Love’s a Stage Page 18

  But sensible advice she must have. If only Aunt Sophie were in the audience! What profit to think of that? She wasn’t, and so . . . Richard Rivington! Last week he had assured Frances that he would take a place in the box of his aunt, Lady Bloxham. In Mr. Rivington Frances knew she could be assured a sympathetic auditor.

  Frances waited impatiently for the finish of the second act. Finally there was a riotous burst of hurrahs from the audience, and the cast flooded back into the room. Each actress beamed with delight at the positive reception of the play; painted cheeks flushed with the heady glow of success. The hallway outside quickly filled with well-wishers wanting to offer felicitations and share in the cachet of what was obviously to be an astoundingly well received play. Frances threaded her way through the jostle to Charles Scott, who was standing with Kennan and Sheila Grant in a crush of congratulators.

  A liveried lackey arrived with an invitation to Kennan and Miss Grant from the box of the Prince Regent. Sheila Grant was to appear in the beginning of the next act. She must respectfully decline the invitation of His Royal Highness until a later time. Edward Kennan would come. Wine was offered—Miss Grant refused hers, saying she would take some before her final scene, and Frances seized the opportunity to ask Charles Scott the number of Lady Bloxham’s box. He gave it to her absently.

  It was well into the next act before Frances attempted to find her way to Rivington; the corridors were crowded with people waiting at refreshment stations until the play started again, and she wished to avoid the stragglers.

  Frances arrived at the box to find its entrance door firmly shut and a wolf on the ducal crest of Bloxham glaring at her with forbidding hauteur. When she knocked, the door was opened by a young man of about eighteen years that Frances was able to recognize as yet another of Rivington’s cousins; he was attractive and slender, with that oddly attentive air that characterized members of the clan.

  He was obviously surprised to face one of the young Drury Lane actresses, but not at all displeased. Frances became uncomfortably aware of her stage makeup and the low cut of her bodice, and quickly said:

  “May I please—that is, is Mr. Rivington here?”

  There was a rustle of fine silk from the interior of the box, and Frances saw a foursome of ladies in elegant pastels turn interestedly in her direction. The younger two snapped open their chicken-skin fans and raised them to shield their faces for a quick, giggling exchange of whispers. A haughty matron in a feathered headdress who was undoubtedly Lady Bloxham tapped her fan in the palm of her hand, and the two younger ladies promptly faced forward. As Rivington rose from his seat to look questioningly in Frances’ direction, Lady Bloxham sent him a reproachful glance that conveyed subtle but massive disapproval. Rivington returned his aunt’s gaze with a cool stare that abashed his aunt not at all. Frances reflected miserably that she was becoming only too familiar with the frequent mortification suffered by females with a questionable claim on respectability. As he closed the door behind them, Frances said:

  “I’m dreadfully sorry—I can see that Lady Bloxham has put the worst possible construction on our acquaintance!”

  “I’m sorry you should suffer that kind of an insult, Frances.” Rivington drew her protectively behind the screen of a dark column. “I don’t make my aunt the arbiter of my conduct, I promise you. And I’m very glad to see you! I’ve been wanting to hear from you directly the story of your adventure with Landry in the balloon—the last time I saw Frances Atherton, she was a small, receding speck in the sky!”

  Frances examined the ruffled flounce on her hem. “Have you not spoken to Lord Landry, then?”

  “No, I haven’t—I had a note from him saying we could call off the search, that you’d landed safely at a ruined manor in Suffolk.”

  “He said nothing else?”

  Rivington hesitated. “Only that he was grateful to me for putting you into the balloon, because the ride might have been dull without you.” He looked at her searchingly. “I’ve had a fairly anxious afternoon trying to interpret the significance of that remark, if it has any. David’s having a small gathering at his home after the play. He said he’d talk to me about it then.”

  Frances looked unhappy. “My aunt says that my reputation would be gone if it were to become known that I’d spent the night alone with Lord Landry in an abandoned manor.”

