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Chapter 6

Subterfuge

W hen Julianna arrived at the agreed-upon meeting space in the Pavilion gardens, the gentlemen were already there. Well, Lords Harcourt and Marsden were there, but they seemed to be accompanied by an older, white-haired gentleman wearing a bottle-green coat and looking as though he were visiting from the previous century. He was . . .

“Effie?” she exclaimed. And immediately corrected herself: “Lord Featherfinch!” It felt wrong to call him that, but what choice did she have? “What has happened?” She answered her own question: “You have cut your hair!”

“Yes, and powdered it.” He kicked up a heel. “I thought it would complement the court shoes you told me not to wear.”

“My . . . goodness.” The long, shiny hair she gathered he was known for was simply gone.

“We tried to talk him out of it, Miss Evans,” Lord Harcourt said. “The haircut and the entire . . . look.”

“Well, I did,” Lord Marsden said. “You didn’t try very hard, Harcourt. He’s wearing your coat.”

“I have embraced the challenge of subterfuge,” Effie, ignoring his friends, said.

“You certainly have.” On the one hand, he looked nothing like himself. His dark hair had been cropped close to his head and, indeed, powdered quite thoroughly, making him look like an elderly Julius Caesar. He was wearing one of his famously outrageous waistcoats—this one was sunshine-yellow embroidered with red, which, she had to admit, matched the red heels on his shoes perfectly. With the addition of his borrowed green coat instead of the black he’d been wearing the two other times she’d seen him, he looked like a confection one might find in the court of Marie Antionette. Subtle it was not, but counterintuitively, it did work as a disguise.

“I have also decided that I’m your husband, not your assistant.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are already wearing a ring.”

“Yes, but . . .” But what? Why did it matter what roles they adopted for a brief tour that would be conducted by someone they would never see again? And more to the point, what was this feeling in her stomach? It was a slow sort of . . . churning. Yesterday there had been seagulls flapping through her head. Today it felt as if worms were coming to the surface of the soil after a rain, slow but insistent.

“I can be your husband and your assistant,” Effie said. “Your husband who is your assistant.”

“That would never happen,” she said, choosing to focus on the minutia of the conversation at hand, rather than the upending of her insides. “More common in my industry is the husband is the proprietor of the magazine and the wife is the editor.”

“No, no, I am not the proprietor.”

“Well, you cannot be my husband who is my assistant. That would raise more suspicion than your”—she eyed him up and down—“personage.”

“All right, all right. I shall merely be your assistant. I just thought if I was your husband, we might dine together after our tour. I know you said we’re not meant to concern ourselves with your reputation, but I thought I could accompany you back to the hotel and . . .”

Julianna very much wanted to know how Effie had been planning to finish that sentence. But more than that, she wanted to dine with him after the tour. Her face was growing hot. She didn’t care for that. She sniffed. “Very well, be my husband. Perhaps it shall be amusing to have one of those for a day. And we all know how accomplished you are at concealing your true identity.” She did not wait for his agreement as his friends chortled at the barb, merely turned and said, “Come along, all of you.”

They were met by a housekeeper, though Julianna imagined the role was more akin to that of a general, given the size of the house and the monarchical stature of its inhabitants.

The interior of the Pavilion—at least the handful of public rooms they were shown—was nothing short of astonishing. Never had Julianna seen, or thought to see, something so opulent, so extravagant.

They were led first to a grand, lushly carpeted gallery papered in a botanical pattern. Everywhere one looked, one saw bamboo tables and enormous vases. The elongated room was flanked on either end by grand staircases that were, they were informed, made of mahogany carved to look like bamboo.

“Can you tell us anything about the inspiration, or rationale, for the decor here?” Julianna asked the housekeeper. “It wasn’t that long ago, I understand, that the palace was made over in the French style.”

Julianna continued to question the housekeeper as Lord Harcourt “sketched” and Lord Marsden took furious notes, notes she suspected were real. Julianna’s “husband” said nothing, merely followed a few steps behind her, though he offered his arm as they departed for the banqueting room.

