Because she liked everything about them. She liked the tall ones, the short ones, the broad ones, the slender ones. She liked them in powdered wigs and with their hair in natural queues. She liked them on horseback and in carriages and strolling about the massive gardens at Norwood Park, where she happened to reside with her father and two brothers. She liked the way they looked at her and smiled at her, and how they laughed with their heads tilted back at all the amusing things she said. Which, apparently, she did with some frequency, as one or five of them seemed always to laugh and say, “How clever you are, Miss Armstrong!”

Margot liked young gentlemen so much that, on the occasion of Lynetta’s sixteenth birthday, she convinced her father to allow her to host a ball in her dear friend’s honor at Norwood Park.

“Lynetta Beauly?” her father had asked with a sigh of tedium, his gaze on a letter bearing news from London. “She is not yet out.”

“But she will be presented this Season,” Margot had hopefully reminded him.

“Why do her parents not provide her with a gathering?” her father had asked as he stuck the point of an ink quill beneath his wig to scratch an itch.

“Pappa, you know they haven’t the means.”

“You haven’t the means, either, Margot. I am the only person at Norwood Park who has the means to provide this young woman, for whom I have no particular regard, with a ball.” He’d shaken his head at the absurdity of it. “Why are you so keen for it?”

Margot had, apparently, blushed. Lynetta said that was one of her true faults—it was impossible to hide what Margot was thinking because her fair skin changed from cream to pink to red with only the slightest provocation.

“I see,” her father had said sagely, and had leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his belly. “Some young gentleman has caught your eye. Is that it?”

Well...she would not belabor the point, but all of them had caught her eye. She’d fussed with a curl at her collarbone. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” she’d muttered as she’d studied the pattern of brocade on a chair in her father’s study. “No one in particular, really.”

Her father had smirked. “Very well. Amuse yourself. Give this ball,” he’d said, and had waved her away.

* * *

A FEW WEEKS LATER, everyone within a fifty-mile radius of Norwood Park descended on the area, as it was well known in northern England that a Norwood Park ball was unparalleled in luxury and company with the exception of London’s Mayfair district.