The Rose

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Does that answer all your questions?” her father asked August.

  “Yes,” August said. “Thank you, Lord Godwick.”

  “Good,” her father said. “You can leave my house now.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  August didn’t leave but her parents did. Day trip to London.

  Lia stood at the window of the music room and watched her father’s Bentley carrying him and her mother through the main gate. August came up behind her and peered over her shoulder.

  “Breakfast went well,” he said.

  Lia resisted the urge to plant her elbow in his liver.

  She turned around and looked up at him.

  “You practically told my father you and I were shagging. At breakfast.”

  “Should I have saved that conversation for lunch?” August asked. She glared at him. “Your father’s not the sort of man who gives up dark family secrets just by asking nicely. I needed him feeling vulnerable. Saying ‘Good morning, old chap, I ate your daughter’s cunt under your roof last night, and there’s nothing you can do about it’ tends to get a man off his game. And it worked.”

  “It did work.” Her father was an old-school sort who was happy to laugh and joke and slap his mates on the back down at the pub—or roar at the politicians on the telly or at the players on a rugby pitch. But his fears? His secret sorrows? Those he shared with his wife and no one else, not even his children. “But why do you care so much about the statue of Aphrodite in my room?”

  “I’m trying to understand how the Rose Kylix got into your possession.” August wore a faraway look in his eyes.

  “And you think it has something to do with that statue?”

  He shrugged and came back to her. “There could be a connection. I know you don’t want to believe the kylix actually belongs to a real god, but I believe it. And the toys of the gods tend to pick their owners. Aphrodite’s name was invoked at your birth. You’ve had a shrine to her in your bedroom your entire life... It’s possible the kylix picked you for a reason.”

  “What possible reason would make a god want me to have one of their toys?” she asked, skeptical to the core.

  “That I don’t know,” he said. “But I intend to find out. In the meantime, keep the statue by your bed. We wouldn’t want to insult Aphrodite. She’s getting cranky in her old age.”

  He grinned but Lia couldn’t, not just yet.

  “I had no idea I almost died when I was born. I can’t stop thinking about Daddy being so desperate he’d pray to a goddess on a mantel in the music room. You could count on two hands how many times he’s stepped into a church by choice. And three of the ten times were when me and Art and Charlie were christened.”

  “He loves you,” August said. “I envy that. My own father can’t stand the sight of me.”

  “Oh, August, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not personal. He can’t stand the sight of anyone. And no one can stand the sight of him, either. Miracle he managed to get any woman to sleep with him, much less my mother.”

  Lia smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile and it didn’t last long. She pressed her head against August’s chest before she realized what she was doing. She started to pull back, but he wouldn’t let her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close to him.

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “I’m being blackmailed,” she said. “Because David knows I love my parents too much to tell them what he did to me. That’s sick, isn’t it? Using a girl’s love for her parents against her?”

  “It is. Makes me sick we’re paying him off. We ought to be throwing him off a cliff. Times like this I almost wish I hadn’t gotten myself kicked out of my family. They could take care of David with a phone call.”

  “Take care of? Like...mafia-style?”

  “I don’t mean kill him,” August said. “Though it’s tempting.”

  “Very tempting. If he wasn’t such a bloody good painter, I’d throw him under a double-decker myself.”

  “Is he that good?”

  “Unfortunately.” She finally managed to extricate herself from August’s arms. “He never even finished the mural in Mum’s room but it’s still incredible.”

  “Can I see it?” August asked. “Or would your mother mind?”

  “She won’t mind.” Lia’s mother had shown it off to houseguests before. She led August upstairs and into the east wing, which had been updated far more recently than the west wing—where Lia lived in the old dowager quarters. The colors were muted blues, and instead of the heavy Victorian dark wood paneling in Lia’s wing, here it was mostly white wainscoting along the walls, nothing that would detract from the paintings and portraits hung in the hallway.

  As she passed the portrait of her great-grandfather Malcolm, Old Number Thirteen, she stuck her tongue out at him. August caught her and raised his eyebrows.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I love the old boy, but this is all his fault for being too handsome.”

  “Too handsome?” August said. “How is that even possible?”

  “This portrait used to hang over Mum’s fireplace in her bedroom. Mum said Daddy caught her looking at Old Number Thirteen during...you know.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Daddy exiled Great-Granddaddy to the hallway and hired David to paint a mural in Mum’s bedroom by way of apology. But it was a good trade, no offense to Number Thirteen. See?”

  Lia opened the door to her mother’s bedroom and let August in first. He did what everyone did upon entering the room. His head fell back, he stared up at the ceiling and his mouth fell slightly open.

  Usually the person seeing the ceiling mural said something along the lines of “wow” or “my God” or even “holy shit.” But not August. He said nothing, but his nothing spoke so much more than anyone else’s words.

  “It’s Cupid and Psyche,” Lia said.

  “Eros,” August said. “He hates the name Cupid.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “People think Cupid is a fat baby with a tiny bow and arrow. Does that look like a fat baby to you?” He pointed at the mural. Eros was a full-grown man with a bow as tall as Lia.

