Love’s a Stage Read online

  It came as no surprise fifteen minutes later when the name Scott announced as having won the part was not her own; it went to Theresa Sea, as he had predicted earlier.

  There was a chattering commotion. A spindle-legged buck dressed with foppish extravagance left his seat in the pit and came to give Theresa a congratulatory toss in the air. Disappointed hopefuls donned redingotes and bonnets, leaving the stage in groups of twos and threes. Taking what she prayed was an inconspicuous glance at the pit, Frances saw no Kennan. She was careful to take no interest in the fact that Lord Landry was no longer there.

  She took as much time as she dared putting on her cape, tying the ribbons of her new pink and pine-green Breath o’ Life bonnet, watching the pit, hoping that Kennan would come. Soon though, even the group in the pit began to break up, its occupants drifting away chatting. It was apparent that Kennan was not coming to the theater today.

  Theresa, standing with her waist cuddled by her skinny beau, finished a consultation with Charles Scott, who strode off to a portable desk in the opposite wing. A woolly-haired boy in his early teens appeared with a cup of steaming coffee. Scott flipped the boy a coin and stood sipping at the contents of the cup while thumbing moodily through the small mountain of papers strewn about on his desk. Hard coffee smell mixed with the odor of fresh wood shavings that were falling beneath the saw of a stage carpenter as Frances approached Scott.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Scott,” said Frances, at once wishing that she thought of another way than that prissily correct formality to begin the conversation. “I know that I didn’t read well this afternoon, but I’m positive that there must be something that I could do in your company. I’ve had experience in the theater . . .”

  “My eye and Betty Martin!” flashed Scott, recognizing the lie. “Frankly, I don’t get the feeling that you’ve had experience at much of anything—you’ve been looking around like a barn mouse in a cat’s nest. Take my advice and go home to your mama.”

  Frances indulged in some very unchristian thoughts about her attitude toward clever men before saying, “I would be happy for even a tiny part.” She held up her thumb and forefinger close together, demonstrating the insignificance of the role she had in mind.

  “Miss Brightcastle,” Scott whispered in an attitude of lending a helpful hint, “even a tiny part takes talent. In the bit you chose, Juliet was dying; you read it as though she were already a ten-hour corpse.”

  Frances bore the snub as well as she was able. “Perhaps you could use someone to do mending? I would be willing to work for very little money.”

  “This city reeks with chits who are willing to do mending for very little money. I can’t help you.”

  Scott turned from her to his cup and his pile of papers. While Frances might be Dogged Determination incarnate, she could recognize a lost cause when she saw one. Knowing herself to be dismissed, she turned to leave, and bumped suddenly and distressingly into Lord Landry. Her recall was quick and clumsy; she bounced back against Scott’s arm and heard him swear as hot coffee splashed on his hand.

  “Miss Brightcastle,” said Lord Landry, laying an emphasis on her surname that told her clearly that he had not forgotten she had given him a different one not two days earlier. His knowing eyes enfolded her in their warm green glow. “How charming to stumble into you again.”

  Frances saw Scott glance at her with some surprise and a dawning interest. He looked toward Landry to study the famous playwright’s expression with academic curiosity. Then Scott said:

  “Friend of yours, Landry?”

  A slow, sensual smile curled on Lord Landry’s lips. His gaze never left Frances’ face. “She might be,” his voice was gentle, “if she wanted.”

  Fresh hot color swam to Miss Atherton’s cheeks. She almost choked on her fury, and when the words did come, they tumbled out in shaky haste. “It was bad enough that you made that offer to me in private! It’s nothing short of infamous that you should repeat it in public!”

  Frances could see that her words had contained a misleading emphasis when Scott responded with barely lifted brows and drawled:

  “Oh, I’m deaf, don’t worry; just like talking to a peach pit.” He gave Frances’ shoulder a squeeze with one wide, raw-boned hand. “You didn’t tell me you were Lord Landry’s friend, Miss Brightcastle. Naturally, that changes your situation.”

