Chapter One
Fifteen Years Later
Libba hated closing night.
It was her least favorite.
The worst.
The end.
Endings were so dreadfully final, weren’t they?
So why did it always require a celebration after the final bow?
She sighed, leaning against the dressing room wall to take one last breath of the era of Ovid’s Pygmalion, rendered in original dance and verse, before dousing the last light. She’d removed her toga. She’d shaken the talc from her hair. She’d let the company go ahead to the pub.
This last part was just for her. Only for her.
She sat at the vanity table and flicked off the little paste gemstones she’d glued over the beauty marks on her cheek, one by one, as she dismantled Galatea for what was likely the final time. Each glittering piece fell onto a creased flyer for the production, writ in bold, red ink.
Liberty Lennox Presents Maiden Production!
New Odalisque Theater on Ship Street!
Pygmalion!
She chuckled, running her fingers over the name Willa had given the theater, her final gift to Libba, bequeathed in her mysterious last will. She wished Willa had been here to see the production, even once.
She wished she’d been here to call her ‘Liberty,’ after she’d changed her name. She’d done it in London, some three years ago. She’d signed a paper at a courthouse with a barrister at her left.
Liberty. That was hers.
It was hers in a way Elizabeth never had been.
She wished a lot of things.
Mostly that it was not closing night. Closing night always made her so damn maudlin.
She changed into a loose, linen dress, a costume, truth be told, with an exterior set of stays that was easy to lace by oneself. She twisted her hair and speared it through with a two-pronged brass bauble she’d been given by an admirer back in Seven Dials.
She kept on Galatea’s sandals for the walk down Ship Street toward the Coin and Cauldron because they were damned comfortable, thank you very much.
And when she heard the ruckus caused by her people from half a block away, finally, she smiled.
The roar of welcome when she walked through the doors of the public house did soothe some of the sting from closing night, with several of her performers standing to cheer and welcome her in alongside her fellow Starling house wards and friends from Brighton at large.
Her eyes immediately fell on her brother, accompanied as ever by Jasper Townsend as both made their way toward her, carrying four pints of ale between them.
“Oh, gracious. For me?” she asked as they reached her, both grinning widely as she held out both hands and took one glass from each of them.
It was a silly, old tradition between the three of them, a competition for who would buy the last to the pub their first drink. A thing they had been doing since the first blush of adulthood had allowed them past the hallowed doors of establishments like this one, many years ago.
And it always ended in exactly this way, with the latecomer holding two pints and expected to drain them both in short order.
“You were spectacular tonight,” Malcolm said immediately as Libba sank her top lip into the foam head on her first pint, tipping the cool liquid into her mouth. “I don’t usually go for such esoteric performances, but I really did enjoy myself.”
She responded by blowing an indignant bubble into her pint, which made her brother grin.
“I think I like plays with more words in them,” he said with a shrug. “Which is why you ought to listen to me about the next one.”
She managed to draw her brows together and glare at him as she tipped her head back and gulped down the remainder of the liquid in her glass before finally throwing her face back forward, a few curls quivering about her ears as she sucked in a much-needed gulp of air.
“Oh, well done!” said Jasper, taking the empty glass from her and holding it aloft over his head to a returning cheer from several other pubgoers.
“And you?” she asked, once she’d dragged in a second and third breath to her lungs, her vision swimming pleasantly as the warmth of the ale settled in her bones. “D’you think my plays need more words?”
Jasper grinned, running a hand over his copper-red hair. “Me? Think? I don’t do that.”
Both Libba and Malcolm groaned at the dodge.
He had always refused to be the deciding vote between their disagreements.
“Let’s sit,” Libba suggested, gesturing with her other, full glass toward the Starling table, where the rest of the wards once adopted by the baroness were gathered. “Maybe you’ll be able to think once you’re on your arse.”
“Not typically.” Jasper chuckled but followed, anyway, as the others made room around the big, round table in the rear corner of the venue.
“It is the same story, anyhow,” Malcolm continued, as though he’d been invited to begin this nonsense again in earnest. “Shakespeare acknowledged it himself, but it’s a matter of marketability.
Your theater is still new in the city and as we head into the off season, you’re going to want to draw a local crowd.
You can do that better with something they recognize than with interpretive dance and Ovid. ”
“‘Ovid’?” said Hattie French, or Hattie Selwyn now.
The brassy little girl from the beach had married the pudgy little boy, quite recently, in fact. Both were adults now, grown, attractive, and newly titled. Still, Libba could never see Hattie as the baroness. Not really.