The room’s enormous table was geographically its center, but the eye was drawn everywhere else, seemingly all at once. Golden lampstands, pagodas, and all manner of luxury competed for one’s attention. It would hardly matter what one ate in a room such as this, so absorbed would one’s other senses be.

“The chandelier weighs one ton,” the housekeeper informed them, causing Julianna to tilt her head back to take in a cut-glass chandelier hanging from a high, domed ceiling. It was held by a silver dragon.

She hardly knew what to say, where to look, so she kept looking at the dragon. In truth, she was feeling a little overwhelmed. She had been prepared for luxury but not to this degree. It was as if her mind couldn’t make sense of such excess. She felt almost frozen.

“What a pity we can’t include an illustration.” Lord Harcourt sidled up to Julianna and showed her his sketchbook—but angled in such a way that she was the only one who could see his “drawing.” The page was covered with scribbles, most of which were abstract, but she caught a glimpse in one corner of a clumsy drawing of a horse, and in another, a tree.

The absurdity of it tipped her out of her trance, and suddenly, it was all she could do not to dissolve into a fit of giggles. “How wonderful, Mr. Nasmith”—she managed to summon the agreed-upon alias for Lord Harcourt. “You have quite captured the essence of the space and your efforts will aid Mr. Hopkins”—“Mr. Hopkins,” of course, being Lord Marsden’s assumed name—“enormously in his essay.”

The housekeeper asked if they wanted to see the kitchen. Julianna thought it odd she was offering, but she wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity. It would certainly make for an interesting juxtaposition to all this luxury. Effie winked at Julianna as he once again offered a “husbandly” arm.

She was both right and wrong about the kitchen being less luxurious than that which had preceded it. On the one hand, it was clearly a functional space, lined with more copper pots and pans than Julianna could count. But it was also like no kitchen she had ever seen. “These are . . . trees?” Julianna asked, gesturing to one of several thin columns that reached all the way up to the high ceiling.

“Yes,” came the reply. “Palm trees. Even the kitchen has not been overlooked in His Majesty’s decor scheme.”

The kitchen was clearly a point of pride, for they were treated to a lecture on its technological advancements, which included a steam-heated warming table and a range hood made of copper that was meant to draw cooking odors up and away.

Julianna was stuck on the trees, though. Imagine having four enormous decorative columns in one’s kitchen . Imagine having a decor scheme for a room that was merely functional, a room that no one besides servants would ever see.

She stopped in her tracks, interrogating herself. Was she implying that servants deserved less beautiful surroundings than did His Majesty’s guests dining on the other side of the door?

So lost in her thoughts was she that she had to hurry to catch the others, who were departing through a different door. Well, she had to hurry to catch Lords Harcourt and Marsden. “Mr. Evans”—because Julianna had already introduced herself when asking for a tour, they’d had to give Effie her surname—was hovering nearby, uxorious as ever.

“Shall we?” he asked gently, seeming to understand that the tour was unfolding at a more rapid pace than Julianna was capable of keeping up with.

Indeed, she had to force herself to pay attention to the saloon, and the music room, which were the penultimate and final stops on their tour. Red silk–paneled walls, an enormous sunflower carpet, pagodas, golden clocks, elaborate wallpaper, soaring ceilings.

Her mind was spinning.

When it became apparent that the tour was winding down, she searched her mind for any remaining questions and came up blank. There was too much detail to even know where to begin with questions of fact, and she could hardly ask whether the kitchen maids and footmen appreciated the palm trees in the kitchen.

After offering profuse thanks, and pledging to send a copy of the magazine, the foursome emerged blinking into the late morning—the interiors of the palace had been dim. As if by previous agreement, they strode across the gardens without speaking. It wasn’t until they were out of view of the main entrance that they circled up.

The gentlemen regarded her keenly. They were, of course, looking to her for direction, for an opinion, for something . They were looking for her to speak, not be struck dumb by a royal palace.

“I knew, of course, that the decor was inspired by the East,” she began slowly. “But to know is one thing, to see quite another.”

