Chapter Fifteen
It took all of twenty minutes into the first showcase rehearsal for Elias to regret ever opening his fool mouth and requesting such a thing.
“Shoulders back, Elias,” Libba snapped at him, slapping the intersection of his spine and ribs with her knuckles. “You’re a baron, not a barmaid. This isn’t the jacket he’s wearing on the day, is it?”
“God, no,” Monica said from her stool near a quartet of dress forms. “I can fix it, though, if he lets me.”
“What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, only to be ignored by both women as he looked helplessly down at the double-breasted linen jacket, which had looked, to him, perfectly serviceable this morning.
“Color’s all wrong,” Ruby told him from her chemist’s stand a few feet away, dripping with sympathy. “Why would you wear brown?”
“Everyone wears brown,” he insisted, ignoring that none of the wards were, just now, wearing it.
“Doesn’t taper at the waist,” Monica added. “Too baggy about the shoulders.”
“It’s such a shame, really,” Ruby continued, arranging her glass vials and bottles on her little table in the sunlight. “You’ve such a scrumptious shape.”
“All right,” Errol Cagney said mildly. “Leave him.”
“How’s my form?” Rhys Caradoc asked, puffing his chest up and striking a knightly pose.
“Skinny,” said Ruby without looking at him.
“Rangey,” Libba corrected, tilting her head to the side.
“I wish I were either,” Monica put in gently, patting her pleasantly plump hips. “You’re beautiful, Rhys.”
“Damn right, I am,” he said. “And so are you, chwaer.”
She grinned, tucking her wispy, blonde hair behind her ears, and shook her head. “The poem,” she said. “Try again.”
Elias groaned. “Where is Harriet?”
“Oh, he wants Hattie,” said Libba with an exaggerated pout. “Isn’t that sweet?”
“She’ll be along,” Rhys said, his eyes sparkling. “She doesn’t need to rehearse the same way we do.”
“She and Malcolm don’t perform as such,” Errol explained. “They haven’t props or scripts. They have to wait for the audience to engage them.”
“With numbers and letters,” Ruby said, tapping her fingernails against the rims of her beakers. “One, two … Rhys! Give it back!”
“No, I need it!” he retorted, which immediately devolved into one chasing the other around the pavilion while Elias watched in helpless fascination.
“You don’t have any siblings, do you, Selwyn?” Errol asked him, sidling up next to Libba to join in their observation of the chasing farce.
Elias shook his head, eyes following their progress.
“No, my mother remarried after I was born and the two of them realized in fast order that children are too much of a fuss for their sensibilities. They didn’t make the same mistake again,” he said.
“I don’t think this is usual, even for siblings, all the same. ”
“Of course it is,” said Libba with a sniff. “We’re not siblings, anyhow. Not really. Well, Mal and I are, but not the others.”
“No,” Errol agreed, his eyes following Ruby’s petite frame as it feinted and spun in her red skirts, knocking Rhys flat on his bottom. “No, we aren’t.”
“Get your own!” Ruby crowed, planting a dainty slippered foot on his chest and leaning down to pluck the beaker from his hand.
“You could’ve broken it!” Rhys whined.
“And it would have been worth it, honestly,” Ruby replied, smirking as she let him up.
“You can’t humiliate me in my own domain,” he continued, leaping to his feet like a cat. “I own the stone you stand on!”
“Yes, yes,” said Ruby, already walking back to her table. “Rhys bloody Caradoc, master of the gazebo.”
“It’s a pavilion,” he intoned, following her just a little too closely to maximize his antagonism. “I need more scent, by the by.”
“Are you going to pay for it this time?” Ruby asked, winning a sputtering scoff from Rhys.
“Oh, it is easy to forget how wonderful it is when we’re together.” Monica sighed wistfully, as though she were watching an idyllic family tableau. “I’m barely even sad about Berlin anymore.”
Elias cleared his throat, attempting to find his slot in this odd woodwork puzzle. “Oh, right,” he said politely. “You were making opera costumes, yes? What was the production?”
She blinked at him, smiling brightly. “Dido and Aeneas,” she said. “Terribly sad. We were doing it in Rococo style. Quite a lot of pastel. You would look well in a nice powder blue, you know.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Ah, Christ,” said Errol, suddenly hopping to action and striding off toward the street. “My pigs!”
“Oh, the pigs!” Ruby echoed in a far more excited tone of voice, dropping all of her vials to hurry after him. “The little one is mine! You promised!”
“What are you going to do with a pig?” Errol chuckled, turning to wait for her.
Rhys immediately swiped the beaker again and tucked it into his waistcoat.
