Love’s a Stage Read online

  Frances stood alone on the stage, still and straight, her pallor subtly enhanced by the costume of Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment, a plain black silk dress with a muslin fichu over the neck, the long ends falling to the skirt front. Her unpowdered hair was tied with a black ribbon, and she wore no ornament other than a black bow and a band of velvet encircling her slender neck. Behind her loomed the twin beams of the guillotine, joined by the heavy black-steel blade, lined dramatically on the bottom by the silvery cold gleam of the cutting edge. The tall, gaunt executioner stood to the side of his instrument, dressed in the raffish style of the sans-culottes, his features hidden by an ominous black hood.

  It was fortunate that when Frances began to speak, her voice was so low that the audience was forced into silence, if only to hear her words. Hecklers who would have called out were quickly shushed by their fellows.

  Her performance was not, to say the least, what the audience was expecting. Broad effects were the dramatic style of the day. Sheila Grant would have strode in magnificent melancholy from one end of the stage apron to the other, gesturing beseechingly toward the heavens. Frances was so stricken with stage fright that she could only stand in one spot, gently wringing her hands and forcing the words out through her dry throat.

  As she spoke, the growing rumble of the audience peaked and began to die away, and after a few shouts of “down in front” and “quiet, please,” it ceased entirely. This so unnerved her that she forgot where she was in the speech, and had to make a long pause until she remembered her place. She felt lost on the wide stage, frightened of the crowd that seemed waiting to devour her. She closed her eyes and thought—best to speak the lines and get it over with—her presence in this play was an accident of fate, something to which she must resign herself.

  The audience grew so still that she imagined they had become disgusted and had quietly left the theater; she was afraid to open her eyes to the rows of empty seats.

  Then she could remember no more of her lines, and stood waiting for the shower of catcalls, boos, and (she was sure) rotting vegetables to descend upon her. The seconds ticked by, until she recalled that, yes, the audience had left the theater; and keeping her eyes closed, she took one timid step to walk from the stage. There was a rustle from the pit. Perhaps there was a straggler, someone who had fallen asleep during the last paragraphs, and Frances opened her eyes to look. To her surprise, the theater was full. She cast about agitatedly for her next course of action, and remembered: the guillotine! That is what I am to do.

  It was in front of her—the gleaming blade, and hooded executioner. Frances took timorous steps toward the terrible duo, and meekly inspected the guillotine. Then she looked at the executioner—was it a different man under the hood than she had seen previously? His physical shape was different, his height perhaps a few inches shorter, his forearms less muscular. She hadn’t recalled a change in this role. She looked back to the guillotine, and at precisely the instant the executioner laid his hand on her arm to lead her to it, she noticed one horrifying circumstance: The two metal pipes that had been pushed as safety catches through the holes on either side and just above the neck rest were missing! What had formerly been a stage prop was now a true instrument of death!

  She was galvanized into action by the shock and began to struggle—the executioner’s grip became more powerful; she kicked and bit and fought; the crowd began to roar and applaud, making a gargantuan ruckus. Someone must have realized that something was amiss, and the curtain came rolling down on the scene. The stage was flooded with hands running toward the struggling couple, and the mysterious executioner released Frances and ran off into the wings, swinging wildly at a pursuer.

  “Bravo! Bravo! Huzzah!” The appreciation of the crowd was approaching torrential dimensions.

  There was spinning confusion as the company massed on stage, examining the guillotine, expressing concern for Frances, and speculating excitedly about the identity of the false executioner. Charles Scott dispatched stagemen to search the backstage areas and ordered the company to fall into line for the curtain. He sent a callboy for Kennan, who someone said was taking his ease at a tavern across the alley.

  Scott put up his hand, signaling for attention, and over the hubbub he shouted, “Ladies! Ladies and gentlemen! We have to bring up the curtain and take our bows—remember now, poise is the watchword. Theresa, straighten Miss Brightcastle’s hair ribbon. We must stay calm—a scandal like this could damage the theater’s reputation. Calm!”

  A stagehand entered the near end of the stage, carrying the abandoned executioner’s mask and cape, causing a new stir of interest. Simultaneously, Edward Kennan strolled onto the stage from the opposite end, looking about curiously.

