Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“Ibeg your pardon.” Dante returned a glare that should have set her running. That glare always managed to scare his sisters and subdue even his indomitable mother.
Not this girl. She merely lifted her chin. The spring sun slanted across her cheek like the caress of a lover, glinting on the slivers of peridot green in her eyes. The breeze nipped beneath her hat and teased out a strand of silky dark hair. It slapped across her cheek, and she pushed it away.
“For one thing, we haven’t secured an investor yet,” the girl said.
He turned his glare to a true glower, bringing eyebrows into play, trying every tactic he knew to set her back on her heels.
Surely this Dorsey was in charge of things, although now that he looked closely, Dante saw the signs of a man who indulged freely in drink.
The blurred line of the jaw, the puffiness about the eyes, the distinct undertone to a cologne attempting to disguise an alcohol smell—he knew the signs.
But what about the matron? Why didn’t she have a handle on this young kestrel?
Dante looked around to discover that the matron, upon flirting heavily with Thompson and a painted fan, had secured herself an invitation to smell the famous Real Cheltenham Salts from the bottle Thompson produced.
She waved her fan, batted her eyes, and pronounced the effect wholly invigorating.
“There’s no point in paying for designs, is there?” The girl, all disdain vanished, turned to Dorsey. “We haven’t secured an investor to build the place. We must have the funds first.”
“We have a bit in our pocket, as you were clever enough to retrieve, and we’ll find investors to finish the rest once we have designs in hand. That’s the way it usually works, gel.”
“I can come up with several different sketches, which you might show to investors. And I have builders I can recommend.” The ones building his house, for instance. Dante’s enthusiasm was growing.
A theater was a grand and public project, and their need was real and immediate, not a fancy project requiring years in the making like Thompson’s villas or Sherborne’s spa.
A design of his own, where his talents could be displayed— This could furnish the cornerstone of his reputation in Cheltenham, and the work would grow from there. He, and his family, would be secure.
“Of course, it would be a simple matter to provide models taken from the designs of others.” The lilac harpy glared at him. “But I am sure Mr. Dorsey would like something original.”
“No building is entirely original,” Dante retorted. “Every good design builds on inspirations from what came earlier, as well as taking into account a building’s environs and purpose. Originality means improving on something that is already known to succeed. Otherwise you are inviting disaster.”
She blinked, then narrowed her eyes at him. Glints of green snapped from beneath her dark brows. “Thank you for the lesson. But I am certain that for our undertaking we should want someone a little more…”
Dante crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for her to finish that thought. “More what?”
Her gaze dropped from his face, where she had been directing all her contempt.
She skimmed his plain neckcloth, then followed the stretch of his shoulders, where the cloth strained over the bulk that so dismayed his tailor.
Her gaze traced the lines of his chest, following the cutaway of his coat, then landing on his pantaloons.
More specifically, the front of his pantaloons.
His tailor absolutely insisted that Dante could not carry off the looser trousers with their puffed waist and refused to put them in his wardrobe.
Only tight pantaloons would do, for the slimming effect.
As a compromise, he’d added embroidery to the waistline in an attempt to narrow the expanse of Dante’s thighs and draw the eye away from the bulge of his quite obvious masculinity.
But the girl took note, and her gaze flew up and away. Crimson flushed across the high slope of her cheekbones, deepening the warm tones of her skin.
An entirely different kind of heat flashed through his chest and down his spine.
Gods damn him. He couldn’t stand here reacting like a randy schoolboy when he was trying to secure a commission.
Blast the girl for affecting him. He wanted to slide his hands around her throat and shake her for her cool dismissal, and he wanted to yank her into his arms, plunge his hands into her hair, and kiss her until she was panting for air.
A gentleman could do none of those things, of course.
Holding back a growl, Dante turned his attention to Dorsey, who was watching his exchange with the dark-haired termagant with the fascination of a man watching a rock dove poke at an insect it intended to devour.
The girl was one of his troupe, wasn’t she?
Didn’t the older man—or someone, anywhere—have charge of her?