Effie and Lord Marsden murmured their agreement, and Julianna, still blinking, said, “I’m afraid I wasn’t able to take in enough detail to do the place justice.”

She was genuinely dismayed by having fallen so short. How would she ever convey to her readers what she had seen?

Lord Harcourt cocked his head, regarding her with a concerned expression. “Perhaps I can help.” He turned his sketchpad to face everyone, showing off his hash of a “drawing,” which was both more elaborate and more absurd than the version he’d shown her inside.

Everyone burst into laughter.

There had been an odd sort of tension accompanying them on the tour, which Julianna hadn’t realized until their laughter made it dissipate. She hadn’t truly been afraid they’d be caught out, but one couldn’t deny that they had gained entry under false pretenses.

“’Tis a good thing I’m only posing as an artist,” Lord Harcourt said when they’d calmed themselves.

“I, by contrast, took genuine notes,” Simon said, turning his journal toward them. It was indeed full of tiny, neat lines.

“You’ve done well, both of you,” she said. “The housekeeper didn’t suspect a thing about your true identities.”

“What about me?” Effie struck a silly pose, kicking up one leg as if he were one of the flamingos she had featured last year in a travel memoir from Sardinia, a posture that made everyone laugh again.

“You, too, dearest. Good job.”

Dearest? Oh no. How had that slipped out? No one seemed to think it odd, though. Perhaps they thought she was jestingly playacting the role of the indulgent wife.

The more pressing question was why she’d thought of Effie that way. Not that she didn’t think fondly on several people in her life. But she didn’t call anyone dearest .

Well, she had once. She didn’t anymore.

She didn’t want to think about that, so she asked, “Lord Marsden, what did you think of the place?”

“I was transported by it.” He huffed an impatient sigh. “Alas.”

“Indeed,” she agreed.

“Why alas?” Effie asked.

“Were you not listening the other day when we discussed the expense associated with its construction and reconstruction?” Lord Marsden said. “It’s positively immoral. That one man, even a king, should require such a home—and it isn’t even his primary home.” Another sigh from Lord Marsden, this one more resigned than impatient.

“And yet . . . ,” Julianna said.

“And yet,” Lord Marsden agreed. “Additionally, I am well aware of the hypocrisy inherent in a peer making such a statement. It was simply so . . . beautiful.”

Julianna said, “Da Vinci said, ‘Beauty perishes in life but is immortal in art.’”

“What does that mean as applied to this case?” Lord Marsden asked. “That the beauty of the Pavilion transcends the circumstances surrounding its construction?”

“Perhaps. And—or—perhaps one can disapprove of the artist but appreciate the art?”

“Hmm.” Lord Marsden nodded. “That is a fascinating notion. But who is the artist? The king? Or the architect Mr. Nash, perhaps along with his predecessors?”

“A good question.” An idea dawned. “My lord, I wonder if I might prevail upon you to actually write this piece. I’d been planning to do it myself, but I fear my mind was moving too slowly to take in all the details of the place. Regardless, I think you would be better suited to the task.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t. I have no experience with writing.”

“You write bills,” Lord Harcourt said. “Dismayingly long ones.”

“I do not write them alone,” Lord Marsden said, “and even I will admit that they are far from engaging reading.”

“You would not have to write this alone,” Julianna said. “I can help.”

“She is an excellent editor,” Effie said, and Julianna paused to smile at him. He was playing his role well. If only she could afford such a supportive assistant.

But no, she reminded herself, Effie was not playing the role of her assistant, but her husband, and she could not afford one of those. More to the point, she did not want one of those.

She turned back to Lord Marsden. “You can weave together a description of the interior, which is what most readers will be interested in, with a bit of analysis of the sort we were just undertaking.”

“You want me to say that the Pavilion is immoral?” he asked incredulously.

“No, no, but perhaps you could speculate a bit on the use, and longevity, of art.” She paused. “But by all means, if you want to say that the Pavilion is immoral, it will certainly sell a great deal of copies.”

“Will Mr. Glanvil allow it?” Effie asked. He turned to the others. “Mr. Glanvil is the proprietor of Miss Evans’s magazine.”

