Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dante had liked her Hamlet.
I never understood Hamlet until now, he’d said.
But those dark, magnificent eyes had said something else. Something that might have been, I never understood you until now.
Which would be a fair assessment. They’d only strolled together in the open air of Cheltenham’s walks and promenades, consulted sketches in the library, made desultory talk at dinners and in parlors, and shared a scintillating kiss in the moonlight.
He had only seen polite Cerys, public Cerys, Dorsey’s Cerys.
Set on learning her role and playing it until she achieved her desired end.
Seeing her act, he would see more of her.
He would see how much she loved it. He would see how she felt like she held different worlds inside of her, different personalities even, and acting was the way she could explore lives and characters that were not her own.
If he were paying attention—and it seemed he was paying attention, watching her always with those dark, hooded eyes—he would see how much she enjoyed prying into the head of another being and learning their workings.
That said a great deal about her, she supposed.
But that kiss. The raw and elemental charge of his kiss had knocked her off her feet like an artillery blast. That kiss made her feel, inside, as if she were a firework sputtering sparks, a wire that burned hotter in his presence.
But he couldn’t know that. She couldn’t allow him to know that.
She wiped a bead of sweat from her brow and tossed her sword to her other hand, flexing her wrist. Kiddell was being relentless this morning.
Perhaps Dante had meant something else. Something like, I never understood love until now. After all, much of her interpretation of Hamlet rested on her belief that he had truly loved Ophelia, but found himself torn from her by circumstances and his own confusion of grief.
No, she mustn’t think the word love in relation to Dante.
That was foolish. Mame already feared Cerys would be a fool, and for many reasons, Cerys refused to be one.
She was pretending an infatuation for him to annoy Bathsheba Baeccon.
She was after a theater for Dorsey’s players.
A venue of their own, gracious as a Greek temple, noble as a Roman forum, as comfortable as the old Covent Garden had been, where Dorsey’s company could dazzle and transport and delight audiences night after night, to their mutual enrichment.
Kiddell stepped back and put up his sword. “I’ve killed you three times already.”
“I let you score a touch.” Cerys rolled back her shoulders. She was sore from yesterday, her first time stage fighting in a while, but she wouldn’t tell Kiddell that.
“A hit, a palpable hit,” Meek said, repeating a line from the play. Fred, who sat next to him in all the gangly grace of a boy just turning to manhood, knobby wrists draped over his knobby knees, nodded in assent.
“You don’t think we’ve practiced enough?” Cerys asked.
Kiddell’d had her up in the early hours, claiming they had to be done in the grand saloon before the gentry morts rose and the morning calls began.
An early morning mist beaded the tall windows, showing the fog rising from the far folds of the Cotswold hills, like the breath of some great animal still at slumber.
Cerys liked the early morning hours just after dawn—they were her favorite part of the day, that unformed beginning where everything felt possible, the day’s dreams capable of becoming reality.
But she liked to use them to walk outside and cut flowers and gather the plants that were best taken in the early morning, heavy with dew and promise.
Not be beaten about the head with a sword.
“I thought we were convincing enough in our performance,” she said.
“Our fight doesn’t have enough going on. We could draw it out. Make it longer.” Kiddell took his stance. “En garde.”
“Does it need to be longer?” Cerys took her stance, one hand in the air, and parried his thrust. “We only need to make the point.”
“Longer,” Meek said.
Fred drummed his hands on his knees. “Great fun when the ladies faint. You need to stagger about a bit more, Cerys, when he hits you. Play up the suspense.”
“Everyone knows Hamlet is going to die. I don’t need to drag it out interminably.”
“Never to rise again,” Meek said soberly.
“See?” Cerys flipped her sword in his direction. “Meek agrees with me.”
“Meek agrees with everybody,” Kiddell said.
Meek bobbed his head. He was Fred’s age, perhaps a year younger, very intelligent with some concepts, and utterly incapable of grasping others.
Dorsey had found the boy on a turn through Little Dean, escaped from the workhouse where he was starved and beaten because he couldn’t follow the rules.
Meek didn’t speak on his own, only echoed what he heard or was told, but he never wearied of repetitive tasks—indeed, he seemed to prefer them—and as long as they took turns looking after him and kept him from wandering off when curiosity took him, he seemed perfectly content with his place in the company.