“In the original Greek?” she asked hopefully.
Libba made a face at her. “Of course not. Did I do Pygmalion in the original Greek?”
“No,” Hattie said with a little frown. “You did it mostly in the silent language.”
“See?!” Malcolm exclaimed, gesturing at Hattie with both hands as though she had just agreed with him somehow. “Shakespeare! Words! Normal folk don’t pay for silence!”
“But they would,” put in the baron, “if given the option sometimes.”
This earned him a swat from his wife.
“Ugh!” said Libba. “It’s just so boring to do the same plays everyone does over and over again. And that particular one is so trite.”
“Steady on,” Malcolm said with a frown. “Let’s not insult the Bard in a room full of potential audience members. Don’t you want to play Juliet?”
“Absolutely not,” said Libba. “Thisbe is complex. Thisbe is colorful. Juliet is a half-wit child from terrible parents who foolishly falls in love with the third-most attractive man in the play.”
“‘Third-most’?” Jasper said, raising his brows. “How’s that, then?”
“Have you never noticed?” Libba replied. “It’s always the same in every production I’ve seen. Romeo is the third-most attractive man in their company. Without fail.”
“Which parts go to the handsomer two, then?” Jasper pressed, tapping the bottom of Libba’s glass so that it would get closer to her lips.
She glared at him and took a sip, holding his eye as he monitored her intake with a satisfied grin.
She swallowed and wiped the back of her mouth, sucking in a breath.
“Tybalt, obviously, is the heart-wrecker. When you have a smoldering beauty of a man in your troupe, he plays Tybalt. That’ll be Lem, obviously. ”
“Oh, obviously,” parroted her foster sisters, nodding sagely, one by one, much to the annoyance of every man at the table.
They turned as a group to regard Lem, the actor in question, and Libba’s right hand. He was tall, dark, muscled, and undeniably good-looking. Just now, he was leaning against the bar, smiling at something a barmaid was gushing to him as he held a tiny-looking pint in his large, steady hand.
“Fine,” said Jasper, in a definite pout. “What about the second-most?”
“Mercutio,” she said impatiently. “Obviously. Oh! Rhys! Do you want a part?”
Rhys Caradoc, a former pickpocket whom Willa had once attempted to turn into a surgeon, looked up from his bowl of peanuts in alarm. “Me?”
“You won’t be doing shows at your pavilion when it gets cold, will you?” Libba pressed. “What would you be doing in the off season otherwise?”
He frowned, picking up a peanut shell and twisting his hand so that it appeared to vanish.
It did, for a moment, and then immediately fell out of his jacket sleeve and into his pint of half-consumed ale with a delicate plink.
“Practice. Innovation. Other things,” he said weakly, giving a look of rebuke to the uncooperative peanut shell.
He sighed and shook his head. “Oh, all right. But I could do magic in the cold, you know.”
“Certainly,” Libba agreed. “But no one would be there to pay you for it.”
His frown deepened. “I need a new ale.”
He drank what was left of the one with the peanut shell, anyhow.
“Why does Rhys get to act?” Ruby Little demanded, tossing her dark hair. “I would make a fetching Juliet, if you aren’t going to play her.”
Libba snorted, not because Ruby wasn’t fetching. She certainly was. Annoyingly so. She snorted because Ruby couldn’t act to save her life. She was as pure and potent as the perfumes she concocted from her chemistry lab, and nothing would ever change that.
Artifice was beyond her.
Still, the snort was not appreciated as a reaction. And that lack of appreciation was clear because as noted, Ruby did not hide how she felt about things.
“Well, wait a moment,” Jasper said, his brow wrinkled like a walnut. “What about Benvolio? Romeo’s best mate? The peacemaker?”
Libba gave him a flat-mouthed stare. “Who?”
He narrowed his eyes. “What!”
Libba rolled her eyes. “Really? Benvolio?”
“He actually survives the thing!” Jasper pointed out, taking a final swig of the dregs of his own ale. “That’s worth something.”
“Yes, we all mourn the lost sixth act,” Libba cooed, “where Benvolio and Nurse abscond to Roma together to live in sin. Please. No one leaves the play thinking, Gracious, I certainly wish there’d been more of that milquetoast friend character.”
He gasped, his hand coming up to grip his cravat.
“Who will you play?” Malcolm asked, sounding genuinely curious and genuinely disinterested in Jasper’s theatrics. “If not Juliet? You are too young to be a matron.”