The Gentleman’s Leading Lady (Ladies Least Likely #12)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Thursday night, the Queen’s Theatre in Coffee House Yard burned down in a tremendous and rather inspiring blaze that leveled the old wooden building within hours.

Friday morning, the members of Dorsey’s Players Company, sifting through the ruins of most of their material goods and congratulating themselves on escaping loss of life, were left to develop a plan for finding new premises.

“I say Cerys can find us a place.” Dot paused in prodding a pile of still-warm rubble and regarded the newest member of the company. “Our own theater, not rented.”

Cerys examined a heap of charred timbers that had entrapped a leather trunk, now scorched and reeking of burned hide, adding to the profusion of unsavory odors. She wrinkled her nose. “Why me?”

“As you’re the youngest,” Rhoda offered.

“Fred’s younger.”

“You’s the comeliest,” said Mame.

“That’s—not true.”

The others regarded her. The scent of ash and burned metal swirled on the air around them, overlying the stench of putrid water pooling in the ruts on the far side of the Yard.

A horse whinnied as it clipped along the High Street beyond, carrying its fashionable folk to one of the fashionable spas.

Cerys was glad she possessed the sort of complexion that didn’t easily show a blush.

“Care—iss,” sang Tryphenie. “That dreadfully lovely face’ll be the saving of us all.”

“Or at least the Dorsey Players.” Mame poked at a mass of smoking tapers, then jumped back when the smoldering wood collapsed. “Not much left ’sides us, is there?”

Cerys looked around at the desolate wasteland that, half a day prior, had been a fairyland of glowing lights and gilded tracery.

How she’d marveled at having a theater of their own, a real theater at last, and one so grand.

Delicate plaster paintings on the ceiling, goddesses traipsing through Elysian meadows with nymphs and satyrs frolicking at their heels.

Mirrors hung with velvet draperies in the foyer.

A retiring room with sconces set on the papered wall and the air redolent with powder and eau de toilette.

She sighed and carefully turned over a fallen timber.

These, just last night, had been the boards she trod as her desolated Juliet called for her Romeo.

That twisted mass of metal might have been the pulley holding her ropes in the pantomime when she was the Sultana’s daughter, kidnapped by Turkish pirates and rescued by the Berber prince.

That bit of congealed glop could be one of the diamonds she had worn in her hair—paste, of course.

“I suppose we ought to be grateful we didn’t burn to a crisp also,” she remarked.

Not a week earlier, Dorsey’s Players had been toasting themselves at the Nag’s Head and congratulating each other on the brilliant success of having secured a lease on a proper stick-and-plaster theater at last, and not the assembly room in some wayside inn or a willing crofter’s barn.

But the danger of fire was the same in those places: a multitude of candles, all needing trimmed at the proper time, and finding all-too-ready fuel for a hungry flame.

“We need someone as can build us a proper theater, in brick and stone,” Dot decided. “And for that, we need us someone as can design something proper. And I’ll bet on my grandmother’s grave if we ask around, there’ll be one man as comes the best recommended—”

“We do need a builder,” Cerys answered. “But I’ll be buried aside your grandmother before I work with him.”

Cerys Van Der Welle Evans had not abandoned everything she loved in her life, or spent the last two years in endless toil and sacrifice, to have it all taken away now.

And not by him. Most certainly not by him.

“’E’s the best builder in town,” said Mame, who was their unelected leader whenever Dorsey wasn’t about. “Everyone says so.”

“He’s not the builder, he’s the architect.” Cerys knelt on the heap and yanked at a crumbling timber, caught beneath another plank. “He doesn’t do the hard work, the dirty work. He just draws the pictures, then bellows at other people to make his vision come to life.”

She grunted and tugged at the shuddering pile encasing the trunk beneath. She, for her part, was not afraid to soil her hands. She’d been proving that since she was old enough to hold a spindle.

“La, a genmum don’t work with his hands, do ’e?” Rhoda fluttered her eyelashes in a semblance of maidenly innocence. “’E saves his fine touch for—other activities.”

Tryphenie hooted with laughter, then set to excavating a pair of unmelted doorknobs.

Tryphenie, like Cerys—like all of them—was accustomed to labor.

And to the approaches of self-styled gentlemen who assumed an actress would heartily welcome their attentions, content to trade her favors for a few baubles or lengths of silk.

Cerys scratched the back of her neck, where her cap had slipped sideways on her mass of coiled hair, baring her skin to the spring sunshine. “That one is no gentleman.”

