The Water Nymph (28 page)

Sophie looked down at them from the second-floor window of Crispin’s apartments and felt the sudden urge to flee. “No,” she said, stepping backward and nearly tripping over her dress. “No, I do not think today is the right day.”

“What are you talking about?” Octavia demanded, swooping down to rescue Sophie’s hem from being trampled under its unappreciative wearer’s feet.

“I think tomorrow might be a better day. Look outside. Doesn’t it look like it might rain?”

Emme, seated in the window embrasure, shook her head. “You might be right, Sophie. I think there is a cloud hovering somewhere over the Kingdom of Sweden.”

Octavia took hold of Sophie’s hand and turned toward her. “Sophie, what is the matter? I thought you wanted to marry Crispin.”

“I did. I do,” Sophie went on. “But what if he does not want to marry me? What if he is just doing it because he made the promise and is too honorable to break it?”

“A very good point,” Emme agreed. “What if he had amnesia when he asked you and forgot that he was already married. Or what if he is not the Earl of Sandal at all but just a cobbler that looks like him and—”

“Enough,” Octavia pronounced, struggling not to smile. “Sophie, you know that is not the case. You know he wants to marry you.”

“Maybe,” Sophie conceded. “But what if the other Arboretti, his brother and cousins, hate me?”

Octavia shook her head. “They won’t hate you.”

Sophie ignored her. “What if they are all very prim and proper and think that I am unladylike and unmannerly?”

“They would be right,” Octavia pronounced matter-of-factly.

Sophie had just turned to her friend, eyes wide with disbelief, when there was a knock on the door. Before anyone could say anything, a blond head, followed by a small body, appeared.

“Are you Miss Champion?” the blond head asked in slightly accented English. When Sophie nodded, she rushed toward her, smiling enormously. “I am Bianca. Your sister-in-law. I could not wait to meet you. You are even more beautiful than Crispin described, and he used many, many adjectives. Not to mention the letters from Lawrence Pickering. Your dress is spectacular, extraordinary.” She turned toward the other two women in the room. “You must be Octavia and Emme. I have heard so much about all of you I—”

“Don’t be alarmed by my wife,” Ian said, striding into the room. “She always talks this much when she is excited.”

“May I present, Ian, Crispin’s brother and my husband,” Bianca introduced. Noticing the other three tall men who had unceremoniously pushed their way into the room, she continued, pointing to each in turn. “And Miles, Tristan, and Sebastian, Crispin’s notorious cousins.”

“You know very well that we prefer the word ‘illustrious,’ Bianca,” Tristan chided her. “We would not want Miss Champion to get the wrong idea about us.”

“Please, call me Sophie,” Sophie just managed to say, completely overwhelmed by her new company.

“Sophie,” Sebastian repeated with a nod and a smile, then leaned toward her confidentially. “Tell us, Sophie, is it true that you were wearing a mustache when you and Crispin met?”

After hesitating for a moment, Sophie nodded.

“And that you saved a dozen women from prison?” Bianca wanted to know.

“I—I suppose,” Sophie stammered, fairly certain that neither talking about her tendency to wear male hairpieces nor talking about her prison record would improve her standing with the Arboretti.

“I didn’t save anyone when I was in prison,” Bianca confided, clearly in awe.

“You did come home with a new steward,” Ian pointed out, his mock exasperation overlaid with loving amusement. “But I don’t suppose Sophie wants to spend her wedding day hearing about all of that. There will be years for us to exhaust her with our boring tales.”

“Boring?” Tristan was aghast. “Speak for yourself. My stories are never boring.”

“Bah. That one about the Raphael painting that you liberated from the collection of the Duchess of Montecastello by feeding her dogs brandy and cookies while you hung suspended by your ankles in her fireplace is definitely boring,” Sebastian said with an exaggerated yawn.

Sophie looked from one to the other of the smiling faces surrounding her, and felt—as she had often in recent days—as though she were in a wonderful dream. Someone else’s wonderful dream, a dream of such staggering marvelousness that it could never belong to Sophie Champion.

