The joke didn’t seem so funny when only a thin layer of silk had separated her body from Marylewick’s muscled, aroused one.
Her fingers were shaking as she fished her portfolio and key from her desk drawer. She unlocked the portfolio’s tiny latch and slipped out her latest pages. Only her cousins, Frances and Edgar, knew she was the author of Colette and the Sultan. Heaven forbid that George would find out she wrote the sensational stories. Since she was too old to be hidden conveniently in another boarding or finishing school, he would tuck her away in an asylum. He was painfully old-fashioned in his views on women. And by old-fashioned, she meant Roman. In his mind, women should never venture from their homes, much less have their names venture into journals.
She grabbed her pen, jammed it into the inkwell, and under where she had written: Colette’s tale was abruptly ended when in her confused state (and much to the dismay of her publisher, a character heretofore unmentioned but always looming in the background) she accidentally stepped in front of a herd of angry camels and was trampled to death, she now penned:
Lord Marylewick’s powerful body trapped Colette beneath him. His caftan was of the finest silk and gold embroidery. Its delicate beauty was wasted on his hard, brutish face and body. Colette refused to give in to fear. She would not give him the pleasure of her terror.
As always, she would change Marylewick’s name to Sultan Murada before she gave the clean copy to her publisher. She would remove any incriminating vestiges of Marylewick’s annoying mannerisms and alter his handsome features to a better reflection of his true ugly personality. Marylewick’s pale gray eyes were changed to vacuous, cold black. The graceful arch in his brows flattened to severe slashes. His lips, which she now knew to be as lusciously soft as they looked, were reduced to a cruel line. However, the sultan sported Marylewick’s unyielding jaw.
For now, she didn’t need to think of the trifling details of appearance. She was a mere scribe to her fast-flowing muse.
He lifted her veil. The vivid sunlight burned her eyes.
“Your father is dead,” he growled. “But my spies know you carry his secret. The formula for Greek Fire. Give it to me, woman.”
“I would rather follow my father in death,” she answered in Persian.
He drew the sword from his sash and held it above her thundering heart. The blade penetrated the thin fabric of Colette’s peasant caftan, in which she had disguised herself in her attempt to flee the sultan and his army. She could feel the sharp point poised on her skin.
“Death is too merciful and does not achieve my aim,” Marylewick spat. “I will make you my slave. Your life is my possession.”
“Do what you will.” Her voice remained steady despite the rapture in her breast.
“Wait! What? Muse, did you say ‘rapture in her breast’?” Lilith asked. “No, no. For God’s sake, he’s making her his slave. She can’t feel anything but abhorrence for him.”
But her muse continued on this dangerous path.
“You’ve already taken my home, my books, my art, all I have known,” Colette cried. “But the contents of my mind cannot be possessed. You will never know the gardens of my heart.”
“I won’t?” His voice was creamy and low. “My fair Colette, it’s not your lush, flowering heart I desire but the sweet nectar from your wet lips.”
He dropped his sword.
A hot, heady wave coursed through Colette’s body as his mouth descended upon hers—
“What! No, no, Muse, you are wrong. Pick up the sword this instant and aim at her heart again.”
Lilith’s mule-headed muse refused to listen.
His rough fingers gently caressed her—
“Dammit, Muse! You stop that!” Lilith leaped back from the desk and stared at her words as if they had come alive—ugly Frankensteins shocked to life. “Muse, you had better have a devious plan in mind, because Colette is far too intelligent and possesses too much taste to find Marylewick the least bit alluring.”
“But, darling, Lord Marylewick is alluring,” a female voice said.
Lilith wheeled around. Her cousin-in-law, Frances, had opened the door and ambled in. A tipsy smile played on her unnaturally cherry-red lips. “Terribly alluring,” Frances said. “Why, when he walks into the room, the heavens open and angels sing.” She waved her hand, jangling her paste diamond bracelets. “But then he insists on speaking and—”
“Hell opens, choirs of demons sing, and Satan falls. Paradise lost.” Lilith began to quote from Milton’s masterpiece. “‘Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; / And, in—’”
“Darling, darling, you know I get a headache when you become dramatic.”
