Chapter 15
Chapter 15
When the massive door at the back of the theater swung open, Julia refused to turn and look. It would be someone who painted scenery, or another actor. She would not allow herself to appear either eager or disappointed.
Even if she had been foolish enough to imagine that Lord Dunstane attended every rehearsal.
She was here to discover the inner workings of the play, to protect her name, to save the magazine. She had not come for him.
And she would remind herself of that until she believed it.
When she had arrived, Mr. Fanshawe and Mrs. Cole had exchanged words—about her, she could guess. But they seemed to have agreed she must have Lord Dunstane’s permission to attend the rehearsal. When Julia had quietly slipped into her present seat, three rows back from the stage, and made it clear that she intended to observe in silence, they shrugged and largely ignored her.
Without the critical eye and tongue of Blackadder’s patron, the actors relaxed into their roles. In their skilled hands—and when they weren’t being questioned at every turn, they were indeed skilled—the characters came alive. Details of the story, disjointed on the page, now fit neatly together in her mind.
And as she listened, she noted a few significant changes, too, which only made her task more difficult. How could she possibly prepare a defense when the battle lines kept shifting? She would have to write to Lady Stalbridge this evening and—
“Rough night, m’lord?” Mr. Sawyer called out with a laugh, breaking character—though only slightly. The poet’s brother was witty and wicked. Audiences would love him, precisely because they knew they shouldn’t.
Julia refused to look over her shoulder. Not even when the answer to Mr. Sawyer’s question was delivered in a soft Scottish brogue.
“Aye, rough.” A few rows behind her, a bench creaked as he sat down. “Just the way I like it.”
I’m a demanding lover.
The words, both the memory of those from the past and the echo of those in the present, set something aquiver inside her, made her curl her fingers around the front edge of her seat.
“Let us hope the lady’s wishes were also taken into account,” said Mrs. Cole with a huff of disapproval.
“Oh, aye,” Lord Dunstane answered coolly— though his voice made Julia flush. “Never you fear about that.”
From the side of the stage, Mr. Fanshawe cleared his throat. “May we continue? With your permission, of course, my lord.” The mulish set of his jaw made clear how little he appreciated having to ask.
Lord Dunstane must have granted his permission with a nod or a gesture, for the rehearsal resumed a moment later, the two principals once more back-to-back at their desks, Mrs. Cole reading with great satisfaction of the poet’s death while Mr. Sawyer looked over his brother’s papers and plotted his revenge.
“Better,” declared Lord Dunstane when they came to a stop, not disguising his surprise. “Livelier.” A long pause followed, and from the expressions on the actors’ faces, she could imagine his contemplative pose. “Hearing the second act, I wonder now whether it wouldn’t improve matters further to shorten the first? Get to the heart of the conflict.”
Mr. Fanshawe bristled. “I beg your pardon, sir. If you cut my lines, how will the audience grasp the source of the animosity between the younger Mr. Briggs and Miss Philpot?”
“I think they might feel more sympathy for your character, Georgie,” said Sawyer, rocking back onto the hind legs of his chair, “if they heard less of his doggerel.”
Mr. Fanshawe’s eyes flashed defensively, as if he had written the awful poetry himself.
“What say you?”
No mistaking that Lord Dunstane’s quiet question was intended for her. She had not heard him move, but he was closer now, nonetheless—close enough that the actors couldn’t overhear what he’d asked her.
At last, she dared a backward glance and found him standing just over her right shoulder. He did indeed look as if he’d tumbled out of bed at two o’clock in the afternoon. Hardly unheard of for a lord, she supposed. His linen lacked its usual crispness. His coppery hair was mussed.
Somehow, his disheveled state made him handsomer still.
She turned back toward the stage and pushed to her feet. “The problem,” she announced in a voice that carried, “isn’t Mr. Fanshawe’s poetry. The problem is Perpetua Philpot’s motivation.”
That got Mrs. Cole’s attention. Lord Dunstane murmured, “Go on.”
