Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Julia hadn’t the faintest notion how much time had elapsed between Lord Dunstane’s departure and the servant’s almost-inaudible scratch at the study door. She had found her way to a chair and taken a book from the shelf, though she hadn’t bothered to open it. The candle still sat on the far corner of the desk where he had shoved it, its flame too distant for her to read by—as if she could have concentrated on the printed page even if the light had been right beside her.
Name your price.
Her foolish words still seemed to echo about the room. What had she been thinking, allowing Lord Dunstane such liberties, offering . . . herself, in exchange for a mere peek at the play? She had intended to tempt him, it was true, to use his interest. But she had not considered how far she might have to go to get what she wanted.
And she had never imagined how tempted she might be to give him whatever he asked.
When she made no answer to the quiet knock, the door opened a few inches, and a parlor maid stuck her head into the room. “Mrs. Hayes is ready to leave.”
Julia rose. “Has her carriage been ordered?”
“Yes, miss.”
Heedless of the bookshelves’ general air of orderliness, she stuffed the unexamined volume in the first convenient space she saw, then blew out the candle with a huff and followed the girl downstairs.
In the high-ceilinged foyer, only Mrs. Hayes, Lady Clearwater, and a footman waited.
“Ah, there you are, my dear,” Mrs. Hayes called up to her when she was still half a flight of stairs away. “I didn’t see much use in our staying for the dancing.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you feeling any better, Miss Addison?” asked Lady Clearwater, scrutinizing every detail of Julia’s appearance. She did not look at all disappointed to see them go.
“Can’t you see how flushed she is?” Mrs. Hayes chided. “I’ll see to it you have one of my special tonics when we’re home.”
Julia wanted to protest, but when Mrs. Hayes promised it would bring with it the blessed oblivion of sleep, she nodded and let the widow take her arm and walked with her to the waiting coach.
Then again, sleep was not without its risks. It might bring dreams—dreams of the sort young ladies were not supposed to have.
In the dimness of the carriage, she pressed gloved fingertips to her mouth. Her lips felt the same as they always had, not swollen or tender as she had half expected to find them. She hadn’t known there were such kisses—or rather, hadn’t suspected she would enjoy them so thoroughly, particularly not from a man like Lord Dunstane: so arrogant and so cold.
No. Not cold at all.
Hot as a freshly stoked fire.
She could still hear his voice, the thickening of his brogue, as if passion unleashed some other side of him—as if her kiss had caused his mask to slip.
Friday’s rehearsal would give her the opportunity to see him again. Was she willing to risk . . . everything to find out what another encounter might reveal?
A shiver passed through her. She was beginning to fear that the answer might be yes. In the chill evening air, she found herself longing for heat—no matter how dangerous.
When she had been wrapped in his arms, protecting the magazine had been the last thing on her mind. She had simply thrown herself headlong into the flames.
“I think you might be feverish,” said Mrs. Hayes. Her expression was indecipherable in the semidarkness, but her voice was full of concern.
Julia gnawed at her lower lip and nodded. “I think you might be right.”
Back in Clapham, Mrs. Hayes called for her maid and ordered Julia straight to bed. Julia hardly had time to slip into her nightdress before Mrs. Whyte, the housekeeper and Daniel’s mother, appeared at her door.
“Warm milk,” she said, proffering a pewter cup, “with two drops of Mrs. Hayes’s sleeping tonic, on her orders. Rest is the best thing for you, Miss Julia.”
With an unsteady hand, Julia reached for the cup and pretended to take a sip, then wiped warm foam from her upper lip with the back of her other hand. “Mmm, thank you. I’m sure I’ll be right as rain in the morning,” she insisted. “After a good night’s sleep.”
Mrs. Whyte’s brows were knitted together in a frown of concern. “Drink it all, then straight to bed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As soon as the door was shut behind the housekeeper, Julia put the cup aside and stood staring out the small, square window into the darkness. Eventually she tipped her forehead against the blessedly cool glass.
