by Joan Smith
“Lady Chamaude’s performances are always sold out,” Breslau replied, with what the hostess considered a quite unnecessary acknowledging bow to the actress.
The marquise, who found Sir Aubrey every bit as dull as he feared, lent an ear to the other conversation. “Give me a real role and you will see a real performance,” she snipped.
“By Jove, I saw a real performance when I went to watch you,” Sir Aubrey assured her.
“The marquise is referring to tragedy,” Breslau informed them. “It’s a cliché in the theater that actors always want to perform the roles they’re least qualified for.”
Lady Raleigh stirred to life. “Lady Chamaude plays the ingénue, I believe?” she remarked, addressing her words to the grate.
There was a short, uncomfortable silence, finally broken by the marquise, who exercised her control not to hear that spiteful remark. “You think I couldn’t play tragedy?” she challenged Breslau. Fire darted from her fine dark eyes. “How is the world to know I can act, if I am only allowed to laugh and flirt? I have known much tragedy in my life, as Sonny could tell you. It is all in my memoirs.”
Lady Raleigh bridled up to hear Nigel being called a pet name by this creature.
“In the dull months, folks want comedy,” Breslau insisted. “Our tragedies never fare half so well.”
“They would if Fleur was playing the lead,” Nigel said staunchly. Lady Raleigh’s nostrils pinched in chagrin.
“Is MacBeth not a tragedy?” the actress asked. “It did very well at Covent Garden last season.”
Pamela noticed that Breslau and his flirt were enjoying a lovers’ spat, and conjured with how this might affect her visit vis-à-vis Nigel.
“None of the chairs left the hall,” Breslau allowed with one of his bored looks, and turned his attention to the fire, to try to kick the embers to flame.
Pamela wished to store up some anecdotes to take home as trophies to Kent and said to the marquise, “I read that you escaped from the guillotine in a cabbage cart, Lady Chamaude. Is it true?”
“Non, it was a cart full of rutabagas,” she replied, and told the oft-repeated story of this hair-raising experience, with a sword being plunged into the vegetables, missing her by inches. Her gown was slit from the blade, just the way Pamela had read.
“It’s all in chapter two,” Nigel said, for he had heard the story several times and wanted to discuss his own editing of the memoirs instead.
“I look forward to reading it,” Sir Aubrey said. “It should make a dandy tale.”
Breslau looked over his shoulder. “You won’t want to miss it, Aubrey. You were one of Prinney’s set in those days, I think. Perhaps you remember the French refugees landing at Brighton?”
“I recall some talk of it.”
“The Prince Regent himself pulled me from the lugger and placed his mantle over me,” Lady Chamaude said, her eyes glowing. “He put some of us up at his Brighton pavilion. I fear he is a naughty man, but I shan’t mention that in my memoirs. Noblesse oblige,” she added.
“But that was years ago!” Pamela exclaimed. “You must have been a child, Lady Chamaude.”
“Oh, a veritable enfant, though I was married. We marry very young in France.” This was the trickiest portion of the memoirs, to account for having been married and on the stage while still more or less in pinafores. The landing at Brighton had occurred over two decades ago, and the Marquise disliked to admit to much more than thirty years. “Ladies marry much later in England, of course,” she added with a meaningful glance at Miss Comstock, still single. That would teach the bright-eyed chit to do her arithmetic in public.
Help came from an unlikely quarter. “I wouldn’t put much past some of Prinney’s set,” Lady Raleigh said grimly. She had managed to cut her husband off entirely from those rakehell friends. “I remember hearing some pretty scandalous stories about the carrying on at Brighton.” Aubrey was right in the thick of it, too, but she’d soon brought that to a halt.
“The dear prince is a changed man now,” the marquise said. She enjoyed his favor, and had no intention of embarrassing him in her memoirs. “He was a very model of kindness to me in those days. He let me ride a pretty white pony. I called her Lady Blanche, and placed three white plumes under her crown piece—the Prince of Wales’s feathers, you know.”
