The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows - Olivia Waite Page 0,37

her hand against her heart. “That’s Joanna Molesey, isn’t it?” For the water nymph’s long nose and hungry eyes were the absolute mirror of the poet’s.

Flood nodded once, sharply. Her voice was reverent, as though they stood in a cathedral. “The dryad is a self-portrait. Isabella sculpted this when she was much younger—right after she’d met Joanna and Mr. Molesey for the first time.”

“Did her husband . . . ?” Agatha had to stop and clear the roughness from her throat. There was so much hopeless yearning in those figures that it made her want to weep. “Was he very angry about it?”

“According to Isabella, Mr. Molesey looked at it and said: ‘Oh, how sweet, the nymph and the dryad want to be friends even though they abide in different elements.’”

Agatha looked at those reaching hands, those parted lips, and back at Flood. “Friends?” she blurted, and pointed at the water nymph. “This statue does not embody friendship, Flood. That nymph is literally melting below the waist, and the dryad is doing the opposite of whatever Daphne does whenever Apollo catches up to her. Honestly,” she said, folding her arms, shaking her head, “you could not come up with any clearer signal of sensual encouragement than opposite-Daphne.”

Flood was laughing at this helplessly, silently. At length she gasped, “You are an artist, Griffin: you’re fluent in this language. The late Mr. Molesey was very much not.”

Agatha made a rude noise for Joanna’s deluded, departed husband and turned back to the statue. “It’s lovely of course—and rather scandalous—but what makes it your favorite?”

Flood got herself under control with a final chuckle. “Partly that it is so beautiful. And I love the curl on that wave, and the bend in the branches. It makes me think of the best kind of pastoral poetry. But also . . .” She paused, biting her lip. “This is going to sound horribly sentimental.”

Agatha waved this aside. “You’ve already mentioned poetry. We might as well bring sentiment into it.”

Flood’s eyes creased at the corners, whether from the bright sunlight or from the difficulty of putting her thoughts into proper words, Agatha didn’t know. At last she said: “Isabella sculpted this because she fell in love with someone she shouldn’t, and she couldn’t act on her feelings even if they chanced to be returned. Art was her only way of grappling with the situation. It’s a moment of perfect hopelessness, captured in stone—but it’s not the end of the story. So when I look at this statue, I can almost . . . look past the pain and see beyond to all the years and the happiness they had together. They had no idea they had all that to look forward to. So the statue, you see, means something more, something better than what the artist originally put into it. And that strikes me as a sort of miracle.”

She cast Agatha a shy smile, knowing she had offered something tender and fragile, ready to laugh at herself if that’s what Agatha chose to do.

Agatha did not feel like laughing. She felt lightning-blasted, rooted to the spot. Mr. Flood’s old coat felt stiff and brittle, like a layer of bark that had encased her tense shoulders and awkward arms.

Someone else’s wife, she reminded herself. Someone else has already claimed her hand, so yours must stay at your side.

But oh, it was all she could do not to reach out.

“Did you ever show Mr. Flood this statue?” she asked instead—then silently cursed her too-sharp tongue.

If Penelope Flood thought the question too probing, it didn’t appear to trouble her. “I did. ‘Very Greek,’ he called it.” Flood’s smile widened, two dimples winking into view in her cheeks. “And now, whenever I look at it, I am going to recall the phrase ‘opposite-Daphne.’ Which I never could have predicted before, either. So you see: truth, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Agatha managed a choked laugh, but beneath her borrowed coat an unspeakable thorn had burrowed into her chest, and she knew it would ache for some time yet.

Chapter Eight

The Four Swallows was buzzing on the night of 6 July, and it was all on account of the news. Penelope shouldered her way through to the bar to get a round for herself and Griffin, then squeezed up next to the printer on a bench to hear Mr. Biswas read aloud from the latest edition of the Times.

A secret report had been presented in the House of Lords: