Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  Late in the evening a messenger arrived. This was such an unusual, unprecedented event that Wyatt’s fears vaulted over an impossibly high barrier. He shivered, overcome by chills, and had to sit down before hearing the shocking message.

  Wyatt took off the cravat and started over again. He did know how to tie it, but his concentration had wandered. He needed more wine.

  Wyatt still hated Ephraim for having been the catalyst for his relationship with the devious, scheming, despicable Charlotte Churchill. And he still loved Ephraim for being his stalwart friend, the one person he could rely on.

  There. The cravat finally looked just right. Wyatt went down to dinner.

  Chapter 81

  “The duke will be returning in six days,” Jewel Allman said to the staff. Everyone was gathered around the huge kitchen table, prepping the dinner dishes.

  “The masked ball will be held, as planned, on the syzygy, three days after his arrival.” Jewel managed to convey both extreme pleasure and extreme discipline as she said this.

  “God help me, Mrs. Allman. That soon? But it was canceled, wasn’t it? How will we ever have time to prepare?” Cook wiped her hands nervously on her apron, then turned back to the oven to check on one of the evening’s fish courses.

  “That’s why I’m telling you now. A lot will have to be organized and readied. The masked ball is always one of the highlights of the year”—Jewel never used the word majestic in front of the staff, always remaining in character, acting as though she were the combination head housekeeper and duchess’s social secretary, in charge of the manor’s events—“and it will go off without incident.”

  “But I’ve got to—” Harriette started, but Mr. Calvert interrupted her.

  “But nothing, Harriette. Yes, you have new duties now, but you’ll have ample time to learn them. Violet will be here for another ten days.”

  “Violet can’t be leaving!” Johnny said as Harriette frowned at him and Nell gave him an unreadable glance.

  “I’m afraid you have no say in the matter, Johnny,” said Mr. Calvert. “As you might already be aware.”

  “But, Mr. Calvert. Sir. Violet is Hollyhock Manor,” said Johnny, and Harriette punched him in the arm. Nell suppressed a giggle.

  “Best get ready to go upstairs,” said Cook, who was alternately fussing over whatever was in the oven and looking nervously over the food that was ready to be served.

  “Will there be an orchestra?” said Rosie. “With violins?” She’d started arranging the platters for dinner, loading them onto trays. “I’ve always wanted to hear a violin for real.”

  “Back to work, everyone,” Jewel Allman said. “Now.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Johnny said to Harriette. “There’s no Hollyhock Manor without Violet. She has to stay. Just ask Rosie.”

  “Be quiet, Johnny,” said Rosie. “We have work to do.”

  “If she’s so necessary, where is she right now?” Harriette said.

  “She’s not a kitchen maid, girl,” said Cook. “Get back to your duties. I’ve got too much to think about without you adding to the strain.”

  Harriette patted the front of her apron and repositioned something in its pocket.

  “What’ve you got there?” Johnny said.

  “Nothing,” said Harriette. “Not a thing.”

  “That doesn’t look nothing-like,” Nell said.

  Johnny reached over, put his hand into Harriette’s apron pocket, and plucked out a soggy envelope. “Someone’s written Harriette a love note!” Johnny said as he jammed the letter into his pants pocket, picked up a heavy tray as though it were a small platter of feathers, and headed upstairs.

  “That’s mine!” Harriette shouted after him, but he didn’t even turn around.

  “What did you take?” Rosie said to her.

  “What do you mean what did I take? I didn’t take anything.”

  “That’s not your letter, is it?” Rosie was frantically working on the next course, arranging the plates the way Cook had instructed her.

  “Get to work, girl. I mean it,” said Cook to Harriette. “You’re still down here until Violet leaves, although you’ll be gone soon too, I wouldn’t wonder. And you”—Cook stared at Nell, who jumped up from her seat—“look sharp.”

  Harriette flounced off to the pantry. “That is my letter,” she said over her shoulder. “You wait and see.”