“We’re asked to believe she writes these heartless reviews because she’s been jilted by a poet. But it’s quite clear she’s a poet herself—and a good one, not some mere poetess.” In popular parlance, the feminine version of anything was always the lesser. The term was bitter on her tongue. “If Mr. Blackadder would help us see her instead as a thwarted artist—”
“Audiences might have some sympathy for her, too,” finished Mrs. Cole with a nod of something like solidarity for Julia.
“But I forgot,” added Julia, tilting her chin to direct her words to Lord Dunstane, though she did not meet his eye. “The playwright doesn’t require such a complex emotional response from those of us in the seats. It might interfere with our willingness to view her only as an object to f—”
Whether she possessed the courage to utter that shocking word remained unknown. Lord Dunstane spoke over her.
“Thank you for your insight, Miss Ah—Hayes.”
He’d almost addressed her as Miss Addison. An honest slip, she told herself—but also a stark reminder that he had the power to ruin her if he chose.
She must learn to disguise her frustration.
“That’s enough for today.” Lord Dunstane dismissed the actors, chipping away still more at Mr. Fanshawe’s role. “Blackadder will be pleased to learn of your progress,” he called after them as they filed out through the back of the stage as before, talking and joking with one another. Mr. Sawyer tried to put his arm around Mrs. Cole’s waist; she slapped his hand away, though without rancor.
When they were gone, Lord Dunstane stepped into the aisle. “You weren’t here on Monday,” he chided as he gestured for her to accompany him out.
“No.” The climb toward the door was steeper than she remembered, but he did not offer his arm. “My aunt needed me.”
“Your . . . aunt.” She heard a thread of amusement in his voice. Clearly, he recalled having been corrected on that very matter the night they met.
But today, she wanted him to remember she wasn’t alone in the world.
They passed into the vestibule in silence. The bustle of preparation for tonight’s show had already begun. A tall, thin man with a beaky nose inspected floral arrangements, while maids tidied and swept around him; ticket sellers hurried to their posts at the snap of the new box manager’s fingers.
On the pavement, Lord Dunstane signaled for a hackney. When a cab rolled to a stop before them, he opened the door and helped her in, holding her hand a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Uncertain, she swept her gaze over his face, taking in the sharp angle of his jaw, hardly softened by a scruff of reddish-brown beard, and his moss-green eyes, underlined by shadow.
“Make whatever excuse to Mrs. Hayes you think best, Julia,” he said. “But be here the day after tomorrow, with a draft of those edits you suggested. The play needs you.”
What had looked in the dimly lit theater like rakishness, the mercilessly gray afternoon revealed to be weariness. Worry. Over The Poison Pen?
He must have wagered a great deal on Blackadder’s success.
At last, he released her, closed the carriage door between them, and slapped his palm against the roof to signal the cabbie to depart.
She looked back at him through the dirty glass as he watched her go, her heart in her throat. The play needs you, he had said.
Was it her imagination, or had he meant, “I need you”?
* * *
I have him right where I want him, she wrote to Lady Stalbridge the next evening, after pointing out to Lord Dunstane that the loss of a loved one would likely dampen Reginald Briggs’s creative output. He’d responded by trimming a few of Mr. Sawyer’s harshest lines.
She didn’t dare tell the countess, or Aunt Mildred, the whole truth.
How Lord Dunstane’s stricken expression when she’d spoken of grief had made her want to gather him to her breast and soothe the hurt that she was beginning to suspect hid behind the cold, hard mask he wore.
How she had begun to wonder whether the bond between him and Ransom Blackadder might be more than patron and playwright. Brothers, as the script suggested?
Whatever drove him, she felt certain it was more than a return on his investment.
The following week, he’d called for daily rehearsals as opening night drew nearer. Monday and Tuesday the cast went through the entirety of the first two acts, with a rationally softened Perpetua and a marginally less arrogant Briggs, thanks to a combination of Blackadder’s edits and Julia’s. Julia was no longer certain her changes always made the play better—some of its humor had gone hand in hand with its sting. But she couldn’t worry about that, couldn’t worry about anything but saving the magazine.
