rolled her eyes. “Spoken like a man. Plow on ahead and damn the details. I need specifics, Bennett.”
It was his turn to be exasperated. “You’re the most circumspect witch I’ve ever met.”
“All the impulsive ones are dead.”
A quiet tap on the study door broke the discussion. At Athena’s word, the door opened. Standing there was her mother. A most striking woman, as her daughter was. Generations of strong-featured, genteel women who could slay a man with a look.
“Ah, Athena the Greater,” Bennett said, coming forward and taking her cool hands. He kissed her proffered cheek, her skin olive marble. “Your daughter’s trying to convince me I’m too impetuous.”
“Athena the Lesser can be overly cautious,” her mother sighed. “It seems she did not inherit the hot blood of her foremothers.”
“Simply because I do not advocate recklessly stumbling around Delos without a plan does not mean I am overly cautious, Mother,” Athena ground out.
“And you rein in your powers,” Athena the Greater continued. “It is as if you fear them.”
“I do not fear them,” her daughter said through gritted teeth. “But I will not cede control to anything or,” she added pointedly, “anyone.”
Her mother started to speak, but Bennett decided it would be prudent to avoid a familial contretemps, which could last well into the small hours of the following morning. He had a feeling their squabble would be heard throughout the house, disrupting his sleep. Lord knew Bennett and his mother could argue until neither had a voice. Their arguments always centered around her favorite topic, which was also his least favorite: when he planned on marrying. There was something about mothers that brought out the petulant child in everyone, no matter one’s age or station. How depressing.
“Much as I revel in your exquisite beauty, Athena the Greater,” he interrupted, “was there something you wanted?”
Mother and daughter broke their loving glare. “Indeed, yes. One of the informants is here.” She turned to the door and motioned someone in. A barefoot boy, somewhere around ten years old, in clean but threadbare clothing. The child seemed a little awed to be in the presence of not one, but two Galanos women, torn between terror and adoration. Bennett well understood the feeling.
“What is it, Yannis?” Athena the Lesser asked.
It took a moment for the boy to find his voice. “The Hotel Andromeda,” he gulped. “That is where the Englishmen are staying. And they leave Athens tomorrow.”
The witches looked pleased, a sentiment Bennett shared. “Very good, Yannis,” Athena the Greater said. She took a two-drachma coin from a small beaded purse at her waist and placed it in the boy’s hand. His eyes widened at the sight, but he recovered himself enough to pocket the coin quickly. At a nod from Athena the Greater, the boy dashed from the room, his bare feet slapping the tiled floor.
Bennett began to follow before Athena the Lesser’s voice stopped him. “Going to the hotel?”
He turned to face her. “As you said, I’ll grab us more information.”
“And then?”
“And then, we’ll know what we’re up against.” He sent Athena and her mother a wink. “Don’t wait up.”
“I’m going out to the garden before dinner,” London said to her father as they sat in the hotel parlor. People were gathering in their evening dress for aperitifs, murmuring pleasantries in English. London had dressed for dinner as well, in a low-shouldered Worth gown of violet gauze over cream satin, her hair pinned up and adorned with silk flowers. She had, in fact, worn that same toilette when having dinner at her parents’ house a week before she and her father left for Greece. She had known everyone at the table. Wearing that same gown now, everything in the hotel so proper and ordinary, London half-believed she was back in England rather than thousands of miles from home. “The night is quite lovely and warm. It would be a shame to waste our final evening in Athens inside.”
Her father glanced up from a handful of correspondence. His dark hair and mustache had turned silver over the course of her lifetime, but his eyes were as clear and cutting as ever as he moved his attention from his letters to her. She often thought that Joseph Edgeworth had been born clutching sheaves of letters and reports, for she almost never saw him without bundles of paper in his hands. When she was small, she had asked her father what all those letters meant, why men were constantly writing to him and petitioning him and showing up at his study at all hours with yet more sheaves of paper. He had said he was a very important man of government business and society, which meant others came to him often for direction. When she asked what he did for the government, he patted her on the head and told her to play with her dolls in the nursery, for such things were not the polite affairs of young ladies.
For years, that was all she knew of her father and brother’s work—that they, and the men of their circle, did valuable work on behalf of their nation’s government. Father refused to tell her more, and Jonas was a dutiful son, keeping silent on that point, at least. Mother was no help, either, insisting that she was just as uninformed as London in the matter, but it was for the best, as her only concern was the home, not what went on past the gate of their house or in the halls of power. And when London asked the wives and daughters of her father’s associates, they all said the same thing. Was it not indelicate, they asked, for a woman to ask such questions, to embroil herself in the activities of men?
As a new bride, she waited, seeking the right moment to ask her husband. She had hoped the shared intimacies of the bedroom might form a bond of closeness between her and Lawrence. But what happened in their bed led only to awkwardness, followed by a cold cordiality. When she finally gathered her courage to ask Lawrence about his work with her father, he refused to talk of it. It became, in time, another source of yet more arguments between them.
Whatever it was, it could be perilous, as witnessed recently when her brother had returned from several months abroad. His traveling companion, Henry Lamb, had disappeared. And as for Jonas…perhaps it would have been kinder if he hadn’t survived. He had been a hale and handsome man. Shortly before leaving, he’d become engaged to Cecily Cole. Then he came home. The burns were terrible, the scars they left behind across half his face almost as bad. Cecily broke the engagement, and Jonas now never left the house, becoming bitter and even more volatile than before. Not a day went by without him smashing some innocent piece of furniture or porcelain to bits. He terrified the servants.
Her dead husband Lawrence had also paid a high price for his governmental work abroad. Paid with his life. But the circumstances of his death were obscure, and her father would not provide specifics. To protect her delicate female constitution from the ugliness of the world.
So, London stopped asking. She would have gone on in complete ignorance, had it not been circumstance that brought her to greater understanding. Father at last revealed more about his work for their government, though grudgingly, and now she was here, in Athens, to finally assist and make herself useful. She hoped she was so useful that she could be a part of his work when they returned home. It sounded far better than endless rounds of paying calls, social breakfasts, regattas and balls, and charity work that did no help at all. And she could apply her knowledge of languages practically, rather than only in theory.
Now she waited for her father’s permission to go outside and escape the stifling atmosphere of the hotel parlor.
“Very well,”