Could she save Miss on Scene and Mrs. Goode without getting burned?
Gradually, from the hopeless jumble of her thoughts—memories of what had been said at the last staff meeting, of what Lord Manwaring had revealed, of Lord Dunstane’s searing touch—a single note of clarity emerged.
She must fight fire with fire.
She sat down at the little dressing table, which sometimes doubled as a writing desk. The room itself was so narrow that when the stool was not tucked beneath the table, it nestled against the bed.
Withdrawing a sheet of paper from the drawer with one hand, she dipped her pen with the other and dashed off a few lines, pausing only to read them through once before folding the letter and sealing it—along with, perhaps, her fate. Then, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she opened the door again and peered out into the darkened house. From all appearances, everyone else was abed.
With cautious, silent steps, she descended into the kitchen. As she had hoped, Mrs. Whyte had retired after delivering the warm milk; only Daniel was still within, banking the fire before settling in for the night.
She cleared her throat, and he jerked about, poker upraised, obviously startled. “Oh! It’s you.” He lowered his weapon apologetically. “I expected you’d sleep until noon, Miss Julia. That dose usually does it, even for Mrs. Hayes. You must have the constitution of a horse. Beggin’ your pardon,” he added, with a lopsided grin.
She gave a silent chuckle and lifted one shoulder. “Every body’s different, I guess.”
“What are you doing down here? Hungry?” Gradually, his voice had risen from a shocked whisper to something almost conversational. With a clatter and a clang, he thrust the poker back into the iron cage that held the other fire tools.
She held up the letter and raised a finger to her lips. “I need you to take this to Lady Stalbridge.”
She had written a brief addendum to her latest column and hoped it was not too late to get it to the printer. Surely if Miss on Scene issued another salvo at Ransom Blackadder, it would redirect his patron’s attention to the business at hand. Then, during the rehearsal, Lord Dunstane would be focused on the play’s success, not on her.
“Now?” Daniel mouthed the word, eyes round. But his expression was eager, too; he was always up for an adventure.
“I’d offer you a guinea for the trouble,” she murmured, handing over the letter. “But at present, I haven’t even a ha’penny.”
“No worries, Miss Julia.” He tucked the letter into the pocket of his livery coat, hanging on a peg behind him, and then shrugged into the garment. “Maybe you could find time for giving me another lesson in—what d’ya call it?—instead.”
“Deportment,” she supplied with a gentle smile. “And I think maybe you’re ready for a few phrases in French, too.”
He beamed. “Gee, thanks! But . . .” His hand clutched his breast, where the letter had been secreted. “What if the fellow who opens the door says her ladyship isn’t to be disturbed and won’t take it to her?”
“You will just have to be persuasive, Daniel. It’s very important.”
With an earnest nod, he was off.
Julia made her silent way back to her bedchamber. Once inside, she sank onto the stool of her dressing table and reached for the mug of doctored milk, now tepid rather than warm. She glanced from the frothy contents of the cup to the rumpled white linens of the bed behind her.
I promise you’ll be satisfied.
Squeezing shut her eyes, she downed the milk in three noisy glugs, grimacing at its bitter aftertaste, then flung herself backward onto the mattress and prayed the sleeping draught would at least keep her from dreaming of him.
Between now and next Friday, she needed to forget what those forbidden words had made her crave, to recall that her attraction to Lord Dunstane was meant to be an act.
* * *
The following Friday morning found Graham in the blue study, seated by the window at the table where Keynes usually worked, staring at a blank sheet of paper.
Well, not quite blank. He’d pressed the tip of his pen into the page so firmly it had made a small tear, not only spoiling that page, but also allowing ink to bleed onto the page beneath. A perfect metaphor for the progress, or lack thereof, he’d made in his revisions to The Poison Pen.
The play had a flaw in it. Hardly visible to the naked eye . . . at first. But large enough to make a mess of things and damned difficult to repair.
