Chapter 1 #2
He hadn’t heard the nymph approach, standing in the water as he had been with the tide in his ears.
It was low tide, and most of the bathers clustered near Chain Pier or beyond, where the wheeled wooden bathing machines lined the beach for yards, one side reserved for women, the other for men.
Where he stood, on the western fringe of the city, there were few walkers at this time of day, so Jay had taken the liberty of removing his boots as if he were on his home beach of Norfolk.
There was something soothing about the cold water caressing his feet. The air moved easily around him, or he through it. He breathed deeply and plunged his hands in the water to gather a scoop of sand. When he straightened, a girl stood at his elbow, as naturally as if she’d sprung from a wave.
“What did you find?”
Her bonnet was pushed back, revealing glossy brown hair scraped into curls framing a wide brow. He caught the upturned tip of a nose as that brow wrinkled, regarding his cupped hands, and then she glanced up at him.
He forgot to breathe.
Oval face, clear skin, her eyes a deep blue, almost indigo. It was her curious, open expression and the animation in her face, the half-smile pulling one side of a finely curved mouth into a dimple, that thumped him in the chest.
He stood there like he’d been elf-shot, hands dripping mud. “Sand,” he said.
“Hmm.” She was lovely, but not uncommonly so.
Every girl with the means aspired to be lovely, and he saw from her dress that she had means.
A green velvet pelisse, the long tippet ends tied at her waist in a fanciful bow, and the matching velvet cloth on her poke bonnet flirted with the latest fashion.
Her sleeve ballooned as she pointed down the beach.
“I’ve found the most wondrous things in the rock pools by the Undercliff. Shore crab, starfish, and a snakelocks anemone, the ones that look like Medusa’s hair. Undercliff is down toward Rottingdean, if you know it—”
“I do.”
She smiled then, a full smile, that mischievous pucker catching her lips on both sides, as if she’d tucked in secrets. Jay sucked in a breath before he grew dizzy.
“I am not from here,” she said, slightly abashed.
“Nor I. It is summer in Brighton. Is anyone from here?”
She laughed, and the sound was like a murmuration of starlings, a great breathy rush that yanked one’s spirit into the air and threw it free.
She held out her hand. A long brown strip, the color of his sand, dangled from her leather glove.
Her eyes looked as if they had caught the sun, which was impossible, as the sky was clouded over while the breeze shoved off the early rain that had left him free to ramble in the surf and meet naiads.
Her face was so brilliant he could not look away.
“I found kelp,” she said breathlessly. “Kelp! There are great forests of it here, a fisherman showed me. And look what is on this one.”
A creature the size and shape of his fingernail clung to the strand of seaweed. Bright stripes of color slashed the brown shell, a startling contrast of vivid and plain. “Is that—”
“A blue-rayed limpet. My first! I intend to sketch it, but my friend has my sketchbook.” She tossed an airy wave in the direction of the promenade where another young lady strolled, hands tucked into a muff against the playful breeze, head turned in their direction.
He’d wondered that a gently born girl would approach an utter stranger and converse so unselfconsciously with him.
Particularly a man so indecent as to bare his feet to the world.
Mortal girls were not so bold. The girls of his acquaintance blushed and tittered and cast coy glances, rarely spoke sentences with one complete rational thought.
This one regarded the limpet on its perch as if she’d unearthed a priceless jewel. As if she honored him by sharing it.
“So you see,” she said confidingly, “you might find more than only sand.”
He was charmed into his own admission. “I meant to find sand. And this is not only sand. This is building material. It makes—” Words failed him. He lifted his hands to gesture at Brunswick Terrace behind them, at the bricks and stones that were growing the town before their eyes.
Her brows were wideset, adding innocence to her look, yet that hint of mischief never departed. “Oh!” Her lips parted on a puff of air. “You mean all of this—the land, the hills and mountains—”
“The bricks we build with,” he said, trying to explain.
She nodded. “And the silt that lined the riverbeds. The earth that grows our crops—”
“Can you grow crops in sand?”
“Can you not?” He couldn’t detect to what degree she was serious, with those wide deep blue eyes and that merry pucker to her lips.
“Kelp grows in the mud. Only think,” she said, pointing to the shingle that stretched the length of the beach, “these pebbles comprise the mountains that hold up the earth. Then along comes the water and wind breaking the great rocks apart, and then those stones wear down into your sand. And then the sand becomes, somehow, I don’t know, all pressed together, and then you have—” She waved a gloved hand as if conjuring— “the earth and the mountains. Building everything, just like you said.”
Jay stood with his feet in the water, touching waves that had perhaps traveled the world over and over since the dawn of time, and he felt simultaneously two impossible things: that he was anchored to the earth in a way he had never been in his life, and that at the same time he was a balloon filled with air but attached to a string, and the string was attached to this girl, and whenever she drew him, he would go.
He didn’t know where to begin with her many errors.
Sand and stone and earth were all very different substances, to begin with, but if her explanation lacked an understanding of geological processes, her vision was the more poetic.
In his experience women did not care for discussions about different kinds of stones, sandstone and limestone and granite and flint, any more than they cared for explanations of how to make bricks.
And he did not want to bore a nymph. Or chastise a minor goddess. She had appeared like a soap bubble, like froth on a wave, and if he were stern she would disappear and the most enchanting interlude of his life would be over.
He wanted to stay in the enchantment, so began cautiously. “That is very—”
“Marvelous! I know! I’d never thought of it quite this way before.
But it must be that everything is connected, and we are made all of the same building material, as you said.
Sand. For God made Adam from the dust of the earth, did he not?
