Love’s a Stage Read online

  Landry, in the meantime, had taken a relaxed posture against the doorframe, grinning sardonically. The host turned to him and demanded:

  “Ho! And what has the lady’s husband to say about this?”

  Landry achieved a knowing leer, and replied, “I find lying abhorrent under all circumstances. I’m not the lady’s husband.”

  They were put from the house in a trice.

  The next inn was located at a crossroad three mucky miles further along the lane. Frances had been resolutely mute since leaving Mr. Monson’s establishment and was forced to listen in frigid silence while Lord Landry introduced her to the innkeeper’s wife as his bride, Mrs. Prudence Whiterose. Landry sketched the story of attacking highwaymen who had stolen their baggage, their money, and even (the cold-blooded knaves!) Madame’s wedding ring! By the time Landry had done, he had woven the tale so skillfully that Frances almost believed it herself. She muttered:

  “I don’t wonder you can write fiction.”

  “Pardon me?” inquired the innkeeper’s wife, looking in a kind way at the shy bride.

  Landry glanced at Frances with exactly the right combination of simulated embarrassment and manly pride before bending to whisper a brief word in the ear of the innkeeper’s wife.

  Chapter Ten

  Sunshine pierced the window of Miss Sophie Isles’ parlor like a solid gold beam on Tuesday afternoon as that lady talked with her niece. Aunt Sophie was respectably prepared to be among the audience on the opening night of Lord Landry’s new play Marie, predicted to be one of the season’s great events. Her brown hair was caught up in a poppy-colored turban, and she wore an evening gown of matching color decorated at the bodice with crystalized gauze dotted with glass beads. An objective scan of her niece revealed the high color in the poor girl’s cheeks to almost match the shade of Miss Isles’ evening dress. It was an attractive, if pitiful, effect, and left Miss Sophie wondering if Frances would go through with her onstage appearance this evening.

  Frances was costumed for the farce in a stomacher-front gown printed in coral chintz on white. As the part required, Frances had, with Henrietta’s help, arranged her hair in curls accented with a dainty branch of silk cherry blossoms.

  “Considering everything, I think you’ve survived in good form,” remarked Aunt Sophie, making delicate adjustments to the elbows of her long net gloves. “What did that innkeeper’s wife give you to eat?”

  “Ham with pork pies,” said Frances with a shudder, “and baked whiting, buttered spinach, eggs, and a Sutherland pudding. It was humiliating, Aunt Sophie! She watched every mouthful I took and said in a motherly way that I mustn’t forget I was eating for two! Then she asked if she ought to send for the midwife to have me examined just in case. I wish now that I’d said yes! That would have exposed Lord Landry and his odious lies. And as for his introducing me as Mrs. Whiterose . . .” Frances struggled to find words that could express her degree of chagrin.

  “Was for your own good that he did lie,” said Aunt Sophie, in a fair-minded way. “If it ever gets about that you spent the night with Lord Landry, you’d have to move to America and change your name.”

  “I wish, dear Aunt Sophie,” said Frances tersely, “that you would not keep referring to my ballooning accident as ‘the night you spent with Lord Landry.’ I’ve told you, we didn’t do anything.”

  Her aunt looked sympathetic. “I wasn’t born last Wednesday, niece. You can unlace your stays around me.”

  Frances sought again the handkerchief she had only recently abandoned and applied it briefly to her misty eyes. “Very well. The truth is that we didn’t do everything. But I . . . we . . .” It was a moment before she was able to go on. Finally she said miserably, “If I am ruined, it’s no more than I deserve.”

  “I can’t agree. Landry’s such a dazzler that if you held yourself off from him you ought to win a medal for chastity. Besides,” Miss Isles added in a practical spirit, “the story of your adventure is in safe hands. I admit that when Richard Rivington came here Sunday night to bring back the parrot and tell me what happened, I did suffer a qualm or two. You must know, though, that Rivington and his father showed the nicest discretion in their handling of the matter! None of the teams were hitched, so they couldn’t chase the balloon directly, but they were not such fools as to raise a general alarm. ‘Never fear,’ young Rivington told me, ‘David will find some way to put that balloon down safely. But it could happen that we might not find them tonight, so it would be best not to let it become general knowledge.’”

