Page 12 of The Lady Plays with Fire

If he hadn’t been so absorbed in his reading, their vacant smiles—at the sheep, at the occasional bumpkin leaning against a stile, at one another—would have set his teeth on edge.

“Have you seen this?” he demanded, slapping the back of his hand against the page open before him.

At the noise, Simon Keynes started, sending the tip of his pen juddering across the letterbook in which he had been recording Graham’s correspondence. He was seated at a delicate Chippendale table beneath the nearer of the two windows, and when he turned toward Graham, the light behind him made his scalp gleam through the wisps of gray-brown hair that still clung to his crown. “I beg your pardon, my lord. To what do you refer?”

“Miss on Scene’s new review.” He gestured with the latest issue of the Magazine for Misses.

That very morning, the housekeeper, Mrs. Beatty, had overheard a gaggle of housemaids chattering over something other than their work, swatted each of them with the rolled-up periodical when it had been produced, and then been on her way to dispose of the trash in the nearest fire when Graham had happened upon her and relieved her of the duty.

“In Mrs. Goode’s Guide to Misconduct?” Keynes pushed his spectacles a fraction of an inch higher on his nose; if Graham hadn’t known better, he would have suspected his secretary of attempting to hide a smirk. “No, my lord. I haven’t had the pleasure.”

Graham wasn’t exactly sure that reading the review had been pleasurable—or rather, he was quite sure it wouldn’t have been, if he were not the kind of man who took occasional delight in others’ misfortunes.

For the first time in his life, he had been glad not to be Shakespeare.

Rising, he stepped across to Keynes and laid the open magazine atop the letterbook, jabbing at the page with his forefinger. “Find out who wrote this.”

Keynes glanced upward and askance, sighed as he laid aside his pen, but did not offer any other protest. As unpleasant tasks went, Graham had demanded worse. “Any leads as to the reviewer’s identity, my lord?”

“Judging from both the harshness of the review and the timing of its publication, it would have to be someone who was in the audience for opening night.”

One of, oh, three thousand or so people, then.

Mentally, Graham scanned the crowds, wondering which of those who had been present wielded such a sharp pen. A grande dame, perhaps, someone with a lifetime’s practice in issuing cuts both direct and indirect. Or more likely, a man, despite the alias. Periodical work wasn’t terribly lucrative, but if a writer cobbled together enough bits and pieces, he might keep his creditors at bay, eking out a sort of living in some frigid garret, with the manuscript of his magnum opus stuffed beneath his lumpy bed. Few writers in such a position would turn down an opportunity to write for a popular magazine.

“Personally, I’ve come to doubt whether it’s written by a young lady,” Graham added, “regardless of the magazine’s claims to be written by, as well as for, misses.”

“You don’t think a young woman would produce such a scathing review?”

“Heaven knows they’ve opinions enough,” Graham admitted, “and saucy tongues eager to share them. But they lack the necessary . . . experience, I suppose, is the kindest way of putting it.” Not that he generally concerned himself overmuch with kindness. “They have too little knowledge of the world.” Sheltered and shielded, kept from education, they could hardly be expected to judge well. “Now, if I had sisters—”

Keynes, who had been attempting to read the review as instructed, darted another glance in his direction, this one pointedly delivered over the top rim of his spectacles.

Graham knew that look, knew it was meant to conjure a memory. And it did, though perhaps not the memory Keynes intended. Graham thought of the enormous family portrait in oils that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room at Castle Dunstane and then turned his head, wishing he could avert his mind’s eye as easily. But the subjects followed him. A husband and wife, stiff, unsmiling, posed with four of their children: the eldest, a boy of eight or nine; a babe in arms; and between their ages, standing beside their mother’s chair, two little girls. He had no recollection of those towheaded girls, save the painting. They had died that very winter, snatched away by a ruthless fever that had, for reasons unknown, spared their baby brother—spared him.

“Very well,” he snapped at Keynes, who had returned his attention to the review. “I had sisters.”

And if they had lived, and if he would have had some say in the management of their education, he chose to believe they would have been rational creatures, not like the silly things who read . . .

At that moment, Keynes closed the magazine. The cover’s claim that the pages within would promote rational conduct and improve wisdom among young persons of the fair sex presented themselves to Graham’s eyes. Before he could snarl over the unfortunate convergence of his thoughts and those of Mrs. Goode, whoever she might be, Keynes held the magazine out to him and said, “I presume Ransom Blackadder will have something to say in response?”

Graham shifted his gaze to the gray London scene outside the window. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself? He’d written a whole play to squelch presumptuous reviewers—and what could be more presumptuous than this?

“Though it would seem from the latest invoices to cross my desk that The Poison Pen is already in rehearsal,” Keynes continued, laying aside the magazine when Graham made no move to take it from him.

“Well, it’s hardly unheard of for a playwright to make an eleventh-hour revision to a script,” Graham answered gruffly, though at the moment, he wasn’t sure what form that revision ought to take. “But the review—did anything strike you as peculiar? A turn of phrase, for example. Something you could use to figure out who writes the blasted column?”

“To be quite honest, my lord . . .” Here Keynes paused to dip his pen and resumed his recording of the day’s correspondence in the letterbook. “I thought it sounded not unlike something you would say.”

Graham had seen the performance of Othello twice through in its entirety since opening night and found it improved each time from what it had been at first. Nevertheless, like Miss on Scene, he still judged Mrs. Siddons ill-cast in the role of Desdemona, far better suited to the power and determination of a Lady Macbeth or a Queen Catherine—or even the philosophizing indecision of Hamlet, a part she had performed many times, though always away from London.

Miss on Scene’s idea of an angry Desdemona struck him as too simple, however. Too primitive. But he agreed that the production as a whole had lacked some spark. Each subsequent viewing, he had felt the absence of something, something missing from the performances or the costumes. Something missing . . .

“Do you still happen to have Mrs. Hayes’s note to hand, Keynes?” he asked, peering over the man’s shoulder at his work.

“Mrs. Hayes? Mrs. Hayes . . .” Once more, Keynes laid aside his quill. He ran a finger swiftly down a column of names, then turned back a page, to those letters received earlier in the week, and began again at the top. “Ah. Here we are.” He paused, and his fingertip tracked across a single entry. “Oh, yes. The unfortunate mix-up with your box at Covent Garden.” With his other hand, he tugged off his spectacles and looked at Graham. “I’m afraid not, my lord. It did not seem to be a matter of great importance, so once I recorded its receipt, I disposed of it.”

Julia had written that note. Graham had been sure of it—and not just because the handwriting had obviously not belonged to an elderly woman. If Keynes had not been looming over his desk as he’d perused it, he might have given in to the temptation to trace the elegant swoop of the in the salutation. Curved and pretty, yet bold—just like Miss Addison.