Chapter 1 #2
Cerys tugged with renewed force at the net of fallen timbers hiding the trunk beneath. The hard edges bit through her thin cotton gloves. Her hands had gotten soft, joining the theater troupe. She’d lost the calluses from hard work, though she knew how to hide the scars with gloves of kid and silk.
She also knew how a canny woman could watch and guard, fight and win, and hold the very fabric of her world together with naught but will and nails and her clever wits. She’d seen her mother do so; she’d seen her friends and other mothers be wily and wise, and prevail. Cerys meant to do no less.
“They go to Dorsey as he’s the man as has charge of you,” Mame remarked. She poked at a teetering chunk of plaster wall, still clinging to its paper. “They’d go to father or brother or husband, if you had one.”
She waited for a response, and Cerys knew what the older woman wanted: some hint at her past, at the life Cerys had led before she came to Gloucester and saw the company performing their version of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.
She’d auditioned to Dorsey by singing Lucy’s tragic “I am a Skiff on the Ocean Toss’d,” and Dorsey cast her that very night.
She made a better Lucy than Tryphenie, who had spurred giggles during her second act song, which was meant to be tragic, by mixing up the words to “How Cruel are the Traitors” and, forgetting most of the lyrics, repeating “pretty villain” and “perjured virtue” several times.
Within a week, Dorsey had taken the role of Polly Peachum from Dot and given it to Cerys, even though Dot was supposedly his niece.
The show had proved an enormous success, with comparisons drawn in the newspapers between Cerys and Lavinia Fenton, the London diva who’d been made famous, and become a duke’s mistress, on the strength of her enchanting Polly.
The company played for an extra three weeks in Gloucester, earning enough to repair the cart they used to travel between towns.
And Cerys was immediately accepted into their ranks, soon learning all their secrets, such as that Dot was Dorsey’s natural daughter but they invented parents who had been married to affect a thin veneer of respectability.
But Cerys had never shared her own secrets, such as they were.
She told them she was born in Bristol and had been raised by nuns in a remote country abbey.
She’d joined the troupe to see more of the world, and she’d seen much.
Strict morality was not a virtue Jed Dorsey held in high esteem—he couldn’t afford to, in his line of work.
Still, Cerys sensed the tiniest distance in the regard the other Players showed her. Polite distance, but distance nevertheless.
The timber she was tugging at dropped from her fingers, suddenly numb. A chill of understanding climbed her body, unconnected with the cool current in the spring air. “So that is why,” Cerys said.
“Why what?” Rhoda fruitlessly dusted a pile of rubble, then sat upon it, propping her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. Rhoda never stuck with one task for long; it was why she was not given lengthy speeches to memorize.
Why the others seemed to accept her, tease or coddle her, but no one taunted Cerys the way they might taunt or insult one another.
No one fought with her. No one denied her anything.
Their regard neared respect, and they never riled her to the screaming matches she’d heard Rhoda and Dot, or Dot or Tryphenie, or sometimes all three have together, with hairbrushes and ofttimes shoes flying across a dressing room.
The affection was guarded, too. Oh, she was accepted, and felt it.
Cerys was given the place of honor beside their host whenever they were invited to dine.
Mame went with Dorsey to negotiate business deals, but Cerys was sent with him when he was trying to lure new patrons or convince a theater manager to give them a run.
She was part of the group, but she didn’t belong in the essential ways. She was of the company, but not the family they’d made before her. She was more like…a guest whose extended stay they made the most of, but a guest all the same. Not one of them, not truly.
“You’re all waiting for me to leave,” Cerys realized. “You expect that one day, I’ll get an offer I’ll accept.”
“Well, why wouldn’t you?” Dot rubbed the back of her glove over her forehead, leaving an ashy smear. “I’d run off to be showered in furs and jewels if I could. Mrs. Jordan did.”
“Mrs. Jordan has just been pensioned off by the Duke of Clarence after bearing him ten little FitzClarences,” Cerys replied, still tugging at the fallen boards.
Better to channel her anger at dead wood than the people who, for over two years now, had been her constant companions, day and night.
“And I heard he is taking charge of the boys, leaving her the care of five daughters, and has prohibited her from ever again taking the stage.”
“I’d take such a pension,” Mame remarked.
“Four thousand pounds a year? Can you imagine!” She stared off to the north, where the timber and stone houses of the old market town gave way to patterned plots of farmland, newly tilled and seeded with the promise of fertile growth.
“A carriage of your own. Silk gowns and gloves. Chocolate for breakfast every morning, hot enough to melt in your mouth.”
“Balls.” Rhoda, chin in hand, followed Mame’s eyes as if viewing the same inner scenery. “Breakfasts. Routs. Fireworks at Vauxhall Gardens, every night.”
“We can get all of that ’ere in the Cheltenham season.” Dot, unmoved, carried on turning over what rubble she could shift. “Well, mayhap not the fireworks.”
“No one’d invite me to a London ball,” Tryphenie scoffed.
“You might not get tickets to Almack’s, but you could go to the public balls and masquerades.” Cerys attacked her pile from a different direction. “It is only the price of a ticket, and they’re great fun. People devise the strangest costumes, and sometimes quite scandalous ones, too.”
Mame turned her head in their direction, the siren’s call broken. “And when have you been in London, pet?”
“Oh. In the past.” Cerys prodded the heap she was working with her toe, aware that the attention of the others was focused on her again. Just like on the stage. They were waiting for this character named Cerys to reveal herself.
Why hadn’t she been honest? She couldn’t quite explain it to herself, and she had a notion her excuses would sound feeble to the others as well.
But if they thought she had only joined the troupe on a lark, and she meant to cut sticks any time she pleased, why wouldn’t they see her as the golden goose?
Ask her to lay as many precious eggs as she could while they had her, and live on the wealth she brought as long as it lasted, once she was gone.
She felt it again, that strange loneliness that was only possible around crowds of people.
She grew up, for most of her years, in households filled with far more than her blood relations.
She hadn’t slept alone, eaten alone, taken a walk alone in her entire life.
There was always someone sent to look after her, and when she was older—which for Cerys came young—someone else who required looking after.
But that longing. That wish to feel she was seen as an individual, and not simply part of the whole. To know that she truly belonged and was valued for her own self alone, and not for what she brought to the table.
It was why she’d taken up acting. To be seen. Adored. Admired. Perhaps it was vain to admit it, but it was the truth.
Well, she had that now, didn’t she? Admiring audiences every night. Her face on the playbills posted when they came to a new town, her name prominent in the adverts. So why wasn’t she satisfied? She kicked at the offending cluster of wood, and part of it shifted grudgingly.
“I won’t let a man pay me to stay off the stage, even if he were a prince,” Cerys said. “I won’t let a man keep and have the rule of me.”
“A royal duke has his way over any number of things,” Mame pointed out.
Rhoda sighed. “Would a royal duke build us a theater, if we ask proper and nice?”
“That’s why I say it’s up to Cerys,” Dot said. “I’ll wager you our season’s box office she’ll get a swell to set us up if she asks with her sweet manner and her big, batting eyes.”
“But we don’t have boxes any longer,” Tryphenie said.
So. She wanted to matter to the company, hadn’t she said it? And here was her role. Bringing in riches. Enchanting and manipulating men by means of her cursed face.