Mischief in Regency Society: To Catch a Rogue

Calliope tucked her spear under her arm and reached for a glass of champagne from a passing servant’s tray. It was the finest quality, of course, a rich, tart golden liquid that blended well with the exotic setting, the swirl of music and laughter. For a moment, she felt transported from London, from everyday life, and lifted into some phantasmagoric fantasy world where reality was gone, vanished amid the sea of masks.

She held the glass up to the light, wondering if the enchanting little bubbles concealed some hallucinogenic elixir, some Shakespearean “love in idleness”.

“Is something amiss with the champagne, Miss Chase?” an amused voice asked.

Calliope whirled around to find their host standing behind her, a smile on his lips. He was as unusual as his house, dressed as Dionysus with a leopard skin over his chiton, his long, red-gold hair loose over his shoulders. Dionysus, the god of wine and revels. Of maddened followers who tore their victims limb from limb in their bloodlust.

Or stole treasures that did not belong to them.

Calliope stiffened under his intense regard. “Not at all, your Grace. The champagne is excellent, as are your arrangements. Your house is most—extraordinary.”

“That is high praise, indeed, coming from a Chase. For you are all experts in art and antiquities, are you not?”

“I would not say expert. We are all students, in our own ways.”

“And is your interest strategic warfare?” he said, gesturing towards her Athena shield.

“Or perhaps olives,” she said flippantly.

“Ah, yes. For it was Athena who ordered olive trees planted on the hills of her Acropolis. The very foundations of her followers’ prosperity.”

“Until rapacious thieves ordered them dug up, in search of buried treasure. Now glorious Athens is just a dusty little town. Or so I hear.”

The duke laughed. “My dear Miss Chase, how kind of you to defend a people you do not even know! Yet if your so-called rapacious thieves did not dig on the Acropolis, think what would be lost to us. So much beauty and learning. Is it better that these things should moulder in the ground, disintegrating in the care of people who have no regard for them?”

Calliope grudgingly had to admit that he said nothing she herself had not argued. But his smug tone of voice, his patronising smile, made her want to quarrel with him. To slap that expression off his face. She shrugged, and drained her glass of champagne.

“Come, Miss Chase, let me show you one of the treasures that would have been lost for ever,” he said, taking the empty glass from her hand.

“The Alabaster Goddess?” Calliope asked.

“Are you trying to gain an early glimpse of the masterpiece of my collection? No, she will be revealed later. At the right moment.”

“One last chance for her to be admired before she is shut away?”

“She is hardly a cloistered nun. She is being taken to a place where she can be properly protected, unlike other antiquities in our fair city of late,” he said. He took her arm in a light clasp, steering her around the edges of the crowd, calling jovial greetings to the noisy guests.

Calliope had to grit her teeth to resist the urge to pull away, to run from him. When Lord Westwood took her arm just so at the British Museum, it was warm and easy. The duke’s touch felt like a cold shackle. She pinched her lips together and walked faster as they moved past candelabra and frescoes.

He led her to the end of the room, where tall glass doors led on to a dark terrace. The crowd was lighter here, the air cooler. Calliope almost feared he meant to lead her out on to that terrace, away from the noise and light, and then—then what? Push her off to the stone walkway far below?

Calliope almost laughed aloud at her own foolishness. He did not know of her plans to keep his Alabaster Goddess safe, to prevent her from being stolen like all those other lost pieces. To keep her from disappearing into Yorkshire, too, if she could help it at all. He did not know of her great aversion to him, of how frightened she was by his behaviour towards Clio at the museum. He couldn’t know any of that.

Nevertheless, when his clasp on her arm loosened, she wasted no time in moving away.

“What do you think of this, Miss Chase?” he asked, gesturing towards another statue displayed between the glass doors.

Calliope forced herself to turn her wary attention from him, to take in a deep breath as she examined the piece. Art, as it always did, slowly worked its magic on her senses. The duke and the crowd subsided to a whisper.