“And you need to make more of a flourish when you kill Claudius,” Kiddell remarked as Dorsey wandered into their makeshift theater, stepping over a coil of rope and inspecting their sword fighting kit. “You just turned and stabbed. No drama in it at all.”
“The goal is to be sudden,” Cerys said. “Like when Hamlet kills Polonius. He doesn’t pause to think. He’s angry and hurt, and he strikes to hurt another. He knows he has to move before he can think about it, because thinking will paralyze him.”
“I made a good enough show of it, with my death throes.” Dorsey poked through the pile of foils in their bag. “Knocking over the throne, that was a nice touch, eh? Got that from Garrick.”
“We ought to have a packet of pig’s blood she can puncture,” Kiddell said. “Then you can spout gore. That’d bring on the fainting, for certain.”
“That’d ruin the bearskin, ye nodcock,” Dorsey replied. “I’d never get the blood out.”
“It’s clear Kiddell doesn’t do our laundry,” Cerys said.
“Women’s work.” He raised his sword. “Will you pay attention this time, or do I have to kill you again?”
Kiddell claimed to be the younger son of a lordly father, turned loose to make his own way in the world.
He found Dorsey in Northleach and said he was joining up as a lark, but he’d stayed with the company for six years.
Cerys held his claim in suspicion, since the sons of gentlemen became gentlemen, and the sons of lords were dispatched into the law, priesthood, or military.
Kiddell’s knowledge of the family of the Lords Chedworth had led Cerys and Mame to conclude that he must be the natural son of one of them, with no hope of inheritance or acknowledgement.
He didn’t need to pretend to noble blood to impress them, but Cerys was well aware that the world classified one by birth, and treated one accordingly.
“So it is settled then?” Cerys watched Dorsey as he hefted one of the stage foils, peering down the blade as if inspecting a real sword. “You’ve secured our investors.”
“Baeccon looks like he might renege,” Dorsey reported, “but the others have as good as laid down their coin. Your gentleman says I ought to write out a contract. Then it’ll hold up before a magistrate.”
“My gentleman?” Cerys raised her brows innocently and lifted her sword in salute to Kiddell, indicating her readiness for another round. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Gentlemen don’t sign contracts,” Kiddell said. “They give their word and then go back on it as they wish. En garde.”
Cerys flexed her knees in the guard position, lifting her free hand in the air. “That must be why Mr. Manelli wants things in writing.”
“He’s not a gentleman, so he’d know?” Dorsey set aside one sword. “This needs mending.”
“I didn’t say that. They all need mending. One’s going to break off in my gullet if we don’t find a smith who knows how to deal in stage foils.”
“Well, it’s on you, gel, to get him to make up designs that will gain us subscribers.
Thompson says the rich men about here are touched up all the time for building projects, the way the town is growing, so we must be sure to impress them.
But get him to give us a fair price for his services.
” He waggled his eyebrows and gave her a sly smile.
“I am certain I do not take your meaning.” Cerys lunged at Kiddell and slipped past his guard. “Point to me.”
“Don’t be dense, girl. You claimed from the first you could cozen him, so make short work of it.
I don’t want to be waiting eleven months like Kemble did for Covent Garden to be rebuilt.
” Dorsey popped the blossom onto the tip of his foil and pointed it at Cerys.
“I don’t want my costs to run over the way his did, either.
No good opening our new theater with price riots and having to cheat ourselves on tickets to woo people inside. ”
Cerys flicked her sword against his. “Now you put your faith in me? When before you didn’t trust me as far as you could winch me on the stage pulley.”
“You’ve got the airs of a Siddons and you’ve got a knowledge of these gentry morts, and you’ve got the face.” Dorsey circled the point of his sword around that area. “Make it useful. Won’t hurt to show the bosoms a bit more, maybe.”
“That won’t do for Hamlet at all.” Cerys lunged at him, and he parried.
“Have a care, gel, I’ve been acting in companies since before your father was spawned. I’ve seen many a woman lose her good sense when it came to a man.”
“That won’t be me, Jed Dorsey. I know a hawk from a hernshaw.”
“When the wind is southerly,” Fred piped up. “Act Two. Dorsey, can’t I be her understudy? Hackett’s too old.”
“This doesn’t seem fair, two opponents against one. And the one a lady to boot.”
Cerys couldn’t stop the thrill that soared through her at the sound of his voice. She faltered in her attack, and Kiddell scored a touch on her shoulder.