  But three hours later, after Johnny had had the chance to read the letter several times, analyzing every sentence, every word, every sentiment, there wasn’t anyone left downstairs who didn’t know that it wasn’t Harriette’s letter at all but a farewell note that Lord Trevelton had written to Violet.

  Johnny had started to read the letter aloud after the final dinner course had been cleared away, but Cook snatched the letter from him and told him that was quite enough. And anyway, Violet was leaving. And the letter wasn’t meant for anyone else’s eyes. Best to let this whole thing alone.

  Yet after everyone had cleared the kitchen and Cook was sitting at the big table by herself, getting ready to plan what would be served before, during, and after the masked ball, she took the letter out of her apron pocket and read it, then reread it.

  Was this a love letter? she wondered. If so, it was the oddest love letter she ever hoped to see, since there was nothing in it about how much he cared and about the depths of his feelings, and too much in it about how much he’d loved someone named Charlotte.

  Cook thought how she’d feel if she’d have gotten a letter like this, but even holding the very letter in her hands, she couldn’t imagine it. Because her lover, if he knew where she was, if he could get a letter to her, would have said it more plainly: I love you, Stephanie. Please come back to me.

  But after your heart is broken three times, you can’t go back to the lover who broke it. No matter how alone you are or how much you love him and ache for him. No matter how often you think about him and miss him.

  Good thing she had the masked ball to distract her, this majestic, and the next ones after that. Safely here on another planet, where there was no risk of running back to him and getting her heart broken yet again.

  Chapter 82

  The transport stopped on Outworld 217, where Nicholas Coburn got off to wait for the next ship. He’d have to switch again before he got to 5730, but it was worth it—still the fastest way possible.

  He’d left everything in Beau Ogden’s more than capable hands, but he was still so shaken by the devastation and loss that he had to force himself to focus on the present and the future. Ironic that he was here on 217, he thought, a place famous for fiery destruction.

  Nicholas never would have set foot on the wretched 217 if it hadn’t been necessary. But he had to get back to Marguerite without delay. He didn’t have another three weeks to wait around for a more direct route to open up.

  Even though Calvert had explained all this to him, Nicholas had had two separate staffers check into the possibilities, and, interestingly, neither of them, both experts in intergalactic transportation, had come up with the solution that Calvert had reached. Nicholas had a lot to thank the man for and would do so, even past the majestic’s end.

  While he sat in the transport lounge, he watched a raging fire miles away in the distance. Someone else’s fire.

  Three people forever gone. Because of him. He’d never forgive himself, and he hadn’t seen it coming.

  Love blotted out everything else. All you thought about was love while you forgot about the very things you think about every day, the things you’re best at, the things you have to be best at in order to survive in your business or in any business.

  But when he was with Marguerite, she occupied his every breath, and he wanted nothing more than to love her and show her that he did, hoping that that alone could convince her to abandon her life with Clive Idrest and be with him instead.

  So he’d never considered that Idrest himself would come between them. Never considered that Idrest would try
to destroy Nicholas’s business. Never considered that Idrest even cared or would care. After all, he’d let Marguerite go on all those other majestics. What had changed?

  Marguerite herself confounded him. He’d never had a break in the midst of a majestic, returning him to his actual life, and he’d not experienced a tragedy like this in years. These two things, and his relief at the miracle of Beau being alive, made him contemplate Marguerite.

  Why would she stay with Clive all these years? She couldn’t possibly be in love with him, could she? Isn’t she in love with me? Or can she love two men? Or three or four?

  Nicholas realized he had no idea what Marguerite did when she wasn’t at a majestic with him. For all he knew, she went to other majestics, had other lovers, teased them and led them on, as she might be doing with him.

  If he didn’t love her, didn’t need her, he would have gotten on the first transport back to Earth. Although she needed him. Hadn’t Calvert implied that? And how could he doubt her? His beloved Marguerite. One more thing he couldn’t forgive himself for.

