Wilde Child EPB

by James, Eloisa

  Joan almost patted his arm again, but he drew back before he could stop himself. She had a sympathetic, nearly regretful, look on her face. “I apologize, Thaddeus. I didn’t know you when I planned my Hamlet. Now that I know you, of course I feel differently.”

  So he did wear that expression.

  “I didn’t realize that you were playacting,” she went on awkwardly, as silence grew between them. “As when your mother described herself playing the role of a duchess. I had no idea. I have always known that I, in particular, must play the part of a lady, and sometimes I have chosen not to comply. I didn’t think of others faced with the same conundrum.”

  “I don’t play the part of a duke’s heir,” Thaddeus stated. “I am a duke’s heir.” He deliberately made his expression mimic Hamlet’s. “I assure you that I haven’t homicidal feelings toward the boy who may usurp my title.”

  “Of course you don’t!” Joan said. She picked up a small glass and poked at her wig, making sure there were no stray tendrils showing. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I shall not need your help choosing a husband. My mother is quite willing to take on the task, now that I’ve promised that I will take it seriously. Which I shall.”

  “When you travel to Lady Ailesbury’s house party,” he said, knowing his voice was wooden.

  She smiled at him as cheerily as if they were discussing the weather. “I also want to get my part of the bargain out of the way. I suggest that you avoid dukes’ daughters; you need someone haughty but not too haughty, if you see what I mean. I’ve given it some thought, and I suggest Lady Lucy Lockett. Her mother was a marquess’s daughter, and her father is an earl. She has excellent connections, admirable composure, and no one will question whether she is fit to be a duchess.”

  For a second, Thaddeus felt as if someone had drenched him in privy water.

  Joan babbled on about the virtues of Lucy—who sounded like an excruciating bore—while Thaddeus ordered himself to show no signs of anger. Ducal composure.

  “Her face is a perfect oval,” Joan told him. “She’s very dainty, if you know what I mean. I expect you can put your hands around her waist.”

  Thaddeus knew exactly what Joan meant: no picnics for him. No ants, no rolling in the grass, no vengeful goats. One heir and a spare, because his dainty wife wouldn’t want to spoil her figure.

  Perfect. Lovely Lucy.

  “And,” Joan wound up with a brilliant smile, “your mother will like her. Lucy often wears pink.” She blinked. Her smile faltered.

  Thaddeus clenched his teeth and kept his composure by counting to ten. It seemed that the woman he loved had suddenly remembered that people weren’t chess pieces to be moved about the board and matched due to superficial traits such as birth and clothing.

  The fact that he himself had declared an intention to marry a duke’s daughter was of no consequence. He’d been a fool.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at her as they descended from the carriage, which had drawn up behind the theater. “Good luck with the performance tonight,” he said, with a curt nod. It would never do to bow to an actor, a male actor, in case anyone was watching.

  Otis was waiting at the theater door, so Thaddeus got back into the carriage without another word.

  The door closed and he took a deep breath. He was about to rap on the ceiling and tell the coachman to take him around to the front of the building, when the door swung open. His head jerked up, but it wasn’t his groom.

  “Vanity and pride are not inherited along with a title!” Joan flashed. Then she slammed the door shut.

  Thaddeus’s jaw tightened, and he could feel a nerve ticking in his jaw. He banged on the roof. “Around the front.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the coachman shouted.

  The coach lurched slightly as his groom jumped onto the back, and the horses began clopping over the cobblestones. The carriage looked as if a trunk had exploded in it. Thaddeus began picking up her garments and folding them.

  Stockings, light as air and marked with clocks on the side. Delicate straw-colored shoes, curiously embroidered. A white and gold fichu, subtly anointed with fresh scent that made his heartbeat speed up because he would always associate elderflower with Joan. A tall wig, though not large for a woman.

  By the time the carriage rounded the front of the theater, he had Joan’s belongings folded on the opposite seat or tucked in the traveling case. He stepped down to the street and paused. The Wilmslow theater wasn’t what he had imagined.