Julianna adored the way he called it “Miss Evans’s magazine” in the same breath that he explained that Mr. Glanvil owned it.

“Mr. Glanvil and I do not always see eye to eye on editorial matters,” Julianna said, feeling that a mite more explanation was in order. “But I’m sure that if you sign your name to the piece, Lord Marsden, Mr. Glanvil will be happy to publish whatever you would like to say.”

“But how can I sign my name if that visit was meant to be anonymous?”

“Ah. You are right, of course.”

“I’m sure we can work something out,” Lord Harcourt said. “Perhaps Marsden can write it, deliver it to Mr. Glanvil, and explain to him the need for anonymity. It wouldn’t even be a lie. You wouldn’t want to hamper your efforts in Parliament next year, would you?”

“No, indeed,” Lord Marsden said.

“Perhaps,” Effie suggested, “you could make it seem as if you are engaging him in a secret. Mr. Glanvil, from what I gather, likes to feel important. What could make him feel more important than a peer of the realm taking him into confidence?”

“I think something like that could work,” Julianna said, smiling anew at Effie. He was so good at this. He knew the compromises required in the business of magazine-making. He knew Mr. Glanvil.

But, of course, that last bit wasn’t strictly true. He’d never met the man. If Effie seemed to know Mr. Glanvil, it was because Effie knew her . Regardless, he was acting the true helpmeet, and it was immensely gratifying, though she had to tell herself not to grow accustomed to it.

“What do you say, Lord Marsden?” she asked, ordering herself to stop grinning at her counterfeit husband/assistant.

“I am flattered. If you will guide me, Miss Evans, I will give it a go.”

After a bit more discussion, they made to part ways. The gentlemen, as she had discovered was their habit, offered to walk her back to her hotel. As was her habit, she declined. She truly believed she’d monopolized enough of their holiday.

“Ah, but your husband must walk you back,” Effie said with a twinkle in his eye, “for isn’t your husband going to the same destination? Aren’t we to dine together?”

Oh. Her cheeks were heating. Was she . . . blushing ?

No . It must be the uncharacteristically hot September sun. Julianna did not blush.

“Very well, then.” She pressed her lips together. It wouldn’t do to appear too enthused.

He offered his arm, as he had in the Pavilion. The difference was, they had no audience now for their pretense, so it was an unnecessary nicety.

Well, they did have an audience, in a sense. She wondered if the other gentlemen, given that they had previously been so concerned about propriety, would object, but they did not. In fact, they looked more like indulgent papas as they smiled at Effie and told him not to trip over his heels. Perhaps it had only been the appearance of propriety that concerned them earlier. Perhaps they truly cared about her reputation.

Why would they do that? She was a stranger to them. A common stranger.

She sneaked a glance at Effie, who somehow managed to look both handsome and ridiculous at the same time, with his powdery hair. She supposed the answer to her question was that the lords cared about her reputation because they cared about Effie, who in turn cared about her.

It was a heady feeling.

Which meant she needed to get a hold of herself. “Playacting at marriage,” she said with a gaiety she hoped did not sound too forced. “As close as I shall ever come to the real thing.”

She had playacted once before, if not at marriage, at love wrapped in an imagined domestic contentment. She had learned what a quick road to heartbreak such a masquerade was.

“So you have said on a number of occasions,” Effie remarked. “You are awfully opposed to the institution.”

“A woman my age may be a spinster, a wife, or a widow. I wouldn’t mind being a widow, but not at the price of having been a wife first.”

“Is that price so high, assuming you were to marry someone you loved? Someone who . . . lifted you up?”

Yes, the price was too high. What he was suggesting was an impossibility. It only led to being left behind. She didn’t say that, though, turning instead to a more practical, though no less important argument against matrimony. “If I were married, all my property would become my husband’s.” She had told him this already.

“Your property is already your stepbrother’s.”

“But you know that is because the magazine was my mother’s, and upon her marriage to Mr. Glanvil Sr., it became his.”