No one noticed the sudden frown that assailed Sir Aubrey’s features. The incident stirred dormant memories. There had been a French refugee taken under Prinney’s wing in those days. Corinne was her name, like the heroine of Madame de Stael’s novel. A pretty, brown-eyed, brown-haired little filly she was, full of pep and vinegar. The marquise, he assumed, had heard the story and used it. Corinne would be nudging forty by now. The marquise didn’t look a day over thirty.
His eyes slid to her profile as she regaled the company with other Brighton tales. “Oh, they were all a naughty bunch of boys.” She laughed gaily. “I remember one—I called him my groom, because he always accompanied me when I rode Lady Blanche in the Marine Parade.” She turned and cast a sapient eye on Sir Aubrey. “Perhaps you remember him, Sir Aubrey?”
Sir Aubrey looked, and felt the hair on the back of his neck lift. How Corinne had changed! Her hair had magically turned to a soft blondish red. Her maidenly body had filled out majestically. Her voice, her manner—all were different, but the eyes were the same. She still had those sharp, knowing eyes.
“Can’t say that I do,” he said gruffly.
She smiled demurely. “Perhaps my visit will jog your memory. It is one of the reasons I’m here,” she threatened sweetly. “Nigel told me you were in Brighton at that time. I’m eager to meet old friends and refresh my own memory. You’d be surprised what talking over the old days can bring up. Lord Alban, for instance, has been most helpful.”
Alban! Yes, he’d been after Corinne as well! Ho, they were all after her. But she’d favored himself. Not as rich as the others, but more handsome. Dot had been home at Belmont that spring. Nigel was only a few months old. How it all came washing back. Corinne, the little cottage at Freshfield Place, near the park. Then the summons from Dot. “Come home at once if you ever want to see your son again.” Who had told her? Alban’s work, very likely.
Had Alban replaced him? He had recently been “most helpful.” There was a very sly glint in Corinne’s eye when she said that. Was it possible she was here to hold him to ransom? Pay up, or I reveal you in my book for the scoundrel you are? “Alban, you say? I haven’t seen him in an age.”
“He is still very dashing—like you, Sir Aubrey. He comes to all my plays. We’ll talk later, non? I’m sure you will remember some helpful details for my memoirs. All my old friends are very generous in assisting me.”
The marquise smiled her charming, warm smile, and turned her attention to Lady Raleigh. No amount of praising the ugly old house turned the termagant up sweet. “I saw a lovely Palladian bridge over a stream as we drove through the park,” she attempted. “All stone, with arches and Corinthian columns. Did you have it built, Lady Raleigh, or is it old?”
“My husband’s father had it built a quarter of a century ago.”
“It’s charming. Nigel tells me you have some paintings hung on tapestry in the gallery, in the old style.”
“You wouldn’t want to see that old rubbish,” Nigel told her. “I say, Fleur, can I get you a glass of wine?”
“Tea will be arriving shortly,” Lady Raleigh announced. She noticed Nigel hadn’t offered Pamela wine. In fact, he had scarcely glanced at her. He was besotted with this wretched actress.
“Tea, so English.” The marquise smiled politely, as her eyes slid hopefully to the wine table.
“You might want to attend the assembly in Hatfield this evening,” Nigel continued, tempting the jaded lady with his simple country treats. “Are you planning to attend, Mama?”
“We will be taking you and Pamela,” his mother replied.
“By Jove, you’ll like that, Fleur. What a stir you’ll cause amongst a
ll the local bucks.”
Lord Breslau had thawed out sufficiently to leave the grate. “Were you just offering sherry, Nigel? I’ll have one, if you please.”
“Tea is on the way,” Lady Raleigh repeated. “You may have wine if you prefer, Breslau. How is your mama?”
“I must confess I have no idea. She doesn’t write—letters, I mean. My housekeeper would have notified me if she were ill or dead, however, so I expect she is fine.”
Lady Raleigh gave him a pained look. “You haven’t written in weeks, Nigel,” was her next attempt at conversation.
“How can you say so, Mama? Didn’t I write just last week and tell you Fleur was coming for a visit?”
“And the very next day to add that I, too, was coming,” Breslau pointed out. “Why, you’ve been deluged with letters, madam. Mama would box my ears if I bombarded her with so many epistles.”
