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“Hello, my dearest,” Effie said a few minutes later as he slipped into Julianna’s room—but not before going into his own and turning the covers down and mussing the bedclothes so it would look as if he’d been there. If anyone came in later tonight, he hoped they would think he’d had a bout of sleeplessness and had gone for a walk. There was precedent for that. “How is your head?”

“My head is fine.” She gestured him to the bed, as she’d done earlier, but this time she was wearing only her shift, the same one she’d worn to the beach.

“The headache was a ruse, wasn’t it?” he asked, as he sat, his pulse kicking up.

“It was a ruse.” She had been reading a sheaf of papers, and she set them on the night table.

“You were determined not to be seen as a gate-crasher.”

“I was determined to have a nap!”

“And did you?”

“I did not. I meant to, but . . .”

“Yes?”

“I found myself too aflutter with anticipation.”

That was flattering. And also the cause of a matching fluttering inside Effie. He decided to be direct. “I must tell you that I have never done this before. May I hope that you have so that at least one of us knows what she’s doing?”

She lifted her head from where she had been blowing out a candle. There was a branch of them next to the bed, and she’d carefully blown out half of them, leaving the room cast in a warm glow. “You are remarkable.”

“ You are remarkable,” he countered. He meant that in the most literal sense. He wanted to remark on everything about her, make a list, a catalog of her attributes. He could hang it on his wall at home, next to her portrait.

She smiled in a way he flattered himself was fond. “I have done this before, yes. There was a, ah, gentleman before you.”

“Excellent.”

“You are the only man on earth who would think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most men would say I’m ruined. That I’ve given away my maidenhood. Their reactions would fall somewhere along a scale of stern disapproval to murderous outrage.”

It was difficult to know how to respond to that. On the one hand, he wanted to honor her experience. On the other, he wanted to dismiss what she’d said as nonsense. He settled for the truth. “I approve of everything that brought you here to me, that brought us to this moment.”

The next smile she graced him with was so unmistakably fond, so wide, it took his breath away for a moment.

When he recovered, he said, “Tell me what to do. Show me what to do.”

The smile turned a little bit wicked. “Come over here.”

He nearly tripped over himself to get to her. He’d been perched on the edge of the bed, but he scrambled across it so he was sitting cross-legged in front of her. She sat up, pushed back the covers and mimicked his position, and for a moment they merely stared at each other. Eventually, she reached forward and pulled his shirt out of his breeches—he had undressed to his shirtsleeves while with Simon and Archie—and up over his head. When she finished, she took up one end of the drawstring at the neckline of her shift and held it out. She wanted him to take it.

He pulled, slowly, the sound of string against string as the bow was untied, filling his head as completely as the waves on the shore had the other day.

When he had finished, she reached a hand inside her neckline and pushed the shift off one shoulder, then the other. He watched; his senses sharpened as if he were in danger. When the white linen fell to reveal small, pink-tipped breasts, he began to fear that perhaps he was in danger, though he could not quite articulate why.

He lifted the hem of his shirt, and before he could think what to do next, before his head was fully out from under the shirt, her hands were on him, stroking down his arms from shoulder to wrist, leaving a trail of gooseflesh.

“You may touch me, too,” she whispered. So, after a beat, he lifted shaking hands to her shoulders, let them slide down to her wrists.

What followed was a slow, sensual game of sorts, whereby she touched him, and he, mirroring her, performed the same gesture. Her hands slid back up to his shoulders; his hands slid back up to her shoulders. Hers made their way then around nape of his neck; his did likewise with hers.

“I adored your long hair,” she whispered as she slid her fingers up over the back of his head—he wanted to groan from the pure pleasure of her fingernails against his scalp—“but I think I like this better.”

Wordlessly, he tangled his fingers in her hair. The flickering light of the candles glinted off it, making some strands look like shimmery onyx, others like warm mahogany.

With a sigh, she let her hands slide down the front of his face. It reminded him of the way he’d once seen a blind man greeting a brother after a long absence.