  He had been to the great London theaters throughout his life. He was particularly fond of the Haymarket Theatre. Like many others, he would arrive by boat on the Thames, escorting his mother up the steps and into the elegant stone building. He would stroll into the theater, nodding to gentlemen, most of whom he would recognize, feeling every inch a future duke. His knee buckles were adorned with rubies, if not diamonds. His frock coat was elegant; his silk waistcoat likely trimmed with gold.

  He would join his fellow noblemen, who were ushered to the upper regions via private doors, while apprentices crowded the pit just below the stage.

  Damn it, the cursed memory made him feel as if he had donned a costume and strolled through the Haymarket Theatre as an actor playing a duke. And his mother on his arm, playing the duchess.

  But this was no London stage.

  With a sinking feeling, Thaddeus realized that Joan’s sensitive, melancholy prince would tread the boards—of a barn. The people crowding in the entrance, throwing ha’pennies in the general direction of the man collecting fees, were not wearing diamond buckles.

  Some of them were obviously inebriated, and since large flagons of fortified ale were being sold at the door, others soon would be. No wonder Wooty was worried about flying vegetables.

  The ale sellers weren’t the only people at work; boys were pushing their way through the unruly crowd, likely collecting purses as they went, and women with garish lip color were plying their trade as well, ushering men around the side of the barn.

  Unhurriedly, Thaddeus walked forward, flanked by two grooms who sprang from the carriage. He glanced over his shoulder at the coachman. “Don’t loosen the harnesses, if you please. The grooms can stay with you.”

  The man nodded, his eyes scanning the unruly crowd.

  A brightly painted woman stepped into Thaddeus’s path. “Time and enough to go round behind, sir,” she said, jerking her head toward the side. “You smell that good.” She leaned in and took a loud sniff.

  “Thank you, but no,” Thaddeus replied, giving her a coin.

  The crowd pulled back as he approached the door, watching him, not silently but with cheerful interest. Comments flew among them, comparing him to a local squire, and then rightly guessing that he must be a swell coming from Lindow.

  “One of them at the castle,” he heard distinctly. “Not a Wilde, though. Them Wilde eyebrows is unmistakable.”

  “Didn’t you see the coach?” another asked. “That’s a Lindow coach. I seen the picture on the door.”

  Thaddeus handed over a ha’penny coin.

  “All standing tonight. Only seating’s on the stage,” the doorkeeper told him. “Additional sixpence for a stool.”

  Thaddeus gave him sixpence.

  “Haven’t seen anyone else wanting to pay,” the man said. “Don’t have the missus with you? You might be on your own to the side of the stage, but you’ll blend in, I’d wager. The play is about kings, as I heard.”

  “I heard the same,” Thaddeus said amiably.

  “I hope there’s something to keep the crowd happy,” the man confided, dropping the money into a leather bag tied with strong cord to his belt. “Last thing I want is my barn burning down, as has happened in other places when the play doesn’t please.”

  “The play is excellent,” Thaddeus said, raising his voice so that all behind him could hear. “It has everything: tragedy, deaths, disclosures, ghosts, love and despair, illusion and disguise.”

  “Hope you�
��re right,” the doorkeeper said, turning to holler, “Jehoshaphat, get yourself over here. Get a stool and take the gentleman up on the stage.”

  An eight- or nine-year-old boy led Thaddeus to the back of the barn where a crudely built stage jutted at waist height. Thaddeus put a hand on the boards and leapt up.

  “Are you looking forward to the play?” Thaddeus inquired, as Jehoshaphat fetched a stool.

  “I heard there’s a king,” the boy said. “I’m named after a king. And swords! I like swords. Plus, there’s juggling in between every scene, not just the acts.” He hopped down from the stage and disappeared into the crowd milling about in front of the stage.

  Thaddeus positioned his stool off to the side, where the wings would be in a London theater, close enough so that he could snatch Joan from the stage if need be, but not awkwardly in the way of the action.

  He sank onto the stool. He was used to being alone, seated above the crowd. Walking through the world in a duke’s costume. He barely suppressed a grimace.