Pamela stared at Lord Breslau as though he were an exotic animal in a zoo. She had never heard such strange conversation in her life, the voice and manner so polite, and the words so offensive. She hardly knew what tone to take toward him. In her experience, gentlemen came in two categories. There were the eligible ones, who were given the encouragement of smiles for any attempt at conversation, and there was the other sort. Despite his title, his fortune, and his fame, Breslau clearly fell into the latter category. She exchanged a bewildered look with Lady Raleigh.
Her hostess was saved the exertion of being polite in the face of such levity by the arrival of the tea tray. “You may pour, Pamela,” she said, to show the actress who had pride of place in her saloon.
“Do you get to the theater very often, Mees Calmstock?” the marquise asked.
“Pamela doesn’t attend the theater. She was very well raised,” Lady Raleigh replied, and passed a plate of biscuits to the actress.
The marquise accepted one with a gracious smile. She turned her head to Breslau and winked, covering her smile with a biscuit.
“Oh, I say, Mama!” Nigel objected. “Everyone attends the theater. It’s not like the old days.”
Pamela gave a conspiratorial smile in the general direction of the marquise. “I should love to see you perform sometime, madam—onstage, I mean,” she said daringly.
“I shall send you tickets for my debut in tragedy,” the marquise promised, with a long look at Breslau, whose interest had wandered to Miss Comstock. Was it possible there was a spark of wit in Nigel’s little lump?
“Well now, that should satisfy you, Lady Raleigh,” he said. “Miss Comstock will have a long wait to attend the theater if that is to be her first visit. Your next play is to be Crowell’s comedy, The Amazing Invalid, Fleur, as you very well know. He’s a new writer of great talent.”
“I think not, Wes,” Lady Chamaude replied, and accepted a cup of tea. “When you, who haven’t approved of any writer since Beowulf was written, start praising an unknown, I know what you are about. You have found a silly farce for me. My next performance will be a tragedy. I have quite made up my mind.”
Lady Raleigh’s nostrils tightened to see the actress on such intimate terms with Breslau. Breslau’s name was Westbrook Hume, but even his close friends called him Breslau. It was only family who were allowed the intimacy of Wes. She never used that nickname herself.
“But I bought the Invalid for you. It’s a marvelous role,” he exclaimed.
The marquise gave him a coy look. “I hear they’re trying to find someone to play Desdemona in Othello at the Garden.”
“That’s hardly a starring role for a lady. The Moor is the star.”
“Desdemona gets to die, and that can be the making of a tragic actress,” the marquise countered. “It’s a story much to my liking. Secret marriage, schemes and intrigues, jealousy, and, of course, in the end the men make a great mess of it all, just like real life. A lady would have handled it more adroitly. We are much better at intrigue, don’t you agree, Lady Raleigh?” she asked.
Lady Raleigh gave a snort of disgust. “It is precisely the sort of play I most despise. Why should I pay to watch the dissipation I avoid in my own live, and that of my family?”
The marquise gave her a glittering smile. “One might manage to free her own life of intrigue, if she has a taste for dullness, but how, pray, do you keep it from your family? Perhaps I should pose that question to the gentlemen,” she said, and cast a sly glance at Sir Aubrey.
He frowned and said evasively, “Some plays are well enough. I prefer a comedy myself.”
“Sheridan, the playwright—so clever—says tragedy is just comedy with the characters dying in the end instead of getting married.” Her infamous eyes flickered swiftly from Sir Aubrey to his dame. “Even marriage, I daresay, is not necessarily a guarantee of a happy ending.”
Pamela bit back a smile. Her hostess was silently fuming. Sir Aubrey looked as if he had swallowed a hot coal, and Nigel was fidgeting uncomfortably.
Only Lord Breslau appeared immune to the undercurrents at work in the room.
“But on the stage,” he said to the marquise, “we allow our disbelief to hang suspended and pretend all will be well. In any case, even a bad marriage leaves more hope than a set of corpses.”
The marquise considered this a moment. “Perhaps you are right, Wes. It’s true that husbands and wives seem unwilling to leave a marriage, however unhappy it is. They will go to great lengths to preserve the form, when the content is gone.”