Her hands didn’t linger, though; they continued their southward journey, down his neck, over his clavicle, and down the front of his chest.

Marveling that he had ever thought of desire as an abstract concept from which he was exempt—he was certain his prick had never been this hard—he replicated the path with his hands on her body. The textures of her were so exquisitely rendered: her collarbones, sharp as her wit; her breasts, soft as her heart. He was aware that she would not characterize her heart thusly, that her vision of herself did not include the word soft , but he saw a truth about her that others, including she herself, did not.

The knowledge that he possessed a singular view of her made him want to laugh and cry at the same time, made the pressure in his groin, and at the base of his spine, intensify.

He had been going to let his hands continue to fall, but she stopped him, putting her own over his so that they stayed in contact with her breasts. She hissed and let her head fall back. Experimentally, he kneaded the soft flesh, and she arched her back as if seeking more of his touch.

The hiss became a moan, and never had he heard anything so pleasing, so erotic, so astonishing . He was struck with the idea that he ought to replace one of his hands with his mouth. He could see himself from above, lips working over one of the pink nubs. They would make a gorgeous, obscene painting.

He made the image come to life, his own moan breaking free just before his mouth made contact. The nipple in his mouth was harder than the nipple in his hand. Experimentally, he flicked his tongue over it, and she took a rapid inhalation and held it. He did it again. Eventually, she exhaled—it was a ragged exhalation, almost akin to a sob.

He was growing more and more agitated. He saw another image in his mind, of her lying on her back, naked, his mouth on herneck. He began to make it so, gently encouraging her to lift her hips so he could remove the shift that had bunched around her waist.

He hadn’t understood that making love was like painting, that when an image arose in his mind, he could make it concrete. They were a living canvas. Her pulse thudded under his lips, and when she sighed, he realized they hadn’t kissed on the mouth yet. So he remedied that, changed the picture, lying atop her but keeping his full weight from her, kissing her deeply. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he gasped in shock—she was painting, too—and gasped again when he realized the maneuver had put his manhood in contact with her soft center.

She began rocking her hips up and down, and he knew somehow that he was meant to rock with her. He had expected to have to have a conversation about making sure she did not fall pregnant as a result of their lying together, but it seemed they would not need to broach that particular topic, at least not yet, for this, this rocking as his prick nestled against her soft heat without entering it, was bringing him a degree of pleasure he had not thought to imagine. It was pressure and heat together, sensations that ought to have been unpleasant, but he wanted more of them; he wanted to rush toward them, profligate and blind.

Blind but not deaf, for he had never heard anything so maddeningly exquisite as the breathy moans Julianna was making. If only he could attend a symphony composed entirely of such moans.

“Keep going,” she said, making him realize that although she was still rocking her hips, his had slowed, so focused had he been on the glorious symphony.

He rocked against her, and pure pleasure bloomed in his belly.

“Oh,” she said, so low and quiet, she almost sounded like someone else. It was followed by another “Oh,” the single syllable as different from the first incantation of such as it was possible to be. It was high and girlish and astonishing, and it made his eyes fly open.

Hers were closed, which afforded him the opportunity to watch in fascination as her face screwed up, almost as if she were in pain. Before he could fully register that expression, it was replaced by one of shock as her eyes and mouth alike opened. Her gaze latched on to his, and her body began to quake. It was glorious. She was glorious.

He was glorious, too. A great surge of pleasure moved through his body, and his hips bucked, losing their rhythm. If Effie had not known love, or desire, before, it was only because he was meant to know them here, now, inside this living painting. It was akin to what Simon had said about not wanting to catch a glimpse of the Pavilion before he was ready to contemplate its full glory. He shouted, and he felt the beauty all around them.

He could no longer hold himself up as he had been, keeping most of the weight of his upper body off Julianna, so he rolled to his side. He had spent partly on her stomach, partly on the bed and was now lying on the wet spot. He had never been happier.