It had been written in a fit of pique. Taking on the critics was biting the hands that indirectly fed him. And attacking Miss on Scene was scolding the one reviewer who had ever seemed to imagine that anything might lie beneath Blackadder’s sardonic mask. The only one who had ever offered anything like praise.
With one swift movement of his hand, he snatched up the topmost two sheets and crumpled them in a ball, then tossed it angrily over his shoulder.
As luck would have it, Keynes chose that moment to enter the room, whistling an airy tune despite the morning’s gray skies.
The sound from his lips stretched into one long, sinking note, miming the high-pitched whine of a cannonball as it arced through the air over the battlefield. “I didn’t expect to find you here at this hour, my lord,” he said as he skirted the lob and came around to the front of the table where Graham sat.
“Sorry for that.” Keynes’s brows rose. But Graham’s apology, though grudging, was sincere. “I had a restless night.”
A series of restless nights, in fact. Since that fateful kiss in Clearwater’s study, he had slept only fitfully and always woke aching with frustration. He should never have kissed Julia. He should never have granted her request to watch the rehearsals of Ransom Blackadder’s play. The risk was too great. And whatever she intended to offer in return for the favor was nothing he dared to accept.
No matter how much he wanted to.
“Ah.” Keynes sent a sideways glance toward the coffeepot, as if he knew it was the third Graham had rung for that morning, as if its bitter contents were to blame for Graham’s irritableness. “Then perhaps this should wait for another time.”
He was carrying a stack of papers, as usual. Graham hardly ever saw the man without them. Correspondence, he supposed. Some pressing business from Dunstane?
“What is it?”
At least it could not be devastating news about some member of his family. The last possible letter of that sort had been received a few months ago. And it couldn’t be a snarling review of a Ransom Blackadder play, either, since none was currently being performed.
With a show of reluctance, Keynes laid something atop the stack of blank paper in front of Graham. Familiar words, framed by the figures of two Greek women with enigmatic smiles, looked up at him.
MRS. GOODE’S
MAGAZINE FOR MISSES
He raised his eyes to Keynes’s face, searching for an explanation.
“The latest issue, sir. Just out this morning. I thought you might wish to . . .”
Graham pushed the magazine aside and picked up his pen. “I’m busy. Too busy for frivolities, Keynes.”
“Of course. My apologies. I’ll just—”
As he reached to retrieve the magazine, Graham casually laid his hand atop it.
“I myself find knitting patterns quite soothing,” Keynes ventured after an uncomfortable pause, withdrawing his own hand to shift the stack of paperwork that remained in his arms. “When my thoughts refuse to untangle themselves.”
“Given the dreck one finds beneath this cover,” Graham retorted, tapping his long forefinger against the word Goode’s, “any random page might put a fellow right to sleep.”
Keynes’s answering laugh sounded a trifle uncertain, but he agreed, “Just so, sir,” and turned to deposit the rest of his burden on the polished desk. “Shall I . . . ?”
With a flick of his quill, Graham gestured for his secretary to seat himself.
For a stretch of several minutes, only the ordinary sounds of work could be heard, the organizing of papers, the breaking of seals, the smoothing of pages. Graham dipped his quill, tapped it against the mouth of the glass inkwell, and then sat with its sharp tip poised above another pristine sheet, waiting . . .
Twice in rapid succession, he drummed the fingers of his left hand, each fingertip striking a tiny blow, momentarily blotting out those little faces and meaningless words like rational and proper.
At last, he tossed his pen aside and leaned back in his chair. Watched the traffic slice through the puddles on Half Moon Street. Blew out a breath. Picked up the magazine and leafed through it with casual disdain.
Sheet music. He hummed a few bars. Not a melody he had heard before. Tolerable, he supposed.
Some screed defending ladies’ study of botany. Who would have guessed that allowing young women to learn about flowers was so controversial?
