The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,36

on paper, from behind the safety of the frame—it was quite another to stand inches away from a sculpted satyr who was life-size in all ways except the one where he was enormously larger than life.

“Goodness,” Agatha said, and blushed to the roots beneath Mr. Flood’s broad-brimmed hat.

Flood’s answering grin heated her skin nearly as much as the sunlight did.

Was it possible to perish from a combination of arousal and embarrassment? Agatha cleared her throat and fought for something like aloofness, turning her eyes back to the satyr as the lesser of two temptations. Well, for a given definition of lesser, at any rate. “How would one even walk?”

“Quite carefully, I should imagine,” Flood said with a laugh. “Especially going around corners.”

“I fear for his fellow pedestrians.”

Flood cocked her head. “The nymphs don’t appear to be complaining.”

And indeed, the lithe figures scattered around among the hollyhocks and peonies looked every bit as louche as the satyrs. Admittedly, with more realistic physical proportions. Some were plump and sported dimples in cheeks and elbows; some were slender as birch trees with merely a whisper of bosom. The closer Agatha looked, the more each one felt . . . specific. The sculptress had not just captured the likeness of a model—she’d been recreating the forms and faces of people she knew deeply and well.

That realization was more shocking than the satyr anatomy, quite frankly: you felt that to look at any figure was to interrupt them at a most private, pleasurable moment.

The couple lounging in luxury at the center of the scene was even more easily recognizable—particularly to anyone who’d been engraving and publishing satires during the wars. “Good lord,” Agatha choked, “don’t tell me that’s—”

“Bonaparte,” Flood confirmed.

“A little more apart would have been appreciated.”

Flood cackled.

Agatha squirmed and gaped at the statue of the former emperor sprawled on a tiger skin, in all his natural glory.

The beekeeper’s voice was fond, as though discussing an old friend. “He’s dressed—well, not so much dressed, but depicting Bacchus, of course. You should see the one of him as Mars that Wellington brought home: it’s nearly twelve feet tall, which puts most people’s face right about . . . well, you can guess where.”

“Good lord.”

Agatha yanked her gaze away from the emperor’s glory to peer at the woman lounging at his side, hair crowned with stars, and a lingering sadness in her large eyes. She was covered in a flutter of drapery, which was as good as a nun’s habit in this setting. “And that’s Josephine as Ariadne, I expect.”

“Very fitting, don’t you think? Parted from her first love, then raised up to glorious heights by the second.”

“Oh, a very apt allusion. I expect this was sculpted before the emperor divorced her? Bacchus would have been ashamed to do any such thing.”

Flood’s expressive lips twisted. “Bacchus has no need of heirs, though, does he? A mortal monarch does.”

Agatha sobered. England had too recently lost the heir to the throne, the much-loved young Princess Charlotte. She had died giving birth to a stillborn son, only a few scant weeks after Thomas’s heart had given out; in Agatha’s personal anguish the country’s prolonged, widespread grief for the young someday queen and mother had been both a comfort and a torment.

Comfort, because it had given Agatha a very handy excuse for tears when she was in a most fragile state.

Torment, because it turned the world into a ghastly mirror, showing a mother and son being mourned when she was a mother with a son, in mourning. There had been no escaping, no recourse from reminders of loss. Even now, looking up at another lost queen, it cut too near the bone for Agatha’s comfort.

She reached out and grasped Flood’s elbow as if it were a lifeline. “Show me a different one,” she said.

Flood looked down at Agatha’s hand, then up again with a smile. “This way. My favorite is in the center of the maze.”

Flood’s favorite statue was a pairing: a dryad and a water nymph. The dryad was mostly tree below the waist and in one arm high above her head. The other stretched down as she leaned toward the water nymph—whose own legs vanished into waves and froth, though her arms reached up, eager to twine with those of the dryad.

The figures were almost, but not quite touching: fingertips inches from grasping, lips parted for a kiss but still a breath away from meeting.

That sliver of space cut through Agatha like a knife. “Oh,” she gasped, and pressed