“Yes, my point is merely that—”

“If I were married, I could not incur debt without my husband’s consent.”

“Do you generally go around incurring debt?”

“Quite a lot, actually. I don’t pay my engravers until after they’ve done their work.”

“I see. However, is it not—”

“I already have a man interfering in my business. I don’t need another.” She took a breath. She’d interrupted him twice. She was exercised over this topic, but there was no need to be rude. She was merely a bit frustrated because they had corresponded on the matter, back when she thought they were both women. Back when she thought he understood.

But he did understand, didn’t he? Effie understood her perfectly well. He understood her in a way no one ever had.

She made to apologize for the interruptions, for her shortness of tone, but he did not appear bothered. “When you say you already have a man interfering in your business, you are speaking of Mr. Glanvil?”

“It’s not that I don’t understand the need to balance art and commerce. I understand it very well. I would go so far as to say that striving after that balance is one of my favorite things about my position. About ladies’ magazines—mine in particular but also in general. But Mr. Glanvil is overly fixated on the commerce side of things. He fails to understand that an entire issue devoted to, for example, tips for keeping house would no longer be a magazine but rather a manual.”

“You were speaking of Mr. Glanvil.”

“Yes.” She paused. Oh. Oh, dear. “Did you think I was talking about you ?”

Effie shrugged. “Well, I am here forcing my way into your business by insisting on posing as that husband you don’t want.”

“No, no. You are biddable, and you always seem to know exactly what I want to do, to hear.”

He winked. “I aim to please.”

She wasn’t expressing herself well. “You are . . . different from everyone else.”

He mock-preened. “I should think so!”

He had been in jest, and he was in a lighthearted mood, so she didn’t press the matter, but Effie was different from everyone else. Unlike so many men, Effie listened . More than that, he seemed anxious to hear what she had to say. Having met him in person, she could even say that he appeared at times to hang on her every word.

Perhaps that was how Effie had come to know her, in the way she’d just been thinking she so appreciated. It wasn’t that complicated when one thought about it: if you listened to a person, carefully and for long enough, you grew to know them.

So why did it feel rather like magic?

She told herself to be careful. She had felt this way once before. She refused to get stars in her eyes over someone like Effie. She refused to get stars in her eyes over anyone .

They walked in silence for a while. It was such a lovely day. She’d enjoyed nothing less than a coup when it came to having talked her way into a tour of the Pavilion. And then in having convinced Lord Marsden to write about it. He would do an excellent job; she suspected the result would be one of the magazine’s great stories for the ages.

Finally, and not least, she was walking arm in arm with the person she considered her closest friend. That was the important part, not magic or anything so melodramatic. Effie was her closest friend, and they had found each other.

It was a good day.

“Here we are,” she said as they arrived at the Old Ship. “It’s more elegant than any inn I’ve seen.” Of course, she hadn’t seen many.

“I find myself dismayed that it isn’t shaped like a ship.”

“How would a building be shaped like a ship?”

“How would an English palace be shaped like the Taj Mahal?”

“I take the point. I’d like to drop my notebook in my room before we dine.”

Effie nodded his agreement, and she gestured for him to follow her, half waiting for someone to stop them, to stand in their path and proclaim their “marriage” a sham.

If they were on a ship, it was smooth sailing: they made their way to her room unmolested.

She spared a momentary thought, as she unlocked the door, for the disorderly state she’d left the place in. Julianna was not a natural housekeeper. She may even have left a shift hanging over the back of a chair. She tried to tell herself that surely Effie’s regard was not contingent on her tidiness or lack thereof, but a competing thought got in the way. The notion of Effie seeing her shift was . . . doing something to her.

“Are you all right?” he asked as he followed her inside.

“Yes, why?”

“You were breathing rather rapidly there for a moment.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“All right.”

His cheerful agreement was discomfiting. She was not accustomed to men agreeing with her, much less doing it with smiles on their faces.

She also wasn’t accustomed to anyone watching her closely enough to notice changes in her breathing.

It had been a long time, anyway.

