Free The Water Nymph by Michele Jaffe

demanded when she opened the front door of Hen House and found Sophie there. Without waiting for an answer, she gently steered Sophie toward the library and into a green brocade chair. “You really look dreadful,” Octavia continued despite herself. “Where did you get those leggings? And that shirt. The fabric is beautiful—it looks too fine to be English—but it is much too large for you. What did you do with the suit I made you? Are you aware that your mustache is slipping?”
    Sophie just stared at her friend through this torrent of questions, and had begun to think of trying to compose a response, when Emme burst into the room.
    “Where did you find her?” she demanded of Octavia.
    “On the front walk. She was sort of teetering there when I got back from my workshop.”
    Sophie resented the word “teetering.” She was sure she had been more perching than teetering, and she planned to tell them so, probably next spring.
    “You look dreadful and that stupid mustache is crooked,” Emme told Sophie, circling around to face her. “What happened to your head?”
    “Orange cake,” Sophie replied, squeezing the words out.
    “You were hit with an orange cake?” Emme’s tone suggested incredulity.
    “No.” Sophie found her strength coming back in the all-important pursuit of orange cake. “But I will hit you with one if you do not stop badgering me. Providing there are any in the house. Are there? I could eat about ten of them.”
    Octavia and Emme exchanged pained looks. “You know that Richards will quit again if you refuse to eat anything but her candied-orange cake,” Octavia reminded her. “And we do not want that to happen.”
    “But this is an emergency,” Sophie pleaded, and she really felt it was, considering the state of her head, her nerves, and her unfed stomach. It was not every morning she awoke naked in a man’s bed. “I promise, if she lets me eat ten, no, make it twelve of them, now, I will never do it again.” Sophie reached her hand toward her heart pathetically as if taking an oath.
    “Your word of honor?” Emme asked.
    Sophie looked alarmed. “Has it come to that?” When Emme and Octavia nodded in tandem, she sighed. “My word of honor.”
    Emme moved off toward the kitchen, the domain she shared with Richards the cook and whose borders no one else was allowed to breach, while Octavia shuttled Sophie toward her bedchamber. Sophie loved this room, indeed it was the reason she had purchased the abandoned convent of Our Lady of the Whispers two years earlier.
    That day, a hazy early summer’s day like this one, she had entered the abandoned convent at dusk. Wandering alone through its long halls and deserted rooms, she had found herself, as if magically, in a chamber that dazzled her. It was filled with light, in hundreds of colors, streaming in through five tall stained-glass windows at its far end, bouncing off its yellow stone walls. The windows had once belonged to a private chapel, but had later been built into the abbess’s private chambers. The two pairs of windows on either side contained portraits of female saints, four exquisite women, each wrapped in a different-colored mantle. In the middle of these, in a window taller and wider than the others, the Lady of Whispers was enthroned, smiling a quiet benediction on the inhabitants of the room.
    Those five women were Sophie’s guardian angels. During the day they filled her room with sparkling colored light, always changing and moving, allowing her to gauge the time of the day by the color of the walls. Early morning was a pale blue, then came red, then gold in the middle of the day, then a light green that grew darker as evening approached, and finally finished in a dazzling purple. By day the women in the windows shared their colors with Sophie, but it was at night that they really did her a service. They drove away the darkness and kept her company so she was never alone, never unprotected, their pacific faces holding