  His mouth gave an ironic twist. “Oh, are we worried about that when we’re about to appear on the stage? It’s not too late, Frances—please let me take you home.”

  His concern touched her, but she had to protest. “I can’t, I can’t—especially not now. I think I know who has been stealing the Duke of Fowleby’s paintings. And the thief is here, in Drury Lane!”

  Into the silence of Frances’ dramatic pronouncement came the soft stroke of footsteps on carpet, and the murmur of voices. Frances looked behind herself distractedly and saw that she had been observed, perhaps overheard! She was confronted by Edward Kennan’s merciless black stare. Kennan, on his return from the Prince Regent’s box, had been walking a few paces ahead of Lord Landry and the banker-poet Samuel Rogers.

  Frances stood still, her heart nearly ceasing to beat. Suddenly Kennan’s gaze flicked from her and he turned to address Rogers. There was an avalanche of applause from the theater signaling the end of the act, and the little group was engulfed by playgoers as the doors of the boxes opened, disgorging their occupants once again into the corridor.

  Frances felt Rivington touch her arm. He indicated that their chances of being overheard were good, and said, “Frances, if you won’t let me take you home, then you had better go back now. It won’t do you any good to be seen with me. I’ll wait on you first thing in the morning and we’ll talk then.”

  Aunt Ambarrow, wife of Frances’ uncle, the Bishop, had been waiting with well-bred patience for the act’s end so she could make her way to a refreshment station to procure herself a jelly. As she stepped from her box, she paused to look in a three-quarter-length mirror hanging on the door, pleased with the aspect of her reflection. She recollected with satisfied complacency how correct she had been to have ignored the hints of her dressmaker that the soft pink of her gown and its molded fit were more appropriate for a girl in her first season than a lady on the leeward side of forty-five. Mrs. Ambarrow noted also, not with conceit, but in mere pardonable pride, that her ostrich-plumed headdress was taller and more elaborate than any other she had been able to discover in her survey of the other private boxes that evening. With these agreeable thoughts, she left her box and went into the corridor.

  Suddenly, as during an absurd sequence in a dream, she saw her eldest niece, that paragon of maidenly integrity, berouged like a common prostitute and seemingly ringed by the delighted countenances of several of society’s most devastatingly charming libertines.

  “Fran-ces Ath-er-ton!”

  Later the young lady so emphatically addressed decided that she ought to have had the presence of mind not to respond, but her poise was already so shaken by Kennan’s appearance in the very midst of her denunciation of him, that her stock of ingenuity had run out. Frances turned and exclaimed in accents of horror:

  “Aunt Ambarrow!”

  Her aunt came bearing down upon her like a runaway bread wagon. “Frances, Frances, what in the name of creation are you doing here? Where is your mother? What are you doing here with your face—” Aunt Ambarrow’s eyes bulged nearly from their sockets. “—covered with paint? Where is your mama?” She looked up and down the hall as though she expected to find that lady slouched in a near coma against the corridor wall from the shock of seeing her daughter so disgracefully displayed. “You’ve guilt written all over your face! You’re up to some trick, aren’t you? You and that brother Joe of yours. I don’t wonder—time and again I told your father that it betokens nothing but trouble to let a girl spend so much of her time with her brothers. It fills her head with masculine notions of independence, and now this! Are you so dead to propriety that you can have fo
rgotten the duty you owe to your family in Beachy Hill? And your poor father, jailed like a common criminal. You will follow me immediately! I shall convey you to the presence of your uncle.”

  It was not a prospect that would have pleased Frances at the best of times. She had always been careful to show every respect to her Aunt and Uncle Ambarrow, but there was a tacit consent in her family that the Ambarrows were not the mentors of Atherton conduct. Aunt and Uncle Ambarrow were of the same guild: rigid standards and no imagination. Frances was sure they would have viewed the whole of her London experience as a distastefully sordid intrigue, ignored everything she had to say about Kennan, and confined her to a windowless room for a week of memorizing Bible passages on a diet of stale bread and mineral water. And her situation with Kennan was already approaching disaster. Frances forced her frozen mind to function. The first directive it gave her was to look at Kennan, to determine his reaction to her exposure. But there was little to be seen of him save his back as he strode away down the corridor through the clustering, milling knots of people.

