Chapter 8
He sent flowers after that. Daffodils. Tulips.
Lilacs and hyacinths. Flamboyant spring blooms in the midst of barren winter.
Then came the picture postcards, remember those?
A few at first, then one a fortnight until we met again.
They’d been franked from all over, each with a waggish little message for me: The view is fine, the croissants are better (for one of the Eiffel Tower).
One must not actually drink the water here (for one of Bath).
I made friends with this good dog (for one of a dachshund holding a frothy mug of beer in Munich).
I think the farthest was from Calcutta. It had a drawing of a tiger wearing a crown, and he wrote: For a true queen.
LONDON, ENGLAND
There had never come a chaperone to the Bloomsbury lease. In time, Pauline had stopped mentioning it, and Rita had pressed Inez to quietly go along.
“We’re doing well enough, just the two of us,” she’d argued. “Neither of us are simpletons. We don’t require a nanny any longer, do we?”
“Not a nanny,” Inez had replied, tentative. “Yet don’t you think, for the sake of—”
“Right. We’re smart and we’re capable. We’ve got Mrs. Corbyn, don’t we? And Della, and the cook. We’re a house full of grown women. What good would one more do us?”
“I suppose—”
“Just don’t mention it to Maman again, that’s all. None of it, the chaperone or what’s proper, or any of it. I honestly think she’s hoping we won’t. Let the notion of it simply, I don’t know, settle away into the mists of the past.”
Inez had only shaken her head.
“The past,” Rita had said again, firmly, holding her eyes. “Where it belongs.”
Eventually, Inez had capitulated. Even she had to agree that Maman seemed to hold a particular pride in her daughters’ semi-independence, sophisticated and contained as it was, two pretty young birds in their pretty cage.
And it wasn’t that unusual to maintain a houseful of womenfolk in the city without men. Was it?
No catastrophes overtook them, no social shame tainted them because they thrived alone.
Not yet, anyway.
Much Ado About Nothing wrapped up its scheduled run quite neatly, a great shiny gift to its ingénue actress wrapped a spectacular bow, but not before the accolades and sold-out houses and subsequent mentions of Rita’s name—that gel, that jaunty gel with the hair and the lips, what a job she did, what a face, what a voice—rose and rose, until it seemed there wasn’t a theatre manager in London who had not heard of her, and not an agent who hadn’t handed her his card, either backstage after a performance or else on the street.
Or at lunch with her sister. Or outside the apartment, as if they were stalking her now, which she supposed some of them must have been doing, because how else would they have discovered where she lived?
But she was firmly devoted to Charles Frohman, because Charles was firmly devoted to her, and she was not a girl who trifled with loyalties. Rita knew better than that.
A week before the final performance, as she was heading to the dressing room to get into costume, William Poel appeared at her side and touched a hand to her elbow.
“Come with me,” he said, serious.
She followed him to his office, a space so compact it seemed more suited to a storage room than the retreat of a fabled director and producer.
But he’d managed to fit in a desk, two lamps, and two chairs.
The desk was littered with papers, invoices and loose script pages and hand-scribbled notes.
An ashtray piled with smashed cigarettes was near to overflowing.
A mug of cold coffee sat atop what looked to be a typed letter from the Empire Theater in New York.
The mug had clearly been there a while, based on the series of watery brown rings staining the paper beneath it.
“Sit,” Mr. Poel commanded, taking his own chair behind the desk.
Rita did. He’d left the door cracked; for a moment, they only regarded each other across the messy expanse of the desk, unspeaking.
People bustled back and forth in the hallway beyond, quick footfalls striking floorboards.
The stage manager called out, Forty minutes, people!
Forty minutes till curtain, as two of the crew tromped by, urgently discussing a faulty footlight.
The walls in here were covered in posters, most of them autographed, every one of them from Poel’s productions. There was scarcely an inch of plaster to be seen between them. If anyone needed to be reminded of William Poel’s extraordinary success with his shows, these walls said it all.
He wasn’t a young man, caught somewhere in his fifties, with striking, patrician features and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair that resisted his pomade.
His eyes were deep-set, sharp. In the back of her mind, he always reminded her of an eagle, and sitting here now, with the silence expanding between them, Rita remembered her comparison of Ansel Lurie to a titmouse. It almost made her smile. Almost.