  “I am not Lord Landry’s friend!” declared Frances, her tone arctic. She turned on Landry, glaring at him as his iniquities massed in her mind like charging cavalrymen. And the first thought to break into words was:

  “You told me your name was David!”

  “My first name,” acknowledged Landry, with a little smile. “I didn’t suppose that knowing my title would have made a difference to you. Would it have?”

  Frances made an about-face and marched from the theater without a word.

  Chapter Four

  A cold rain battered London from dirty gray skies and pedestrians took to their heels, seeking shelter in street-side shops. But Frances was so angry when she left the Drury Lane Theatre that she walked more than half a block before she realized that she was in the midst of a spring downpour. The shops were brimming with a rough company of porters, draggle-tailed vendors, and crossing sweepers. After looking in vain for a hack or a sedan chair that might be rented, Frances decided regretfully that she would have to walk home through the wet. In the rainstorm, a beggar may find himself the most envied man on the street, be he the possessor of a well-oiled umbrella, and Frances could only admire the perspicacity of those fellow citizens who had thought to equip themselves thus when they had ventured from their homes earlier that day. As she walked, Frances had to jockey constantly to stay in the middle of the pavement. The rain gutters on the roof overhung the walkway, sending a sheeting waterfall onto anyone walking too near the walls; near the street one risked stepping into the greasy rainbow-colored filth that was puddling up from the overflowing open sewers.

  By the time Frances had reached Aunt Sophie’s building, her pine velvet carriage dress was sticky wet and clung like a moist sheet, and the cardboard lining under her bonnet brim hung down, hound-ear style. Mme. Dominique had assured her that the bonnet’s plume was “genuine ostrich”; maybe so, but it stank like a damp chicken and its pink dye had bled a messy smear on the bonnet’s green satin trim.

  Stepping gratefully into the dry hallway, she was forced by a sneeze to take refuge in her soggy linen handkerchief. Not looking down, she almost tripped over a long braided rope that stretched from the stairfoot through the open door of Mr. Rivington’s apartment. An abrupt, friendly voice told Frances, “Watch yourself there!”

  The speaker of this kindly warning was crouched on the brown hall carpet beside a tangle of rope bigger than a bushel basket. He was a tall man with narrow shoulders and a bristle of wiry graying hair sprouting from his weather-beaten pate and, unfashionably, his upper lip. Swathed neck to top boots in a massive gray cape, he gave the appearance of a big barn spider hunched in exhaustion over a newly mummified fly.

  Concern that her nose might be running prevented Frances from immediately lowering her handkerchief so her voice was rather muffled, if perfectly civil, as she said:

  “Thank you, sir! I’m afraid I wasn’t watching where I stepped.”

  “And no wonder,” offered the barn spider, glaring at her with gruffly paternal solicitude, “with that hat dangling in your eyes.” He stood and bellowed toward the open door of Mr. Rivington’s apartment. “Richard! Have you got a blanket? There’s a poor lass here, and if she were any wetter, she’d have to have gills!”

  Rivington appeared in his doorway to look Frances over with astonished empathy. “My dear girl, you’re soaked to the skin! You don’t want to go upstairs; Henrietta left about half an hour ago to take a basket of old shoes to the cobbler for heel-piecing, and Mr. Pike, the landlord, is upstairs with a sweep doing the chimneys. There won’t be a fire in the place. Come into my parlor and warm up.”


  The disheartening prospect of changing her sodden garments in front of a cold hearth from which a chimney sweep might burst at any minute was enough to cause Frances to make only the most token protest as Richard Rivington propelled her into his parlor, established her in a winged armchair before the fire, and cocooned her in a blanket of Irish frizz. Loose snakes of steam began to rise from Frances’ hem as she apologetically pointed out to Mr. Rivington that she was dripping on his carpet.