  When the transport that would take him to Trylon arrived, Nicholas took one last look at the fire out in the distance. It seemed to have intensified rather than diminished.

  He sat back in his seat, alone in Section One, and stared out the window, watching 217 and the latest in its continual series of fires get rapidly smaller until it and they disappeared.

  He sipped at his tea, a special blend served only on the transports.

  Why had he never considered that Marguerite had to stay with Clive Idrest? He had a special hold on her. He must have. This was so obvious, but Nicholas had never thought of it.

  Now all he had to do was find out what that hold was—and eliminate it.

  By the time the transport arrived on the intergalactic hub Trylon, Nicholas had formulated a plan. By the time he boarded the transport to 5730, he was able to sleep for the first time since he’d been forced to return home.

  Chapter 83

  Violet stood behind Lady Patience, and Harriette stood next to Violet.

  “Can’t you two go any faster?” Lady Patience said as Violet thought for the hundredth time how ironic it was that LP had gotten the name Patience when she in fact had none.

  “Yes, my lady,” Violet said. She’d been remarkably successful in keeping to the script, she thought, congratulating herself. Good training for Mirage. The very Mirage that was sending all the way to Outworld 5730 just for her.

  Of course she’d gotten the part. She’d always known she would. Some things were inevitable. Some things you just knew.

  “But how did you do that?” Harriette said to Violet, who’d inexplicably started imagining the way Trevelton’s hand had looked resting on the table. Violet refocused her attention and took out the pin she’d just placed in Lady Patience’s head, then very very slowly swirled LP’s too-blond hair through her fingers again and repinned it.

  “I’ll never get this,” Harriette said, and Violet feared she was right. There was nothing all that difficult about any of the hairdos Violet did for Lady Patience, but Harriette seemed incapable of managing even a simple chignon.

  “I’m going downstairs in five minutes, Lettie, so finish up now.”

  Lady Patience made a show of squirming in her seat, and Violet ignored Harriette and finished LP’s hair. It did look good. Violet could always get a job as a Regency-era hairdresser if things didn’t work out on Mirage. Although that was hardly a comforting thought. And Mirage was destined to work out for her. She kept reminding herself of that.

  After Lady Patience went downstairs, Violet showed Harriette yet again what to prepare for LP’s bedtime, what to choose for the morning, and where all of LP’s zillions of clothing items were stored.

  “It’s hopeless, Violet,” said Harriette. “I’ll never ever ever get it all.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Violet said, although she’d never thought that for even a second. This was one of the easiest, if not the easiest, job she’d ever had. Not counting the Trevelton mistake, which was not part of the job although it had happened at the majestic.

  Rafe. Over now. Over for days and days now. Since before the duel.

  Harriette needed encouragement.

  “Look. None of this really matters, Harriette. Just make Lady Patience happy, learn one or two of the hairdos she likes best, and everything else will be fine.”

  Lately LP had seemed very distracted, so that much was probably true. She wouldn’t notice if the wrong morning dress were on offer or if Harriette didn’t tie back the bed curtains just so or had the too-rough towels for her bath.

  “The duke’s coming back tonight,” said Harriette while she ruined Violet’s neat arrangement of underthings in LP’s dresser.

  “Don’t worry, Harriette. I’ll do Lady Patience’s hair for dinner. And you’ll get it soon enough.” But it couldn’t be soon enough. Violet was leaving in four days, and Harriette had learned exactly nothing since she’d started training her.

  Wasn’t there anyone else who could do this job? Cook insisted that she needed Nell downstairs, and Rosie had refused, saying she had to stay in the kitchen, where she could keep an eye on her brother. Violet couldn’t argue with that. And she was still furious with both him and Harriette over her letter, which Cook had given back to her that night and which Violet had immediately destroyed.

  There was no need to hang on to it. Not only did Trevelton not care about her, but she was leaving in four days now, and she’d successfully avoided him since the day of the duel.

