Page 79 of Under Her Protection

Vivienne worked her.

She worked her slowly. She worked her thumbs along Leo's spine, up through the muscle either side of it, to the base of the neck, and she worked out the knot that was the knot of a woman who had carried a shoulder rig for fourteen years, and she went back down. She worked the shoulder blades. She worked the ridge at the base of the skull. She worked under the scapula on the left side, where Leo had a piece of old scar tissue no woman had worked the edge of in a decade, and Leo made, at that, a small sound in the towel.

"Mm."

"Do not," Leo said.

"I am not doing anything."

"You are."

"I am attending to my employee."

"Vivienne."

"Face down, Mademoiselle."

Vivienne laughed.

She laughed. It was a low small laugh, a private laugh, the laugh of a fifty-two-year-old woman who had not laughed with oil on her hands in two decades, and Leo, face down on the towel, kept the laugh alongside the other laugh from the bed and did not, this time, pretend not to.

Vivienne worked her down. Lumbar. Hips. The backs of her thighs. The backs of her calves, slow, with two hands. Her feet. Each foot a full minute. Vivienne's thumbs under the ball of Leo's foot, once, and Leo's body, which was a body that had been on alert for six hours, stopped being on alert.

"Turn over."

Leo turned.

The small grey candle had burned down a quarter inch. The small study had, in the forty minutes since Leo had closed her eyes, gone from being a room she had walked through once to a room that smelled of Vivienne's oil, faintly, and of the low beeswax undertone that belonged to every room in this house, and of the vetiver that belonged only to the woman kneeling beside her. The candle was the only thing in the room moving. Leo, on her back, her hair out of its elastic where Vivienne had taken it out at the nape without asking her permission, looked up at the ceiling for the first time and noticed the ceiling had been frescoed in eighteen ninety by somebody who had liked clouds.

She laughed, once, under her breath.

"What," Vivienne said.

"Ceiling."

"Ah."

"Who commissioned that."

"My great-grandmother."

"Of course."

"She liked clouds."

"Mm."

"You are stalling, Mademoiselle Cole."

"I am stalling."

"Stop stalling."

"Yes, Vivienne."

Vivienne knelt beside the daybed with oil on her forearms, her hair still up, the signet catching the low light through the grey curtain, and she looked at Leo on her back on the grey towel with her mouth in the almost-smile and nothing at all unkind in her face.

"Mademoiselle Cole."