  Frances smiled through her tears. “Small good that would have done if we had landed in a town square.”

  “Nonsense,” said Aunt Sophie, in a practical spirit. “A public descent would have been the best. Everyone knows, my dear, that even such great rakes as Landry rarely choose to consummate their affairs on town squares, whatever you may have heard about Lord Byron and that Millsmith tart in the Clarence Hotel foyer!” Since Frances’ very shocked expression informed her aunt that she had not heard that particular piece of scandal broth, Miss Isles cleared her throat and said hastily, “Never mind that! How did you pay your shot at the inn and two tickets home on the mail coach? Rivington admitted that he didn’t believe Landry had any money with him.”

  “The innkeeper’s wife insisted that I lie down for the hour, and while I was resting, Lord Landry sold the sheep to a farmer. He told me later that he would send one of his footmen this week to buy them back for Captain Zephyr.”

  “There’s a circumstance,” chuckled Aunt Sophie. “The noble Lord Landry on a common mail coach!”

  “He was perfectly at home, I assure you! We rode with a butcher and his family, and Lord Landry swept the husband into an animated converse about what effect the depressed price of pig iron will have on the Shropshire blast furnaces. Then he flirted abominably with the daughter, played ‘How Many Coaches?’ with the four-year-old son, and settled comfortably in the corner and dropped off to sleep, leaving me to the mercy of the butcher’s inquisitive wife, who had the story of our supposed robbery from the innkeeper and interrogated me for every detail. I’m sure if she caught me in one lie, she caught me in a dozen. Never have I been so mortified! Crowning everything, I have missed the chance to penetrate Fowleby Place during the masked ball.”

  “The hand of Providence, my dear child. If only now you would stop behaving so mulishly and permit me to talk you out of appearing on the stage tonight.”

  “Aunt Sophie, you know I must, if I’m to keep up my imposture. I can’t quit now!” A tap interrupted the ladies, directing their attention to the parlor door, where Henrietta was hovering with a folded sheet of stationery in her hand.

  “Yes, Henrietta, what is it?” said Aunt Sophie. She received the note and read the envelope with a disappointed air. “It’s from Priscilla Bolton. I hope this doesn’t mean she intends to be late!” said Miss Isles as she broke the seal and opened the missive. “I don’t want to miss the first minutes of the play. Drat the woman! She’s turned her ankle. And she has the effrontery to beg me to come and sit the night with her.”

  “You must go to her, of course,” said Frances, trying to hide her dismay.

  “And leave you alone at the Lane tonight? I couldn’t; it wouldn’t do.”

  Frances smiled bravely. “Nonsense, Aunt Sophie. I have to be there so much earlier than you, we weren’t even going to ride together. I’m incognito, so we can’t acknowledge each other. It would be a comfort to know you were there, but it will be quite as comforting if you come tomorrow night instead.”

  Miss Bolton was a gentle lady of fragile health; Miss Isles allowed herself to be persuaded. Since she had made an absolute secret of Frances’ participation in the play, she could hardly use those grounds now to refuse Priscilla. Besides, Aunt Sophie thought with an inward smile, Frances would not be friendless at the Lane. Lord Landry was sure to be there.

  * * *

  Drury Lane Theatre was packed with spectators, as would be expected
for the opening of one of Lord Landry’s plays. The French Revolution was a popular theme, Landry was a popular playwright, and with Edward Kennan and Sheila Grant in the lead roles there was every anticipation of a handsome return on a three-shilling-and-sixpence ticket.

  “Oranges, ginger beer, bills of play!” cried the orange-girls as they fanned out through the crowded pit, exchanging jibes with the audience, coquetting, and making change. Over two thousand playgoers were jostling for seats on the benches of the theater floor. The wait for the heavy green curtain to rise provided an opportunity for the expression of alarming exuberance. The fops strutted with chests inflated, the better to display the amethyst buttons of their snowy white shirts and the intricate arrangements of their cravats. With shirt collars so high that it was impossible for them to turn their heads, they moved with elegant stiffness as they hailed their comrades with the wave of an ivory-knobbed cane or a white evening glove. Artisans, young lawyers, tailors, shopkeepers, and street toughs mingled in a roaring melee, stomping, fighting, shaking rattles, blowing whistles, posthorns, and trumpets. One fellow wearing a false nose banged on a dustman’s bell as he was paraded through the crowd on the shoulders of his comrades. Four university students had decided to race from the front of the pit to the rear, and many a fellow reveler suddenly found himself knocked flat by the rushing quartet.

