleeves slashed to allow glimpses of a cloth of silver. Her mother had wanted to buy her a new gown, but Jane had resisted. She was an artisan now, and had no intention of pretending to be part of the fashionable set . . . and yet, being escorted by the Prince Regent made that choice seem less easy now.

But all that worry fell away upon entering the Polygon Ballroom, which glittered and dripped with diaphanous folds of glamour hung to create the illusion of a water folly filled with mermaids and sea-horses. She and Vincent had laboured for the past three months on the spectacle and they could justly be proud of the effect, though she would have to retouch the anemones when she had a chance. The colour was off when compared to the palette of this winter’s fashions.

The Prince Regent stopped with her on the threshold of the temporary structure and inhaled with pleasure.