  Rivington gave Frances an ironic grin and denied caring about the carpet, and indeed, its condition lent color to his assurance. The rug’s faded red-and-blue pattern bore the scars of being repeatedly hacked by someone who hadn’t troubled to remove his spurs after riding. The whole parlor, in fact, was in a state of cheerful disarray and more nearly resembled a tack room. A bureau against the inner wall was littered with and surrounded by knotted ropes, grapnels, telescopes, sextants, and a wonderful variety of brass tools. The opposite wall was covered with a vast bookcase stuffed with a library of volumes that reflected the eclectic taste of their owner. The History of Aerostation rubbed shoulders with a cheaply bound copy of Fanny Hill. Steam Power Practicum suffered in offended silence beside Ben Varney’s Body Verse.

  The man in the gray cape had followed Frances and Rivington inside, and as Rivington began to unlace Frances’ mud-limp kid boots, the man made the comment that Richard was getting so many fillies that there was no keeping track of them, and asked with vague interest if he’d met Miss Atherton before.

  Frances couldn’t detect the slightest trace of embarrassment in Rivington’s face as he looked over his shoulder and told the man, “She’s not mine—hand me that towel, will you please, sir.” Rivington accepted the huckaback towel from the man and started to rub Frances’ feet. “Frances, your toes are like ice! Oh, and this is my esteemed sire.” He gestured behind him with the towel. “No one uses his real name—he goes by Captain Zephyr. A little conceit of his.”

  Rivington’s lack of filial deference seemed to please rather than annoy his father. Zephyr gave his son a playful nudge with the toe of one boot and smiled in the way of a besotted parent who finds a choice witticism in any chance utterance of his offspring. Captain Zephyr’s smile widened as Frances exclaimed:

  “Not The Captain Zephyr?”

  Captain Zephyr acknowledged it.

  “The Captain Zephyr who ascended eight thousand feet in a gas balloon at Frankfurt-am-Main?” asked Frances with awe.

  Again, Captain Zephyr nodded, looking at Frances in a particularly approving fashion.

  “The most daring of all British aeronauts?”

  Captain Zephyr beamed at Frances, modestly disclaimed being the most daring, and asked her if she was a student of aeronautics.

  “No, sir, I have only a small understanding of what I know to be a complex subject, but my elder brother, Charles, takes a great interest in all branches of the science, and before he left for the mission in North Africa he used to talk of it for hours at a stretch! Once, when Charles was at Oxford, he saw you make an ascension from Hyde Park and he said ever after that it was one of the high points of his education.” Since Frances had forgotten that the context of her brother’s remark had been a condemnation of the quality of university instruction, and not in praise of the ascension, she had been able to speak with what Captain Zephyr found the most satisfying enthusiasm. Frances continued: “And the ropes in the hallway, sir. Are they—could they be the ropes from your balloon?”

  The tone of Frances’ voice injected a respect for the ropes that, if it didn’t elevate them to a holy relic, at least placed them on par with the Stone of Scone. Captain Zephyr had by now decided that Frances was the most charming and intelligent of the many young women he had seen in his very attractive son’s company.

  “They are!” confirmed Zephyr. “Last time I went up with Richard here and my nephew, Giles, we took a rip in the balloon fabric and were forced down in a pigpen.”

  “Enveloping a herd of squealing porkers,” added Rivington with a grin. “If you think the rope’s a shambles, you ought to have seen our balloon! What a way to travel!”

  Captain’s Zephyr’s right eyebrow quirked into a right angle at the heretical tenor of this opinion, but his voice was perfectly affectionate as he advised his son not to be an impudent chaw-bacon. “In twenty years, Miss Atherton,” Captain Zephyr informed her, “balloons will change the way we live. On the corners where you see hackney carriages for hire, there will be balloon stands, ready to ferry people wherever they wish. And at a nominal sum—nominal, Miss Atherton! No need to worry any longer about carriages overturning, or a horse with a strained tendon. No more jolting coach rides over rutted roads! The smoothness of balloon travel is unimaginable. Tell me, Miss Atherton, have you been up in one? No? We’ll take you then!”

  However thrilled Frances might be by the Romance of Balloons, those who ascended in them were considered the most dashing and reckless of adventurers. Such were the dangers that one heard of whole balloons and their crews vanishing forever in some fearful accident. Therefore, Frances was more alarmed than gratified by Captain Zephyr’s stern invitation and was grateful that Mr. Rivington created a diversion by loosening her bonnet and subjecting its waterlogged and misshapen form to a critical inspection.

