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mysterious yet seductive. Contriving some errand in the next room, I set my course across the chamber near the cluster of men, giving my skirts an extra twitch as I glided past Lord Chesterfield.
    “What goddess is this, to venture so near to mortal earth?” He turned to face me, his expression one of frank admiration. “Tell me your name, fair one, so I might worship you properly.”
    “If I were to make my name so common, then how should I remain a deity?” I paused, and parried, striving to mimic the same elegant banter of the older ladies. “How could I keep from being sullied by that same mortal soil?”
    “What if I were to kneel before the altar of your beauty?” he countered, sweeping his hand before him to indicate where he’d kneel, right there on the well-swept mortal soil of Lady Walthrop’s parlor floor. “Would that be worshipful enough to earn the honor of my goddess’s name?”
    Behind him one of the other men sniggered. “It’s Barbara Villiers, Chesterfield.”
    “Miss Villiers, then.” Recognition lit his eyes, as almost always happened when others heard my family’s name. “I’m honored, dear Goddess Villiers.”
    I tipped my head a fraction in cool acknowledgment, though my cheeks grew hot against my will. No doubt he’d lay the fault for his jilt at my cousin’s door; what if he shared me in that blame?
    “What, so chill a greeting, my sweet deity?” he asked, taking a step closer to me. “No warmth to spare for me, your humble supplicant?”
    I granted him the hint of a smile, though in truth I found him even more pleasing at this range than from afar. How much more manly he was than the callow youths who’d tried to court me!
    “No more acknowledgment for my devotions, my goddess?” he asked, and pressed his hand over his heart, a practiced gesture, but one that in my youth still thrilled me.
    “Worship should be its own reward, my lord,” I said with what I hoped was airy disdain. “A faithful follower expects nothing more.”
    “But the most faithful of worshippers expects to be rewarded.” Before I’d realized it, he’d hooked his arm into mine with the audacity of a privateer with a new-captured prize, and was leading me away to his port. “Come with me, Goddess Villiers, and let me sing a paean or two to your ears alone.”
    His boldness startled me. It was one thing to play this game before others, but I worried that my novice’s skills would not be equal to his if we were alone. Yet I was likewise too flattered by his attentions to refuse him entirely, and thus I made myself smile, as if such suggestions were commonplace to me.
    “To Lady Walthrop’s gallery, then,” I said, pointing with my fan. “There, and no farther.”
    He didn’t wait, but swept me away, and my last glimpse of my friend Anne’s face showed amazement, and envy, too, that I’d succeeded in beguiling such a gentleman on her challenge.
    The gallery ran across the front of the house, with windows full of moonlight down one side and along the other old portraits of grim-faced ancestors deemed too ugly and out of fashion to display anywhere else in the house. These, then, would be my guardians, such as they were, and yet as I gazed up at Lord Chesterfield beside me, I did not doubt or falter.
    “You’re new to London, aren’t you, my goddess?” he asked, stopping beneath one of the portraits, a cross-eyed fellow with a beard as pointed as a Jesuit’s. “I would have known you otherwise.”
    “I’m not so new as that,” I said, unwilling to paint my youth quite so openly. Most gentlemen believed me older than my years, and I hoped Lord Chesterfield did as well. “Rather it’s you who’s new returned to England.”
    “Ah, a clairvoyant goddess,” he said, and laughed, displaying his fine, even teeth by the moonlight. “Yes, my affairs did take me away from England for a time, but then I was also able to meet with His Majesty in Brussels, and reassure him of my