  The pit was surrounded by three gilded tiers of private boxes, exclusive territory available to those able to pay as much as twenty-five hundred pounds for a season’s subscription. The Prince Regent sat in the Royal Box, the only one equipped with a fireplace, surrounded by a champagne-sipping crowd of celebrities clad in silks and precious hardware. The Prince was laughing uproariously over a bon mot offered by no less a personage than Lord Landry himself, who looked incomparably fine in a dark-blue coat and superbly cut breeches that accented the long line of his legs. Surrounding the Royal Box like planets circling the sun were the boxes of the Royal Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester, the Duchess of Richmond, the Duchess of Argyll, Lady Jersey, and other celestial objects. It was a seat of fluttering fans and twinkling quizzing glasses, all trying to see and be seen at once, the ladies graciously ignoring and the gentlemen sneaking glances at the boxes containing the beautiful Fashionable Impures, shimmering with the jeweled favors of their wealthy admirers. There was much cross-traffic between the boxes as the patrons pursued the answers to the major questions of the evening: Who is sitting where and with whom? Who is being seen talking to whom?

  The uppermost tier was called the gallery. Here a seat could be had for ten shillings, which was cheap enough unless one considered that an oversight in the theater’s design had left an angle so extreme that all that could be seen of the stage was the actors’ feet. Gallery occupants were therefore apt to show their displeasure with the poor accommodations by throwing orange peels and glasses of water on the spectators in the pit, and by releasing pigeons to wheel near the ceiling, to the indignation of those below.

  The audience’s tumult penetrated backstage to the ladies’ dressing room, where Frances Atherton sat on a cushioned bench, obediently holding her lips parted while a wardrobe maid applied a waxy coat of lip rouge. The room was crowded with hothouse lilies and roses sent to the actresses by friends and lovers, and the scent of the flowers mingled with perfume, sweat, and stage makeup. A score of women stretched long legs to roll on silk stockings and paced the room reciting lines. At a small dressing table next to the one at which Frances sat, Theresa Sea expertly powdered her nose with a hare’s foot. Beyond her, Sheila Grant was reclining on a Grecian lounge calmly studying her lines and twirling a single yellow rose.

  “The audience sounds as if they’ve come to a riot,” remarked Frances apprehensively.

  Theresa Sea gave her a condescending glance. “This is nothing—a little high spirits,” she said sourly. “I only hope it doesn’t get worse. Did you see the Chronicle this morning? There was a rumpus at the Covent Garden last night.” Theresa reached into the cloth bag at her feet and pulled out the newspaper, spreading it on her dressing table. “Here it is: ‘We attribute to the unhappy influence of gin the events last night at the Covent Garden Playhouse. Without the least plea or pretense whatever, the gentry in the upper gallery began midway into the second act to call for and demand a hornpipe, though nothing of the sort was expressed in the bills. They went so far as to throw a quart bottle and two pint bottles upon the stage, which happily did no mischief, but might have been productive of a great deal!’” She flipped a page. “Let’s see if Hazlitt has anything about it in his column.” After reading for a moment, she looked curiously at Frances. “I see someone’s been busy on your behalf. It says: ‘. . . where I had the privilege of meeting Miss Brightcastle in the green room at the Drury Lane. This dainty newcomer will move across the stage like a gay creature of the elements in her role in the farce presented after Lord Landry’s new play, Marie. Her eyes like dark pools, her lips like two sweet summer strawberries . . .’”

  Frances squeaked, “What!” and slid over to the bench beside Theresa Sea. “Who could have written that?” She wondered at the name heading the column. “I’ve never met Mr. Hazlitt.”

  The wardrobe girl who had been doing Frances’ makeup said, “You don’t have to know him, Miss Brightcastle.’Tis puffery—the theater manager, John Rawson, slips him a couple of guineas and he says nice things about you in his column. Gives the audience the good prejudice in your favor. It’s a fine thing to be bragged up in the paper.”

