Chapter Five #3
“But don’t you think Apollo needed to be taught a lesson about arrogance?” Angelique chimed in.
“Maybe he could have bragged about his archery skills without actually making fun of Eros,” Lucien conceded.
“What a pity they didn’t have a cozy sitting room up on Olympus in which to debate their issues,” Delilah reflected. “It’s
clearly mayhem up there.”
“What I don’t understand is why turning her into a tree was the only option. Why was that the first thing that sprang to Peneus’s
mind? ‘I’ll show him—I’ll make her a tree!’ ” Ginny asked.
“She was in a forest. Maybe he needed to make sure she matched the surroundings, if she was going to be there for an eternity,”
Dot shyly suggested.
“So by your way of thinking, Dot,” Mr. Marchand said, “if Apollo was about to catch up to Daphne in the sitting room, Peneus would have been compelled to turn her into an Epithet Jar or a settee?”
Everyone chuckled except Ginny, who refused to be charmed.
Dot shot a nervous, speculative glance at the settee, as if it might have once been a nymph.
“Why not turn her into something like a dragon, so she could at least defend herself?” Ginny pressed, feeling oddly frantic
for the poor fictional Daphne.
“Because even if she was a dragon, she would never have been able to kill Apollo. He’s an immortal. His punishment is that
she’s not only forever out of reach, he will suffer over her forever,” Bolt said.
“Isn’t love sort of a punishment anyway, regardless?” Ginny said.
Good heavens, that remark caused a sharp silence she hadn’t anticipated.
“Forgive me! I didn’t mean it to sound so melodramatic. That is, the punishment is built into the reward. Because you don’t
get love without eventual grief. And you don’t get grief without love.”
That’s when she noticed Marchand’s cool social mask slip for a moment. He fleetingly looked stunned.
She saw it because she had, maddeningly, looked right at him.
She forcibly averted her gaze.
“Well now. Now that you mention it, Miss Woodville, it is diabolical to turn love into a punishment.” Delacorte was a little indignant now. “I think I want to change my vote. If you
think about it, that Eros was a right bas—”
All heads whipped toward Mr. Delacorte.
“—ket of trouble,” he completed, darting a glance at the Epithet Jar.
“So many stories in myths are about nymphs being transformed into something else in order to escape a threat. As if there’s
no other option but to change yourself completely in order to avoid danger,” Ginny said suddenly. How had she just realized
this about a familiar myth?
Suddenly her chest felt tight from the injustice. If the Greeks were writing about it a thousand years ago, what hope did
a modern girl have? Men always did the choosing; women always did the adapting. Just like Marchand had said.
“That’s a very astute observation, Miss Woodville. Perhaps there isn’t any other option but to change in those circumstances,”
Mrs. Pariseau suggested gently. “And perhaps that’s the point the story is making. How else do we truly transform, if not through some sort of strife?”
Everyone contemplated this.
“But I feel as though I’m transforming every day I’m here at the Grand Palace on the Thames, and I don’t feel a bit of strife,”
Mr. Delacorte declared.
“No strife? Be honest, Delacorte.” Bolt tipped his head at the Epithet Jar, then at the chessboard, and added a surreptitious
eyebrow hike in Dot’s direction.
“And yesterday I found a piece of cheese that I accidentally dropped behind my bed a few weeks ago, and it had transformed
quite a bit by just sitting there,” Delacorte insisted. “Grew a fur coat.”
“The maids ought to have found that, Mr. Delacorte.” Angelique’s tone suggested she was making a mental note to have a stern chat with Meggie and Rose.
“At least as a tree, Daphne is utterly off limits to Apollo. He can never have her. They are entirely different species,” Ginny concluded.
She didn’t look at Marchand, but out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw him smile almost enigmatically.
As if he somehow knew better.
Isn’t love sort of a punishment anyway?
Miss Woodville’s voice was once again echoing in Marchand’s head as the smoke from four cheroots rose and mingled on the ceiling.
The men had retreated to the smoking room after the myth reading, leaving the ladies to their embroidery and knitting and
chatter. This room amused Marchand: Dense brown velvet curtains poured from the windows, squashy brown chairs surrounded an
old battered table upon which a man could throw his booted feet, and a carpet in a scrolling pattern of browns and oxblood,
the perfect stain-hiding shades, was spread across the floor. God bless and God help the women who understood men all too
well.
Marchand was forced to concede that he hadn’t hated the so-called spirited discourse.
He’d never before heard the story of Apollo, Daphne, and Eros, but he found the notion of immortal gods behaving like conceited, petty asses entertaining.
