A woman’s hand, wrist, and forearm. A woman’s naked back, rising in a powerful curve from the skirts heaped around it. On a ledge deeply cut into the cliffs, a woman with her face hidden by her raised arms, the rest of her exposed to the sun. A pair of woman’s legs dangling over the edge of a rowboat. Did she want those to be hers, or did she not? She looked again at the penciled lines, the deft light strokes, the delicate shading. On one of the bare calves, a scar curved where hers did: her legs, then. Her arms, her back. Her self. As Sebby’s friend had realized. And as Daphne must have realized too.

How little, after all, she’d kept secret from Daphne. Only the letter, perhaps; perhaps not even that.

After she lied about Mason’s letter, she and Daphne had spent their evenings apart. Daphne continued to visit Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage—pushing forward, she admitted, with her conquest of that circle of painters, literary men, and musicians; no one but Henrietta understood how much she depended on such connections for the success of her work. Henrietta was less frank about her pursuit of Sebby, but no less determined. When Mason’s letters continued to arrive, she ostentatiously threw them out unread. She cut up Mason’s hat. She pretended grief and let Sebby comfort her. She pretended confusion and let Sebby seduce her when in fact, and despite her ignorance, she seduced him. Soon he stopped going to Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage, telling his friends that he was making a set of night paintings but instead spending the hours after dinner with Henrietta. On that tiny island, smaller than Henrietta’s village and densely populated by summer guests and the staff who looked after them, she and Sebby still found secret spots where they curled into each other. On a pile of kapok life vests, in the corner of a boathouse. In the nooks of the northern headlands. During the day, as they worked together, Henrietta listened to Daphne disparage Mason, congratulate her for shedding him, reiterate (she herself had already shed several suitors) the enormous advantages of the single life. Then at night Henrietta undid Sebby’s buttons with fingers so quick they seemed to have practiced without her knowledge.