  Lia had always been fascinated by the strange story of Cupid—strike that—Eros and Psyche. Psyche was a backwater princess from a backwater kingdom whose beauty rivaled Aphrodite’s. Eros had married her in secret. She hadn’t even known she was marrying a god as they made love every night in the dark.

  “Why did your mother choose this myth?” August asked. “Or was it David’s idea?”

  “I suggested it,” Lia said. “And Mum liked the idea. Said it reminded her of her and Daddy. They’d eloped right after meeting. She said being married to Daddy was like having a stranger in her bed, just like Eros with Psyche. But eventually, she saw who he really was, and she loved him.”

  “Why did you suggest it?”

  “This myth has always fascinated me,” she admitted. “The fantasy of a powerful stranger summoning you to his home to be his wife. Then having sex with that complete stranger in the dark every night so you can’t see who he is. And finally you discover the whole time you’ve been shagging the god of sex?” Lia laughed. “Better than what happened to me. I thought I was sleeping with a god. Turns out he was monster.”

  “I’m sorry, Lia,” August said. He touched her cheek. She smiled for him.

  “Why didn’t Cupid—” she began. August glared. “Eros, sorry. Why didn’t Eros just tell her who he was from the beginning?”

  “A few reasons,” he said. “Common sense, for starters. What passes for common sense among the gods. If you love a mortal you can’t tell a mortal what you are, or they’ll be too frightened and run away. Or they’ll love you for your power and not for yourself. Eros wanted her to fall in love with him, not his power or his majesty. They had to meet as strangers and there was only
one way to do that—he had to keep Psyche in the dark. Literally.”

  They stood in silence, both of them, gazing up at the ceiling. David had done marvelous work. The mural took up the entire center of the ceiling. Eros, a beautiful winged youth with dark curling hair, approached a magnificent canopied bed where a girl with flowing chestnut hair sat in a gown of white—with a dark blue sash, embroidered with silver crescent moons and golden stars, tied over her eyes. The implication was obvious. Eros was about to make love to the girl on their wedding night and he’d hidden her eyes, so she couldn’t see that it was a god in her bed and not a mortal prince. Of course, Psyche cheated and peeked at her sleeping husband. She was cast out for breaking the rules and nearly died trying to win back his love. Poor Psyche. Lia always felt so bad for her. What girl wouldn’t want to know who was making love to her every night?

  “Why the blindfold on Psyche?” August asked. “She wasn’t blindfolded. They made love at night, in the dark.”

  “David said unless we wanted the entire mural to be one solid black square—night—he’d have to improvise. Mum suggested the blindfold. It was my idea to make it midnight blue and put little stars and moons on the fabric to symbolize night.”

  “Ah,” August said. “You’re very clever, Lia.”

  She blushed.

  “David finished the main panel but that was it before I sent him packing.” Lia pointed up at the scene of Psyche in her blindfold on the bed and Eros approaching. “The rest of the ceiling was going to be scenes from Psyche’s quest to win back Eros’s love. And then the frame was supposed to be all butterflies. See?” She pointed out a framed pencil sketch on the fireplace mantel that showed the completed mural, butterflies and all.

  “She never lost his love,” August said, staring at the sketch.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The writer Apuleius was a novelist, not a historian. He invented most of the Eros and Psyche myth. But there were pockets of truth in it. Eros saw the mortal princess and fell in love with her. He wanted to marry her but knew his mother wouldn’t approve of him marrying the mortal girl who people said was more beautiful than Aphrodite. He had to sneak behind her back.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He had the god Apollo give an oracle to Psyche’s father, saying Psyche must go to a hill and there she would see the palace where she would live with her new husband. He didn’t want to get in trouble with his mother for marrying a mortal, so he kept Psyche in the dark about his identity. If he told her his name, she might tell her sisters...eventually it would get back to Aphrodite. But Psyche found out and was furious he’d lied to her. Eros didn’t cast her out because she spied on him in his sleep. She ran away from him when she learned she’d been lied to by her husband, who was too cowardly to even tell her his real name.”

  “You’re being very hard on poor Eros,” Lia said, smiling.

  “It wasn’t his finest moment,” August said. “You can’t keep secrets about yourself from the person you love. If they don’t truly know you, they can’t truly love you. Eros tried to win her back, and she did forgive him, but Psyche didn’t want to be married to a being who would stay ageless and immortal while she grew old and died. He begged his mother to give his wife the gift of immortality, but Aphrodite refused.”

  “What happened to her, then?”

  “Eros had to let his wife go. She remarried, had children, lived and loved and died.” August took a breath, smiled. “They were married a week, but during that week, no two beings ever loved each other so much. And Eros never quite forgave his mother for letting Psyche die. Though maybe she had a point.”

  “Gods and mortals don’t mix?”

