Love’s a Stage Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1980 Thomas Dale Curtis and Sharon Curtis

  Excerpt from The Windflower copyright © 1984 by

  Thomas Dale Curtis and Sharon Curtis

  Cover images © Victoria Davies/Arcangel Images

  The right of Sharon Curtis and Tom Curtis to be identified as the Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in this Ebook edition in 2014

  by HEADLINE ETERNAL

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by arrangement with Forever,

  an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4722 2120 9

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headlineeternal.com

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Laura London

  By Laura London

  About the Book

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Excerpt from THE WINDFLOWER

  Find out more about Headline Eternal

  About the Author

  Laura London is the pen name for the husband and wife writing team Tom and Sharon Curtis. Married more than forty years, Tom and Sharon published ten historical and contemporary romance novels from 1976 to 1986, many of which have come to be regarded as classics in the genre. The Windflower is in numerous top 100 lists of best romances of the twentieth century, including on Goodreads, The Romance Reader, All About Romance, and Dear Author.

  Find out the latest at www.facebook.com/lauralondonauthor.

  Praise for Laura London:

  ‘This sophisticated romp takes readers into the Regency period with charming, colorful imagery that describes all the sights, sounds and smells of the period. Sharp, witty dialogue, sweet romance and unforgettable characters are all hallmarks of the classic novels by this incomparable writing team. Don’t miss this oldie, but goodie’ Romantic Times

  ‘From its very first sentence, The Windflower seduces the senses with lush, lyrical, evocative prose. It is a brilliantly-plotted work full of wonderful details, subtle eroticism, clever humor, and heart-wrenching emotion, yet it is the characters that really capture the reader. Not only are the hero and heroine unforgettable, but a wealth of secondary characters are drawn with a richness and depth rarely equalled’ All About Romance

  By Laura London

  The Windflower

  A Heart Too Proud

  The Bad Baron’s Daughter

  Gypsy Heiress

  Moonlight Mist

  Love’s a Stage

  Sunshine and Shadow

  The Testimony

  The Golden Touch

  About the Book

  She didn’t know she’d come face to face with one of England’s most notorious rakes. She only knew the golden-haired stranger who came to her rescue as David.

  Miss Frances Atherton, country parson’s daughter, has a lot to learn about London’s wicked ways. But not even David’s brash charms can distract her from her purpose: to trap the Blue Specter, the infamous smuggler for whose crimes her own father has been imprisoned. The trail is hot and leads to Drury Lane, where she treads the boards as an actress – a shocking profession for a lady. But more shocking still is the discovery that David – Lord Landry – is the most renowned and scandalous playwright of the day . . . and that she is losing her heart even as she stalks her dangerous prey.

  Chapter One

  Miss Frances Atherton, the parson’s daughter, stepped from the hired hackney carriage onto the busy marketplace corner of Charles and Russell Streets. A whimsical spring breeze dandled the long ties of her old-fashioned straw bonnet as if to undo their neat arrangement, and molded her shapeless gray traveler’s cape to her trim young figure, causing more than one head to turn in her direction. Bustling herds of shoppers, hawkers, and costermongers schooled around her as she gazed with innocent awe on the spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral, gilded like a chapel shrine by the late afternoon sun. It was a stirring view for a young lady who had lived her nineteen summers in Beachy Hill, Sussex, a fishing village so small that when Mrs. Brantley’s baby cried on the west side of town, cross old Mrs. Betterton on the east side would shut her window. Miss Atherton’s previous definition of a crowd had been the parish packed into her father’s church on Easter Sunday, but this single London corner contained more souls than her father had had a chance to save in the last decade.

  The corner contained more vegetables, too, thought Frances, glancing about—not, of course, that her father had ever tried to save the soul of a vegetable. Frances felt a tiny smile tighten her lips at the idea of her Reverend Papa sermonizing earnestly from his pulpit toward pews packed with hefty radishes. But if Miss Atherton had been spared the company of vegetables at Sunday service, she was certainly surrounded by them now. A dusty mountain of potatoes was heaped on the pavement with a hill of crisp turnips rising at its side. Maroon pickling cabbages fought piled onions and bundles of glossy leeks for space on busy market stalls. Down the street an herbalist’s shop was getting a fresh coat of whitewash from a trio of rowdy youths, who paused to tease a group of apple-women sitting nearby on their porter’s knots sharing a pipe.