  Her second thought was a particularly irrelevant urge to glance up at Lord Landry. She thought to find him laughing, but she was amazed to find instead an expression of interested empathy. Unable to bear his pity, she looked quickly away. The door to Lady Bloxham’s box opened and the young man who had admitted Frances originally, strolled over, smiled at Frances, and asked if Richard could introduce him to his pretty friend, with so pronounced a youthful licentiousness that Frances feared for her aunt’s health, so purple did her coloring become.

  Aunt Ambarrow swelled like a pigeon and rapped, in a tone that lent credit to the theatrical surroundings, “Frances, we will leave this place at once.”

  Frances’ heart beat so high in her chest that she had to clear her throat to talk. “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” she said, “you’re mistaken. I am not Frances Atherton.”

  Her aunt gave Frances a look that would have exploded gunpowder at fifty paces. In the moment that it took Mrs. Ambarrow to find her voice, Frances saw with ill-concealed dismay that the scene had gained further witnesses as Lady Bloxham stepped into the hall with her three pretty daughters.

  “Not my niece?” said Mrs. Ambarrow in a ringing tone. “Not my niece! You tell me I don’t know my own niece when it was I that you spat your milk on upon the morning of your baptism.”

  “I am sorry, ma’am,” said Frances, quaking inwardly at her own temerity, “I fear you’ve mistaken me for another.”

  “Mistaken!” said Aunt Ambarrow. “I’ll show you who’s mistaken. I’ll show the management of this theater who’s mistaken when they find themselves brought to court for soliciting an underage girl to parade herself like a strumpet in their theater.”

  The air throbbed with tension, and then Landry took a single step toward Frances, passed a glance of haughty amusement at Mrs. Ambarrow, and said in a pleasant voice, “What nonsense about nothing.”

  Frances’ aunt was no lightweight, but his expression was such that the color darkened in her cheeks.

  “I’m sure you won’t mind telling me your name, my good woman,” he continued. Frances had no time to recover from the shock of hearing her self-important aunt addressed as “my good woman” before Mrs. Ambarrow rebutted with:

  “That, sir, is no concern of yours.”

  “I won’t deny it,” drawled Landry, who, to Frances’ amazement, had suddenly assumed the bored air of a lounging beau. “I can’t imagine anything that would interest me less. But I wondered by what name I should introduce you when we go before the—I believe you said the theater management?”

  “I’ve not the slightest need for you to introduce me, sirrah,” snapped Ambarrow. “I’m more than capable of making myself known to the villains who have undertaken the corruption of my niece!”

  Landry scrutinized her from under eyelids heavy with contempt, and said without hesitation, “That’s clear. Shall we proceed then? Because I find that I’ll have to accompany you to verify that this young lady here is not your niece.”

  “Then you, sir,” said her aunt, the feathers on her headdress quivering dangerously, “are a liar.”

  As soon as she had spoken, Mrs. Ambarrow knew she had made a mistake. The sympathy of at least some members of the crowd had been with her, but now she felt it veer sharply away. Frances was startled, though no more so than Lady Bloxham’s attendant offspring and nephews when that lady stepped forward, and in a clear, carrying tone, said:

  “My nephew Landry may be many things, but I shall not stand by to suffer him called a liar. Your relationship to this young woman is immaterial. What matters clearly is that she doesn’t want to accompany you. That being the case, I think you ought to be off before my nephew is forced to lay aside the deference he owes to the female sex and act toward you with a rudeness that is, I assure you, repugnant to a gentleman of his good breeding.” Lady Bloxham turned to her nephew Landry’s admiring countenance and commanded, “David, you will escort this young person back from whence she came. Immediately, if you please.”

  The battle light was still militant in Mrs. Ambarrow’s eyes, but for the moment there was nothing she could do short of following Lord Landry and Frances through the corridors demanding the return of a young girl who had shown herself intent on denying their connection.

