Chapter 11
Chapter 11
When Mrs. Hayes announced at the end of luncheon that she intended to rest that afternoon and wished to be left alone, Julia could hardly believe her luck.
Whether it was good luck, or bad, remained to be seen.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” she asked as she helped Mrs. Hayes to her feet.
“Oh, well enough, I suppose. When the weather turns this time of year, these old aches and pains fatigue me so. I hardly slept a wink last night.”
Julia knew that wasn’t quite the case. For one thing, Mrs. Hayes had softly snored her way through the second half of The Iron Chest, to which they had returned, unaccompanied, because too many evenings at home were intolerable to the widow. And while Mrs. Hayes had dozed, Julia had been at liberty to imagine what the next day would bring—if she decided to go to the rehearsal, and if she could find some excuse for going out.
Now, it was Friday at midday, rehearsals for The Poison Pen began in a couple of hours, and Mrs. Hayes was providing the excuse for her.
Julia knew better than to tell herself it was Fate, nudging her toward a decision to sacrifice her virtue to save the Magazine for Misses—Mischief, she had almost thought. Never had the mocking soubriquet seemed more apt. Papa, who had been a good man, was certainly not smiling down on his mischievous daughter and paving the way for her misdeeds.
No, the temptation came from quite another direction, another source.
But really, if she did make up her mind to let a wicked Scotsman have his way with her, would it go any worse for her immortal soul if she let herself enjoy it?
After she helped Mrs. Hayes settle into bed and drew the drapes to shut out what little light the day had provided, she brought a glass of water into which she was instructed to add a drop of the same sleeping tonic that last week had rendered Julia dead to the world for a dozen hours at least. A smaller dose would not last as long, and because Mrs. Hayes turned to it more often, it was not likely to have quite as powerful of an effect on her. But still, Julia knew that for the next few hours, she would never be missed.
Retreating from Mrs. Hayes’s chamber on tiptoe, she closed the door behind her with no more sound than the faint click of the latch. In her own little room, she closed the curtain and arranged the bed so that if anyone chanced to peek, it might look as if she were resting too. Into her reticule, she tucked a tiny notebook with pencil attached, to jot down her observations about the play. And then she slipped downstairs without alerting anyone, even Daniel, to her departure.
Her hooded mantle protected her both from prying eyes of passersby and the chill of early November. With its windows shut tight against a drizzling rain, the interior of the hansom smelled faintly musty, and the long, jostling ride to Covent Garden offered little more to look at than a constellation of raindrops on the glass and the blur of traffic beyond. She made herself relax the fingers that were clenched around the ribbons of her reticule, watching the movement of her gloved hand as if it were a thing quite separate from herself. It would not do to behave as if she was nervous.
To say nothing of excited.
At the theater, the cab driver deposited her in a puddle and hurried away. She was left to knock at three different doors until a man in rough clothes—he either worked behind the scenes or was costumed to play the part of someone who did—let her in.
“Lord Dunstane said I might . . .” Her voice trailed off as the man turned away, indifferent to her explanation.
Uncertain what else to do, she climbed the stairs and slipped past the heavy curtain into the familiar box. Lights had been lit around the stage, but the large chandeliers overhead remained dark, casting all else into shadow. Empty of an audience, the theater felt enormous, the box higher and farther from the stage than it had been just the night before. She sank into the nearest chair, its blue silk upholstery cool to her touch, and watched as the actors milled about the boards, clad in ordinary clothes rather than costumes, tattered scripts still clutched in several hands. They talked and joked with one another in rather ribald fashion—her first glimpse at the coarse behavior that made actors scandalous.
“All right,” called one of the men, gesturing with his own tightly rolled script like a baton. His paunch and balding head made him look older than she thought he probably was. “Places, everyone.”
The actors scattered, some to the wings, two to chairs on opposite sides of the stage. The woman, seated at an elegant French escritoire, picked up a quill, tested its point, gave an exaggerated wince to suggest its sharpness, and began to write, the lavish plume dancing above the paper. She was in her thirties, Julia guessed, still beautiful in a cold, unapproachable way.
On the other side of the stage, the man who had spoken now hunched over a scarred oak table, its surface lit by the stub of a tallow candle, his quill a bedraggled feather. Once silence fell, he mimed several cross outs and corrections and at last began to speak the words he had penned.
“O fairest Muse, return to me!
I can but choose to pine for thee,
For while thou leav’st me empty-hearted,
From thither to thence my thoughts have darted—”
Evidently, he played the ill-fated poet Lord Manwaring had described. Between the first and second couplet, he broke for an ominous, though hardly convincing, cough.
When he finished, the woman paused in her scribbling to read over what she had written.
“Though empty-hearted he claims to be,
More empty-headed, ’tis plain to see.
The only rhymes he’s fit to parse
I’ll use for paper to wipe my—”
Julia pressed her fingertips to her lips, uncertain whether what she stifled was a gasp or a laugh. Surely Blackadder did not intend to pass that off as a witty exchange. Was that how he imagined Miss on Scene? Did he really believe her capable of writing anything so crude?
