Snobbery with Violence by MC Beaton

said, ‘When you go down to the servants’ hall, you will need to find out which is my bell. Oh, there’s the dressing gong. I wonder who else is of the house party.’
    Daisy was rapidly unpacking the trunks. ‘What dress, my lady?’
    ‘White, I suppose. The moiré with the lace inserts. My pearls, I think. White gloves. The kid shoes with the little bows and those new sequinned evening stockings.’
    Daisy helped Rose put her hair up over the pads and fixed it in place after she had dressed. ‘You look really beautiful, my lady. Maybe there’s a handsome gentleman in the party.
    ‘After my recent experience, I have no interest in men.’
    ‘Garn!’
    ‘No, I mean it. Now pick up my stole and fan and follow me to the drawing-room. The second gong has just been sounded. You’d better ring the bell first and get a guide.’
    A liveried footmen escorted them down from the tower into an enormous fake baronial hall where fake suits of armour glistened under fake tattered medieval flags.
    A butler took over and led them across the hall, opened a heavy carved door and sonorously announced, ‘Lady Rose Summer.’
    It seemed to Rose at first that she had entered a room full of staring eyes. Red light from a large fire flickered on monocles and lorgnettes. Then the marchioness came forward. ‘Nice to see you, dear. Pleasant journey?’
    ‘Yes. I—’
    ‘Good. Let me see. Take you round. Introductions. No, I won’t. You’ll get to know everybody in good time. Ah, dinner.’
    ‘Got the honour,’ said a young man with patent-leather hair, holding out his arm. ‘I’m Freddy Pomfret. Deuced fine place this, what?’
    ‘Very fine, yes,’ said Rose politely and was led into dinner. She wondered briefly whether the marquess would serve roast ox to chime with the surroundings, but the dinner was the usual extravagant fare. A large silver epergne in the centre of the table depicting General Wolfe’s army scaling the heights of Quebec restricted her view of the guests opposite her. Freddy was on her right and his friend, Tristram Baker-Willis, was on her left.
    The words of Miss Tremp came back to Rose. ‘Ninety men out of every hundred’, the governess had said, ‘offer a remark upon the weather, but unless there has been something very extraordinary going on in the meteorological line, it is better to avoid the subject if possible.’
    Fortunately for Rose, the bomb explosions near her home fascinated her two dinner companions so much that she was obliged to say little. Freddy ranted about the Bolsheviks and when she eventually turned away to Tristram, he ranted in much the same vein.
    At last the marchioness rose as a signal that the ladies were to follow her to the drawing-room.
    Rose had counted nine men and nine women in the house party, the number not including their hosts.
    The marchioness introduced Rose and she tried to remember all the names. There were two American sisters, Harriet and Deborah Peterson, buxom and healthy-looking but disappointing to Rose because they did not have American accents but the clipped, staccato speech of the others.
    Then there was a thin, waspish girl called Mary Gore-Desmond who said little but kept flashing angry little resentful glances all around her. A Scottish beauty, Frederica Sutherland, was telling them all about the joys of hunting in a voice which could have been heard across two six-acre fields and three spinneys.
    Mrs Jerry Trumpington, ensconced in an armchair by the fire, was a toad of a woman with a fat lascivious face and very thick lips. She was talking about food to a dark, elegant woman, Margaret Bryce-Cuddlestone.
    Standing together in a corner: mousy Maisie Chatterton, and a tall, pseudo-theatrical lady called Lady Sarah Trenton.
    After the introductions, it looked as if Rose was going to be ignored, but Margaret Bryce-Cuddlestone approached her and said with a smile, ‘Are you getting over your terrible treatment at the hands of that cad,