A Tart Affair in the Riviera A Mills and Swoon short by Sarnia

 

The French Riviera was unseasonably warm and offensively smug.
Lady Honoria Bellweather had arrived with three trunks of silk, one cousin (mildly forgettable), and a vague desire not to get arrested....this time.



She had not, at any point, intended to seduce a Hungarian count. That simply happened.

Count Miklós Várady was, in her defence, tall, unreasonably bronzed, and cursed with the kind of accent that made even his hat sound suggestive. He was also in possession of a pastry yacht.

“Do you mean a yacht for pastries or a pastry in the shape of a yacht?” she’d asked, suspicious.

“Both,” he had replied, with a smirk that had probably unbuttoned dozens of corsets across Eastern Europe.

The trouble began, naturally, with a tart. Not Honoria this time (though the local bishop would argue otherwise), but an actual lemon tart served during the Ambassadors’ Gala at Villa Les Oiseaux, a soirée so exclusive even the waiters required breeding.

One minute, the tart sat proudly atop a silver salver, lemon curd glistening like a debutante’s tears. Awaiting it's fate to be sliced, divided, and conquered. The next, it was gone.

Not sliced. Gone. Not a crumb, not a whiff of tangy lemon...gone.

An uproar ensued. A Spanish diplomat fainted. A baroness accused her husband of "culinary sabotage." Honoria, somewhat tipsy on crème de violette, leaned toward the count and said, “You haven’t hidden it in your trousers, have you?”

“No,” he said, scandalised. “This is tailored.”

Later that evening, as diplomats sulked and waiters were interrogated with unkind cheeses in the pantry, Honoria took matters into her own gloved hands. She cornered Miklós near the ornamental fish pond and whispered, “You stole that tart, didn’t you?”

He smiled enigmatically. “What would you do if I had?”

“I would be forced,” she said, removing one glove with delicate menace, “to punish you.”

“Ah,” he murmured, stepping closer. “You are English.”

The affair escalated rapidly.

By morning, Honoria was declared “missing” by her cousin, who had been too busy making eyes at a Sardinian botanist to notice her disappearance.

She was, in fact, on the pastry yacht, anchored discreetly off the coast, half-naked and thoroughly unrepentant.

“So where is the tart?” she asked, wrapped in a silk robe of questionable origin.

Miklós reached beneath the settee and produced it: flawless, unspoiled, perched on its little gold doily.

“I couldn’t allow anyone else to eat it,” he said.

“Because?”

“Because it was named after you.”

Naturally, there was fallout.

The British consul received a formal complaint involving patisserie theft, indecency, and a diplomatic insult involving a suggestive napkin fold. I saw it, and yes, it was falic, one couldn't argue.

"If you have never had a pastry eaten from your lower regions you haven't lived," Honoria explained to the horrified ladies at the Sunday cricket match. It wasn't her fault, there was gin and a very good loocking waiter.

Honoria, once returned to shore (and clothed), blamed sunstroke and a misinterpretation of Hungarian dessert etiquette.

Miklós vanished shortly after, last seen boarding a steamer bound for Tangier with a violin case and a twinkle of mischief.

He left Honoria one thing: the tart, now immortalised in oil on canvas, delivered to Bellweather Hall under the name:

Portrait of a Lady in Lemon.

The End

© 2025 Sarnia de la Mare for Mills and Swoon

The Dilemma of the Disappearing Derrière A Mills and Swoon short by Sarnia

                                       

          

It began, as these things so often did, with a bottom.

Not Honoria’s, which was widely agreed to be both pert and philosophically unassailable, but the alabaster posterior of the Duke of Bellington, recently immortalised in marble by one Miss Lavinia Crimble—sculptress, troublemaker, and owner of the most expensive collection of scandal in Sussex.



The statue, titled Man in Repose, had been commissioned for the gardens at Brimwell Abbey, and depicted His Grace reclining against an improbably convenient vine, entirely nude save for a suggestion of toga and an expression that suggested deep thought or mild constipation.

Lady Honoria, attending the unveiling for the champagne and a chance to ogle the nobility in daylight, leaned toward her companion and whispered, “Well, someone’s been chiselling more than the truth.”

Her companion, the Honourable Benedict Prym (debutante-snubbing bachelor, collector of obscure beetles, and renowned for once seducing an heiress with nothing but a butter knife and a minor chord), did not laugh.

He was looking at the statue’s rear, which, unlike the rest of it, had been… partially removed.

Not broken. Removed. As though by expert hands and inappropriate curiosity.

“Who steals a duke’s arse?” Honoria murmured.

“Someone with ambition,” Benedict replied wryly.

Later that evening, as the Duke thundered about breaches of dignity and Lavinia Crimble sobbed into a lace doily about “the sanctity of form,” Honoria did what any sensible woman with a fan and a fondness for intrigue would do: she went snooping.

Her inquiries took her to the servants’ quarters, where she was offered a sherry and an unsolicited view of the butler’s left breast; to the sculpture tent, where Lavinia was found passed out atop a bust of Queen Caroline; and finally to the tool shed, where Benedict was already waiting, holding a lantern and looking suspiciously competent.

“You,” she said, stepping inside. “Of course.”

“I might say the same to you.”

“Did you do it?”

He blinked. “Do I look like a man who abducts buttocks?”

“You look like a man who gets bored before dessert.”

He ignored this. “The piece is symbolic.”