Though the character of the reviewer was as least as good a poet as the fellow who was now slumped over his work, soon to breathe his last, pierced to the quick by the woman’s pointed words.
Julia sighed. Perhaps Blackadder hadn’t yet seen the challenge she had issued in this month’s issue of the magazine. Or perhaps he intended to take her advice and shield himself from criticism by making The Poison Pen as dull as possible.
“Nay. Stop. That’ll never do.”
If she hadn’t known already to whom the voice must belong, the shape of that final vowel—dae—betrayed the speaker’s Scottish origins. A man emerged from the shadows at the back of the theater with a sheet of paper in his upraised hand. It took several of his long-legged strides before the stage lights struck a coppery gleam from Lord Dunstane’s hair and highlighted the seemingly permanent scowl etched into his sharp-featured face.
At the edge of the pit, he paused and, to her surprise, tore the sheet in half. “Here,” he barked, thrusting each jagged-edged piece toward one of the principals, who stepped forward together with obvious reluctance and took them from his hands. “Blackadder wants you to read that instead.”
The scene began again, the two performers back-to-back in their opposing corners, once more showing their characters at work. This time the poem, still expressing love for a fleeting muse, was more melancholy than maudlin. The reviewer, however, flatly rejected the poet’s claim to either artistic inspiration or the love of a beautiful woman.
A chill chased down Julia’s spine. With a few strokes of his pen, Blackadder had transformed the play’s version of Miss on Scene from somewhat clever to downright cruel, perhaps in response to Julia’s latest goading words. And Lord Dunstane looked on and nodded approvingly at the change.
Well, no. Not exactly approvingly, though his head did move in an oblique motion as he listened and watched, his arms folded across his chest. When the scene came to a close, with the actor playing the part of the poet splayed across his worktable, he said nothing. A moment’s silence stretched into a minute or more, seeming to echo about the theater with no audience to absorb it.
“Mrs. Cole,” he said at last, addressing the woman who played the reviewer, “I fear Mr. Sawyer erred in his recommendation of you for the part of Perpetua Philpot.” The actress, who had risen to her feet when he began to speak to her, straightened her spine at that, a movement Julia mimicked in her seat, as if she could withdraw further into the shadows, far enough not to witness the tongue-lashing she fully expected to follow.
But Lord Dunstane spoke quietly. Only the theater’s excellent acoustics made it possible for Julia to hear him. “Perpetua is meant to be deadly, it’s true. But she must also be desirable,” he went on before the actress dared to interrupt. “What makes the poet crave her approval? What gives her her power? You play her as an ice queen, cool and remote. But you must think of the to-and-fro between writer and reviewer as a seduction.” Julia felt a blush heat her cheeks. Certainly she had never considered her work in quite that manner. “If she is to be successful at stabbing men in the back, first those men must want to get close enough to f—”
Though unfamiliar with the final word he spoke, Julia could not mistake its meaning. This time, her gasp left her lips before she could prevent it. Heat flamed up from her chest, burning across her cheeks and in the tips of her ears. Onstage, heads swiveled to find the source of the sound, and she tried to duck behind the back of the chair in front of her.
Not soon enough. Not before Lord Dunstane had caught her eye.
She was meant to be a writer, and yet she knew of no word to adequately describe the mixture of sardonic amusement and annoyance that lined his expression. He did not speak, only beckoned her down to the pit with the come-hither curl of his forefinger before turning his attention back to the actors.
In her haste to flee from the box, she tangled her limbs in the drapery and could have sworn she heard a derisive feminine laugh from below. Once she had freed herself, she stumbled to the nearest bench in the long saloon to catch her breath and gather her wits.
She knew she ought to leave Covent Garden entirely. To display good judgment, for once. And certainly, she thought as she glanced around the empty saloon, there is nothing to stop me.
Nothing but her own curiosity. Her desire to see what was behind the curtain, to witness the machinery that made the magic of the theater. And yes, more than a little—she curled her fingers in the plush velvet upholstery—her desire to see Lord Dunstane once more.
I promise you’ll be satisfied.
Pushing to her feet, she descended the staircase with measured steps and crossed the vestibule. The doors leading into the pit were tall and heavy, and she struggled to open one of them. Another sign, perhaps. Another opportunity to demonstrate good sense and leave.
At last, after using the combined strength of both arms to give the handle a determined wrench, she succeeded in opening the door just enough that she could slip inside.
The theater’s horseshoe shape enveloped her, directing her footsteps down the aisle, toward the stage, where the actors and Lord Dunstane had resumed their conversation in voices that did not carry. Three more players, two men and a woman, had emerged from the wings to join them.
Lord Dunstane was standing in the second or third row of the pit. Above, on the stage, the actors towered over him, looked down at him.