She stayed where she was, and in fact took the space vacated by him to spread her limbs a bit, but she turned her head in his direction so they maintained eye contact. Neither spoke for a long while. They merely panted and smiled.

“What are you thinking about?” Effie finally said.

“Lately, I’ve been comparing myself to a starfish.”

A great big laugh burst out of him. “That was the last thing I expected you to say.”

“I keep finding myself sprawled out, having lost my wits. I was lounging exactly like this on my bed at home after you sent me Archer’s Lady’s Book , and before I knew it, I was on a Brighton-bound coach. Sprawling mindlessly with one’s limbs akimbo brings to mind a starfish, though perhaps I defame starfish. For all I know they are quite intelligent.”

“So you were thinking about the fact that you weren’t thinking.”

“I suppose I was. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I was under the impression that I was meant to seek out a bud of flesh between your legs. Just now, I mean.”

“You did.”

“I did?” He held up a hand and considered it quizzically. Had he forgotten?

She laughed, rolled onto her side to face him, and took the hand in question. “You did it with your . . . member.”

“I did?”

“Yes, when we were rocking back and forth, it provided just the right sort of continuous pressure.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.” He paused. “It was just the right sort of continuous pressure for me, too.” Another pause. “In case you couldn’t tell.” He grinned, knowing he was being ridiculous—she had on her stomach the very residue of his enjoyment. He took up his shirt, which was within arm’s reach, and blotted.

When he returned his attention to her face, she looked . . . not sad exactly. Wistful.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Remember when you said just now that you approve of everything that brought me here?”

“Yes.”

“If that is the case, I think I ought to confess something,” she said, running her fingers up and down his chest in a way that was making him a little crazy. “Or, not that I ought to exactly, in the sense of feeling compelled, but I find myself wanting to.”

“Please do.” He was hungry for knowledge of her. He wanted more remarkable items for his list.

“You were my third, not my second.”

Effie had meant what he said before. He was glad one of them had some experience. He didn’t disapprove of her for having lain with others. He just . . . didn’t want her to do it anymore. “Oh, so there were two lucky gentlemen before me. I wonder that one of them didn’t come up to scratch.”

“One tried. He was—is—one of my regular engravers. He proposed.”

“And?”

“We have spoken of this several times. You know I am averse to the idea of marrying. The last thing I ever want is a man to propose to me. I declined.”

“That was smart of you.”

“You don’t know anything about him!” After a brief silence, she laughed.

“What is so amusing?”

“I am laughing at myself. Here I am affronted on his behalf, even though I turned him down most fervently. But I suppose my point stands: you don’t know anything about him, so you cannot say I was smart to rebuff him.”

“I can, though!” She leveled a look at him. He winked and said, “If you had accepted, you wouldn’t be here; therefore it was smart of you to decline.”

Effie was careful to keep his tone light, teasing, but he meant every word. He meant every word most ardently.

She laughed again, which had been his aim, but he found himself desperate to know what she would say next. “I would have declined regardless, but he only asked because he was laboring under the weight of moral distress after our initial liaison. That is a terrible reason to propose marriage. We were not in love.”

They were not in love. Was she implying that she would have accepted, had they been? No. She had just reminded him that her aversion to the idea of marriage itself had prompted her refusal.

He was safe.

No sooner he had that thought than it was replaced by another: Safe from what?

“And the other gentleman?” he asked, careful once again not to allow his tone to betray the urgency he felt. “What kind of numbskull was he to not want to propose to an incomparable such as yourself? I can’t believe two gentlemen could make your intimate acquaintance and not fall in love with you.”

“We were in love, in that case. At least, I thought we were. I was.”

What Effie thought was No . What Effie said was “What was his . . . dilemma, then? Why didn’t he come up to scratch?”

“He didn’t come up to scratch because he was not a he. Her name was Edith.” She studied his face. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Effie was set back on his heels, but when he stopped to think about it, he found he wasn’t surprised. “I see.”

