Hearts and Masks

On a fog-laced Cotswold morning, Alice—feral grin, ankles itching for velocity—spins through baroque corridors like a Catherine wheel, her uncle’s swollen toes crystallizing into the very shackles she means to shatter. A single thunderous prank—pheasants loosed in the study, ink in the claret—bludgeons the gouty patriarch into exile; the mansion exhales, its windows yawning open upon a kingdom of self-invention. She lacquers her identity with a maid’s apron, coaxes the staff into masquerading diplomats and duchesses, and waylays Richard Compton, a lionized novelist whose sentences are longer than his patience, persuading him that the marble mausoleum is now a bohemian guesthouse. Furniture is re-christened, ghosts are rented out as boarders, and for one incandescent dusk the manor becomes a Pirandello diorama—until the uncle’s cane raps back across the gravel, bursting the illusion like a soap bubble. Months later, under chandeliers dripping with hunt-ball candlewax, Alice pirouettes in silk, her heartbeat syncopated to the quadrille; Richard, still bemused, circles her orbit while Galloping Dick—top-hat highwayman, burglar laureate—threads the ballroom pockets for a diamond rivière worthy of a tsarina. Midnight yelps; jewels vanish; suspicions ricochet. Alice, convinced her beloved litterateur moonlights as a jewel magpie, bundles him into the wine cellar where they collide with Dick’s lantern-jawed accomplice. In the mercurial torchlight, identities melt like tallow: heiress, author, thief, audience. Handcuffs click, accusations detonate, yet the true larcenists are unmasked in a finale that pirouettes from farce to fugue, leaving reputations re-stitched and hearts freshly pickpocketed.