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last chime faded amid cracks of thunder. She was undressed, her arms and legs spread lazily, unmoving as Leopold traveled about her body. He was an artist in the way he pressed and pulled, coaxed and demanded. She liked to give over to him this way, to feel like clay in his hands, as if she had no cares, no responsibility but to be, and to be moved by him.
    She was in danger. She was beginning to want what she could not have: this, to go on forever. If only, if only. If only things had been different.
    “My father was a gentleman’s oldest child,” she whispered. Leopold stroked her stomach and breasts; she felt him grow hard against her. “My mother was—no one, but he loved her utterly. He married her. The estate wasn’t entailed, and his family disowned him.” It was only partly a lie, and the truth was too complicated and didn’t matter.
    Leopold inched down, the warm wet of his tongue on her belly. With a flash of lightning she groaned. “My father died. He was killed, actually.”
    “You are a lady here with me.” His lips were at her ear, and he was inside her and around her, like light and like thunder.
    Let it all go , she thought. Forget about life now, and just feel. Feel him on you now, in you, the luxury of this bed, the rain and the thunder, and him inside you now, there is only now.
    Morning came like a fairy story, with sunshine and flowers, coffee and oranges and hot scrambled eggs. As if the white lady had come at last and carried Susan to the other world. For a few days she ate and slept and made love and almost believed she had at last found enchantment.
    But reality makes a cruel mirror. She saw the truth in the knowing looks of the hotel staff. She might have the memory and the manners of a gentleman’s daughter and a better vocabulary than most, but not the clothes and certainly not the conviction of gentle standing. She was one of them, and they knew it.
    They would not let her go with the white lady, but she’d heard the white lady’s song.
    On the fourth morning, the sun came out, and the couple took their breakfast in the teahouse. Leopold said, “Today I wonder if you’d like to visit the waterfalls at the gardens.”
    “I’ve never seen them. I’ve been in London these last years. Most of the niceties of Bath are unknown to me.”
    “Of course.”
    She felt him withdraw, as if he suddenly understood what it meant to have to work for one’s living, that she was limited to less than the gods had meant for her.
    “Ancient as Bath is,” she said, “it yields to change. The place was a shrine to a Celtic divinity before the Romans installed their own goddess at the waters. Seventy years ago, excavators unearthed the carved stone head of Minerva.”
    He warmed to her again. 
    “Not ten years ago, the old Roman foundations of her temple were uncovered. The local worthies have been building this tourist attraction ever since.” She chuckled. “Now a shrine to Mammon, I suppose.”
    “Before we leave, you will see it all,” he said.
    The last day, they breakfasted on their room’s balcony as a group of players gathered on the grounds below. Amid a cacophony of instruments being tuned Leopold said, “This is a nice send-off.” He offered her a section of orange. “Whenever I have oranges and coffee, I will think of Miss Gray and the pleasures of Bath.”
    There it was. He was leaving her. He had already done so in his mind.
    She expected as much, sooner or later . Oh, why could it not be later? The wedge of orange in her mouth became a flavorless lump. She studied the acrobats and musicians below. “That is how I will always think of you,” she said.
    “As a street player?”
    “As a musician. You are the man who plays while the world pays rapt attention.”
    She hadn’t meant to do it. She wanted only a diversion, a temporary escape from her fate. But she had fallen in love with this young man who quoted philosophers and tyrants and made sense of them all.
    “I