“And?” Julianna prompted.

“And what?” Am I supposed to say that I’m sorry you could not marry your love?” He paused, trying to think what to say that was true but would not paint him in an unflatteringly possessive light. “I’m not sorry, because again, had you, you wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re not scandalized.”

“No.” That, at least was the truth.

“Perhaps you . . . understand. Understand in a deeper way, I mean.”

Oh. Yes. She had revealed something private, something she was afraid of being judged for. She was searching for understanding. And here he had been focused not on that aspect of her liaison, but the fact that she had fallen in love. That she had been in love with someone who wasn’t him. That bit made him uncomfortable. Jealous. And being jealous made him feel . . . small.

“I do understand,” he said, wanting to put her at ease, even if he was confused about his own feelings. “Theoretically. Until recently, Marsden and Harcourt apparently thought I favored gentlemen.”

“And do you?”

“I think I favor . . . everyone. Theoretically. Is that possible?”

“I think so. I can’t speak for society at large, but that is how I have always been.”

“At the same time, though, historically I have favored no one. I find the expression of ardent urges impossible to imagine outside the context of a close friendship.”

“Hmm.”

“It is not the same for you?”

“I don’t think so. While I certainly considered myself on friendly terms with both Charles and Edith, my desire for them felt . . . independent of that bond.”

A terribly urgent question began coalescing in his mind. “Did you . . . remain friends with your past lovers?”

“With Charles, yes. We remain fond of each other, though the ardency has bled out of our connection.”

“And Edith?”

She shrugged. “Summer ended, and she left. I had hoped she would write, but she didn’t. I was terribly sad for a while.”

Effie hated how jealous her words made him. He hated that hecould intuit that “I was terribly sad” was Julianna understating the depth of her connection to Edith, and her dismay at its rending.

He forced himself to set his feelings aside and attend to hers. “One hears of gentlemen who are romantically inclined toward one another. They may live as friends. I suppose ladies might manage a way to do the same.”

“Yes. I had . . . imagined a future in which that might have been the case.” She pressed her lips together. “But when we parted ways, Edith was resigned to her fate, which at that point she believed was marriage. ‘Resigned’ is not even the correct word. I did not realize that she was corresponding that summer with a gentleman she had met briefly at a house party the previous Christmas. She was looking forward to meeting him again at the same party that year.

“She has three children now, I am told, and lives very happily in Somerset. I’m sure she never thinks about our ‘transgressions’—that was her word for what had happened between us.”

Effie had made an involuntary squeak, one he hoped conveyed his vicarious affront at the word Edith had chosen. Heartbreak was one thing; being left so blithely by someone who was planning to step immediately into another life was quite another.

“Yes,” Julianna said sadly—his squeak must have done its job.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly. It was only partially a lie. He was sorry she’d been hurt, but he wasn’t sorry that her heartbreak had made her available: to write to him, to edit his words, to lie with him.

She smiled sadly. “Effie, you really are the most generous-spirited person.”

“Come now.” She would not say that if she knew about the discreditable, greedy things he was thinking.

“I never imagined telling anyone this. Not only that I have given myself to a man, but that I have given myself to a woman.”

“And you have given yourself to me.”

“And I have given myself to you.”

“As I have given myself to you.”

“Indeed.”

He almost didn’t want to ask, but he had to. The only way to discharge this knife-edge feeling of envy, was to speak openly. To ask the question he wanted answered rather than swallow it in fear. Still, in order to brace himself for what he was almost certain would be the answer, he phrased his question as an observation: “But you won’t keep me.”

She placed a palm on his cheek. “I am sorry, I won’t. I can’t.”

It was not unexpected. He told himself he couldn’t be hurt by having a future he had never counted on taken away from him.

He further told himself not to think of the future at all. Another of Julianna’s maxims was relevant here, and he recited it back to her: “There is only now.”