“Of what? The fragility of dignity?”

“Of legacy,” he said, stepping closer. “What we leave behind. Or, in this case, what gets taken.”

Honoria stared at him, aware of the close air, the faint smell of turpentine, and the odd fact that someone had left a half-eaten crumpet on the workbench. Benedict leaned in, his hand brushing hers—perhaps by accident, perhaps by plot.

“The question,” he murmured, “is not who stole the posterior, but why.”

There was a beat of silence.

“I was really hoping for a kiss,” Honoria said. “You’re ruining the moment with amateur philosophy.”

"Kissing is for grandmothers and children, grown-ups make love."  

And then, bliss. Or at least, heat. Mouths met. A little too many teeth for Honoria's liking which she put down to Eton and the boys practicing on each other.

The lantern wobbled. Somewhere, something wooden creaked in protest. Honoria’s fan fell to the floor like a wounded dove. And, in the background, the sound of distant shrieking as the Dowager tripped over the missing sculpture part, which had been hidden, poorly, behind a geranium.

In the commotion of the accident all lost sight and care for the half buttock which disappeared into to oblivion of forgotten drunken celebrations.

By morning, the theft was hushed up.

The Duke’s dignity was reassembled with a hand file and discreetly repositioned to avoid viewers coming up the rear.

Lavinia claimed artistic intent.

And Honoria… well, she didn’t marry Benedict either. He left to document horned beetles in Madagascar and sent her a telegram every Christmas that simply read: Still thinking about that shed. Last news reached England that he had found love with a girl from Bath who had protruding teeth. A match made in heaven, surely.

She kept the fan, of course. A lasting memory of another near escape with an old Etonian. Behind a velvet curtain in her library, another keepsake, a marble half-buttock that she swore was just “a bookend with character.”

THE END.

© 2025 Sarnia de la Mare

The Art of Falling, Elegantly, A Mills and Swoon Short by Sarnia

Lady Honoria Bellweather’s chief concern, apart from the ever-expanding mildew patch in the east wing of Bellweather Hall, was not to fall in love. Love, after all, was for servants and poets, neither of whom had to maintain a viable bloodline, or tolerate the Dowager Marchioness’s dinner conversation.

                                                      

It was therefore particularly inconvenient when, upon entering the ballroom at Carrion House—her gown artfully ruched to imply innocence while aggressively suggesting otherwise, Honoria slipped on a dropped profiterol and landed in the arms of a man who was, by all accounts, thoroughly beneath her.

Major Dominic Arlesford had the kind of reputation that required the use of italics when discussed in polite society. He had been “posted abroad” for reasons that seemed to involve a diplomat’s daughter, a Turkish wrestling match, and a camel with a mild opium addiction. That he was now back in England, glowering by the pianoforte with a scar on his jaw and trousers cut a whisper too tight, was nothing short of a scandal.

“Major,” Honoria said, once she realised he was not going to drop her, “you appear to have caught me.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” he replied. “I usually only catch women when they’re running away.”

“Oh, how droll,” she said, too quickly, and hated herself for it.

 

Over the coming weeks, Dominic appeared in the strangest of places; at her aunt’s tea mornings, at her cousin’s fencing demonstration, once even in the hedge maze at dusk, which might have seemed accidental if he hadn’t had a blanket, a bottle of something French, and a loaf of bread he was inexplicably slicing with a cavalry dagger.

“Do you often picnic in topiary traps?” she asked.

“Only when I expect company,” he replied, tearing a piece of bread with his teeth like a wolf who owned a cravat.

It was becoming intolerably difficult not to be intrigued by him.

The inevitable scandal occurred, of course, during the annual Harvest Ball, where the wine flowed like minor gossip and everyone’s virtue was at risk by the second quadrille. Honoria, emboldened by three glasses of claret and the knowledge that her corset was on its last hook, found herself whisked onto the terrace by Dominic.

“You’ve been looking at me all evening,” he said.

“I was merely squinting at the lanterns.”

He moved closer. “And last week, at the stables?”

“I was admiring the filly.”

“You said it was gelded.”

“I was being diplomatic.”

Dominic looked down at her, his gaze lingering a moment too long. “You are trouble, Lady Honoria.”

“I assure you, I am merely inconvenient.”

And then, a scandal most decadent. Or at least, a moment so charged that Honoria would later insist the wind had shifted and their lips had merely collided in a freak gust. Either way, a breath was taken, a cravat was tugged, and an earring may have rolled into the shrubbery.

They were discovered by her mother, of course. The Countess of Dorking had the uncanny knack of appearing whenever her daughter’s reputation was most at risk. There was a scream. There was a threat of disinheritance. Dominic was challenged to a duel, but declined on account of his gout (which may or may not have been real). 

But by the next Season, Lady Honoria was married.

Not to Dominic—God, no. He eloped with the vicar’s wife and moved to Portugal, where he opened a fencing school for aristocrats who enjoyed wearing tight britches and emitted the the vulgar vanities of men with large endowments.

Honoria married Sir Giles Flapperton, who owned several successful jam factories and, more importantly, a complete indifference to her whereabouts on Tuesday afternoons.

She took up oil painting, eventually. Her teacher, decrepit to avoid any distractions. And, in the privacy of her solarium, she painted an exceptionally lifelike study of the man that may have been or may have not, holding an earring and staring out toward her wherever she happened to be.

THE END.

© 2025 Sarnia de la Mare