  “My new Breath o’ Life bonnet,” gasped Frances.

  “I don’t know much about ladies’ hats,” said Rivington doubtfully, “but it looks to me like whatever breath of life it did have has been extinguished. Shall I toss it out?”

  “Yes!” declared Frances, fervently. “I never want to see it again. I’m convinced it made me look too . . . too young ladyish today. What I needed was the Jezebel, or a Bonnet à la Borgia.”

  However limited might be his knowledge of feminine apparel, Rivington was nevertheless able to interpret this to mean that Frances’ trip to the Lane had not met with success. “You didn’t get a part? I’m sorry! Did you see Kennan?”

  Frances shook her head and stretched her bare toes closer to the fire. “He wasn’t there . . .” she said, wiggling her toes. “But I saw your cousin.”

  “Which? David? I thought he was in Brighton this week, with the Prince.”

  “Oh, no,” interpolated Captain Zephyr, helpfully. “The Prince’s party came back yesterday. I saw David at Sefton’s rout last night—the young dog! Damned if Caroline Lamb wasn’t hanging on his arm, too. There’s a connection I wouldn’t care to encourage! That’s a gal who don’t have a notion how to manage an affair of the heart, and you know how crazy women get over David. I remember last year when that Russian princess chained herself to his bed! Took us half the night to chop her free.” He stopped, noticing the pink band that was beginning to spread across Frances’ satin-skinned cheeks. The healthy glow pleased him immensely, since he mistook its cause, and he said, “There you go, young’un! A spot before the fire will take the trick every time. The color’s begun to return to your face! What’s this Richard says about not getting a part? Are you an actress?”

  “Not exactly, sir, but I would have liked to join the company at Drury Lane. I was quickly shown the error of my pretension! I don’t even look like an actress, and as for being able to act, why, I had no more idea of how to go about it than a cat raising puppies. I looked precisely what I was: an amateur and an outsider.”

  Having disposed of her bonnet, Rivington came to stand before the hearth; he swung the towel gently as he encompassed Frances in a speculative gaze. “You might,” he suggested carefully, gauging her response, “ask David to help you. He can get what he likes at the Lane and you can depend on him not to interfere with your ulterior plans. He’s a natural for noninvolvement.”

  His words weren’t phrased as a warning. Was it his expression that made them seem like one? Was Rivington trying to tell her that whatever his cousin offered her, it wouldn’t be his heart? Perhaps Mr. Rivington felt that she needed to be cautioned but he was quite, quite wrong. There was no danger, Miss Atherton told herself,
that she would fall in love with the shameless Lord Landry!

  “There are no circumstances under which I shall request or require Lord Landry’s aid,” said Frances firmly. “No matter how influential he may be!” she added, remembering Lord Landry’s hateful inference that her knowledge of his title might cause her to repent her initial rejection of his advances. “I shall find some other way.”

  Nearly a week passed before Frances was able to continue her pursuit of Edward Kennan. Her sneeze became a cough, and the cough heralded the arrival of a sore throat. Miss Sophie’s maid, Henrietta, an ardent adherent to such time-tested maxims as “Feed a Cold” and “Cold in Head, Stay in Bed,” gave Frances three slices of baked beef rump with mincemeat fritters, peas in cream sauce, a compote of Siberian crab, and a currant tart, and encouraged her to take a nap that afternoon. When Miss Isles returned later that afternoon, she took one look at the feverish countenance of her sleeping niece, and, as she had already taken that young lady’s measure, Miss Isles seized her chance to stow every item of Frances’ clothing in the satinwood-veneered spare wardrobe, lock the door, and remove the key to some mysterious location that she refused to divulge to Frances. Thus persuaded, Frances had no choice but to remain abed, using up stacks of Aunt Sophie’s tatting-edged handkerchiefs, writing a long and fictitious account of her activities to her mother and a longer yet and more truthful account to her brother Joe, and trying in vain to teach Mr. Bilge to say “pretty boy” and “you’re a sweetie.”