“Yes.” Her smile struck Effie as a little wistful, though perhaps he was only seeing what he himself felt. She rolled away from him, and he wanted to tell her not to do that. He wanted to take her hand and place it back on his cheek.

She had lifted a candle, and she was gazing at the mantel across the room. “It is very likely past midnight, but it is too dark for me to make out the time on that clock. I am imagining you skulking out of here like a character in a Gothic novel. I think you shall be very well suited to such a task.”

He suspected she was trying to lighten the mood.

It didn’t work, but he pretended it did. He smiled and held out his arms and she set down her candle and rolled into them.

“It is a theatrical challenge I shall embrace, though ’tis a pity that if I am to be successful, it means I shan’t have an audience.” He spoke blithely and tried to make his heart light, too.

When she fell asleep, he knew he ought to go. And he would, just not yet. He slid off the bed and tiptoed to a small desk covered with papers. He smiled. She’d been here only a matter of hours, and already her editorial ephemera were everywhere.

He found paper and a quill and, arranging himself so he had a view of her, got to work answering a letter.

Dear Home for Christmas,

You must take your children and go. You are very lucky indeed to have a mother who loves you and whom you consider a friend. I hope you know how exceedingly rare that is.

Consider a scenario in which you do not go. Your mother dies alone, and you forfeit the chance to say goodbye. Perhaps your husband is satisfied, but once the disagreement is over, will he even notice, much less appreciate, that you have stayed to placate him?

Consider, too, the opposite scenario: You do go. You and your mother are both comforted by your presence at the end. Your husband is upset by your absence. Is his upset worth it?

I must think so. With my sincerest condolences, Mrs. Landers

Effie reread his response several times, questioning himself. He was always telling these women to defy their husbands. Was it right of him to do that? He believed he was giving morally sound advice, but he was only thinking about the question immediately in front of him. He wasn’t considering the repercussions that might follow when his correspondent took his advice.

He carried the letters back to bed, taking care not to awaken Julianna. His realization was not dissimilar to the one he’d had after that day on the beach with Julianna and the boys. Julianna had been bewildered by their concern for her reputation. That is your world, not mine , she’d said. He stared at the ceiling and pondered. Was he applying the wrong lens to the problems faced by his correspondent?

Effie and Julianna had initially found it endlessly amusing that “Mrs. Landers,” the author of the magazine’s “Advice for Married Ladies” column—an addition to the magazine that had been mandated by Mr. Glanvil—was not married. Julianna had seemed to relish deceiving Mr. Glanvil, though of course she, believing Effie to be a lady, hadn’t known the true extent of the duplicity. They had both embarked on the enterprise as if it were a great big jest.

It had taken only one letter to sober Effie. It had been from a woman who was having trouble conceiving a child, and he would never forget the anguish woven through her words.

Other ladies’ magazines of the day contained nominal advice columns, but they generally used a letter as a jumping-off point for a moral essay, and they almost never printed their readers’ letters in their entirety.

Le Monde Joli took a different approach. Julianna printed several letters in each issue, and Effie was meant to give each reader genuine, and specific, advice. That first letter had been a lesson in the weight of that responsibility.

He had, from the start, tried to keep his not-lady-ness in mind, had endeavored to compensate for his sex. He was now realizing, however, that he had not spared much thought for the class he inhabited, or that of the women who wrote to him.

It had taken Julianna telling him she had only two dresses to jolt this awareness into him.

He remained ashamed of this oversight, but what could he do but try to be better going forward?

He considered “Home for Christmas.” If his correspondent was a noblewoman wanting to visit her mother’s deathbed, that was one thing. She could take her children with her and be assured of help both on the journey and at her destination. Her husband wouldn’t suffer, not materially, by her absence. But if the woman was poor, that was quite a different scenario, was it not?

Luckily, he could ask his editor when she awakened. Which might be tomorrow.

Or—he turned to find her staring at him—it could be now.