Why should he handle her with kid gloves rather than taking some of the air out of her pretensions?
Instead the manager was letting his actress have her head, and Dante would guess this had been true all the girl’s life.
No one about to haul back on the ribbons, even when she was getting out of line.
No one teaching her to behave with common decency to those she considered below her.
She’d been raised a pampered princess, spoiled with all the gifts her beauty could win her, and this temper was the result of it.
What had she said, again? There’d been almost something plaintive in her remark about not having an investor. A yearning revealed. There was something she needed, and Dante had the power to give it to her.
“A theater of your own,” Dante said. “I can give you that. Not a building on loan, and not a makeshift stage. Something that will belong to Dorsey’s Players.”
Longing flashed through the girl’s eyes, raw and eager. Dante wished he hadn’t seen it.
“Such a thing would belong to all of Cheltenham, it would.” Dorsey withdrew a small clay pipe from one pocket and a snuffbox full of tobacco out of another.
He packed the bowl as he spoke. “We’d be doing the town a service, with our entertainers to fill their nights.
Revenge tragedies. Sentimental romances.
Harlequinades, mayhap the occasional pantomime ballet.
” He struck a match and lit his pipe, his eyes catching the glint of flame.
“We are more than artificers or entertainers. We spin dreams into life.”
“Ballet?” He’d heard of this, but never seen one. “Who is your dancer?”
Dorsey’s eyes flitted to the termagant, who turned suddenly and studied the front of the pavilion as if she weren’t listening to every word they said, ready to jump in to heap scorn upon his head. Her chin tipped up a notch, a ribbon on her chip hat fluttering in the light breeze.
Of course. Of course she would be their leading lady.
No other woman in the group had her air of grace and command, and not a one came close to her striking looks.
She must be their prize attraction, the face of the playbills and posters, and as such she was petted and spoiled, her every whim attended to, her every wish fulfilled.
Dante didn’t know what that was like. Not many common people did.
He turned back to Dorsey, man to man. Aspiring gentleman to aspiring gentleman. “Have you decided on investors to approach?”
Dorsey’s gaze slid sidewise to where Thompson stood introducing his son, who was visiting during a break in his university studies.
Thompson had bought huge tracts from the De La Bere estate when the ancestral lands went up for sale.
He was as keen a player as any in the competition to attract visitors to one’s well to drink plain old water flavored with iron and salt.
One had to admire the man’s showmanship, if nothing else.
“Himself, of course.” Dorsey nodded in Thompson’s direction. “But location will be a question, I know. We’ll want our premises on High Street, or as close as possible, I’d wager.”
Dante nodded, though he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the scene of Pearson Thompson meeting the termagant for the first time.
The boy could be no more than seventeen, a raw young blood, a pup barely grown into his paws.
The points of his shirt collar touched his jaw, and his cravat was tied in a flamboyant bow.
He tripped over his feet stepping forward to take the harpy’s slender hand and kiss the back of her kid glove.
She smiled, and the pucker at the sides of her mouth deepened.
That plump lower lip came into balance with the upper when her lips curved.
There was nothing coy nor purposefully beguiling in her manner, just the exchange of pleasantries that might take place in any fashionable haunt across Britain.
Yet Pearson looked as if he’d been struck over the head by the gleam of peridot green in her eyes, and Dante’s gut burned. He wrenched his gaze away.
High Street. Yes. High Street was a burgeoning vein of the town, new buildings springing up to the east and west, though the best place for development, as Dante saw it, was the expanse south of town between High Street and the river.
The wells were found there, with pavilions and pump rooms to be formed around them, walks and byways to be designed, and scenic drives just waiting to be landscaped.
“You might try Joseph Pitt,” Dante said. “He’s bought up a great deal of land as well, with plans to build.” In fact, Pitt had visions of building a spa to rival Thompson’s, and Dante was preparing sketches for the day he meant to begin in earnest.
Dorsey nodded, his eyes flickering toward another fashionable group making their exit from the pavilion. “The Reverend Skillicorne—is he primed for any more investments?”