  “Not well,” he said. “Don’t think of the Olympic gods as these wise, ancient beings. They’re more like eternal children with much too much power. A human man betrays his wife a dozen times and she divorces him, and he never sees his children again. Zeus seduced thousands of mortal women, destroyed their lives, their marriages, forced them to give birth to monsters sometimes. Zeus carried on, no consequences except a dirty look or two from Hera.” August looked at her. “Death is a gift in a way. And weakness, frailty, too, all gifts. Human actions have meaning, consequences. With gods, everything’s a game. Everyone’s a toy. Nothing matters. They never learn. Be grateful you’re a mortal human, Lia. Even if it hurts sometimes.”

  Lia returned to the center of the room, gazed up at the scene of Psyche waiting for her new husband to come to bed and Eros, lovely long-limbed Eros, approaching.

  “It’s not fair a wanker like David gets to be such a good painter,” Lia said. “Why are so many great artists such awful people?”

  “Because they’re people.”

  “I used to love watching David work. I’d bring him water and snacks while he was in here having one of his marathon painting sessions.” She looked at August, blushed. “I modeled for Psyche.”

  “Did you?” His voice was far away, like he’d been sucked into the painting. She knew how he felt.

  “David was having trouble figuring out how to paint a woman’s hair when she had a blindfold around her head. I volunteered. Glad Mum and Daddy were gone that day.”

  Lia remembered how she’d shivered, nearly insane with excitement when David had her sit on the edge of the bed and tied the black sash over her eyes. She had to sit so still and say nothing as he studied her from all angles, trying to decide the best way to pose Psyche on the bed. In profile? Full face? From behind? He’d chosen to paint her hair a deep dark chestnut color. Otherwise everyone, he said, would know he’d used Lia as a model if he gave Psyche the same gingerbread-colored hair as her. “Our secret,” David had said, and then gave her a wink.

  “That was the day I decided I was going to marry him,” Lia said. She heard the sadness in her voice, the regret. “I was such an idiot.”

  “Human, Lia. And we’ve all been human,” he said. “Even me.”

  Lia heard real regret in his voice. She knew the feeling all too well. So much regret... She didn’t tell August this was the first time she’d looked at the mural since her nasty falling-out with David. She tended to give her parents’ bedrooms wide berth, anyway, but also she thought it would hurt too much to see David’s fingerprints in her mother’s room, so to speak. But it didn’t hurt. The mural was stunning. Truly. The colors vibrant and the scene so vivid Lia thought she could climb a ladder and step into the ceiling and live in the golden palace of Eros.

  David said that was his goal with the mural, to make anyone lying in the bed look up and wish they could float to the ceiling and live inside his painting. He wanted to, he’d said. He would have given anything to step foot into one of his own paintings, and Lia had known exactly what he meant. She’d felt the same way when she’d read about Pan’s Island in The Wind in the Willows. All she wanted was to dive into the pages and live and breathe those words like air.

  Such a pity. If David hadn’t started up their war again, she might have forgiven him just for his talent alone. They could have shaken hands, apologized for how badly they’d both behaved—meanwhile, each of them secretly thinking the other had behaved so much worse—and gotten on with their lives. It did give her a thrill of pleasure to think that while David might paint Eros’s golden palace and his wedding night with Psyche, Lia could live it.

  If August would agree to play it with her.

  She pointed upward. “Can we play that game?”

  “Eros and Psyche?” he asked, and it seemed for the first time she’d managed to shock him.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Didn’t imagine I could find your limits. Sex in the dark too weird for you? The man who made love to a cloud?”

  “The cloud started it.”

  “What is it?” she asked. “Did I hit a nerve?”

  Augus
t shoved his hands deep into his pockets and shrugged.

  “I was married,” he said.

  “You were married?” Lia knew she shouldn’t laugh at that, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t laughing at him so much as laughing at the idea of a free spirit like August being married to anyone.

  “Long, long, long ago... Brief marriage. Young love.”

  “When you were a teenager?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Much like this,” he said, nodding up at the ceiling. “I didn’t tell her some very important things about me. There are some people you’re not allowed to keep big secrets from—spouses, for example. But I did. She found out and left me. When I wanted to get her back, my mother talked me out of it. This all—” he pointed his finger up at Psyche in the bed “—hits a bit too close to home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lia said.

  “I was a selfish little ass,” he said. “I’m the one who ought to be sorry. But if you want to play the game, we’ll play it. It would be good for me.”

  “You know, I could play Eros,” Lia said. “And you could play Psyche as a young prince instead of a princess. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in a blindfold.”

  He smiled that mischievous smile, the one that made her toes clench inside her shoes.

  “Now that,” he said, “does tempt me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  August left her for the day with a kiss and a promise to see her that night. In the meantime... Lia couldn’t put it off any longer. At three in the afternoon, Lia called another meeting of the Young Ladies’ Gardening & Tennis Club of Wingthorn Hall to order.

  As it was a fine late-May afternoon, the young ladies of the YLG&T Club were mostly wearing gauzy floral print summer frocks. Georgy wore silver cowboy boots with hers, of course. Rani was the exception in a white skirt and pale pink polo shirt.