Eros had destroyed the life of that poor nymph just because his ego was wounded.
It was in many ways a story about the perils of hubris, which ironically paralleled his own predicament.
Because he’d been so bloody confident that he’d ruthlessly, cleverly dealt with the problem of Miss Guinevere Woodville, only to almost immediately find himself fixed in the accusing beam of her big brown eyes in a boardinghouse sitting room.
Not only that, but according to the boardinghouse rules, he would need to endure her glare almost nightly.
If this ghastly coincidence didn’t have the ring of fate to it—or the knell of doom—he didn’t know what did.
Granted, the view had its compensations. The lines of the girl—the way her long, slender throat glided into her collarbone
and the way her hips flared from her waist, for instance—were more eloquent than any Caravaggio, as far as he was concerned.
He was not one to disdain the opportunity to admire an elegant package.
Even if it contained a grenade.
Because he was quite certain that Miss Woodville was capable of being as unpredictable as a Greek god in a snit.
He’d contemplated leaving the boardinghouse for a hotel for perhaps half a second last night, and rejected it out of hand.
Like Eros, he would be damned if anyone got the better of him, let alone a girl.
His own room on the third floor was insidiously cozy. There were bosomy-plush pillows on the bed and flowers stuffed into
a little vase. Everything in it was soft. Lucifer’s Fall’s marble and gilt sheen was designed to bolster the egos of men of
money and power; the whole of the Grand Palace on the Thames seemed designed to cushion spirits and falls. To . . . envelop.
While the men who gambled in Lucifer’s Fall craved and curried his favor, few of them would ever invite him to their homes.
(And none of them would ever introduce him to their daughters, but that went without saying). They all understood the social divide.
It had never occurred to Marchand to mind as long as he made a profit and had a fine place to live.
But in the sitting room an epiphany had landed on him like a cinder thrown from a fire: The Grand Palace on the Thames was
a home. Which made this his first stay in someone’s actual home, the kind of home that had long been loved and lived in by people
who belonged with and to each other. The realization had made him feel fleetingly furious and foolish and raw. As if he was
the only one not in on a secret. As if he was pitiable for not recognizing how a real home ought to look and feel.
“What could have been” seemed everywhere he looked in this bloody place.
He was aware that everything tended to land on the raw at this time of year. The relentless coziness of the place, the surprise
of Miss Woodville, the unexpected presence of a curly-haired little boy—taken separately, he could have managed well enough.
Combined, however, they had nudged him off kilter. And normally it was as impossible to do that as it was to knock over that
huge marble statue of the Duke of Valkirk in Hyde Park.
Isn’t love sort of a punishment anyway? was a funny, jaded thing for a young woman like Miss Woodville to come out with. But she wasn’t wrong.
“I’ll give little Daniel the bit with the belly,” Delacorte mused, breaking the silence. “That’s not too far off the mark. And the puffy cheeks. Was right funny the first four hundred and twenty-three times he did it. But why the crossed eyes? I don’t look like that. Do I?” he demanded.
“Not at all,” Captain Hardy assured him.
“I’ve been told I’ve nice eyes.” Delacorte was indignant.
“They’re lovely,” Lucien agreed, and Captain Hardy laughed.
“Fine pair of eyes you have there in your head, Delacorte,” Marchand contributed. “I bet they work really well, too.”
“Like nobody’s business!” Delacorte confirmed stoutly.
“I suppose pulling faces makes everything twice as funny when you’re a child,” Marchand told Delacorte. “It’s like adding
chocolate sauce on top of blancm—”
“Don’t say it!” the other three men implored in unison.
Marchand grinned.
“At least I didn’t make Daniel cry by just looking at him, like you did, Hardy,” Delacorte said.
“It wasn’t so much how I looked, as what I said,” Hardy maintained. “Which was ‘How do you do, Daniel.’ And for some reason
that shattered him.”
“I’m very certain it was both how you looked and what you said,” Lucien said remorselessly.
Delacorte nodded. “You have a look, Hardy.”
“I have a look?”
“Do the look, Delacorte,” Lucien urged. “Hardy’s ‘I’m going to have you flogged for insubordination’ look.”
“You do me?” Captain Hardy was stunned.
Mr. Delacorte planted his hands on his hips and glowered sternly, eyebrows drawn together.
Lucien and Delacorte laughed. Marchand thought it was wisest not to laugh, though all of this was impossible not to enjoy.
Captain Hardy was speechless.
His jaw dropped. “When have I ever planted my hands on my hips that way?”