She forced herself to not fidget under his examination, keeping her hands and shoulders relaxed, her expression mildly curious. But her mind was racing; she tried to think of anything she’d done wrong, a flubbed line, a break in character, a late entrance, and couldn’t.
“You’ve done a credible job,” he said abruptly, leaning back in his swivel chair. The springs at its base creaked in complaint. “Better than I’d expected, if I may be frank.”
“Aren’t you always frank?” she replied, rather bold, but it won her a brief smile.
“I’m putting together something new. Romeo and Juliet, a traveling production. Still settling on the timing of it all, but the plan is to take it across the kingdom. Only the larger cities, of course, ones with universities or the like. It might take as long as a year. You’re eighteen, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, her heart beginning to smack against the bones of her chest.
“No husband, no children?”
“No.”
“A sweetheart?”
“No.” He looked skeptical, so she added honestly, “I’ve had no time for one.”
“And your parents?”
“Very liberal. At least in their support of me.”
“Is there anything to tie you to London for the next year or so?”
“No,” she said a third time, a little too intense, and then smoothed her tone. “Nothing.”
“Excellent. I’ll have you read as soon as I’ve gotten a better notion of the rest of the cast. In the meanwhile, I need you to keep this conversation between us. I don’t want any discord sewn backstage. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir. I only …”
He’d been in the midst of rising. At her words, he eased down again, and again the springs protested.
“Yes, Miss Jolivet?”
“Forgive me,” she said, and went on in a rush. “I only wonder which part you had in mind for me? Of course, I’m thrilled with any part, any at all. But …”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re wondering if I’m considering you for Juliet?”
She looked at him straight on, nodded.
In many ways, he was still a mystery to her, a stranger, even after all these months.
She knew him as a director, but that was it.
They’d never interacted socially or in any other manner beyond this small, perfect bubble, this theatre, this whirlwind production.
Until five minutes ago, she hadn’t even known how he took his coffee. (Black, as it turned out.)
“Miss Jolivet, rest assured I wouldn’t have pulled you in here for the role of a jeune fille standing in the background.” He came to his feet; so did she. “If there was ever an actress I’ve met meant to play Juliet Capulet, it is you.”
He extended his palm to her, the tips of his fingers stained with nicotine. With her heart still smacking so hard she thought she might be trembling from the force of it, they shook hands.
“A YEAR?” INEZ said that evening in the parlor. She looked up from the postcard she’d been reading and re-reading, tracing her thumb over the inked lettering. “You’ll be gone an entire year?”
“Or so. It’s not clear yet. But these traveling productions usually do take a lot of time, you know.
You have to gather up a cast and crew, the set, all the costumes and props.
Lumber and hammers and lights and—and I don’t know what.
A million little details to be stitched together for the performances and then picked apart again as the caravan moves on to the next town. And then you start it all over.”
“But who’ll look out for you? Who’ll take care of you?”
“Who does it now?” Rita laughed. “It’s Juliet. The most—oh, the most shattering ingénue role ever written. I’m not going to pass it up, no matter what comes. Even if I have to drag old Corbyn along with me!”
“Hush,” Inez cautioned, glancing at the door.
“If anything, we need to start thinking about who’ll take care of you. You can’t go back to Winter Queen. You’ve grown wings since then.”
She spoke swiftly, flippantly, attempting a distraction, but as she said the words, Rita realized it was true.
Her sister was not only a shade taller than she had been this time last year and several shades more beautiful, she carried a sort of glow within her now, an ethereal, muted radiance Rita hadn’t noticed before.
Or maybe she had, but it had evolved so slowly, and Rita’s world rotated so quickly, anything muted or ethereal was faded against the glare of the stage lights she bathed in every night.
Inez’s eyes seemed bluer, her complexion more alabaster. Even her hair had changed, no longer the color of light honey but more an ambered gold, rippling in heavy curls.
We should get her portrait taken, Rita thought, the actress in her taking over. Publish it in the social sheets like the American debutantes do. Caption it “A Perfect English Rose.”
Inez’s eyes lowered. She tapped a finger against the postcard, then placed it on top of the blanket chest by her chair, next to a vase of red-and-white streaked tulips. “No, I won’t be going back. Not anytime soon.”
“Is it your Mr. Vernon?”