Sir Aubrey was subjected to another penetrating shot from the marquise, and stirred restively in his chair. Lady Raleigh found the conversation not only unsavory but pointless. She was aware of her butler hovering beyond the doorway, which was a clue he wished to speak to her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I must speak to Wetmore.”
“The butler,” Nigel explained to Lady Chamaude. “That would be about your wanting the downstairs bedchamber. The marquise always likes to sleep downstairs when she can,” he explained to the others. “Since we have a guest suite downstairs, I told her she might have it.”
“It is a foolish habit left over from the terror in France,” the lady said. “My dear husband was pulled from his bed in the dead of night and taken to the Bastille. I always felt if we had been sleeping downstairs we would have heard them come, and perhaps Henri might have escaped. To this day I still feel unsafe in an upstairs bedchamber. The past has a way of hanging about us,” she said sadly, just before she fixed Sir Aubrey with another of those peculiarly meaningful looks.
“You needn’t fear for your life at Belmont,” Nigel said heartily, and moved down to the end of the sofa to be closer to the marquise.
“I know it is foolishness on my part,” she agreed. “We actresses are a superstitious lot. I surround myself with good-luck charms. This shawl,” she said, holding up the elegant paisley garment, “is my good-luck piece. I never travel without it.”
The gentlemen smiled fondly at this evidence of ignorant superstition. Pamela regarded the shawl and noticed it looked remarkably new for a shawl that had done much traveling. The threads of the long silk fringe each hung separately. They would have bunched into unsightly clumps if the shawl were old. Its color, too, in shades of green and rose, matched the lady’s suit superbly, but would look quite at odds with other colors. An affectation, Pamela decided, and ascribed it to the marquise’s love of drama.
When Lady Chamaude wrapped the shawl over her shoulders, Nigel sprang up from the sofa to help her. “Merci, chéri,” she murmured with a soft glance. Pamela was extremely glad Lady Raleigh wasn’t there to see that look.
“I shall wear my good-luck charm when I go to the Garden to discuss playing Desdemona,” the marquise continued, directing her words to Breslau now. “I hear they are paying their leading ladies fifty pounds per performance. That was what Siddons made, at any rate.”
“We’ll discuss your salary at another time, Fleur,” he replied. “In any case, tragedy pays no more than comedy, if that is what you are implying.”
“A lad
y has to think of her future, when she has grown too old to perform.”
Sir Aubrey waited for her head to turn in his direction. On this occasion he was spared, but he knew in his bones the words were uttered for his benefit. She had come to hold him to ransom.
“Pardon me,” he said, and rose from his seat. “I see Dot is beckoning me from the hall.”
A short silence fell over the remaining company. “More tea, anyone?” Pamela asked.
Breslau strolled languidly toward the tea tray and held out his cup.
Chapter Three
“Well, Miss Comstock,” Breslau said, with that heartiness reserved for invalids, poor relations, unattractive lumps of girls, and other social misfits, “I was happy to hear you are not averse to the theater.”
Pamela carefully filled his cup, and when she handed it to him, he noticed the lump had rather pretty eyes. They reminded him of his favorite cat’s eyes—a tawny topaz shade, wide-spaced in her pale face. Her nose, too, had a kittenish touch to it that set ill with his preconceptions of Miss Comstock.
“I don’t get many opportunities to attend, but I adore it.”
Breslau hesitated between a meaningless condolence and a joke. “That shows a lack of initiative on your part,” he said, opting for the latter.
She knew by this time that his conversation was unusual, and showed no surprise. “Does it? I thought it only betrayed my rustic abode. We don’t get many traveling players in the country.”
“This is true,” he nodded, assessing her quite openly.
“To show you we are not completely out of it, however, I can assure you I attended the theater just last week. Tuck’s Traveling Players gave us an excellent performance of The Beggar’s Opera.”
Breslau stood holding his cup, undecided where to sit. He now took up a seat beside Pamela. “If you endured the entire performance, you are indeed an irreclaimable lover of the theater.”
“Have you actually heard of Tuck’s?”