  “Where have you been, Edward? It’s not like you to be late for the curtain,” said Scott. “Especially under these circumstances.”

  Kennan’s smile was smugly bland. “The boy told me; much ado . . .” He gave Frances a snide look. “Someone’s been playing a practical joke on you again, Miss Brightcastle. Have you angered one of your lovers?”

  Frances longed to expose him so desperately that the words burned in her throat, and she was prevented from uttering them by the lifting curtain. An avalanche of applause descended on the stage. Bow, smile, acknowledge the private boxes, step forward, throw a kiss to the pit, raise hands to the gallery. The curtain came down and went up again, and still the applause thundered. The stage became littered with fair-smelling petals as the playgoers ripped the flowers from the hands of the flowergirls and tossed them at the company. As the curtain touched down again, Frances saw Charles Scott bearing toward her. With a hand on her forearm he whisked her offstage.

  “Enough of that for now,” he said. “Landry’s arranged for a private coach to carry you home.”

  “Landry’s arranged! I shan’t go. Someone’s just tried to take my life and . . .”

  Scott interrupted. “Which is exactly why you’d better be conveyed safely home until we’ve had time to investigate. Edgar Murphy, who plays the executioner, was found unconscious, bound, and gagged in the prop room, and no one’s caught the imposter.”

  “Mr. Scott, there’s no need to investigate. I know who’s tried to kill me. Where’s Richard Rivington? Have you seen him? I must talk to him at once.”

  Scott looked like a person taxed beyond endurance. “Rivington, is it now? Listen to me; if you want to play fast and loose with Landry, don’t involve me or the theater in it. Good God, girl, Landry is the last person I want to alienate.”

  “Pleasing Lord Landry is not my object!”

  “Well, it is an object of mine!” said Scott, looking harassed. “Keeping Landry happy is everyone’s concern here, or he’ll have his next play produced at Covent Garden. Are you miffed because he hasn’t come to see you himself? He didn’t want to endanger your reputation; this is the first time I’ve seen him show that much concern for anyone. He gave me strict instructions to personally see you into the coach and deliver you safely inside your own door, and you’re coming with me if I have to drag you.”

  “I—but what of my role in the farce?” she said with some confusion. “Who’s going to fill it?”

  “Don’t worry about your role in the farce,” he snapped. “Any twit can fill it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It had been a highhanded maneuver, decided Frances, for Landry to have ordered her hustled home; that he should have the audacity to assign her a bodyguard was outrageous. When Frances arrived at the sumptuous town carriage she was handed inside by a short man with massive shoulders, undulating biceps, a broken nose, and a merry eye, who announced himself as Nick Vent, at your service, and that Lord Landry had said he was to accompany Miss Brightcastle and watch over her house for the night, begging the lady’s pardon. The carriage door had been closed, the mysterious Mr. Vent had scrambled nimbly to the box beside the coachman, and the horses put forward before Frances’ indignation had time to crystalize into a protest. However, by the
time they reached Miss Isles’ front door, she was more than ready to give Mr. Vent his good-bye. She was not sure why Lord Landry should take the responsibility of providing her with a guard, but it was an action taken entirely without her knowledge or consent; Mr. Vent should consider himself released from any task contracted by Lord Landry.