Frances’s blond curls were twisted around ostrich plumes. Pink fabric roses clustered at the bodice and down the bustle of her purple gown. She was vivid and vibrant, and Lilith worshipped her.
After years of the Maryle family sending her from one boarding school to the next, Lilith had finally managed to escape to her paternal cousins, Edgar and Frances Dahlgren. They took her in and kept her safe from George’s controlling clutches. Lilith savored their exciting world of artists, musicians, and writers. Just being amid the stunning art was as close to heaven as she could get on Earth. She had always wanted to dwell in a story or painting. As if she could step out of her anxious life and into the paper and canvas and exist in a better world.
She’d learned at a tender age that books and art offered a kind of escape from the loneliness and fear she suffered amid the strict, uniform living of boarding school life. At seven, she taught herself to read while hiding behind the curtains in the alcove of the school’s study. She remembered laughing aloud when reading Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. So this is laughter, she had thought, reflecting on the rise and release in her chest and the peace that flooded her body. What the outside world couldn’t provide her—a true home, loving parents, kindness, companionship, and laughter—she had found in books.
Later, after she grew older and bolder, having learned to make friends, conceal sweets in her mattress, smoke a cigar, and sneak out of the seventh floor dorm windows at night, she still craved to escape into art, this time into the darker reflections of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and her beloved Keats. She found kindred spirits in the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She spent hours studying their paintings of beauty seemingly locked away behind an invisible wall—perfection so close, but never attainable.
“I saw you fly away.” Frances clutched the bedpost. “Has odious Marylewick vexed you again? Did he say anything about your money?”
Lilith rested her pen on the tray. “Of course he did! The man can’t mutter three sentences without reminding me. ‘Hello. What fine weather we’ve been having. Did I mention that I control all your money and expect you to grovel for it?’”
“He isn’t stopping your allowance, is he?”
“Until next month, you can be sure.”
“Dear God! But we need—” Frances visibly checked herself and began again in a calmer voice. “What happened?”
Lilith’s face heated. She glanced at her pages, where Colette remained trapped beneath the sultan. “He, er…he was angry because of the exhibit opening, what I was wearing, and that I had lied to him—which I hadn’t.” Lilith couldn’t sit still and began tidying her empty toffee papers. “You see, when I begged for extra funds on Monday, I told him that we had outrun the grocer, which was true, and that I had outrun my gowns, which was also true, because I can hardly get into them anymore due to my little toffee problem. I couldn’t tell him that I needed money for the gallery. I didn’t have the fortitude to sit through the denigration of me, my lifestyle, and my bohemian friends, only to be told no. He detests you and Edgar and thinks you’re a terrible influence upon me.”
“We try our best, darling.”
“I meant to go to the shops directly after I spoke with him. Truly. Except that Monday was particularly gray and soggy, and you know how low I become after meeting with George. He makes me feel horrible about myself. I thought a tiny spot of tea and toffee in my favorite teashop would brighten my spirits. And what do you know, I smashed into Figgy.”
“You didn’t tell me about Figgy.”
Lilith sank into her chair.
“The poor man. He hasn’t written a poem since his wife died. He was a dreadful sight, disheveled and unshaven. My heart bled for him. How could I not help? So I gave him a few pounds.”
Frances groaned. “You are too generous, and it’s dreadful. Charity, luv, begins at home. This home.” She waved about her.
“But I gave the rest of the monies to you for the exhibit opening. Don’t tell me we need even more.”
Frances bowed her head. “Edgar hasn’t sold a painting, whether his or other artists’, in a month.”
Oh no! Their little household rolled along on tenuous finances. Lilith gave money for rent, coal, and groceries from her monthly allowance, but running a gallery and supporting a community of underappreciated artists stretched their meager funds.