  Rather than survey the crowd—many members of whom showed a ready willingness to engage in fisticuffs if they took affront—he sent those closest a silent warning that had them turning their backs, and then stared across the stage at the barn wall.

  He didn’t have to live in costume. He was no Hamlet.

  Yet somehow he had become Hamlet: emotional, uncontrolled, desperate.

  His reaction felt primitive and entirely ungentlemanly. No subtleties. He wanted—he wanted her. Joan. No Lucy Lockett for him.

  He would have her, his unladylike, dramatic, illegitimate . . . love.

  He turned the statement over in his head until he realized that reason played no part in it. He had fallen, not for feminine wiles, but for something altogether more powerful and honest: a woman who made him laugh, who made his heart pound with a mere glance, who seduced him with a spoonful of rose jelly.

  He was still mulling over what in the hell had happened to him when Jehoshaphat came back with two more stools, and a couple in tow. They ponderously mounted steps to the stage that he hadn’t noticed.

  “Mrs. Meadowsweet,” the lady told him, when he rose and bowed.

  She had a faint resemblance to a gladiator: well fed and possessed of a remarkable breastplate. “Mr. Meadowsweet and I were just married this morning, so we thought we’d have a bit of fun to celebrate. I told Mr. Meadowsweet that I wouldn’t tolerate being down among the groundlings.” She sat down heavily, teetered, and managed to keep her balance on the stool.

  “Mrs. Meadowsweet is worth three times as many sixpences,” her husband announced. He bowed. “Mr. Meadowsweet, at your service.”

  Thaddeus bowed. “Lord Greywick.”

  Mrs. Meadowsweet turned to her husband. “A real lord! Now aren’t you glad that we chose the theater over a trout stream? You can see trout any day of the week!”

  Before her husband affirmed the paucity of lords as opposed to fish, an actor sprang out from the curtain at the back of the stage and blew a trumpet, signaling the beginning of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

  Joan’s Hamlet paced across the stage, looking like a melancholy warrior, ready to draw his rapier and stab someone in the heart. The crowd didn’t seem too impressed, but they liked the Ghost and squealed every time he boomed his famous line, Remember me.

  Thaddeus watched Mr. Wooty, positioned directly across from him on a prompter’s stool, glance repeatedly at the crowd. It didn’t take theatrical experience to realize that the crowd wasn’t following Hamlet’s convoluted speeches and didn’t understand much of what was going on.

  The biggest cheering came for the juggler who followed the first two scenes. Thaddeus watched him for a moment before he nodded to the Meadowsweets, rose, and walked off the back of the stage to the area where the actors were entering and exiting.

  Mr. Wooty was coaching Otis in his lines, while a laughing Madeline dusted some rouge on his cheeks.

  Joan was practicing yanking her sword from its hilt. She jerked her head up as he walked over and to his enormous pleasure, her eyes lit up. “Thaddeus!”

  He bowed. “Hamlet.”

  He turned to Mr. Wooty. “It’s not working,” he said bluntly.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” Mr. Wooty admitted. “I wouldn’t have, but we had to rehearse for Lindow, and I didn’t want to lose a day rehearsing a different play.”

  “Do it as a comedy,” Thaddeus said bluntly.

  “What?”

  Thaddeus turned to Joan and Otis. “Do it the way you played for the children. Make it funny. The audience will love it.”

  “But the other actors—” Joan protested.

  “They’d just as soon not be plastered with tomatoes,” Mr. Wooty said. “But I’ve never heard of a funny Hamlet. Now this particular Ophelia . . . certainly. Last night I laughed myself into stitches, watching her pull flowers off her hat and offer them to the queen.”

  Joan was shaking her head, so Thaddeus took a step closer. “You’re funny, Joan. The funniest person I know. Everyone laughs around you.”

  “It’s Hamlet,” she whispered. “A classic of English—”

  “A boring play about a fretful prince,” he interrupted her. “All these people paid for a night’s entertainment, and you can give them that, Joan. Just play the Hamlet who gazed at the alligator head.”

  “I don’t think I can,” she said, winding her hands together.

  “I know you can.”

  “I agree,” Otis said. “Look, I’m about to go in there and have my big scene where I give you back my love letters, right?”