  Frances was about to protest indignantly, when Charles Scott entered the room without knocking and walked over to kiss Sheila Grant on the cheek. He seemed oblivious to the various stages of undress exhibited in the room, and neither did any of the actresses take undue notice of his presence.

  “You look magnificent, darling,” he said to Sheila. “How do you feel?”

  Miss Grant gave him the cool, self-assured smile of a woman who had reigned as a beauty from her cradle. “Very well, naturally. I hope you’ve sent word to Mrs. Parkington to stay in her sickbed.”

  Scott offhandedly fastened the top two hooks and eyes of Theresa Sea’s gown while he spoke. “I have, though she’s on the mend from her flu. She said she’ll be able to come in tomorrow night, and I’m glad. I don’t like to have you working without an understudy.”

  “Charles, you’re unjust,” Sheila Grant remarked with teasing reproach, a smile curling one side of her mouth. “Miss Brightcastle has worked with me so much on my lines that she knows them as well as I.” There was a delicate trace of hostility in her slanting eyes. “Would you be eager to see if you could step into my shoes, Miss Brightcastle?”

  Scott gave Frances an apologetic shrug and sat by Miss Grant, assuring her of the irreplaceable nature of her contributions to the company.

  They were soon interrupted by the call-boy’s whistle and shout of, “If you please, Miss Grant, one minute’til curtain!” The flurry of activity ceased as Sheila Grant composed herself; and when she turned from the mirror, all present were awed into a respectful silence when they realized that she had dropped her everyday mask to reveal the regal features of Marie Antoinette; it was a reincarnation that explained much concerning Miss Grant’s position as the theater’s primary actress. With royal condescension, she accepted Scott’s escort from the room, followed by the cast members who were to appear in the first act.

  Frances heard the crowd’s uproar turn musical as they sang the National Anthem. The rising curtain caused a storm of applause that threatened to bring down the house. Then voices came dimly from the stage. Two actresses left in the dressing room with Frances began some desultory gossip about a rumor that Lord Byron would turn his hand to a stage play.

  Frances, feeling a surfeit of nervous energy, turned to mending handkerchief hems from the basket she had brought from Aunt Sophie’s. This proved an unsatisfactory diversion, as it served to occupy her hands but not her mind. If only she had able to get evidence against Kennan earlier—sh
e might not be facing the prospect of an appearance on stage for which she felt wholly unsuited!

  There was another thunder of applause as Kennan made his entrance, and a moment later Frances heard his strong dramatic voice as he worked his magic on the crowd. Her feelings of agitation increased, and she cast about for a distraction: she noticed the newspaper Theresa Sea had left open on the dressing table and began scanning it as she sewed.

  An item of particular interest caused her to lay her basket aside and read the newspaper with intense concentration. It concerned the Duke of Fowleby’s masked ball. The Duke, mentioned in the headline, was the focus of her attention. There was a column and more of a guest list studded with “the Lady L. and the Duke of R.” and carrying a description of the colored fairy lights used to decorate the gardens, and the cost of the fireworks display. At the close of the article, the author pointed out a tragic note to the festivities; in the midst of the ball, the quiet attack of some undiscovered bold thief had augured the loss of the Duke’s Tintoretto canvas of Mary Magdalene; the priceless painting was slit from its frame and spirited away as though by some evil specter. Three previous thefts of paintings from the Duke had been carried out in the same manner, and it was thought, smuggled from the country, since the paintings were too well known to be sold in England.

  Smuggling. Evil specter. The thought snapped into her mind that Edward Kennan was more dangerous and diabolical than even she had thought! Motive had been there, and opportunity. Frances realized with horror that her father was only one of many wronged by Kennan. She guessed—no, she knew—that Edward Kennan was pillaging the treasured collection of his own benefactor! Frances suffered the overwhelming feeling that she must confide this terrible secret at once. Her first vision was of a handsome face with hair like a new-minted gold piece, and perceptive green eyes. How odd that her love for Landry should inhibit her from seeking him now, but her pride couldn’t bear it.