  She swept into the house and up the stairs, but when, a quarter hour later the yap of a prowling dog caused her to glance out of the window, she observed that Mr. Vent, far from having respected her dictates, instead had taken a stalwart post by the entrance door. A sigh of exasperation escaped her as she went downstairs to try to make him go away again, receiving only a cheerful negative shake of the head in return. Mr. Vent, as it happened, was Lord Landry’s groom. And, as it happened, the son of Lord Landry’s father’s groom; and before that, Mr. Vent’s grandfather had been Lord Landry’s grandfather’s—Frances put up her hand to stop the onslaught of genealogy. Mr. Vent would have her to understand that he would do naught to distress a lady, but when His Lordship sent him to a task—well! Nick Vent had never come short in his duty. In the end, Frances was forced to resign herself to the presence of the immovable Mr. Vent. The dictates of conscience would not allow her to leave him to cool his heels on the frigid pavement all night. She asked him if he wished to step into her aunt’s parlor and partake, if he would care for it, of a light supper. Mr. Vent was agreeable. His shoulders were so wide he had to turn partially sideways to get through her aunt’s parlor door, and Frances began to fear for the knickknacks. The grace and care with which he made his way to the small tea table put her fears to rest. It was no small thing to sustain that substantial frame, and to Frances’ awe and Henrietta’s admiration, Mr. Vent put away a quantity of salmon, some cold tongue, a pyramid of strawberries, three biscuits, two Seville oranges, and a dish of boiled cucumbers. To wine he said no; coffee would be just the thing, if it were not too much trouble. That’s what was needed to keep a man awake at night. Frances made note that it was not through any wish of hers that Mr. Vent would spend a slumberless night, adding that she was sorry to find Mr. Vent in the thrall of an employer who would expect such a thing.

  Vent answered with a grin that while there was nothing in the green land of England that he respected more than a sweet lady’s opinion, he had to say that there wasn’t a man in the world better to work for than Lord Landry. Mr. Vent had tried to make his name in the boxing ring for a time, but it was no life for a peaceable man, so he’d returned to the service of a man who’d been his boyhood friend. To hear Nick Vent talk, one would think Lord Landry a paragon of paragons, in kindness second only to the archangels, in generosity equal to the patron saint of alms. Frances was assaulted with anecdote after anecdote extolling Landry’s virtues, mercifully brought to a close by a sudden eerie whistle of wind in the chimney grate that recalled Mr. Vent’s mind to his responsibilities.

  “If you don’t mind then, ma’am, I’ll set up in a straight-backed chair before the front door.” He nodded to Frances with a good deal of kindness. “You can rest yourself easy, ma’am, for there’s nobody that’ll get in here by me; so you have the word of Nick Vent. It’s a right bad scare you’ve had this night, so His Lordship tells me!” He tsked his sympathy. “There’s some that will have it that it’s a full moon that drives men mad. I say watch out for an eve like this one, for the dark of the moon.”

  “Dark of the—” Her stare was blank, into space; then she flew to the window and gaped raptly at the heavens. “It is! It is!” She held up one finger, begging silence, and then paced a short circle on the flowered carpet, her hands pressed to her cheeks in a worried and thoughtful posture. She came to rest before Vent and looked at him with troubled hazel eyes. “The smuggler’s moon, they call it? The weather is clear, so I know they’ll make a run! And Kennan with them, no doubt!”

  “Kennan, you say?”

  Frances looked at him sharply. “You look as though—has Lord Landry mentioned something about Kennan to you?”

  “Naught, ma’am, only that,” Vent hesitated, “that if that fellow tries to approach you, I’m to keep him off, and damn the consequences—begging your pardon, miss.”

  “I must speak to Richard Rivington immediately! He lives downstairs.” She was walking toward the door as she spoke. “No! He won’t be there! He was going to Lord Landry’s house. I shall go there at once.” Heart thudding with excitement, she rushed to her bedroom and pulled from her wardrobe a wine-colored three-quarter-length coat lined in pink satin. With hurried fingers, she pulled a reticule jingling with sixpence over her wrist. As she returned to the hallway, she found herself confronting Vent.

  “Ma’am, you don’t want to be going to Lord Landry’s house,” he said concernedly. “It’s a bachelor establishment, y’see, and not the right place for a young lady. And less tonight than most nights, when it will be filled with his lordship’s friends, bright young bucks every one of them. And spirits flowin’ like the Thames at flood tide.”

  Frances would have walked barefoot across pin grass to catch Kennan. After the guillotine, a few drunken young bluebloods were a mere nothing. Vent shifted uneasily on his feet as he saw the determined look in her eye. He lodged every argument he could think of to dissuade her, until at last he saw she was adamant, and he’d better take her or she’d make her way there herself. What Landry would say about it later would be another thing entirely.