She struggled to find the proper words to tell her visitors how overwhelmed she was, but nothing seemed right. Instead, she managed to come out with, “It is a real pleasure to meet all of you.”

“I assure you, the pleasure is wholly ours,” Ian replied with an earnestness that gave the words more meaning than mere social niceties. Then he crossed the room toward her and, taking both her hands warmly in his, said, “Welcome to our family, Sophie. We have been waiting for you.”

Unbeknownst to him, unbeknownst even to her, Ian had just spoken the words that Sophie had been longing to hear for eleven years.

The group crowding around the base of the main staircase in the entrance hall of Sandal Hall grew silent at a sign from Thurston.

“Breathe,” Ian leaned over to whisper to Crispin, who nodded but completely disregarded his brother’s good advice. He would not breathe or swallow or even move again until he saw Sophie and knew that she really was going to marry him.

A door on the first landing opened, and Bianca appeared, followed by Helena, then Emme, then Octavia. What Crispin calculated to be roughly six hundred years passed, and then, all of a sudden, she was there.

Sophie seemed to float above them, shimmering splendidly from head to foot. She was an incredible vision, too beautiful to be mortal, blushing too strongly to be anything else. Her gown was of deep ocean blue, and turned her eyes that color too. The skirt was completely embroidered with mermaids and mermen dancing together while sea creatures played among them, their hair and bodies picked out in diamonds and pearls and emeralds to make them shimmer as if underwater. The underskirt was a lighter shade of blue, cut to move like ripples of water, with small diamonds and aquamarines carefully set in so it glistened like the surface of the sea at dawn, and the same stones formed a small bee on the hem of the gown. There was no question that the dress was Octavia’s masterpiece, but it was not that which caused Crispin to lose his tongue. It was the way Sophie looked in it, and, even more, the way she was looking at him.

Crispin looked back at her and said in a voice that carried out to the crowds in the streets, “Sophie Champion, I love you.”

The cheering that began then did not end until well after dawn. Description of the wedding of the Earl of Scandal to Miss Sophie Champion took up eight pages of the newly reopened
News at Court
(“under the proprietorship of Lady Priscilla Snowden and her sister, Lady Eleanor Nearview, Aunts to the Earl of Sandal”), which featured descriptions of everything from the food that was consumed (“a notable preponderance of orange cakes”) to a transcript of the Queen’s remarks on the occasion (which included such sagacities as “Very fine wine, Sandal,” and “Where do you suppose he had these cushions made?”). A half page was given over to an impromptu monologue performed by a raven named Grip from the window of His Lordship’s chambers, apparently on the topic of slugs, and another half to a listing of “Women Claiming to Have Had Their Lives Saved by Sophie Champion.” A pageant performed by members of a patriotic association called the Worshipful Hall (“unknown to the Proprietors”), which raised a few eyebrows when all the dancing boys turned out to be dancing girls, received three quarters of a page, but by far the longest segment was entitled “A Report of What Transpired at Midnight.”

It was just slightly short of that hour when Thurston, standing in front of a planting shed off to the side of the Sandal Hall gardens, cleared his throat. “Good evening, my lord, my lady,” he said, as if there were nothing at all unusual about seeking a renegade bride and groom in the outbuildings of their own garden during their wedding. “I did not like to bother you, but this was just delivered, and the messenger says it is urgent.”

Crispin appeared from around the shed first, wiping a smudge of dirt from his ear, and Sophie followed, trying not to blush furiously. She looked over Crispin’s shoulder as he slit open the parcel.

Crispin and Sophie
,

I wish I could have been there with you to celebrate your wedding, but a melancholy boor who spends all his time licking his wounds is hardly worthy company for such a joyful day. The happiness you know is something I once longed for myself, but understand that I can never have. No one, however, deserves it more than the two of you
.

I have sold off all my properties and left the money in a trust to be given to those in need, which I hope you, Sophie, will oversee. All my wishes, all my joys, all my rosy hopes for the future, now reside in you two. Know that when the H.M.S
. Phoenix
sails tonight for the wars in Spain, there sails aboard her a captain whose heart is filled with gratitude and love for you both. Your friendship is my most precious possession
.

