Chapter 8 #2
The pale cheeks took on a becoming flush. “He’s not my Mr. Vernon. And no. I haven’t even seen him since Sandringham.”
“But you’ve heard from him. He’s certainly diligent about sending flowers and those postcards, cryptic as they are. Well-traveled for a singer, isn’t he?”
“I suppose he’s very much in demand.”
“By the tsar of Russia,” Rita drawled.
“Stop it, sissy, I mean it. No doubt he’s just very well connected. It’s not unheard of for a person of singular talent to be adopted by the elite. We, of all people, know that.”
And this was also new: the brittle edge to her voice that warned Rita she wasn’t joking, that the teasing had gone further than warranted and as far as it ever should, lest something more serious be damaged between them. Something permanent.
Whatever he was, wherever he was, Mr. Vernon had clearly made an impression. Stamped himself right on her sister’s tender young heart.
Rita yielded a hand in surrender, and Inez blew out a breath.
“Anyway, the reason I’m not going home is because my social calendar is beginning to fill up.”
“Is it?”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, it is. I’ve been asked to five more parties de plaisir, including one hosted by the Duke of Connaught at Bagshot Park, and three bloody damned balls.”
Rita gave a blink, and Inez lifted her chin. “That’s right. I swore. I’ve decided I’m swearing now, when the occasion warrants it.”
“And … these balls warrant it?”
“When they consume my life, yes! Apparently, the king’s invitation was as good as opening a floodgate.
Balls, weekend retreats, teas. A letter from Maman arrived this morning—I put it on your pillow in your room—to let us know they’re returning in a week’s time.
She’s threatening to drag us both back to Paris for more clothes.
I think she expects you to join us for these jolly frolics, at least some of them. ”
“Lord, no.”
“Now you know how I feel,” Inez said darkly. “I don’t know how you’ll convince them to let you fly free for a whole year. Even you aren’t that silver-tongued.”
Rita clicked her fingernails against the wooden arm of her chair. “We’ll see about that.”
IT TURNED OUT that she had to do hardly any convincing, silvered or otherwise.
Papa objected, of course; he was almost obligated to, wasn’t he?
But it was barely an echo of the scene that had birthed this one, back in Winter Queen’s humid conservatory when Marguerite had informed her family of her intention to become an actress.
This time Charles had protested: a year? And she’d told him why that had to be, how the whole company would travel like circus folk across the king’s land, a cohesive band of them, a solid, safe mass.
He’d said, no chaperone? And she’d assured him the company would supply one, which was probably not an untruth, but anyway she was a citizen of the Old Smoke now, practically wizened, and knew how to look after herself.
And then she’d gone to him, knelt before him in his chair and taken his hands in hers and pleaded, Please, and Juliet, and a few more impassioned sentences that all added up to: A role like this may never land in my lap again.
The last time she’d gone to her knees before him, had grabbed his hands and actually pleaded was when she’d been twelve and she’d begged him for a pony and cart of her own.
She’d gotten the pony, but not the cart, and that was enough, as it turned out.
She’d spent years afterward braiding Mathilde’s mane and tail, currying her, whispering her ambitions into soft equine ears in exchange for apples and sugar cubes.
And now Mathilde resided, plump and happy and retired, back at Winter Queen, while Rita was ready to soar on, even farther away than London. Out into the yonder.
Pauline understood. She sat calmly and listened without speaking, only watching, but once again with that slight, satisfied curve to her lips. The entire conversation unfolded so tamely that no one even bothered to switch to French.
“Let her go,” Pauline had said finally. “This is who she is. This is what we’ve hoped for her.”
“I’ve hoped for rather more than this,” Papa had grumbled, by which Rita understood he meant a husband, a family, stability.
“But this,” Rita said, rising again and leaning over him to buss him on the cheek, “is what I’ve hoped for. All my life, this.”
Stability was for houses and bridges, solid things that needed solid earth beneath them to remain upright.
The stalwart masses who toiled and wed and reproduced as they should, never getting lost in the Milky Way above their heads, never hoping for more than what they’d been given, what was within ready reach.
Rita had always stood at the hazardous precipice of more. She had always looked up and hoped.