  Frances exhaled with relief as they turned the first corridor, and, looking at Landry, found he was anointing her with a conspirator’s grin.

  “Relax, if you like,” he said, lifting his hand to acknowledge an acquaintance. “I don’t think she’s going to give chase. What a dragon!”

  “Do you mean your aunt—or mine?”

  “Both,” he retorted. “Pluck to the backbone, your—what did you call her, Aunt Ambarrow? I’d give a monkey to see her matched against Jem Beamer. Is your family full of these formidable females? If so, I can see how you developed your style.”

  Frances stopped so suddenly that a young man behind her carefully juggling three cups of lemonade laid waste two of them and seriously depleted the third.

  “I’m nothing like Aunt Ambarrow!” she exclaimed.

  “Oh, no, not now,” admitted Landry with a cheerfulness that made Frances long to do him violence. “But in another twenty years . . .”

  Frances glared at him as she tried to conjure a suitably biting retort, but Landry’s expression was so invincibly genial that she began instead to laugh.

  “Not with you around always,” she said, “to burst my bubble.”

  There was a moment of curious intimacy as hazel eyes gazed into green eyes; her smile faded as she realized that she’d committed the hideous faux pas of assuming he would be there in twenty years. Her embarrassment saw their silence as awkward, and to end it quickly, she said:

  “I can’t stand here, of course! They will be expecting me in the dressing rooms.” Her hand fluttered self-consciously to her throat. “Don’t accompany me, please. P-people gossip so over the merest nothing! Good-bye! And thank you for the help you’ve been with my aunt.”

  She turned and sped off through the crowd before he had time to reply. There was a common hall that strung the dressing rooms together like beads on a necklace, and as Frances entered, she saw at once that something was very wrong.

  The faces of the players were stiff with distress, and Charles Scott rushed toward Frances, running his hands wildly through his disheveled hair.

  “Where have you been, Brightcastle?” he shouted. “Come with me! Hurry! You’ll have to go on in the next act.”

  “The next . . . but it’s not time for the farce,” said Frances.

  Scott pulled her briskly after him, his hand on her elbow. “Who said anything about the farce?” he flung over his shoulder. “We’re in the middle of one of those charming little situations known as a crisis. Sheila Grant has collapsed.”

  “She’s what?” exclaimed Frances, nearly tripping on a discarded bill of play.

  “When she had her exit five minutes ago, she too
k half a glass of wine and went into a swoon.”

  “Has a doctor seen her?” asked Frances.

  “Of course,” snapped Scott. “The pulse is strong, her lungs are steady; the best guess he could make is that she appears to have been drugged.”

  “Oh, no, it can’t be—who would have done such a thing?” said Frances.

  “God knows. A rival playhouse or a competing actress perhaps. We’ll hire the runners to find out what we can tomorrow. Right now our biggest problem is filling her spot. It would take more than an hour for the understudy to arrive. By that time we’re likely to have a riot in the pit, especially when they hear they’re not going to get Sheila Grant. I’m going to have to let you take the final scene.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was a gift from the gods, a once-in-a-lifetime smile of favor from the muses. “Take ten years of my life,” went the centuries-old prayer of the bit player, “but let me have the star’s role for one night. One chance, one chance to shine before an audience so they can see the genius in me.” Frances’ near-tearful objections that she didn’t want to go on were regarded at first as an understandable fit of nerves. When her protests persisted, Frances saw that they were regarded with such suspicion that she had no choice but to silence them.

  In perfect truth, Frances knew that Scott’s confidence in her ability was so slim that only the most dire necessity would have made him risk the play’s success on her meager store of talent. The play was so new, the final speech so long and complex, that except for Sheila Grant, Frances, and her understudy, not one of the Lane’s actresses knew it through.

  The curtain rose. In front of it an audience angry at being deprived of the stunning Sheila Grant, their beloved favorite, shifted and stirred like a wakening beast. There was a cough from the gallery, and the snap of a snuffbox.