  The day had been a long and tiring one for Miss Atherton. She had come from Eastbourne on the public stagecoach in a grueling ride that had begun at four o’clock that morning. The other two passengers had been a baker’s widow in black bombazine and a frail stay-maker’s wife with her overweight bulldog. After three hours of battering over rutty spring roads, their stage had become mired in a lowland road near a swollen river bank. Pulling the bulky stage through the knee-high mud had been a hard enough task for the horses even with the coachmen leading them; the passengers had been forced to get out and walk. Frances had descended bravely into the muck, saying that she was sure she wouldn’t mind a chance to stretch her legs. Her two lady companions had followed her with loud complaints, but the fat bulldog had steadfastly refused to leave the carriage. The coachman had angrily announced that he wouldn’t have his horses drag the coach another step with that bulky brute inside, the staymaker’s wife had begun to cry that it wasn’t Doggie’s fault that he didn’t like to walk in the mud, and the widow in black bombazine began a shrill for the return of her ticket price. Frances, with an inward sigh and all the good-natured cheer that she could muster, had offered to carry Doggie. She had marched the next three miles in wet sucking mud carrying a forty-pound bulldog, who alleviated his tedium by struggling and licking Frances vigorously on the side of her face.

  No sooner had the bedraggled and weary travelers returned to the cramped interior of the stage
coach than the baker’s widow insisted that there was too much draft and ordered the scuffed leather curtains pulled down to cover the windows. Frances had sat in increasingly stuffy discomfort while the staymaker’s wife enumerated the outstanding qualities of her son, currently apprenticed to a snuff-box painter, and then went on to describe his advent into the world, which, it seemed, had been accomplished in miraculously short order. Not to be outdone, the baker’s wife had offered the tale of her own confinement, some forty years past, which, she said smugly, had been remarkable for its length and difficulty. The staymaker’s wife quickly countered with the claim that, of course, everyone knew that short confinements were more taxing and risky than long ones. The baker’s widow did not take well to a suggestion that any confinement could have been more risky or taxing than her own, and from thence the two ladies began a prolonged and detailed exchange of obstetrical histories that caused Miss Atherton to lose what little appetite she had left for the roll and hard cheese she had brought for lunch, and might have (had she not been a young woman of common sense and character) caused her to enter a nunnery forthwith and eschew the company of men not likewise celibate.

  Frances had found no emotion within herself stronger than that of relief when the stagecoach had finally pulled into the hopping courtyard of the London’s Great George Coaching Inn. She had hired a hackney carriage, seen to the transfer of her case, and within minutes here she was among the vegetables.

  The picturesque hustle about her filled Frances with fresh energy. She smoothed a wisp of her soft brown hair under her bonnet and gave her crumpled skirts a brisk shake. A sparkle returned to her hazel eyes as she filled her lungs determinedly with the dense acrid air of the metropolis. Tilting her head back, she smiled politely at the hackney driver.

  “This is my first trip to the capital,” she said. “But I can see that it’s a city of which England can be proud.”

  The hackney driver was a surly man in a green felt cap and a double-breasted cloth frock coat with a turned-up collar. He looked contemptuously at Frances and muttered a reply largely indistinguishable, but which sounded suspiciously like “Sure, girlie, and me old dad was a kidney pie.” In more audible tones he said, “Fare.”

  Miss Atherton opened her purse, selected the coins, and handed them up to the driver. “Here you are, one shilling and sixpence. If you please, you may set my case here on the pavement.”

  The driver looked at the fare in his cracked palm as if someone had presented him with a cockroach corpse. The other hand he lifted to scratch his unshaven chin, and he looked down at Frances with an intimidating frown.

  “Ain’t enough,” he growled.

  “But it is,” she answered, taken aback. “I counted it out most carefully, one and sixpence.”

  “One and six ain’t enough,” returned the driver, with the air of one talking to a dimwit.

  “Most certainly it is,” said Miss Atherton stoutly. “’Tis the fare on which we agreed at the coaching inn not twenty minutes ago.”

  “One and six was enough then. If yer don’t like it, yer can come and get yer own trunk,” said the driver, smirking unpleasantly.

  As Miss Atherton’s case was strapped onto a baggage rack behind the hack driver and more than six feet off the ground, its retrieval would have called for her to clamber up the side of the coach on widely spaced footholds and kneel over the driver’s lap. Miss Atherton stood back and reassessed the situation.

  “Sir, you are not behaving well,” she observed.

  The hack driver cleared his throat with disgusting, and quite unnecessary, resonance and spat upon the pavement.

  The three youths who had been whitewashing the herb shop saw the exchange and, sensing that better amusement was to be had near the coach, trotted over to gape at Frances and nudge each other suggestively.

  Ignoring her chortling audience, Frances said firmly, “I shall have my trunk now, please.”

  The driver squashed his cap further down on his grizzled head and fixed Frances with a cold stare.

  “Ye can come and get it,” he said, with tight-mouthed satisfaction.

  Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and before Miss Atherton had time to think of an adequate retort, the watching group had swelled to include a bevy of sooty chimney sweeps, a greengrocer in a blue apron bulging with carrots, and a red-faced woman with a gaudy gypsy scarf and a basket of crimson love apples on her head. A youth with a long, pointed nose and coarse ginger bowl-cut hair made a saucy comment that drew snickering approval from the gathering. The Golden Rule and chivalry aside, a young, unaccompanied female on the London streets was considered fair game.