Elias frowned, watching them greet the wagon. “‘Pigs’?”
“They do tricks,” Libba offered, patting him on the shoulder. “You’ll see it soon. Now again, from the first stanza!”
He sighed, turning back to face her and wondering just how high she might have climbed in the cavalry, in a different world.
And he obeyed.
Oddly, the pigs ended up helping him. They seemed to enjoy the flow of rhyming verse and keeping them entranced was enough motivation to sufficiently ease him into repeating the verses over and over again until they were fully memorized.
It did not, however, stop him from thinking about his apparently deeply unflattering jacket. And when the afternoon grew very hot, he took it off and handed it to Monica.
“Oh,” she said, clutching it to her chest. “To fix?”
“Or burn. Whichever,” he said, shrugging as he rolled his sleeves to his elbows. “Feel free to come by my chambers at your leisure to assess the rest of my wardrobe.”
“Truly?” she asked, as though he’d just baked her a sheet cake.
He grimaced. “Truly.”
They watched as Libba’s troupe arrived from their lodgings at the inn, flocking around her as she explained the program of hours she had created for the showcase to come, stepping over the pigs as though they were unsurprised to share the stage with the wriggling pink rivals while she spoke.
“I wish we had time to finish Pyramus and Thisbe, but alas.” Libba sighed. “We will revert to our troupe’s lauded variation on Ovid’s Pygmalion, in highlight only. Where is Lem?”
“Sick,” a woman with short, cropped hair said, raising her eyebrows. “He didn’t like the boat.”
Elias felt a bump against his shin and looked down to find a pig nudging him with its forehead, apparently in search of more poetry. He stared down at the creature for a moment before kneeling and giving it a scratch behind the ears.
“I wish we had somewhere to sit,” he whispered to the pig, who immediately flopped onto its hind parts in a dutiful sitting position, startling Elias. “Well,” he said, “look at you.”
“She can shake your hand as well,” Errol called from the other side of the pavilion. “And play dead. Her name is Peach.”
Elias chuckled, extending his hand half in jest. “Pleasure to meet you, Peach.”
To his utter shock, the pig slapped her cloven foot against his palm and guided the shaking motion.
“Christ,” he muttered, cupping his hand over her head. “I’ll never eat pork again.”
That was how Hattie came upon him, arriving from his rear, having observed God-knew-how-much of his discourse with Peach the pig.
Her shadow fell across his back, bringing the pig’s attention up before Elias caught on, and he turned to find her looking down at him with half a bemused smile while he had one hand on the pig’s head and the other wrapped around her hoof.
“Good afternoon,” she said, kneeling down to peer at the pig. “A rival?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. I’m in love.”
She giggled, reaching out to touch the pig’s flat nose. “Did you teach Elias the language of jests, little one? So quickly, too!”
“I could always jest,” he said with a sniff. “I just chose not to.”
“And the language of lies as well,” she marveled, her eyes sparkling amber gold in the sunlight as she beheld him.
It was then that he realized he hadn’t been lying at all.
He was in love.
Shit.
“Hattie! Malcolm!” Libba cried. “Come! I have to show you your places!”
Hattie smiled and stood, using his shoulder to help herself to her feet and giving him a little squeeze before she sashayed off to receive her orders, leaving that odd spiced sweetness lingering in the air in her wake.
“Shit,” he said aloud, just to the pig.
The pig seemed to nod in agreement, glancing over its pink shoulder to watch Hattie as well and then looking back at Elias with an expression of pure sympathy.
“Do you want a dog bed?” Elias asked her. “Or do you prefer to sleep at the foot of my bed instead?”
He stood, looking about for Errol, and strode toward him, pleased to a degree that ought to have alarmed him when the pig turned and trotted after him in concert.
“I’m keeping this pig,” he said to Errol. “She’s mine now.”
Errol chuckled. “All right. But she still has to perform at the showcase.”
“So must we all.” Elias sighed and turned to watch his bride-to-be as she glittered in the sun, shaking the hands of a motley assemblage of actors and vagabonds, clearly finding many among them who spoke tongues other than English. “So must we all.”
“You’ll have questions, I assume?” Errol pressed, following Elias’s eyeline to Hattie with a knowing raise of his tawny brows. “About the pig, I mean.”
“The pig,” he said, still watching Hattie. “Right. Many. Her preferences and so on?”
“I’m happy to answer any question you have,” Errol told him, giving him a clap on the shoulder. “Feel free to ask.”
“I’ll do that,” Elias replied, “if any good questions ever occur to me.”
And, he thought privately, if he couldn’t get up the courage to ask the lady directly.