From the moment she had turned to see if Viscount Le Cherche was still in that crowded drawing room and found him seeking her eyes, she was changed. The silent, obedient daughter was still visible, but so, if an observer cared to look closer, was something less predictable. Brazen man, she thought to herself. Disrespectful ogler! And his dark clothing, his distant hooded assessment of the others in the room—as if he watched them from a cool and bottomless distance—a raptor’s gaze. Well, she was no passive dove waiting for the talons. Perhaps she had talons of her own.
She came home from that initial meeting and held the dress her mother had chosen for her against her perfect breasts, swirling before a mirror and letting the reflection take its time with her, letting her own feelings about what she saw take shape. Electra knew that its clustered roses and cool paleness showed her freshest features to advantage—the firm, creamy skin, the mirrorlike eyes, the thick tumble of silky, pale hair. Yes, she was what Paris fashion regarded as lovely. But was it the kind of loveliness that appealed to Monsieur X, Monsieur Y, or Monsieur Le Cherche? The anger that had had its origin, she believed, in her reaction to the Viscount Le Cherche spilled over and into her cool gaze in the mirror. She would not be forced to be a particular kind of woman by anyone—not her mother, not Monsieur X, not the harpies who clustered around Madame de Lac. She would not be costumed for their regard. If Monsieur X and Y disliked what they saw, that would only leave her freer to go her own way. And Electra Gates suddenly, unaccountably, wanted to be free.
She threw the gown her mother had chosen aside. She went, alone, into the city. When she finally found the reflected image she’d sought in a tiny alley in the Marais, she felt a kind of excitement that was entirely foreign to her. The deeply cut bodice exposed her breasts almost to the nipple. The waist was tightly cinched, the skirt full of movement, almost diaphanous—and when she was still the material lay on her thighs like a caress. Perhaps most satisfying to her was an uneasy glittering feeling marbled through this new mood—the mood of a huntress who, at the same moment that she understood herself to be engaged in a blood sport, felt that she was the hunted as well as the hunter.
Six days now to the ball.
*
I set the book down, startled to find myself still in my closet. I looked up at a green winter coat that Lilly had passed on to me the winter before and I knew right then that I wasn’t going to return this book to its shelf the next time I went to Mrs. Daniels’s house.
The grown-up world, from what I could see on these pages, wasn’t exactly what I’d thought it was. How could glittering feelings and raptor talons have anything to do with my mother or my father, or Mrs. Daniels? Either I didn’t understand anything, or their world was even stranger than I’d imagined. I climbed out of the closet, jammed The Pirate Lover under my mattress, and told myself, again, that Mrs. Daniels wouldn’t miss one book from those crowded shelves if I kept it just a bit longer, which could possibly mean forever.
She didn’t seem to miss it at all. She set me to a few pages in The Odyssey the next Wednesday afternoon. On and on I went, listening to Telemachus whine about how he was too little and weak to fight the suitors and how his dad was maybe dead and who was going to help him blahblahblah. When Athena finally told him to get off his rear end and go have an adventure, I’d already decided he wasn’t worth my attention. Mrs. Daniels sensed my mood and took the book back, flipping to another section: Odysseus—stranded on Calypso’s island and kept prisoner as her lover. I perked right up. “Is he in love with Calypso?” I asked.
“I sincerely doubt it. They amuse one another, but his destiny is elsewhere. He must return to his home.”
“Because he’s in love with his wife?”
“Perhaps.”
“But that’s what he says, Mrs. Daniels.”
“In his world, little girl, being able to lie well is a desirable skill. And he lies very well. All the most attractive characters in this story are accomplished liars. It’s a good skill in a dangerous world. Wait until you meet the woman he hopes to return to—she is his match in every way. She is a particularly gifted liar.”
“They read this book in school but not until ninth grade.”
“Are you saying it’s too hard for you to read?”
“Oh, no.” I straightened up and got my face looking like it belonged to somebody who could read anything a ninth-grader could read. I could even read stuff I didn’t understand. That was my job and I was going to do it.
“Good.” She took the book from me and flipped through. “Perhaps I should have taken you to Circe’s island. I suspect Circe would amuse you.”
“What happens on Circe’s island?”
“She turns all the men into pigs.”
I must have looked stunned, because she shook her head a little bit at me. “Don’t worry. She turns them all back into men in the end.”
“Why did she do that to them?”
“Because she could, I imagine.”
“The ladies in these stories don’t like men.”
“Which ladies?”
“The Sirens sing songs that make the sailors come so close they crash into the rocks and die. Circe turns them into pigs. And you told me that General Agamemnon’s wife and her new boyfriend clubbed him to death when he got home from Troy.”
“Keep in mind that the stories are made up by men, for men, about men. What they have to say about the ladies is perhaps not entirely unprejudiced. And we do not have the ladies’ perspective. Would you like a cookie, child?”
Yes. I would like a cookie. And I decided, mid-cookie, that when I got home I was not going to think about the Sirens or Circe or any of it. But I couldn’t help myself. I did anyhow.
LILLY
Where She Is Now
Neave thinks that Snyder and I didn’t know she squirreled herself in the back of the closet with those books she stole from Mrs. Daniels. Of course we knew. We didn’t tattle because it would irritate Mom, who would try to make her quit it, and then they’d fight. When she and Mom fought, everybody’s concentration went to hell and dinner ended up burned.