So we, and the mountains, and everything else that is good grows from what you hold in your hand. ”
Jay looked at the mud in his hands. He looked at her, and it was as if the gray, sober Earth he knew had broken apart.
The world was no longer blocks and squares and a steady progression through one’s days.
It was a vast, breathing network, shot through with light, glittering like dawn dew on a spider’s web of the most brilliant and intricate design.
Blood hummed through his veins. This woman. Who was she?
Her companion on the promenade lifted an enormous sleeve and called out. “Iphigenia!”
“Coming!” the girl called back, waving her kelp at her friend.
“That cannot be your name,” Jay said. “That is a doomed name.”
She laughed again. He didn’t have to explain the myth to her; she caught his thought as if they were passing a basket. “I am the eldest and most favored of my father’s daughters.”
“So was she.”
That laugh. The air sparkled, refracted light and wonder through that sound. The clouds rolled off to the east, dragging a blanket of sun over the sky. Some great boulder in Jay’s chest fell away, exposing him to a rush of lightness and air.
“Effie!” the other woman bellowed. “You’ll make us late.”
His nymph’s eyes danced. “One is not behind times for an appointment with Miss Elphick.”
“The world is better for bending to the will of the Miss Elphicks,” Jay agreed.
She giggled, and he’d done the most remarkable thing in this life, matching her wit. She was light and life and everything ineffable, and he, in her presence, was no longer dull clay but quickened, a statue come to life.
“Adieu, Master Builder. Do not forget the rock pools if you wish to find creatures among your sand.”
And off she ran—yes, ran, abandoning the dignity of poke bonnets and fashionable pelisses and skirts just to the ankle.
Her leather boots left light prints in the sand; she was made of flesh, after all.
And he had not asked her name, her direction, the direction of her friend, any way he might find her again.
Iphigenia. Jay snapped back to the present, to the pleasure club and its tableau, to the entrancing woman in Grecian robes singing to the lyre, her voice hauntingly lovely.
In his head he heard again that laugh, that lilt to her voice that matched the sparkle in her large eyes, the secrets hidden in that sweetly curved mouth.
The scent of salt air and sea-watered earth had clung to his nostrils all afternoon. He couldn’t quell the wanting she’d called up within him, the longing to stand beside her again and see the world as she did, as a place of enchantment, laden with mysteries and delight.
He longed to touch her and see if that cheek would feel smooth as a pebble beneath his palm.
To pull apart the pert coils of hair, or unwrap the green pelisse and find the soft, beating heart of the human woman beneath.
Little wonder he’d come to a place called Hedone trying to distract himself. Little wonder he’d chosen Greece.
But no, the woman singing would not be his nymph. That could not be the same curved mouth with the mischievous pucker at the ends. He was simply so besotted with the girl he’d met that he was imposing her face on the next woman who caught his attention.
He had a sudden vision of himself spending the rest of his life searching for a glimpse of that girl from the beach.
He might go about painting her visage onto every woman he met, seeking her laugh in every woman’s voice until doomsday.
Jay had never been a man given to fancy, nor quick to give his heart; Burnhams were born with a shield against the world, wariness bred in their bones.
Now he was hollow, thrown open to the world, and even this tableau stirred and pained him.
He understood what it meant. A circle of women, sufficient unto themselves, engaged in their own leisure and pleasure.
No one to serve but their own inclinations, no obligations to fulfill, no charge to be dainty or attractive or conciliatory or anything other but what they were.
One embroidered; one held a wax tablet and tapped the stylus to her lips, as if composing.
The bare-breasted woman, older, wearing a matron’s years, dabbed at a painting of the singer, the face already emerging from the canvas as if they’d done this several times before.
“The Muses,” the gentleman spectator said. He shifted in his chair, sounding strained, and Jay wondered what the other man had come for. Simply to watch women, to know what they did in secret among themselves?
The women continued, not acknowledging him.
“There were nine Muses,” said the woman in the audience. She watched the tableau with a sharp, hungry look on her face. “These must be the Graces.”
The singer switched her song to something slow and melancholy. Jay had heard it before.
The moon and the Pleiades have set,
it is midnight,
time is passing,
but I sleep alone.
“That is by Sappho,” Jay said. “This is her school at Lesbos.”
He would have to tell his sister Nora that her obsession with ancient Greece had proven useful for him after all.
Though perhaps he wouldn’t go on to tell his sister that he had patronized a secret pleasure club where visitors used mythical aliases and the members acted out fantasies in various states of undress.
The group broke apart. The singer laid aside her harp and rose, and Jay stared at the lithe form revealed by her clinging robe as she walked to the alcove and pulled the curtain across the scene.
His imagination was going to give this form to the naiad who’d ensorcelled him on the beach, and between the graceful figure of the one and the enchanting laugh of the other, he would find no sleep tonight.
“What happened? Why did they stop?” Jay asked.
“You guessed the theme.” The other gentleman seemed irritated to be wrong.
“They will prepare another. Shush,” said the seated woman.
He could leave now. No one had recognized him; no one had even taken note of him. He could tell Farren he had taken his recommendation and visited the club, that he appreciated the premise but it was not Jay’s particular inclination to peer into the secret fantasies of others.
He would go back to his empty bed in his friend’s lodgings and the next day’s bricks and business, dignity intact, and he would take care himself of any particular urges that arose from the memory of the water nymph who had lighted his world with her laugh, or from the shape of the mouth on the masked woman as she sang.
The curtain drew back on the second scene, and Jay was obliged to admit that he was lying to himself. He was extremely interested in peering into the secret fantasies of these women. One in particular.