Free The Water Nymph by Michele Jaffe Page A

at bay the voice that haunted her perpetually. No one could hurt her, Sophie believed, as long as she was under their watch.
    So often had Annie, the chambermaid, found her asleep on the floor beneath the windows that Octavia had finally had a divan made to fill the space, large and stuffed with the softest feathers. It was on this commodious piece of furniture that she now deposited Sophie and then disappeared. When she returned a quarter of an hour later, she was trailed by a servingwoman pushing a large tub on wheels filled with steaming water and another carrying a wooden box holding glass vials.
    “Strip,” Octavia commanded Sophie, and was surprised to see her friend cringe. “What is wrong?”
    “I never,” Sophie said, rising from the divan and pulling off the shirt Octavia had admired, “want,” she continued, balling up the leggings and kicking them into the corner of the room, “to hear,” she went on, stepping into the bath, “that word”—Sophie slid down into the tub—“again.” She ducked her head down and let the hot water cover her completely.
    Octavia stood at the edge, carefully adding drops of oil from one of the glass vials. The scent of jasmine soon filled the room, and as Sophie brought her head to the surface, she felt herself relax. With her eyes closed and the deliciously aromatic water lapping around her, her mind began to settle down. There were three things she had told herself to remember, she remembered, but she could not remember what they were. In the hope of reclaiming them, she began to slowly recall the events of the previous night.
    She recollected the idiotic cat-and-mouse game through the streets of London and the horrible striptease and the wager, but after that everything got fuzzy. There had been a bird who was noisy, and a man who was silent, and…
    “Ouch!” she hollered, sitting straight up in the water. Sophie reached a finger toward her upper lip, found it unadorned, and turned toward Octavia, who was dangling the sopping-wet false mustache in her hand. At that moment, Sophie remembered one of the things she had forgotten. “I am very upset with you,” she told Octavia sternly.
    “Because I took the mustache off? It did look rather fetching, but—”
    Sophie interrupted. “If it was not for you I never would have ended up in his bed naked.”
    “I don’t see—” Octavia began, but stopped herself. Certainly she had been encouraging Sophie for months to at least explore the caresses of the opposite sex as a way of getting over her discomfort with men, but she did not recall having recommended that she throw off her clothes and go to bed with them all at once. Nor had Sophie ever given the least sign of listening to her, other than making faces involving gnawing on her upper lip with her teeth and rolling her eyes, or grunting like a wild boar. This turn of events was very perplexing, even worrying, and Octavia thought for the first time that perhaps the bump on Sophie’s head was more than superficial. “I am afraid I do not understand what you are talking about,” she said gently. “Did you hit your head hard? Do you remember where you are?”
    Sophie glared at her. “It was that mustache paste you made. I think I am allergic to it. It made me feel very strange and…” Sophie’s voice trailed off.
    “The mustache paste made you take your clothes off?” Octavia queried as if it were the most natural thing in the world, while she busied herself collecting the clothes Sophie had strewn around the chamber.
    Sophie was somewhat appeased by her friend’s tone. “No, he did that when he made me strip. But I probably would have been thinking more clearly and would have avoided it, if it weren’t for the mustache paste making my insides feel like I had been drinking hot spiced wine, and my knees like they were made of cream pudding.”
    Octavia now understood Sophie’s earlier reaction to the command “strip,” but the words her friend was