Certainly, she couldn’t worry about Lord Dunstane or wonder what he’d meant by those whispered words, why his thoughts were often far away.
Wednesday began rehearsals for Act Three, which, according to the script she had read, called for the critic’s exposure and eventual destruction. Undercutting its message would take some doing. On the first day, she did nothing but listen and plan.
On Thursday, however, she arrived with her script marked up with new ideas.
“Up you get.” With no more fanfare than a flick of his wrist, Lord Dunstane ordered her to the stage. “Watch her,” he said to Mrs. Cole, who had given up protesting Julia’s incursions.
When Mr. Fanshawe called the scene, she spoke the lines as originally written.
“Again,” said Lord Dunstane in his quiet but forceful way as he stood and walked to the end of the row where he’d been seated for the past half an hour.
This time, she dared to incorporate a few of her changes.
“See,” he said to Mrs. Cole when the scene was done. “Sweet, not sour.”
Mr. Sawyer made a show of licking his lips, to the amusement of the men standing just offstage.
Lord Dunstane bounded up the steps. She thought, for a moment, that he would reprimand Mr. Sawyer’s bawdy behavior. But he stopped beside Mr. Fanshawe in the wings and explained away his decision to move by rubbing his neck with one hand, evidently easing the stiffness brought on by sitting below and looking up at the stage. “Again.”
Julia returned to Perpetua’s mark, drew a breath as if about to utter her lines, and then hesitated. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I wonder if it wouldn’t work better to—”
“Jesus.” Mr. Fanshawe tossed his script to the ground. “I signed on for a play by Ransom Blackadder, not Miss Hayes.”
Lord Dunstane swept the tattered paper aside with his foot, sending some of the pages fluttering into the pit. “Perhaps you’d rather not act at all. In this play, or any other.”
“Nay, m’lord,” Mr. Fanshawe ground out as he set about collecting his script. “Apologies. I only meant—”
“I know what you meant. Go on,” he said to Julia, jerking his chin as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Let’s hear it.”
She quailed beneath his cool regard and nearly lost her courage. Had he too grown tired of her interference?
“The first rehearsal I attended, you said that everyone ought to want to—” She willed herself not to blush. “That they ought to desire Perpetua Philpot. That if they did, it would make it easier for her to stab them in the backs.”
He regarded her with wry amusement—she’d still never seen a genuine smile. “Aye. I did say . . . something to that effect.”
“Well,” she said, forging bravely—or foolishly—ahead. “Shouldn’t Reginald Briggs want her too?”
“What makes you so certain he doesn’t?”
“He says the most awful things about her, in his poetry.”
“That’s how some men declare themselves, Miss Hayes,” said Mr. Sawyer, chuckling darkly as she tried to block out the memory of his conversations about women with Lord Dunstane, the rakish exchange about his rough night in particular. “Some men can’t show their feelings any other way.”
“In some cases”—Lord Dunstane pushed away from the proscenium and began to walk across the stage, tossing the words over his shoulder to Sawyer as he passed between the man and Julia—“not even when they are being paid to act. Scene.”
He spoke the direction so quietly that she didn’t immediately realize what he meant. Not until she saw that he’d stepped to Mr. Sawyer’s mark did she understand that he intended to act the part of Briggs.
One of the unusual—sometimes, she was tempted to say remarkable—things about The Poison Pen was that the principals never actually met, though they were onstage together throughout, verbally sparring with another. But they spoke to one another only through their writing, from opposite sides of a stage divided, as it were, by a partition, albeit an invisible one. They lived in two worlds—even the scenery was split between the artist’s garret and the lady’s boudoir—worlds that had no point of overlap, save for his poetry and her reviews.
“ ‘You squander your gift on the masses.’ ” Julia read Perpetua’s line from the script. She could not meet Lord Dunstane’s steady gaze.