  “First, your father tells you to give back the letters,” Joan told him.

  “I knew that!” Otis said, making a quick recovery. “Anyway, as soon as I walk out, they’ll begin laughing. Just play along.”

  “I know that you wanted to play a serious part,” Thaddeus told her. “I’m sorry, Joan. I’ll arrange for you to play Hamlet in London, if you wish.”

  “God, no!” she cried. Her face expressed utter conviction.

  Thaddeus had to stop himself from kissing her.

  “More lip color,” Otis said to Madeline. “More rouge too. And can you throw a few more flowers onto my hat?”

  Up on the stage, the juggler caught his balls, blew a kiss to the crowd, and jumped off the back. Thaddeus made his way to his stool, where Mrs. Meadowsweet leaned toward him. “We’ve been discussing you,” she announced. “Did you write this play?”

  “No, I did not,” he answered.

  She looked relieved. “Mr. Meadowsweet feels it’s right rubbish and not worth the money.”

  Her husband muttered something that sounded like, “A trout stream is free.”

  “The play will get better,” Thaddeus promised.

  “Was that ghost the king who’s dead?” Mrs. Meadowsweet asked.

  Thaddeus nodded. “Thus he’s a ghost.”

  “Twisty,” she said. “I expect the queen’s new husband killed him. He looks a fair rotter, like my second, as died last year. Not that Mr. Meadowsweet killed him, of course.”

  Mr. Meadowsweet put on a stern look. “I certainly did not.”

  Luckily, the trumpet sounded before Thaddeus had to comment on the homicidal propensities of Mrs. Meadowsweet’s third husband.

  Otis was a huge success. The audience began laughing immediately, not bothering to pretend that Ophelia was actually a woman, but recognizing one of their favorite pantomime characters: Cinderella, or Patient Griselda, or any other character, played by a man.

  Ophelia complained to her father that Hamlet seemed to have gone mad, and acted out the madness herself. The audience roared with laughter.

  It was even better when Hamlet and Ophelia were on the stage together. The tense, agonizing scene in which Ophelia gives Hamlet back his love letters turned into a raucous conversation, and when Hamlet told Ophelia she should enter a nunnery, the audience screamed with laughter.

  This Ophelia? In a nunnery?

  N
ot the way she was strutting around the stage, swishing her hips and poking Hamlet in the stomach when she got cross.

  “He’s better off without her,” the woman to the front of the stage told her husband in a loud voice. “She’s no better than she should be. A nunnery indeed!”

  Thaddeus couldn’t stop himself from laughing, watching Joan play the audience like a virtuoso. When she acted Hamlet the night before, she had pretended the audience wasn’t there and performed as if they were recreating history. But tonight?

  She held them in the palm of her hand.

  To be or not to be was hilariously received, and Otis’s mad scene, when he gave away all his flowers and then began plucking them from his hat and throwing them into the audience, was cheered so loudly they must have heard it in the center of town.

  He was slightly concerned how Joan would handle the dueling, but he shouldn’t have worried. From the moment she had trouble pulling her rapier from its hilt, to the point at which she collapsed on the stage, employing every technique her brothers had taught her about long, dramatic deaths, the audience adored her.

  Cheering brought the company back on stage three times to take bows.

  Thaddeus watched his neighbor clapping and then leaned in. “So you enjoyed it?”

  “The best was that lady with the jaw like a frying pan.”

  “A man,” Thaddeus confirmed, tucking away the “jaw like a frying pan” to amuse Otis.

  “She climbed in the prince’s bedroom window,” Mrs. Meadowsweet said. “No better than she should be.” She leaned in closer. “Don’t believe that she drowned herself, though. That sort would have paddled off downstream, and the family buried an empty casket to keep themselves from being mortified.” She narrowed her eyes with a vigorous nod. “Aye, that’s how it went.”

  In London, the audience clustered around the stage door, wanting to meet their favorite actors. Here, they poured into the street and left for the public house. The Lindow coach was waiting, so Thaddeus instructed the coachman to go around to the back and pick up Joan and Otis.