LITMIR.BIZ

      Julian utterly loses himself in this version of his girl. She is quiet, unassuming, agreeable. She is never painted, yet her mouth is always red; she is youthful and lovely. Her body is abundant everything. Every night Julian’s carnal strings are pulled by his naked puppet master, first in front of Fabian and sometimes by themselves in the conjoined intimacy of his bed.

      She is amiable and kind. This is how Julian knows the other girls are mendacious fools. They call Mallory wanton and cunning. This could not be more false. She holds his gaze, speaks truth to him with courtesy. No matter what he talks about, she listens raptly. She even tolerates his homilies on the fauna and flora of London’s public gardens. She tolerates them especially well. She is endlessly fascinated by his tales of the plants and flowers that have been imported from faraway lands like China and India and planted in the royal gardens of the kings and queens. On Sunday afternoons, they walk together arm in arm through the Westminster parks like a gentleman and a lady, he in his velvet waistcoat, she in her Sunday best. “Mallory, why do you keep your eyes to the ground when we walk?” Julian asks.

      “That’s where the pennies and the berries are, sire.” Mallory smiles as she devours his heart. She likes St. James’s Park most of all, because that’s where they have the most exotic foliage, and the crocodiles in the ponds and elephants grazing. Once she and Julian even saw two camels! She’s amazed by this; he no less so. It’s remarkable to see a crocodile in the middle of post-plague Westminster in 1666.

      Mallory loves to hear about the blooming things. She listens to him as if he’s reciting poetry, sonnets he had composed for her, borne of love and loss. She listens to him wax and wane about oleander and elephant ear, larkspur and lily of the valley, about golden chain and bleeding heart. She adores his stories of rosary peas and laurels, jasmine and azaleas, wild cherries, oak, and yew. Moonseed and mistletoe please her, hemlock and nightshade enchant her.

      And in return, on their weekday morning trips to Covent Garden, Mallory entertains Julian with the things she loves. In lavish detail she recounts for him the one play she’s seen besides Julius Caesar and tells him about her modest dream of one day being able to attend the theatre like a rich lady—which to her means any time she chooses. He loved his wife so much, he built her a theatre so she could attend the opera any time she wanted, echoes in Julian’s overfilled heart.

      “You don’t wish to be on stage yourself, Mallory?”

      Coquettishly she dismisses him. “I don’t need to be on stage, sire. I told you, my life is my stage.” She confesses that if she could be in any play, she’d like to be in The Honest Whore, the backdrop for Othello. She saw it five years ago at the Mermaid Theatre by Puddle Dock when she was fifteen. Her mother took her. It was subtitled Humors of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife. Julian and Mallory are walking back from Covent Garden, pushing a cart filled with red peonies and yellow daisies as she regales him with the colors of the play. “The Duke of Milan fakes his daughter’s death so her lover Hippolito will leave her alone.”

      “Why does he need to fake her death?” Julian asks. “Is Hippolito very persistent?” He smiles.

      “Very,” she replies. “It’s one of Hippolito’s most endearing qualities.”

      “But not his only endearing quality, right?”

      “By far not his only endearing quality.” Mallory covers Julian’s hand with hers as he pushes the flower cart. “The daughter’s name is Infelice. Which means unhappiness.” Mallory shrugs. “Almost like my name. Don’t look so suddenly glum, sire. Unfortunately for Infelice, a whore named Bellafront also falls in love with Hippolito. He doesn’t want to love Bellafront back, because he wishes to remain faithful to Infelice, but he cannot help himself. He falls in love with Bellafront, too.”

      Julian stops walking near St. Martin-in-the-Fields and waits for the church bells to stop ringing as he draws the girl to him. “Mallory, my beauty, have you considered the possibility that the new seductress and the former lover are one and the same?” He kisses her.

      “That can’t be. Infelice is dead.”

      “She is not. You said so yourself. She’s hidden.”

      “Hidden!” As if the thought had never occurred to her.

      “Yes. Bellafront is Infelice disguised.”

      Mallory looks thrilled and stunned by this development. “You don’t say, sire. You don’t say. Well, well. Was I too young when I saw the play and simply missed such a vital detail?”

      “Yes, Bellafront,” he says fondly, his arms around her. “I think you missed it.”

      Julian doesn’t need to exaggerate any aspect of his present life, doesn’t need to embellish any part of his existence by hyperbole. In every sense, in every way, without any help from heightened metaphor, Julian’s love-soaked days here with Josephine are altogether marvelous and good.

      Except … sometimes near Covent Garden, as they pass empty lanes of such dismal misery that they must put their heads down, Julian glimpses something else in Mallory. Something hidden. To comfort her, he tells her that the ruthless epidemic that took her mother and aunt is the last such epidemic England will ever have. Mallory doesn’t believe him, and why should she? Seeing the world as it is, especially around the nearly abandoned Drury Lane, his words are impossible to believe. She bristles as he carries on about the need to cleanse London of the parasitic scourge. “Please, sire!” she exclaims with barely concealed scorn. “What do you think we need here, an overflowing volcano, like Pompeii? The brimstone fire of Sodom and Gomorrah?”

      “Yes,” Julian says. “A fire.” Slightly his limbs shake. He wishes he knew the exact date of the Great Fire. It was in 1666, right? He’s not sure of anything anymore.

      “Look at the way we live,” Mallory says. “Fire, no fire. What do you think a little flame will do? Drury Lane will remain the same fetid alley, riddled with the dead. And my mother will still be gone. She’s the only one who ever loved me, the only one who tried to keep me from harm.”

      Your mother is not the only one who ever loved you, Mallory.

      “What does it matter to Mother what might happen in the future? She’s dead. Frankly, what you’re saying is nothing but cold comfort, sire.”

      In the night, when they are warmer, Mallory divulges things about the Black Plague. They had suffered bouts of the pestilence before, and no one paid much mind to the initial stages of the plague. At the first sign that it was a real epidemic, not just a flu that was going around, Anna sent Mallory south to live with her sister Olivia. As everyone around her continued to die, the mother finally abandoned her house of bawd and traveled across the river to reunite with her daughter. She carried in her hands bouquets of wormwood, a most bitter smelling and tasting flower. “Mother had heard that it might protect me from harm. She made me drink a potion made from vinegar and wormwood. Oh, was it ever vile!”

      “Did they paint your door?”

      “With

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