Effie began poking around the room, looking out the window, letting his finger glide over the handle of the ewer on the bureau, leaning over the bed to peek at a piece of paper—a theatrical review for December—she’d left there.

“Don’t put your head on or near anything,” she said, further discomfited by the way he was so openly and unabashedly curious about her surroundings. “I don’t want powder on my things.”

He looked up from the other side of the bed. “It’s flour.”

As if that were any better. “What did you do? Ask the cook for a sack of flour?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes needs must.”

He looked so silly, so insouciant, so . . . Effie, that something swelled in her chest. It was warm, and buoyant, and she suddenly feared that it was going to lift her clear off her feet.

She didn’t know what to do, so she picked up a pillow from her side of the bed and threw it at him.

She threw a pillow at him!

What had come over her?

He sputtered, but laughter moved in to replace shock. “I thought you didn’t want my head to touch anything, and now I’ve contaminated your bedding.” He retrieved the pillow from where it had fallen on the floor and slapped it, sending a fine mist of flour into the air.

“I don’t—”

He threw the pillow back at her.

She emitted a sort of laugh-gasp hybrid. The nerve! Handily, there were two pillows on the bed. She threw the second back at him, making contact squarely with his head and sending another puff of flour into the air. She attempted to use a book from her night table as a shield, but he was too quick with his retaliation.

Soon they were engaged in an all-out pillow fight. She was gasping for air because she was laughing so hard, and Effie’s low, rumbling chuckle was doing something, too, when it came to making her breathless.

“Ow, ow!” Eventually the laughing and the breathlessness made her stomach and chest start to hurt. “If I remove this pillowslip and wave it”—the pillowslip was white, and not just because of the flour—“will you consider it a proper surrender?”

“No, no.” He dropped his pillow to the bed. “It is I who surrender.”

Something about the way he said it, all low and knowing, intensified the pressure in Julianna’s belly. It is I who surrender. It was, on the surface of things, a submissive thing to say. What was surrender but submission? But at the same time, there was an air of authority to the declaration, a decisiveness in the way he dropped both the pillow and the teasing all at once—they were like stones that had sunk in the sea.

She followed suit, with both pillow and book.

Which left them staring at each other, weaponless and shieldless. Nothing in between them. They were alone.

In some ways, they had always been alone together. In their letters, of course, but even here, in Brighton. That first moment they’d seen each other, that moment in which they’d communicated without sound and across distance. When he had taken off her gloves and examined her hands. There had been so many moments when the world around them had fallen away.

But it hadn’t actually fallen, had it? It had merely felt that way. All those times, all those touches and glances, had unfolded in public.

But now.

For the first time since they’d met in person, they were alone together without an audience. The world actually had fallen away. Effie had made it so, with his ridiculous shoes and his ridiculous hair and his ridiculous scheming.

He was panting slightly, grinning as he stared at her with his kind eyes, blue and brown twinkling in equal measure, his dear face covered in flour. He was absurd. He was wonderful.

He was about to kiss her.

Or perhaps she was about to kiss him.

They were moving toward each other in nearly perfect unison, and hadn’t it always been like that with them? Their letters. Their work as poet and editor. Their ability to communicate without words, even though their relationship had been built on words.

She told herself to be clear-eyed about what this was, and what it wasn’t. To pin what was about to happen in time, in place. She was in Brighton on a beautiful summer day, and she and her best friend were about to kiss, and wasn’t that an unlikely but lovely confluence of events?

And then Effie’s lips were on hers. Or hers were on his. She would be lying if she hadn’t, late at night under cover of darkness, imagined what it might be like to kiss Effie, but she had never imagined this . A strong mouth moving against hers—no, moving with hers. A deep, masculine groan when she pressed her tongue against the seam of his lips.

His hand came around to the nape of her neck, and she sighed. Desire pooled inside her, but, oddly, so did relief. She hadn’t wasted her money coming to Brighton, or her time. She belonged here. For now at least, in this time and this place.

Belonging somewhere was a novel sensation.

What would happen, she wondered, if she tipped her body ever so slightly? If she . . . just made them fall. Would he come with her? Would they fall together?