  * * *

  Some fifteen years earlier, Lord Landry’s father, a brilliant nobleman noted for his iconoclastic tendencies, had sold his ancestral pile on Saville Row to a wealthy paper manufacturer and employed one Mr. Basevi to build him a handsome Greco-Roman mansion on Belgrave Square. If, on completion, he found Mr. Basevi’s attics a bit too ornate and the porch a trifle pompous for his taste, he felt himself more than compensated by the particularly handsome interior with the many modern conveniences upon which he had insisted. His French chef had gone into raptures over the built-in Bodley range, the maids adored the modern plumbing, and even the lofty butler, Quelbream, was forced to concede the cellars adequate to hold his master’s store of fine wine. Of course, Quelbream had been a more tolerant man fifteen years previous to the arrival of Frances Atherton and Nick Vent on his doorstep this moonless night. He had never approved of Mr. Vent, and looked at the groom with magnificent impassivity, while ignoring Frances entirely.

  “Lord Landry,” pronounced Quelbream, “is not at home.” The yellow-lit windows and the bright ring of laughter from within belied Quelbream’s words. Lord Landry was at home, but not to unknown females.

  “As it happens,” said Frances, with more confidence than she felt, “I have no wish to see Lord Landry. Would you be so kind as to summon Mr. Richard Rivington?”

  Quelbream’s nose tilted until it was nearly at right angles to the floor; he was much too dignified to allow a gleam of triumph to show in his eye as he said, “Mr. Richard Rivington is not within.”

  This statement at least had the virtue of being true. Quelbream noted with dismal satisfaction that he had given the encroaching young woman pause; but Nick Vent, like the unabashed plebeian he was, began an immediate protest, saying that Quelbream was a dried-up snakebait and he’d better let the young lady in or lay no blame tomorrow on Nicholas Vent when Landry gently nailed his hide to the cellar door. Quelbream made only a barely audible sniff. He knew himself to be on solid footing. Landry maintained a bachelor suite several blocks to the east where he withdrew when the extended visits of his female relations rendered his mansion an excessively nice atmosphere. At this apartment, it was said, Quelbream was happy to have no personal knowledge of such irregular goings on; his lordship might, should the mood suit him, see fit to receive a member of his enormous flock of female admirers. However, they did not press their claims on him at his family home. Lord Landry might be renowned for the sweetness of his temper, but there was a streak of steel beneath that brooked no uninvited familiarities. Vent was much in his young master’s confidence, but Quel
bream was smugly certain this time that the young ape had overstepped his bounds.

  Vent was struggling with the unacceptable choices of leaving Frances outside while he fetched Landry, or napping Quelbream on the honker, when he saw at the far end of the foyer His Lordship’s cousin, Sir Giles, take a step from the Egyptian room. Sir Giles was one of the closest of what he affectionately referred to as “His Lordship’s cronies,” so he hailed him by name, adding, “Could you give us a hand, guv?”

  Sir Giles, at least two sheets of the proverbial three sheets to the wind, spun about uncertainly and peered searchingly down the length of the foyer. “Nick?” he said questioningly, then, “Nick! Hello, little man. What’s toward?”

  An intimate knowledge of Landry’s intelligent if rakish young cousin ensured that Vent would know the quickest way to attract that young gentleman’s somewhat erratic attention. “I’ve got a young woman here I’m trying to bring to Landry, but Quelbream won’t let me in.”

  “A woman? Hell you say!” said Giles, sufficiently interested to begin the journey down the foyer in their direction. “Is she pretty?”

  “I venture to say, sir, a beauty.”

  “Is she, by God? Quelbream, you chicken-necked fossil, clear the way! Here’s David made another smash at the theater, and you cut up stiff about Vent’s damsel,” said Sir Giles amiably. He stopped, dismay spreading across his features as he recognized Frances. “Good God—Miss Atherton!”

  It was a prologue that under any other circumstances might have set Frances writhing with embarrassment, but urgency has a single mind. “Please, Sir Giles, would you tell Richard Rivington that I’d like to speak with him?”

  “I’ve already informed this”—Quelbream paused, majestically searching for Frances’ category—“this young individual that Mr. Rivington is not within.”