Please accept the two gifts that accompany this as a token of my deep and undying affection, and in remembrance of where our friendship, Crispin, began so many years ago
.

Your humble and faithful,

Lawrence

Before Crispin could ask, Thurston presented him with the large parcel he had been given along with the note. Sophie lifted the canvas that hung over it and let out a gasp.

Standing before her was a painting of such exquisite artistry that it seemed to glow with its own light. In the middle of a seascape, a magnificent woman rose from the water, naked but for her lush hair which wrapped around her, concealing her form but suggesting its magnificence. She stared out of the painting at the viewer, smiling, kind, and very, very beautiful.

Crispin reached down and lifted a rectangle of parchment from where it had been wedged between the boards of the painting and the frame. “ ‘
I thought you might like this old piece as it reminds me of Sophie
,’ ” he read from Lawrence’s note aloud. ‘ “
It’s by a long-dead Italian named Sandro Botticelli. According to his son, from whom I bought the painting several years back, old Sandro painted two of them, one called
The Birth of Venus
and this one, which he called
The Water Nymph.
He sold the first one to some Florentine count but kept this version for his private collection because he thought it was superior. I know you probably do not have a place for such an old and useless piece in your grand house—you can see how the left corner is starting to crack—so feel free to use it as kindling or however you see fit
.’ ”

Crispin shook his head at the note and whispered, “Lawrence, you cad. ‘Feel free to use it as kindling.’ ” Then he looked up at Sophie. “This painting was the masterpiece of Lawrence’s collection. My cousin Tristan tried to buy it from him for years. He says it is worth more than all the art he owns put together, more probably than all the art in England.”

“It is magnificent,” Sophie breathed, mesmerized by the image of the red-haired woman rising from the water.

Crispin had not stopped shaking his head. “It certainly is. But given this trifle, I fear what Lawrence’s other present might be.” He turned to Thurston and asked with some trepidation, “Where is the other package?”

“There was no other package, sir,” Thurston said, looking, for the first time in Crispin’s memory, vaguely bemused. Crispin, on the other hand, was relieved. But before either Thurston’s bemusement or Crispin’s relief could really take hold, a loud explosion was heard, and the sky over the river steps of Sandal Hall lit up with green stars.

Sophie wrenched her eyes from the painting and moved them in the direction of the noise. “Look, Crispin, the other present,” she cried, dragging him toward the river. The Thames in front of the house was filled with barges, and from each of them, towers of brightly colored flames were exploding. Some shot high into the air, golden arcs of dazzling sparks; others exploded outward in purplish clouds that made the surface of the river seem to be on fire. From this purple cloud emerged first a sparkling golden horn, and then a glittering white unicorn, wearing a fiery red collar from which dangled what looked like a pair of dice. The unicorn reared once, twice, then leapt gracefully into the river. As it vanished, a golden egg appeared on the central barge, growing and growing, and then cracking open with a staggering explosion to reveal an enormous bird, its wings red, its body and head orange and gold, simulated flames lapping at its feet. This Phoenix, for it could have been no other, seemed to double and triple in size until it blazed into a large explosion. Simultaneously, all the barges came alive, awash in white cascades of sparks, and where the Phoenix had been now appeared the letters
C
and
S
in red, moving slowly together and finally entwining to form a single red heart. Just before the firework heart disappeared, a cloud of a thousand live pure-white doves whose wings had been studded with diamonds flew out from behind it, the gemstones glittering wildly in the light from the barges as the birds made their way up and up and up into the sky.

Side by side Crispin and Sophie stood on the river steps of their home, their hands clasped tightly together, their eyes striving to follow the ethereal trail of the last shimmering dove as it disappeared into the night.

For generations afterward, people spoke of the magical summer of 1588 when the Thames exploded in mysterious fiery portents, the
H.M.S. Phoenix
led the English to victory against the Spanish, and three hundred families went from poverty to riches as the sky above London rained diamonds for days.