He would, and they did, landing with a thud crossways on the bed.

“I am overcome,” Effie said against her mouth.

Julianna was, too, but she didn’t speak the words aloud.

“What are we—?”

“Shh.” She did not want to talk about what was happening. Talking about it would mean talking about the future. Expectations. Declarations.

“But—”

She silenced him with another kiss.

He let loose another of those groans. It was so urgent, so at odds with his usual mild manner, his easy affability.

She let her mouth open slightly, to encourage him in. He came, and they kissed deeply and slowly. She never wanted it to stop.

It had to, of course, and it did, a minute or so later when, with another groan—a gratifyingly annoyed-sounding one—he pulled away.

He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, she said, quietly, “Leave it be. Can we leave it be?”

He nodded, though something passed over his face. She wasn’t sure what, but it was dark. Uncharacteristically so.

He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the ceiling, allowing her to study him in profile. He had a Roman nose, and up this close, she could see the fine wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. The wrinkles were more prominent when he laughed, and Effie laughed a great deal.

But he also brooded.

So perhaps whatever dark thing she’d seen in his eyes a moment ago wasn’t that uncharacteristic.

He turned his head, startling her. “Come swimming with me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Swimming. I will teach you, like we said before.”

“How?” she asked, though this was what she adored about Effie. He had a wild sense of adventure, an expansive view of what was possible. “Where? When?”

He quirked a smile. “How about we start with what is always the infinitely more interesting question, and that is ‘Why?’”

“All right. Why?”

“Because the water cures you. Not in the way that the doctors yap on about. In a deeper way. You float on it—in it—and are reminded of how the world should be.”

She wasn’t precisely sure what he meant by that. She could ask him, and he would elaborate. He would very likely say something devastatingly true, and beautiful. But she, she who made her living commissioning words, surprised herself by not wanting any of them to answer her question. She wanted to know what the answer felt like. What did it feel like to float and know how the world should be? Would it be similar to the sensation she’d experienced two days ago, floating in the arms of her dipper? Probably that, and more, for it would be Effie’s arms buoying her, rather than those of an unsmiling stranger.

Effie was staring at her with an intensity that made her eyebrows itch. She flashed him a smile and said, with a breeziness she did not feel, “How can a lady refuse such an offer?”

“She cannot. Therefore, I shall now answer your other questions. I know you care little for your reputation, but I think it better that we not be seen.”

“I agree. Consenting to being seen with three lords on the street on a bright summer day is quite apart from being seen with one of them in the sea in a state of half undress.”

He gave a curt nod, as if they were discussing a business matter. “I suggest our beach in Hove, where we ended our walk yesterday. In the very early hours, before the sun comes up.”

“Very well. Tomorrow?”

“Yes. Tomorrow’s Sunday, so everyone will be at church. Is six too early? The sun should just be coming up.”

“Six is fine.”

“Shall I collect you? I can take Lord Harcourt’s carriage, or I could come on horseback. Do you ride?”

Did she ride? When would a woman like her have had occasion to learn to ride? Effie was such an endearing mixture of wise and obtuse. “I do not ride. I walk. I shall meet you there.”

She could tell he wanted to object to the idea of her walking alone at such an hour. She held up her left hand and used her right to gesture at her ring. “I have my protective charm.”

“Have you enchanted it?” he asked—seemingly seriously.

“Of course not. It was a figure of speech.”

“I think you could, if you wanted to. I think you have so much more power than you know.”

Why did that assertion make her throat tighten? She pretended to misunderstand. “I merely meant that being ‘married’ provides a certain degree of protection when I walk alone.”

“I knew what you meant.” Was it her imagination or did the smile he produced look a little sad? “Shall we dine before I depart?”

He rose from the bed. He must have begun perspiring at some point during their . . . exertions, for some of the flour that had migrated to his face had pilled, forming little dough balls.

She grinned, which caused him to grin. Any residue of wistfulness in the air was chased away.

She pointed at the mirror. “Fix your face before we go downstairs, husband.”