Page 7 of What Happens in Hedone

He startled. “How did you know my name?”

“I asked Lady Hedone.”

She had asked about him. Jay made no effort to rein in his grin, which only widened as she took the opportunity survey him from head to toe.

He knew he made a decent figure, better than old Trouser Tent, at any rate. He chose not to wear a corset, so his waist was not as slim as fashion condoned, but his own shoulders did a creditable job of filling out his coat without padding. He’d chosen the evening coat with its swallow tails and contrasting colors for his waistcoats, complementary but not gaudy. Jay preferred the more comfortable shawl collar and the waterfall style of cravat, and he chose looser trousers rather than the clinging pantaloons for ease of movement. Her look of approval satisfied a masculine vanity he wasn’t ordinarily subject to.

“You are bold,” he remarked, pleased.

“We are allowed to be, here.” She slipped a candied violet in her mouth and held out her hand. “I am Lady Erato.”

She wore no gloves, and he’d taken his off on arrival. Her fingers were warm and strong, and she squeezed his as he bent and dropped a kiss to her knuckles.

Jay forced open his hand to let her go.

“Erato. One of the… I don’t recall.”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “A Muse. The goddess of lyric poetry.”

“Ah.” He was not the sort of man to be put on the back foot when a woman knew more than he did. Intelligence, in any person, pleased him. “A relation to Eros, god of love?”

“She is the patroness of erotic poetry especially.”

“You were singing Sappho. The Midnight Poem.”

Her smile flashed. “And you knew it.”

Jay selected a piece of candied angelica from the dish beside the violets and popped it in his mouth, giving himself something to do. That smile, on that mouth, devastated him. He could think of nothing but kissing her, as he’d wanted to kiss his nymph that afternoon when she smirked at him about sand making stones and mountains. This woman smelled like vanilla, another aphrodisiac. His naiad at the beach had smelled like sea air and salt and rich clay scooped straight from the earth.

His naiad had deep blue eyes, the color of gathering dusk over the sea that girdled his home. She was shorter and rounder than this woman. Her hair had been ash brown, and he was certain he’d spotted a spray of freckles across her nose. Lady Erato was a slender willow with dark brown hair and no freckles. The skin along her jaw and neck was as smooth as alabaster, and with the mask concealing her expressions, she was as enigmatic as one of the blank-eyed statues carved onto the wallpaper in the foyer. His nymph’s face showed every fleeting thought and notion. She had been as transparent as glass.

Jay was confusing the two in his mind, muddling his senses.

He tried to find the thread of their conversation. “My sister is a great fan of Sappho. But I am curious why you chose her.”

Know a woman’s secret desires, Jay realized, and he would know her in full. He wanted to know what moved this woman. His nymph on the beach, he would guess, was moved by wonder; the world was one great unfurling mystery she wanted to follow to its heart. This woman had hidden layers, he was certain.

She moved along the table to a dish of wigs, small heavy scones studded with caraway seeds. She nibbled unselfconsciously, licking a crumb from the side of her lip.

“I spent some years at a girl’s school near my home. We were allowed to study anything we wanted and encouraged to question and seek answers. You cannot imagine the freedom among women when there are no mothers to please or men to entice, no rules but those of our making. No burden on our time but to pursue our own ends, whether they be learning or industry or pure enjoyment.”

He could dimly imagine. He had sisters and a mother, and sometimes when he and his father and brother returned from their day, Jay had caught the scene of tranquility in his mother’s favorite parlor. He knew his sisters and their friends found a relaxation in their own female company that vanished when a man entered the mix.

Some men, he had found among his close friends, could find the same relaxation and liberty among their own sex. But too often a group of cocks became a competition for status and prestige, a jostling to prove who was the better sportsman, the better politician, the better barrister, the better rake. Jay was shuffled to the bottom, every time. The son of a baron, the lowest among peers. A man who pursued trade and made more money than he needed, so among the dissolute second sons and strivers of his acquaintance, he had no claim to poverty, and among his professional friends, he was a man who worked with his hands.

But Lady Erato didn’t know that about him. She knew nothing but what she could perceive from his manner. There was no shadow of his brick business looming over his head, and no candidacy for a title to interest her. They were simply themselves.

Or rather, their aliases. There was a heady liberty to that, too.

“Cupid and Psyche,” he murmured.

“That was Lady Cybele’s request. What if they were not forbidden? What if the god revealed himself to his wife and let her see him fully?”

That wish to be seen for what one was, valued for one’s person and nothing else. He understood.

“Andromeda.”

She nodded. “Lady Pandora’s suggestion. What if she is not the bait but rather the prize? What if he came out of tenderness to claim her, slaying monsters not for his own glory but to free her from her chains?”