It was beautiful, of course, as everything in the duke’s collection was. Beautiful in a strange, violent way. This depicted not a battle or brawl, but Daphne at the very moment she was transformed into a tree by her father Peneus, after Daphne called on him to stave off Apollo’s unwanted advances. She was running, her body twisted as she looked frantically back over her shoulder. Her legs and upflung arms were turning to branches. Her long hair flowed back like a river.

“What do you think, Miss Chase?” the duke asked.

“It is lovely. The sense of movement, the way the flesh of her arms transforms just here into wood—extraordinary.”

“Exactly so. It is a Roman copy, of course, but still its great beauty is evident. And her face looks rather like your sister, does it not?”

Startled, Calliope stared up at the duke, shaken from the reverie the Daphne invoked. He did not watch her; all his attention was on Daphne’s cold, carved face. He reached out one fingertip to touch her cheek, sliding a slow caress along the angle of her cheekbone.

It did look like Clio, Calliope had to admit. With that hair, and the sharp, thin angles of the face and bare shoulders. And that made his rapt attention all the more chilling.

“She has the same independent spirit, you see,” the duke murmured. “But in the end, one way or another, she will belong to the gods. Run though she will.”

Calliope’s throat was dry, and she knew she had leave, to find Clio. She slowly backed away from the duke, who still seemed lost in his own world. His own fantasies of poor Daphne.

“Excuse me,” Calliope murmured. “I see someone I must speak to.”

She hurried back into the midst of the crowd. There seemed to be even more people packed into the ballroom than before, knots and skeins of humanity laughing and drinking, oblivious to any nightmarish quality this house might hold. Yet there was no Clio anywhere, not even a glimpse of her shimmering green silk. Thalia was still dancing, as she probably would do all night. Their father was nowhere to be seen. Probably he had gone off to the card room with his philosopher friends, continuing their discussion over a hand of vingt-et-un. She did see Emmeline, dressed as the Delphic Oracle, talking with one of her assigned possible thieves. She gave Calliope a small nod and smile. All was going as planned in that corner.

If only Calliope could say the same! She so hated when her plans went awry. But then, what could she expect from someone like the Duke of Averton? He was a strange one, to say the least, and there could be no predicting what might happen in his house. She had to stay calm. Remember her goal—to protect the Alabaster Goddess.

And surely in such a vast crowd Clio was safe enough. The duke couldn’t hurt her here, couldn’t turn her into a tree. He probably couldn’t even find her. Still, Calliope would feel better if she could talk to her sister, warn her to be on her guard.

Hoisting her shield higher, Calliope threaded her way through the ballroom. Several friends greeted her, but there was no Clio.

“Where are you?” she muttered, straining on tiptoe to see over the crowd.

“I am here, grey-eyed Athena,” a voice said, slightly muffled, close to her shoulder.

Half-fearing the duke had crept up on her again, Calliope turned. There was no Dionysus, though. It was Hermes, in his winged sandals and helmet, muscled arms bare in a white chiton. The visor of the helmet was down, but Calliope recognised the unruly dark curls that escaped its golden confines. She also recognized Hermes’ scent, the clean smell of citrus soap with something darker, more complex and alluring, underneath, like cinnamon or sunshine, salty sea air.

A strange sense of relief flowed over her. She was not alone in this crowd any longer! “My eyes are brown, Lord Westwood,” she said, resisting the urge to hug him, to cling to those strong arms. It was surely just another measure of how bizarre this evening had become that she was so very happy to see him.

“Always so logical,” he said, pushing back the visor to reveal his smile. “How did you know it was me?”

“Your soap.”

“My soap?”

Calliope shook her head. “It’s not important. Have you by any chance seen my sister?”

“Miss Clio? I don’t think so, but then anything is possible in this crowd. What is her costume?”

“Oh, you couldn’t miss her. She is Medusa, in a green-and-gold gown, with snakes on her headdress.”

“Snakes? Never say she brought reptiles in here! But then, I would not really be surprised. You Chases always do things in your own fashion.”

Calliope had to smile in spite of herself. “I dare say Clio might have brought real snakes in, if she didn’t know how I dislike them. But she only has cloth snakes. With green glass eyes.”