Amanda McCabe - Girl in the Beaded Mask

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England, 1922

David Carlisle believes no woman would want to marry the broken and isolated man who has returned from the trenches of France. Especially vivacious Lady Louise Hatton, better known as Lulu—the one woman who makes his heart begin to thaw with her bright smile.

What David doesn’t realize is that Lulu has been fantasizing about him her whole life. And at a scandalous masked ball, she’s determined to show David just how badly she wants him….

I was so excited to have the chance to write a story set in the 1920s! I’ve been fascinated by the era ever since I was a teenager—I blame The Great Gatsby and old silent Louise Brooks movies. The music, the fast cars, the cocktails, and above all the gorgeous clothes! It’s a fascinating time, filled with enormous change and upheaval, dashing men, and spirited, independent women. It’s the perfect setting for a romance.

Before I jumped into David and Lulu’s story, I watched silent movies and various versions of Gatsby over and over, and did a lot of reading. Here are a few great sources I came across:

Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America(2003)—my story is set in England, but this book was huge help in tracing trends and fads of the era

DJ Taylor, Bright Young People (2007)—an account of the high life in between-the-wars England

Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation (1989)

Ronald L. Davis, ed., The Social and Cultural Life of the 1920s (1972)

Marion Meade, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin (2004)

Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring ‘20s (2010)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

1922

“Mum is going to absolutely kill you if she catches you with that,” a lazy young voice said, punctuated by the slow turning of a magazine page.

Lady Louisa Hatton—known by everyone as Lulu—looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. It was dyed a stylish peacock-blue, and sent curls of silvery smoke out the open window into the warm summer breeze. It looked terribly chic and sophisticated, but… “And she would be absolutely right. They’re perfectly vile. I’ll have to learn to be glamorous without them.”

She extinguished it in the crystal bowl set on the window ledge. The foul thing disposed of, she tightened the sash on her dressing gown and turned around to face her younger sister. Jessica lay sprawled out in the middle of Lulu’s bed, her feet propped on the carved headboard as she read the latest issue of Town Talk.

Town talk—that all seemed terribly far away in the middle of a quiet country summer. Her London debut season seemed ages ago, even though it had just ended. Beaded gowns, tea dances, trips to the theater, masquerade balls…and the disappointing, fumbling kisses from men behind screens and potted palms. How could something be so exciting and so dreary at the same time?

She had waited so long to be grown up, to be part of the real world at last. She was so tired of being pushed to the side, of being “protected” from things considered “unpleasant” for her own good. But being a woman wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, either. She still wasn’t really allowed to have fun.

And the young men she met at those carefully orchestrated dinners and dances—they weren’t what she had hoped for, either. Years of reading stuff like Jane Eyre and those delicious sheikh novels from America didn’t prepare her for the truth of English courtship. For young men whose palms were damp as they danced with her, who talked on and on about cricket and house party pranks. They weren’t Rochester or Mr. Darcy. They weren’t…

Well, they weren’t him. They weren’t David Carlisle, which was so silly since she hadn’t seen David in nearly four years. Even before that, all those summers when he would come to Hatton Hall to visit his school friend, her poor brother William, she had only been Bill’s pesky kid sister to him. He teased her, laughed at her, loaned her books, and then went off to dance with beautiful debutantes.

But Lulu built a whole dream around David Carlisle, with his crooked smile and bright blue eyes. He became her ideal, and she was sure that once she really grew up, once she was one of those debs, with their satin gowns and upswept hair, he would see that they were meant for each other. No one was as handsome and smart and sophisticated as he was. No one made her feel the way he did when he just looked at her.

Then the war came, and all her girlish dreams were just one of the millions of lost things. After the Armistice, David visited Hatton Hall once more, to tell them about Bill’s last days. He wasn’t the same David at all. His eyes were dark and haunted, and he walked with a stick. The left side of his face was red with scars. He had kissed Lulu on the cheek and said, “You’ve grown up while I was gone.” But she could tell he was not really there, that he had left his old self far away.

She looked for him in London, hoping he would appear at some party or at the opera. He never did, and she heard little gossip about him.

Lulu pushed away sad thoughts of David Carlisle. It did no good to dwell on him and on all that was lost, on old hopes and loves. It was just summer here at Hatton Hall, stirring up memories. In London, where everything was new and blindingly bright, she could hide from the past. Here it was everywhere she turned.

“What’s going on in Town Talk, then?” she asked brightly. She went and perched on the edge of the bed beside Jessica, peering over her sister’s shoulder at the glossy photos of Bright Young People at various parties. Dancing in elaborate fake Watteau gowns, swimming on the French Riviera, riding in sleek cars, champagne glasses always aloft and painted mouths laughing.

“Oh, heaps,” said Jessica as she turned the page. “Or at least there was, until everyone left London for the summer. Is it always like this in the city?”

Lulu studied a photo of party-goers dressed as pinafored babies for a theme party, riding in giant prams. “Not under Mum’s watch it’s not,” she said. “London is all staid tea dances and the opera for a deb like me.”

“I shouldn’t like London anyway,” Jessica said decisively.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“No. I’m sure I couldn’t take Angel there and I can’t live without her.”

Angel was Jessica’s favorite pet, a smelly lamb she dressed up in little jackets and took around on a silk cord lead. “It’s true Mum wouldn’t let you take Angel to London, which is too bad. She’d be a big hit at parties.”

“Would she? Maybe London wouldn’t be so bad after all then.” Jessica gave her a shrewd look. “But you didn’t seem like you’d had much fun there when you got home.”