And yet it could not have been more obvious that he was in command.
Though it had hardly been a silent entrance on her part, no one paid any heed to her arrival or her approach as she walked down the aisle with hesitant steps and stopped a few yards from where he stood. At last, he turned, though only enough to look over his shoulder.
“Ah. There you are. I’d begun to think you changed your mind.”
She lifted her chin, rising instinctively to the challenge in his voice. “No, my lord. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Excellent.” He beckoned her closer with a wave of his arm and faced the actors again. “This is Miss . . . Hayes.” The hesitation in his voice was too brief to draw attention to the falsehood he had uttered.
At first, she could not imagine why he had given her employer’s surname instead of her own. A mocking reference, perhaps, to the fact that Mrs. Hayes insisted on introducing Julia as her relation when they were in company.
But it was also a measure of protection. Whatever happened, she might yet leave the theater with Miss Addison’s reputation intact, and for that, she could only be grateful.
“She has asked to observe a rehearsal of The Poison Pen,” he went on, “to which I agreed, in exchange for her—”
Please don’t say it.Heat prickled her cheeks.
“Willingness to smooth my way with a certain young lady of her acquaintance.”
“Skirt-chasing again, my lord?” teased one of the men who had come from the wings. He was a year or two younger than Lord Dunstane, with light-brown hair and a cleft chin, and he carried himself with confidence—like all actors, she supposed, but still, she suspected he was the one who would play the Ransom Blackadder part in Act Two.
“I hardly need to chase them, Sawyer,” he corrected mildly. “And again implies that I ever stopped.”
All of them, even the man lying face down on the table, joined in a wicked laugh.
Julia could not remember hearing a more humorless sound. Well, hadn’t she suspected for some time that Lord Dunstane was a rogue?
Mr. Sawyer then turned toward her and bowed. “What do you think of the play so far, Miss Hayes?”
“Oh.” She started at the address, then managed the shallowest of curtsies. “I, er . . .” Even a few moments of watching had shown her the vast difference between what an audience saw and what went on before the curtain rose, how little her experiences at the theater had prepared her to give an answer at this juncture.
Mrs. Cole fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. At this distance, even with no stage makeup to exaggerate her features, her expression of contempt was perfectly legible. “Yes, do tell.”
Julia lifted her chin a notch higher still. “After my brief observation of your rehearsal, I believe both Mr. Blackadder and his patron have it wrong.”
Her words were met with a chorus of oh-hos and cleared throats and the creak of two chairs as the bad poet sat up a little straighter and the barbed-tongued reviewer sat down.
Lord Dunstane regarded her with fresh interest and not, she thought, anger.
Not yet.
“The problem does not lie with Mrs. Cole’s acting,” she went on, focusing her gaze on a point just below the lip of the stage. “Both the lines originally given to her, and the revision, are ill-judged. They paint her as too crude, or too cruel. If Perpetua Philpot is to fool people into falling in love with her, she cannot—at least at first—seem to be either of those things.”
Her assessment of the problem was met with silence. Every member of the company appeared to be waiting for Lord Dunstane to speak first. And his reply, when it at last came, was delivered as quietly as his earlier critique, his voice no less wry.
“I said nothing of love, Miss Hayes.”
Her blush burned a degree or two hotter. What retort could she make? She did not think she had ever been more aware of the rise and fall of her breasts, how every effort to slow her breath only made it come more rapidly.
“Tell me,” he went on after a pause, “what would you suggest to improve matters?”
The actor playing the sickly poet made a scoffing noise. “With all due respect, my lord, what does she know? If the little miss fancies it’s so easy to play the reviewer’s part, perhaps she ought to come up here and give it a try.”
Julia whipped up her head. “I protest, sir. I never said—”
“An intriguing idea, Fanshawe,” declared the actor who had spoken so boldly to Lord Dunstane—Mr. Sawyer, was that his name? As he spoke, he came down from the stage using a small staircase off to one side, taking the steps two at a time. His nimble movements and mischievous air would have made him an excellent choice to cast as Puck, the troublemaker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When he reached the level on which the audience was usually seated, on which Julia and Lord Dunstane stood, he bowed with a flourish that could only be called theatrical. “Won’t you help us, Miss Hayes?” He held out one hand to assist her in ascending to the Covent Garden stage.
She fully intended to refuse. Mr. Fanshawe’s words had been intended as a taunt, not a sincere offer. Besides, some dreams were not meant to be fulfilled.
But just as she began to demur, she caught sight of Lord Dunstane, standing a few feet away with his arms once more crossed over his chest. He was regarding her with a curious expression: part intrigued, wondering whether she would rise to the challenge, she supposed. And part something she was tempted to call jealous, as if he did not like the idea that someone else had been the one to issue that challenge to her.
Slowly, he shook his head. More disapproval? Another warning?
She laid her fingers across Mr. Sawyer’s palm, though her eyes were still locked with Lord Dunstane’s. “Gladly.”