✍️ Sarnia de la Mare FRSA Teller of Tales 🍿

  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 silve...

                                         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, leane...