Chapter 10 #2
Lady Upton leaned forward slightly. “If Kean is as good tonight as he was the last time I had the pleasure of his performance, you are in for quite a treat, my dear.”
Lord Upton gave a quiet sound that might have been scepticism.
Francesca looked down again at the pit, thinking how strange it was that the same city which could starve workers and pass acts to silence reform could also gather here to watch a man speak Shakespeare under painted ceilings.
Contradiction was perhaps London’s most abundant product.
It manufactured splendour and misery with equal skill.
“You are thinking again,” remarked Major Manners.
“You say that as though it were a vice.”
“In this room it may be counted as eccentric.”
“Then I shall endeavour to be ordinary.”
“I would advise against it,” he said.
She raised a brow. “Why so?”
“Because ordinary is a bore.”
She looked at him fully then, and something in his expression—so grave while saying something that ought to have been light—caught her off guard.
It was not flirtation. It was not even admiration, though there may have been a hint of that too.
It was attention of a rarer and more unsettling kind: the compliment of someone who did not give them lightly.
For one perilous instant she thought of that morning and of Kendall’s letter still folded in her writing desk.
She thought of caution and confidence, of the ledgers and the salon and the peculiar discomfort of finding herself suspicious of a man she had always trusted.
Meanwhile, here, beside her, sat a gentleman she had no reason to trust and yet found herself looking to all the same.
How ridiculous human judgement was; how unhelpfully entangled.
The curtain rose at last and rescued her from further thought.
For a time she surrendered, as any rational creature must, to the force of performance.
Kean justified every reputation she had heard attached to him and perhaps exceeded several.
There was something almost dangerous in watching such command of feeling—the ability to seize a room full of people and hold them, not by rank or wealth or social expectation, but by talent alone.
Francesca had not realized until that moment how rare such a gift truly was.
It was earned in every breath and gesture, and therefore it satisfied her far more than the whole glittering apparatus around it.
She found herself leaning forward more than once, wholly engaged, and on one occasion, when a line struck with particular force, she forgot herself enough to speak under her breath. “How extraordinary.”
Not long after this, during one of the quieter scenes when the house had settled into a hush so complete that even the pit seemed subdued, she became suddenly aware of being watched.
The sensation came upon her all at once, with no warning she could name: that slight prickle on the back of the neck, the inexplicable certainty that one’s person has become the object of a gaze too fixed to be accidental.
It was not like the ordinary inspection of Society, which she had long since learned to ignore. This was more deliberate.
Her eyes moved instinctively away from the stage, down and then across… into the pit.
At first she saw nothing but the expected blur of faces, coats, movement, and shadow. Then one face resolved itself from the rest with such shocking familiarity that her breath altered before she could prevent it: Thomas Kendall.
He stood, rather than seated on a bench, somewhat back from the crush, near one of the side passages, and he was watching the box, watching her.
His expression was unreadable from that distance, but she knew, from the line of his shoulders, the stillness of his head, the unmistakable fixity of attention.
He was not there by chance. He was not looking generally upward in the manner of a man surveying the audience.
He was looking at her. A chill went through her.
Why had he come? Had he known she would be there? Had Lady Upton mentioned it? No—surely not. Yet there he was, plainly dressed enough to pass unnoticed among many in the pit and yet impossible, now that she had seen him, not to see. Her hand tightened on the fan in her lap.
“Miss Vale?”
Major Manners’ voice was low, but so near and so attentive that it startled her almost as much as Kendall’s presence had.
She turned her head too quickly.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.” The answer was immediate and wholly unconvincing. She knew it the moment she said it, and his expression told her he did as well.
“You have gone pale.”
“It is warm in here.”
“It is.”
She almost laughed at the absurdity of it, but the laugh would not come. Instead she glanced, involuntarily, back towards the pit. That was enough.
Major Manners followed the direction of her gaze with the practised economy of a man who noticed for a living. She saw the instant at which he identified the object of her attention. Something in him altered—very little outwardly, but enough that she sensed it at once.
When he turned back towards her, his voice had changed too. It remained quiet, but whatever lightness had existed in it before was gone.
“Did he do something to upset you?”
Francesca kept her eyes on the stage because she no longer trusted herself to allow them anywhere else. For a moment, she and the Major sat in a silence that seemed much louder than the theatre itself.
“I did not expect him to be here,” she said at last, and was vexed by how much that sounded like an explanation.
“Nor did I.”
She dared another glance. Kendall had not moved—or perhaps he had only shifted so slightly that she could not tell. The effect was somehow worse. He was neither approaching nor leaving. He was only there, watching.
A dozen interpretations rose and fell within her in rapid succession.
Perhaps his presence meant nothing. Perhaps it meant precisely what her nerves had already told her it meant: that Kendall now moved in circles she had not expected, and that his interest in her movements had grown sharper than friendship alone required.
Major Manner’s hand, resting along the arm of his chair, shifted the slightest degree nearer to hers… not touching, merely there.
The same strange sensation returned to her—the one she had first recognized at the small of her back while entering the theatre—that of protection. “If you wish to leave,” he said, “you have only to say so.”
She looked at him.
The offer was perfectly serious. He would have removed her at once from Lord Upton’s box, from Drury Lane, from the whole of London, if she had asked in that moment. The certainty of it shone so plainly in his expression that she almost forgot to answer.
“No,” she said quietly. “There is nothing unremarkable in him attending the theatre.”
His eyes held hers for one instant longer, then he inclined his head once, accepting the decision with alacrity.
The play continued. The audience laughed, gasped, applauded, and hushed itself again. Lady Upton, happily absorbed, seemed not to have noticed anything amiss. Lord Upton watched the stage with a grave concentration which could be construed as boredom.
Francesca, though she kept her face turned towards the performance and her posture as composed as ever, was aware of two men now with a clarity that made all Shakespeare secondary.
When the curtain fell on the act and the house erupted into movement and conversation, the spell broke around them—but not within her. She looked again towards the passage beside the pit. Kendall was gone.