A recipe for syllabub. Perfectly ordinary, except for the line, intermixed with the instructions for preparation, which remarked that it was the ideal dish to serve the average suitor, who was also “cloyingly sweet, insubstantial, and full of air.”
A laugh rasped in his throat before he could stop it, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Keynes pretend not to glance his way.
And then two more pages slid past beneath his thumb, and he was struck by the words Miss on Scene in bold script, the mask of Tragedy to their left and Comedy to the right, the ribbons of the masks trailing to either side to form a sort of banner across the top of the page.
Beneath that banner was a review of an opera performed a few weeks past at the Haymarket, one of the most innocuous assessments of an artistic production he had ever read in any publication. Hardly worthy of the name review at all. It left him with the same sort of feeling one might have at biting into a last winter’s mealy apple. Nothing like the review of Othello. Nothing into which a reader might sink his teeth.
Proof that “Miss on Scene” was merely a name, not a person? Perhaps a variety of would-be authors—men, women, young, old—submitted reviews for the magazine. He was no doubt wasting Keynes’s time, having his secretary chase after a figment, a figure as flimsy as that syllabub, as papery as the fictitious “Mrs. Goode” herself.
With a wry sort of smile, something like chagrin at the credence he’d placed in a single column in a silly ladies’ magazine, he returned his attention to the page. Centered beneath the toothless review was a printer’s flourish that looked—he tilted his head to the side to be certain—yes, oddly like a dagger. And then, below it, a few more lines of type:
Miss on Scene is flattered to learn that her work has earned the notice of Mr. Ransom Blackadder, who seems to imagine he has cause to fear her poison pen. She wishes to reassure him that he need not be concerned for the fate of his work at her hands.
She reserves her ‘deadliest’ reviews for plays that are not deadly dull.
“Why, that little—!”
His final word was not quite drowned out by the sound of the magazine slamming against the tabletop. The gust of air sent his discarded pen skittering a few inches farther away, and the force of the blow made the ink in the bottle shiver.
Keynes whipped up his head. “My lord, is everything all right?”
“Perfectly,” Graham snarled past clenched teeth, though he meant it. More than all right, in fact. “Ransom Blackadder would seem to have made himself an enemy, Keynes.”
And Blackadder was at his best when he had someone with whom he could spar.
“Oh.” Keynes pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose with the tip of his index finger. “Does that mean—?”
“It means that, after this, he can have no compunction about treating Miss on Scene as an adversary, albeit an unworthy one.” He picked up his quill and twirled it between his thumb and first finger, watching the faint gray and white striations on the feather blur and swirl together. “If she shows no mercy with her weapon, she can expect none from his.”
With exaggerated care, he laid the pen atop the stack of paper, closed the magazine, and pushed away from the table. “I’m sure I speak for Blackadder when I say that any revisions to The Poison Pen must take into account this latest sally and respond in kind.”
Something twitched at one corner of Keynes’s mouth. “Or unkind,” he said, low enough that Graham could pretend not to have heard. “Are you off to the theater, then, sir?” he asked in his normal voice.
“I’m going to consult with Blackadder first. Advise him. This afternoon, I’ll convey his instructions to the players.” And in a tone that brooked no dissent. Oh, aye, there would be harsh words at Covent Garden this afternoon. Mr. Fanshawe might find himself without a part—in this play, or any other.
Well, that’s what rehearsals were for. To improve matters. To tear things down so that they might be built up better, stronger. They were messy, ugly things, unfit to be seen, and for that very reason, closed to the public. At least no one would be there to witness—
“Damnation!” he muttered beneath his breath.
He’d been so focused on the irritating words of “Miss on Scene,” he’d momentarily forgotten the true source of his present madness.
Julia.
“Problem, my lord?”
“Nay.” Graham bit off the word with an audible snap of his teeth as he strode from the room. A solution, in fact. If he wanted one.
To keep himself from ravishing Miss Addison, he could simply direct his energy toward ravaging Miss on Scene.
And once Julia had seen what he was capable of, she might never step foot in the theater again.