Page 3 of The Lady Plays with Fire

With automatic movements, he drew a stack of clean foolscap from a drawer and fished a pencil from a tarnished silver tray, touching the tip to his tongue. Ransom Blackadder was going to have to teach Mrs. Goode’s Misses a lesson. The author of that ridiculous review would soon understand the misery that befell a young lady foolish enough to play with fire.

Chapter 1

London, September 1810

As the carriage crept along crowded West End streets, Julia Addison’s anticipation grew, until the butterflies dancing and fluttering inside her might have been mistaken for a herd of dashing, leaping stags. Tonight marked the official start of her second London Season.

But it wasn’t a ball or a rout or a dinner party that had set her nineteen-year-old heart racing. That part of the Season was yet to come, and nothing she, as a lady’s companion, was likely to participate in. What marked the true beginning of the Season in Julia’s mind was not even the opening of Parliament. It was the fresh bill of operas and ballets and, most important of all, plays to be performed each autumn and winter at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, this year to be observed from Mrs. Mildred Hayes’s reserved box on the second tier, overlooking stage left.

Mrs. Hayes sat on the carriage’s forward-facing seat, the tip of her cane planted on the floor between her feet, both hands resting on its polished silver handle, her relaxed body swaying easily with the vehicle’s desultory progress. Her eyes were closed.

Julia marveled that anyone could sleep at a time like this. The noise surrounding them was terrific: the clatter of hooves and harness, the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels over cobblestones; men, women, and children along the pavement hawking goods and services ranging from the practical to the profane; and the shouted oaths of carriage drivers—occasionally including their own.

As she peered out the window, a sedan chair hurried by, easily threading its way through the snarl of traffic. Julia envied its occupant. No matter how burly the men hoisting the poles, Mrs. Hayes could never consent to put her trust in such a contraption. So, they lumbered through the crowded streets in Mrs. Hayes’s old-fashioned barouche, traveling at a snail’s pace, even as the minutes flew by.

They would be late. At half past six, the curtains would rise on the celebrated Mrs. Siddons acting the part of Desdemona in Othello, and Julia might as well be back in the little stone rectory in Oxfordshire, where she had had grown up, for all she would see of it.

No, there! The head of Bow Street, just visible in the distance. If she hopped down now—she wouldn’t even need to signal the driver to stop, they were moving so slowly—she could make it the rest of the way on foot in a matter of moments.

“Settle yourself, my dear. We’ll only be fashionably late.”

Julia had reached for the door handle without realizing it. Now a spasm of guilt drew her primly back into her seat. Of course, Mrs. Hayes couldn’t be expected to walk so far. The staircase to the boxes would be trial enough. And even aside from her rheumatism, such bustle did not suit her notions of either propriety or consequence.

Mrs. Hayes had spoken those words of reassurance without even opening her eyes, Julia realized. The jewel-handled lorgnette Julia had long known to be an unnecessary aid to Mrs. Hayes’s vision, not quite an affectation. But surely she was not possessed of the gift of second sight?

“I do beg your pardon, ma’am.” Julia folded her hands in her lap and refused even to glance toward the window, though the increasing gloom of the carriage’s interior was a telltale sign of the lateness of the hour. “I must learn to curb my impatience.”

A smile carved Mrs. Hayes’s wrinkled cheeks, her round face a pale circle against the leather squabs, rising above her black bombazine gown. “I understand your eagerness—though when I was your age, I fear the audience would have held at least as much of my attention as the actors. Well . . . most of the actors.” A twinkle revealed that her eyes were not as tightly closed as Julia had thought.

Mrs. Hayes, who had been a widow far longer than she had been wife, was rumored to have had an affair with Mr. Garrick, one of the leading actors of her day. Most of the time, Julia found the story impossible to believe. But at the moment—her fancy helped along by the magic of the evening and Mrs. Hayes’s mischievous expression—she wondered whether it might not be true after all.

“One cannot avoid looking at the audience, ma’am,” Julia conceded, try though she might to focus all her attention on the stage. Enormous chandeliers lit the house throughout the performance, and most people—dripping with jewels and swathed in showy silks and sparkling taffetas—attended the theater less to see than to be seen.

“Surely even you will agree that sometimes it is the more interesting show.”

Grudgingly, Julia dipped her chin. “Sometimes.” Not every item on the bill could be equally entertaining.

Though, truth be told, she had never seen a gentleman in the audience who could hold her attention, who made her breath catch and her pulse quicken, like the actors who trod the boards. From the first time she had seen a traveling troupe spout their lines from a makeshift stage on the village green, she had wished for some way to join them—an impossible dream for almost every woman, but most especially the daughter of a clergyman.

The sharp turn onto Bow Street caught her off guard, so absorbed had she been by the image in her mind’s eye: a fantastical vision of herself as a celebrated actress, the audience in her thrall. “Nearly there now,” she said to Mrs. Hayes, who surely knew the route at least as well as Julia.

A moment before, everything had seemed to stand in the way of their pleasure. But now, every lurch brought them closer, as each carriage in line ahead of them disgorged its passengers, and the distance between Julia and the theater doors dwindled, measurable now in mere yards, in feet, in inches.

With her eyes raised to the theater’s grand façade, Julia descended first, the better to assist Mrs. Hayes. She turned back just as Mrs. Hayes appeared in the carriage’s opening, reaching for the cane with one hand and wrapping her other securely around the older woman’s left arm as a liveried footman took her right. Together they helped Mrs. Hayes down the two steps and onto the pavement. Once she had shaken the creases from her skirt and straightened herself, she gestured for her ebony walking stick and Julia restored it to its rightful owner. The usual clickity-clack of its silver tip against the ground was inaudible over the noise of the crowd as they made their way inside.

True to her word, Julia spared no more than a glance for the crush of patrons surrounding them on every side. Once through the doors, they made their careful way up the sweeping staircase to the elegant saloon that ran behind the private boxes, decorated with marble sculptures in the Grecian style and tufted benches upholstered in crimson velvet. Cologne was thick on the air, not quite masking the lingering scent of tobacco, the cheroots the gentlemen had extinguished outside, just a moment or two before. Conversation buffeted them like waves, a greeting here, an exclamation there. The plumes on Mrs. Hayes’s turban nodded to her left and to her right, but she never paused for more than a moment, nearly as eager now as Julia to reach their seats.

Every indication gave her hope that they had not missed the start of the performance, though it must surely be nearing a quarter of seven. Heavy crimson velvet draperies guarded the entrances to the individual boxes, giving the occupants some degree of privacy and muffling the incessant noise from the saloon. A good number of them still stood open, awaiting the occupants’ arrival. As no usher stood nearby to assist, Julia stepped ahead to sweep aside the curtain to their box for Mrs. Hayes.

Curious. The cord that fastened the curtain shut during the play had been secured from the inside. She supposed it had accidentally fallen into place, somehow. She would have to slip her hand around the corner of the door frame to release it.

As her gloved fingertips found the curved metal hook and fumbled to slide the silken loop over it, the curtain was wrenched open by someone unseen, and a strong, warm hand encircled her wrist.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” demanded a man’s voice in an unmistakable, though not unpleasant, Scottish accent.

Against the glare of light from the theater beyond, she could make out little of the man’s appearance beyond the fact that he was tall, with brownish-red hair the color of burnished copper. She was still trying to blink him into focus, and to rein in her clattering pulse, when Mrs. Hayes spoke.

“We are trying to enter our box, good sir,” she said in a firm voice, accompanied by a sharp rap of her cane against the floor. “And I will thank you to unhand my niece.”