Fame and freedom. Freedom and fame. The very notion of them entwined fizzed through her blood, surged hard and fast through her entire body, head-to-toes delicious, finer than champagne.
THE TOUR KICKED off in Brighton, in a May so mild and pleasant after months of winter and a very soggy April, that the birds seemed to never stop celebrating it, and the wildflowers lining the roads bloomed in thick vivid clusters.
Yellow horseshoe vetch and magenta corncockles, lacy white cow parsley, and—as they got closer to the sea—pink papery clusters of thrift, clinging tenaciously to rocky ledges.
Rita couldn’t say if they were traveling as the circus folk did, as she’d never actually seen a circus, but maybe.
For the most part, they were a caravan of horse-drawn wagons and carriages, plodding but constant.
William Poel typically led the way in his motorcar, a red Phelps runabout he’d had imported all the way from Massachusetts.
It was a two-seater, three if the person in the middle was small, and even so, it was a squeeze.
Rita would occasionally ride with him, one hand clutching the top of the seat, the other on her hat.
It was noisy and dusty and impossible to converse unless they shouted.
She finally begged off by telling him she needed to save her voice for the shows, which was true.
But even more true was the fact that she preferred the slower, more peaceful pace of the Cleveland Bays.
Sometimes she’d travel atop one of the wagons instead of inside a carriage, and that was finest of all.
The breeze on her cheeks, the warmth of the sun along her shoulders. The placid horses, their flanks shining. The steady, hollow clop of their hooves.
In Brighton, they stayed in a splendidly shabby Victorian hotel overlooking a long strand of beach, the English Channel an iron sweep beyond it sliced with foam.
France lay at the other edge of those rough waters; the whole of Europe lay at the other edge.
The wind rattling the hotel room windows carried the constant scent of fish and brine, and of taffy candy from the vendors on the sand.
For this, their first official performance, in the first official town for their first official tour, the stage was set out of doors, in a grassy park surrounded by low-slung Georgian shops selling everything from seashells to fried cod to bathing costumes.
The park featured a sunken amphitheater, with tiers of cement seating surrounding it in a half-circle, row after row carved into the slanted earth.
“As the Greeks did it,” Mr. Poel said approvingly, as the salt air whistled by and flipped up his tie.
Two tents had been staked past the back rise of the amphitheater, one for the gentlemen actors, one for the ladies.
There was no water closet available, only a chamber pot in each tent hidden behind a leather screen.
The precariously secured flap for the entrance was mere feet away, and the wind never stopped tugging at its ties.
By the end of the evening, everything inside—the pot and the screen, the mirrors and folding tables and chairs—would be dusted with grit.
Ellen Terry, the actress playing Lady Capulet, looked at the pot and sighed.
“How much one doesn’t miss the good old days before proper plumbing.”
Rita had to laugh. “At least we don’t have to share it with the boys.”
“Amen to that! Good God, can you imagine? With these drafts and their aim, nothing would stay dry.”
Rita liked Ellen, a famed veteran of Shakespeare, who had kind eyes and a wry wit, and who had welcomed her into the troupe with a handshake that had turned into an embrace.
Everyone here had been so nice, so easy to befriend, even the crew.
Even the young man playing Romeo, who was just as sandy-haired and handsome as Frank Monroe had been, but with ten times more talent and none of the arrogance.
He’d made it simple for her to inhabit the soul of Juliet.
To fall in love with him, and kiss him, and die for him, night after night.
In time, it felt as natural as breathing.
The play opened late in the afternoon, before the shops closed and so before the tourists departed, as the park had no gaslights and the wind was too untrustworthy for lanterns. Mr. Poel, familiar with both the town and the amphitheater (and apparently the capricious wind) had planned it all out.
“We should wrap up just at the first blush of sundown. Still enough light to see, and the colors in the sky will be our lanterns and scrim.”
And so it was. They opened to a full crowd, some of them locals, most heavy-eyed tourists already weary from the sun-drenched day.
A sprinkling of university students, surreptitiously passing flasks back and forth between them.
The pubs would stay open later than any of the shops, eager for the business after the show, and the students knew it. The flasks were quickly drained.