His mouth formed itself into a smile without his conscious involvement. Her hair was mussed and her cheeks were pink, and who wouldn’t smile at her? “How long have you been awake?”

“Long enough to observe that you look rather tortured.”

“‘Tortured’ may be somewhat hyperbolic, but read this, will you? I could do with some advice.”

She did, and he explained his dilemma, his recent realization.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “I think, however, that your initial impulse was correct. She ought to go see her mother. Perhaps you needn’t write such a lengthy answer. I adore the way you sometimes answer rather cheekily, often with a single sentence. You are familiar with the letters of which I speak?”

He explained his response to the “Sartorially Sullied” letter that was also meant for the December issue.

“Yes, precisely! While you can’t answer ‘Home for Christmas’ with humor, suppose you take a similarly minimalist approach? Say something in the vein of, “Go home to your mother for Christmas. You will regret not doing it.”

“But—”

“I know you are concerned about the larger circumstances, and that is to your credit. But we don’t know the larger circumstances. If you will allow it, I will give you two pieces of advice.”

“Please do.”

“The letters we print have dual purposes.”

Effie was so chuffed by that we , by the use of the plural pronoun, that he had to remind himself to attend to the rest of what she was saying.

“First, there’s the immediate aim of the dispensation of advice. But the other purpose is to affect readers. To entertain them, or inspire empathy in them, to move them in some way. You are writing to your correspondent, but you are writing for all our readers.”

“That . . .” Seemed eminently logical. Effie didn’t know why he hadn’t considered it from that perspective before.

“Take this current letter. Should you advise the correspondent to visit her mother, you are also telling everyone who reads it that this is the correct course of action. You will have done good in more settings than the life of the letter writer. Beyond that, even if the specifics of the scenario in question do not apply to the wider readership, the tone you take in a response may yet affect them.”

Hmm. “This is the reason you appreciate amusing replies.”

“Yes. They entertain our readers.”

Our readers. There was another plural pronoun. He smiled. “Was there another piece of advice?”

“I see a thread weaving its way through your Mrs. Landers letters. A theme, if you will.”

“You do? What is it?”

“You always take the part of the lady.”

“I don’t think I do that intentionally.”

“I know you don’t, which makes it all the more effective.”

“It is possible—likely—that I am overcompensating for not being the lady I was meant to be when you gave me the job.” He paused. “I am sorry. It is a consequence of my dishonesty.”

She waved away the apology. “I do not believe you are overcompensating. That’s not why you always take the part of the lady.”

“Why do I do it, then?”

“Well, in some measure, I suppose because your charge is to help your correspondents. You are primed to be sympathetic to them. But also, in a larger sense, I believe it is because you are a good person.”

“I am?”

She threw a pillow at him. “Yes, you fool.”

He caught it. “Do say more.”

He thought she would decline, tell him not to flatter himself overmuch, but she said, “You care about people. You put yourself in others’ shoes, and you are willing to entertain the notion that your way of thinking may be incorrect. That’s what you are doing here, is it not, asking whether your instinct is right in the case of this particular letter? Do you know how exceedingly rare such an attitude is, especially for a gentleman?”

Effie found himself choked up. Had anyone ever said such lovely things about him? To him? And she had said different but equally flattering things during their sunrise swim. Effie did not doubt that Archie and Simon respected him, and regarded him very highly. But much of that had to do with their shared history. And certainly his family had never said anything of the kind.

He thought of his peacock waistcoat. He felt like a peacock now, displaying his feathers, proud of himself.

He turned the paper over and tried another version of the letter while she watched, her head resting on his shoulder.

Dear Home for Christmas,

You must go. Your mother must not die alone.

With sympathy, Mrs. Landers

“What do you think?”

“It’s perfect.”

She was perfect. This was perfect. Lying here with Julianna, working on the magazine in bed. There is only now . Perhaps her philosophy worked, after all.

The only thing that would make it more perfect would be to seal their editorial triumph with a kiss.

So he did.