  A less resolute young lady might have let prudence win over principle and paid the hack driver his demanded due, but Miss Atherton was made of sterner stuff. Turn and run? Not she, the girl who, at the tender age of eleven, had taken the village smithy to task for drinking away his good wife’s market money at the county fair.

  Frances shook her finger reprovingly at the hack driver. “I suppose because I am from out of town that you think I’m to be easily bamboozled,” she said, adopting a tone one would use with a refractory child. “You’re quite wrong! I won’t allow you to take advantage of me.”

  To the crowd’s heartily expressed enjoyment, several voices inquired if they might be allowed to take advantage of the young lady. A burly giant with curly black hair and enormous shoulders in a coster’s corduroy was inspired by the uproar to drop his bundle of beets with their dirty dangling roots and step toward Frances with a foolish grin that stretched from one stumpy ear to the other.

  “I’ll help you get your case, missie,” he proclaimed. “Let me put my hands on yer waist and I’ll lifts ye right up to your case and in no time, too.”

  Miss Atherton barely had time to say “thank you, no,” when the rough giant slipped his hammy hands under her cape, taking her in a bruising grip. With real alarm, she jerked away from him and took a step back, and the rough fellow came after her, arms outstretched as if to get a better hold on the situation. She stumbled, her heel striking an upturned flagstone, and fell backwards.

  A pair of light, strong hands steadied her from behind, releasing her when it was plain that she had regained her footing.

  She turned instinctively, looking backward over her shoulder, and found herself gazing into a young, vividly male face so attractive as to be almost startling. Miss Atherton was not one who allowed her knees to turn to pudding every time she met a handsome gentleman (which, it must be admitted, was not often), but however immune one might be to the Hollowness of mortal Beauty, Frances was aware of a rather intense, if brief, sensation somewhere in her middle that Modesty forbade her to name, even to herself. The gentleman was tall, fashionably dressed, and sensuously slender, with hair the color of melted gold touching his collar. His eyes had been painted by the same brush that decorates the first sweet greens of spring; they held an expression that was at once mocking and friendly. Frances was far too inexperienced to see the serenely calculating admiration in them. She didn’t know that she was face to face with one of her country’s foremost and most fascinating rakes. She might not know it, but the watching crowd did. They gave a cheerful shout of recognition, which further disoriented Frances, and she failed to understand its cause.

  The black-haired knave who had been so willing to offer Frances unwanted assistance gave the blond stranger an affable salute, and gestured toward the driver of the hackney carriage, saying, “This son of a whip has been tryin’ to take advantage of the dimber mort” (this with a lewd wink toward Frances), “so her says.”

  “Does she?” said the golden-haired stranger, his wonderful green eyes alive with interest. He gave Frances a smile that was famous throughout London for its irresistibly engaging tenderness. It quite completed the job on her. “What happened?”

  The black-haired man seemed to consider himself the party who had been applied to for information. He hitched his hairy thumbs through his belt, looking as please
d as the schoolboy winner of a running contest. “’Er driver says’e won’t give up’er case until she gives’im’is fare,” the fellow chuckled proudly, “and I says I’m gonna’elp’er by liftin’’er belly up to board.”

  Miss Atherton had not yet recovered from the shock that she, noted in her family from the cradle for her sensible attitudes, could react to a member of the opposite sex like a giddy miss. It did nothing to assist her composure to hear herself publicly proclaimed to possess so vulgar a member as a “belly.” With an effort that can only be described as heroic, she gathered her not inconsiderable mental resources, blocked the blond stranger from her mind, ignored the crowd’s gay jibes, delivered a quick, reproving frown to the black-haired lout, and stepped toward the hackney carriage.

  “I shall summon a magistrate,” she announced valiantly, not having the faintest notion where in this vast city one was to be found.

  The hackney driver had been deriving a fair measure of sour enjoyment watching Miss Atherton’s discomfiture, but at the mention of the law, his pleasure evaporated. “Oh, you will, will you?” he snarled. “Damned if I’ll take sauce from a snooty little curtezan like yourself. If you don’t pay your fare, see if I don’t take it out in trade before you’re much older.”

  The black-haired lout captured the spotlight. He made a rude gesture toward the hack driver shouting, “That ya couldn’t, old Domine Do-little!” The crowd roared its approval. “This kitten needs to take her aqua vitae from a Johnny Ready like meself!” The fellow made a lunge for Frances, attempting to envelop her in his bearlike embrace.

  Again Frances felt light, experienced hands encircle her waist as the golden-haired man laughingly plucked her from her attacker’s path, setting her down behind him. Her rescuer held a restraining hand toward the black-haired giant.

  “Oh, no, my friend,” said the gentleman, giving the giant a dose of that curiously affectionate smile. “You may be ready for her, but I very much doubt that she’s ready for you.”