“Are we still talking about the Italian?” Dot demanded. “What do ye all have agin him?”

Cerys rested on her heels, hoping she wouldn’t tear or soil the muslin fabric of her day gown, as there’d be no income from last night’s performance, and not for the foreseeable future. She pushed away a lock of hair sliding free from its pins. “What’s to like?”

Rhoda giggled. “That oughta be obvious, lovey. Tall.” She held a hand above her head to indicate superior height. “Devilish good looks.”

“Devilish is right,” Cerys returned. “Some might call him swarthy.” Though she was one to talk, given her own bloodline.

“Well-proportioned.” Rhoda tapped a finger to her lips. “Don’t think that’un has need to pad his coats.”

Cerys snorted. “Likely he wears a corset.”

“Did you see the fit of his pantaloons?” Dot demanded.

Tryphenie howled and pretended to fan herself, because as usual, she’d misplaced her fan.

“I was too busy being burned to cinders by his scathing reprimand to take note of his unmentionables,” Cerys said.

“Oh, is that who you tangled with the other day in the Colonnade.” Mame plucked out a melted piece of brass that might have been a wall sconce, then added it to her pile of scraps.

“He was among a group of gentlemen that Dorsey wanted us particularly to meet—”

“Meaning a group o’genmum Dorsey wanted to show ye off to,” Mame clarified.

“Well, yes, I suppose so.” Cerys brushed cinders off her gloves.

“One of them asked how we were liking the grandeur of Cheltenham. Apparently the town has enjoyed tremendous expansion ever since the King took the waters here a score of years ago or so. I, in my native honesty, noted that the Colonnade started well, but peters out to a dirt track. Why, there’s nothing but a plank bridge crossing the river and a muddy slough beyond! You all saw it, didn’t you?”

She swept her audience with a gesture beseeching response, and every head nodded or shook sorrowfully in acquiescence. Every ear hung on her words. For a moment, the spell of the theater fell across them, and Cerys remembered why she loved this. Why she was good at it.

Why she was soiling one of her few pairs of gloves with ash and charcoal so she might cling to this dream a bit longer.

“Well,” she huffed, striking an operatic pose with the back of a hand pressed to her forehead.

“You might have thought I’d slain the man’s mother and impugned his family honor.

You might have thought I’d run my carriage wheel over his favorite hound!

He near took my head off in telling me that my terribly insightful observations had already been registered by others in a position to know better, and the matter was being addressed. ”

She sniffed. “Then he told me, if I had further suggestions for improving the city, I might take them up with the Paving and Lighting Commission.”

Rhoda whistled. “So. A genmum as weren’t taken in by our lovely Cerys. Have we ever seen such a thing?”

Mame, who had been right there with Dorsey to offer Cerys a place with the Players, reflected. “No.”

Dot tapped her chin. “There was that blade in Stow, where we did The Fatal Marriage, what said her Isabella could never match that of Siddons.”

Cerys pressed a hand above her heart. “No one can match Sarah Siddons. She is peerless. The very observation is redundant.”

Tryphenie poked at a twisted length of metal that jutted up beside her like a fanatical sheaf of wheat. “La, that bloke was just trying to lure her away from us to become his mistress. He asked Dorsey how much to turn ’er over.”

Cerys stared. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. “He did not.”

“The plump gent in the antique frock coat and the bag wig three decades out o’ fashion?” Tryphenie widened her eyes. “Did indeed.”

“Cerys, gel, Dorsey is approached with an offer for you everywhere we stop,” Mame said. Her voice came thin and weary, like a thread stretched too long from a spindle. “Sometimes two or three a night.”

“Men wantin’ ta take ye under their protection,” Rhoda clarified, as if Cerys didn’t understand the full, mortifying implications.

“I am not a hog to be haggled over at a market fair!”

“We know that.” Dot kicked at a mound of crumbling plaster. “But do they?”

“And they approach Dorsey with these offers? Not me? Unbelievable.”

She ought to believe it. She’d seen enough in her life to know how the world worked.

Great ones laid down the laws and customs that gave them power and filled their pockets, then looked aside at the suffering their rules and customs produced.

Lesser folk struggled to keep body and soul together—some with larger demons to slay than others—and Dame Nature came in with tempests and snows, hail and rain, and laughed as she brought all her creation, high and low, shivering and sobbing to their knees.