Amanda McCabe - Mischief in Regency Society

Calliope turned away from them, disquieted.

“Or perhaps not so eclectic as all that,” Clio said quietly. “Murder and bloodletting are sadly a part of every civilisation. The duke seems bent on reminding us of that fact.”

“Indeed he does,” Calliope said.

The higher up they went, the more the noise of the party grew, a hum that expanded into a vast river of sound as they spilled into the ballroom. Calliope usually had little use for balls and routs that earned the coveted society accolade of “dreadful crush”. There was little real conversation possible amid such clamour, just overheated air and far too much noise. Tonight, though, she welcomed the crowd. It seemed a bright haven of normalcy in this very bizarre house.

The ballroom was not as eerie as the foyer and staircase, but was merely a large, bright space with white walls and gleaming parquet floor. The domed ceiling was painted with an elaborate fresco of an Olympian banquet where, thankfully, no one was killing anyone else. Around the walls were more ancient frescoes, no doubt snatched from some Italian villa, scenes of cosy domestic life. Marble statues were interspersed with the paintings of scantily clad nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses that echoed the costumes of the revellers.

As Calliope expected, there was no one quite like Clio among the crowds who were forming a dance set or milling among the statues, sipping champagne and nibbling on lobster patties and mushroom tarts—rather unGrecian hors-d’oeuvres, Calliope thought. There was a Minotaur, hulking and hairy, flirting with Ariadne and her ball of twine; several Achilles and Hectors; some giggling Aphrodites with various versions of Ares and Cupid. Their father soon joined a cluster of other philosophers in the corner to argue about how man could examine his reasons to be in harmony with the cosmos, and Thalia was swept into the dance by an Orpheus, their respective lyres deposited with a footman.

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.