The Water Nymph by Michele Jaffe

together, expressed an opinion about her clothes.
    “What about the green gown?” Sophie asked. “The new one, with the other green on the bottom and that stuff all over the front.”
    This description sounded more in character, but even so Octavia had to bite her tongue to keep from asking if Sophie would not rather lie down—say for two weeks, perhaps in a comfy apartment at Bedlam—as she extracted the requested gown from the armoire. It was one of her recent designs, light green silk the color of a young apple, over a darker green silk skirt. The “stuff” on the front was actually elaborate embroidery work depicting delicate vines that curved over the bodice, drawing the eye and emphasizing its low, square cut. Flowers of light pink, blue, and purple grew out of the vines, and just above the left breast there was a small bumblebee. Octavia signed all of her gowns with a bee, causing that humble insect to become the most sought after object of adornment in London for the past two seasons. Women eyed one another with disdain if there was no bee visible and scrutinized each other’s embroidery to learn if it was a real Octavia Apia or a sham. But Sophie paid attention to none of this as she flounced miserably in and out of balls, Octavia’s best advertisement and London’s most envied model, nor was she thinking about it now.
    No, she was not thinking about the many compliments she had received on the gown before, or the fact that it made her eyes look remarkably green, or the hungry, desperate way every man had gazed at her the last time she wore it out, or that she had been described the next day, in public, as the most beautiful woman in London. She had chosen it, she knew, only because she remembered it was comfortable and not on the off chance that the man who lived in the palace across the street might look out his window as she departed. Or rather, exactly on that off chance, so that she could show the callow beetle that she did not care what he thought of her. Or something like that.
    As she stepped out of the house, brushing from her riding cloak, crumbs of the orange cake she had inhaled, she suddenly remembered the third thing she had forgotten. She hesitated for a moment, about to go back in and ask Octavia about the pistol, but decided against it. She could ask her later, Sophie thought, mounting her dappled mare and taking the reins from the stable-girl, when she returned home to eat two dozen more cakes.
    Setting out across London, she could hardly have known that there would be no later. Sophie Champion would not be going back to Hen House. Not later. Not ever.
    This was no way for the Phoenix to be spending his day, Crispin thought to himself as he shifted uncomfortably on the unsteady stool-like torture apparatus and started on the final bundle of papers. He would rather have been out facing a group of Spanish brigands armed to the teeth desperately protecting their unlawfully collected treasure, or the French royal firing squad with pistols loaded, or even a Turkish merchant who had padded his body with gunpowder that would explode at the merest touch by another person and embarked upon a suicide mission to blow up the English ambassador’s residence in Constantinople. He would rather have been dealing with any of these (as he had—the firing squad more than once, in fact) than sorting through other people’s perfumed love letters in someone else’s perfumed den of iniquity.
    Indeed, if Crispin had known that Richard Tottle’s personal apartments would be covered almost entirely in pink silk, he never would have come. The walls, the doors, the bed, the divan, the curtains, all were of pink silk, and what could not be covered in silk was at least made pink. The floor was topped with a carpet needlepointed in a thousand pink roses, the mirror was framed with pink glass flowers, the fireplace was surrounded with pink tiles, portraits of pink women smiled out of pink frames… not even the