“ ‘Your only talent is to call forth the mob,’ ” he recited in his turn. He knew everyone’s lines by heart.
His commanding presence served him well onstage. She wondered whether he had acted before. Though his voice was still quiet, she suspected he could be heard in the farthest seats.
Back and forth the exchange went, the two of them speaking to one another, past one another, over one another, coming ever closer to the invisible wall that divided them. She tried to invest Perpetua’s words with anguish, and sometimes with heat. Perpetua didn’t really despise the poet, she had decided. Or at least, not for his poetry. She envied his popularity, his creativity. His freedom.
As the scene wound to a close, Julia drew herself up to her full height, a meager attempt to counterbalance Lord Dunstane’s imposing stature—Mr. Sawyer was not nearly so tall—and tossed her head defiantly. “ ‘You claim I can’t even read—’ ”
Lord Dunstane took one final step toward the center of the stage. “ ‘You say I’m not worth the printer’s ink—’ ”
They were standing so close now that when his chest rose on those words, his cravat nearly brushed her upturned chin.
Then the shared line, spoken together, that ended the scene and cemented their tangled fates: “ ‘Yet we both know, you write for me alone.’ ”
For a moment, they held their positions, no movement but their breathing, the imaginary wall between them thin as a pane of glass. No, thinner. A skim of ice at the edge of a quiet pool as winter turned to spring. It would melt away at the slightest touch—if either of them dared to reach out a hand.
Mr. Sawyer broke the spell with mocking applause. “Very instructive, sir. I see now what you mean. They think they want to kill one another.” He had gone to stand beside Mr. Fanshawe and now jostled him with an elbow, much to the other actor’s annoyance. “But really, they’d rather kiss.”
Julia turned sharply away under the guise of returning the script to the desk.
When it came to disguising her growing feelings for Lord Dunstane, she’d turned out to be a terrible actress.
“Now you know what that looks like,” sniped Mrs. Cole, “maybe next time you’ll make a more convincing job of it.”
“That’s enough for today.” Lord Dunstane put an end to their bickering. “Go home. All of you.”
Julia trudged off the stage with the rest of the actors, they to the dressing rooms below, she to the entrance of the theater. At the door, she paused to glance back.
Indifferent as to whether his command had been obeyed, he had seated himself at Briggs’s desk and was swiftly scrawling something across one of the prop scraps of paper.
Probably more suggested revisions. Though part of her wished it might be a letter to Blackadder, resigning from his commission as the playwright’s go-between and washing his hands of the whole production.
As much as she wanted to put a stop to Blackadder, she needed to know that the play wasn’t the only thing drawing her and Lord Dunstane together.
The next afternoon, Friday, she was settling Mrs. Hayes for her afternoon nap as usual, when a rap sounded at the front door. She heard Daniel open it, the muffled exchange of masculine voices. In another moment, the boy appeared on the threshold.
“There’s a gentleman downstairs, asking for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, miss. A Scotsman, with the grandest rig I ever saw!”
Her heart had already begun to pound, even before he’d added those unmistakable details. Slipping past Daniel, she hurried down the stairs, then paused at the landing to collect herself.
Lord Dunstane stood, hat in hand, his tall, lean frame almost filling the narrow hall. “Today’s rehearsal has been canceled. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you.” She dipped into a curtsy, in part to hide her bafflement. “But you hardly needed to come all this way. You might simply have sent word.”
“Aye,” he agreed.
“I wrote out those revisions I suggested yesterday,” she began.
“Later.” He waved her words away. “Since we’re free, I thought we might go for that drive.” His expression—she hardly knew how to read it.
Or perhaps she knew exactly how to read it. She’d seen it in his eyes before. The intensity of his gray-green gaze drove away every thought of the play, the magazine, Aunt Mildred’s caution that she must be discreet.
She could only recall how it felt to be close to him.
His as-yet-unfulfilled promise of satisfaction.
She nodded. “Just let me get my things.”