  He knows where I am, she thought as Harriette botched yet another simple task, snagging the lace on one of Lady Patience’s favorite nightgowns as she hastily pulled it out of the drawer. He knows exactly where I am, Violet thought.

  She’d first met him in this very room, where he’d stopped by to meet Lady Patience and accompany her to dinner. It was no mystery where Violet was. It wasn’t as if she were hiding from him. Yet he’d never sought her out after he’d gotten back to the manor the day of his resurrection.

  And everyone—everyone—had said how jovial he’d been at dinner that night, acting the raconteur, regaling everyone with more and more highly embellished versions of the story of his and Lord Saybrook’s miraculous recovery.

  She was better off without him, as Rosie had said from the beginning and still said. Better off without the marquess Rafe Blackstone, and also well rid of the man portraying him, the farmer Ephraim Croft still in love with a girl who left him for his best friend.

  Let him spend his days mourning the loss of his beloved Charlotte.

  Violet, whoever you are. She often thought of that one line in the now-destroyed letter.

  She was Violet Aldrich playing the lady’s maid Violet Aldrich. And she would soon be the rising star Violet Aldrich, cast member on Mirage. Seen by billions across the galaxies. Loved, hated, argued about, torn to ribbons, praised to the heavens, adored, disparaged, sought after, criticized, and followed.

  She’d hardly thought about Rafe these last several days. She had too much to do, trying to train the untrainable Harriette, keeping LP’s things in order, and helping out in the kitchen whenever she felt the familiar waves of loneliness wash through her.

  She’d be able to pay Booker’s debts now. She had the job she’d wanted so dearly.

  After Harriette left to go downstairs and help—or more likely, hinder—with the dinner preparations, Violet imagined that in a moment, Trevelton would look in the doorway, that he would see her, that he would finally tell her he loved her.

  Chapter 84

  The duke, looking exhausted but natty, was sitting at the head of the table, a place that had been empty for weeks in his absence. Saybrook was sitting too far away to talk with, and anyway he was engaged in a heated debate with the off-putting Lord Fitzmore.

  Directly across the table from Saybrook and Fitzmore, Lady Patience and the duchess were enmeshed in a very private conversation.

  As
usual, Vernie Dalston and her useless friend Baron North were on either side of Trevelton, who’d started thinking he might go home before the majestic was over.

  It had been over for him the day of the duel.

  That was why he’d come—to confront Wyatt, to defeat Wyatt, although it hadn’t turned out that way. The outcome instead was superior to anything he’d planned on. He and Wyatt were friends again.

  It wasn’t, and could never be, the same as it had been at the Acres, but although something that had seemed essential and inviolable was now no longer present, their new relationship was richer and deeper than the one that had been shared by two young students.

  Even more satisfying, he rarely thought of Charlotte anymore, and when he did, he thought of her certainly dull marriage to the unremarkable Abel Fulton, who Ephraim had met once during a school hiatus when he’d gone to New Zealand with Wyatt.

  “What do you think they’ll be doing tonight?” Vernie said in her best impersonation of a whisper, the voice level that could be heard by only half the dinner guests. She giggled and stabbed a hunk of potato with her fork.

  “Nothing that you yourself wouldn’t do, my dear,” said North as he inhaled whatever had once been on his plate. “And probably less.”

  “You’re such a tease, my lord,” Vernie said.

  Trevelton had utterly no one to talk with, so he drank yet another glass of the not-bad wine they were serving with tonight’s meal. They’d broken out the good stuff for the duke’s return, and Rafe had at least that to be happy about.

  But riding about 5730’s lovely countryside, catching up with Wyatt’s life, rebuffing the advances of a host of quite fine-looking but dreadfully boring players, and eating exquisite meals wasn’t enough to keep him here.

  On his ride that morning he’d gone by the hut in the forest. It was the first sunny morning in a long time, and Trevelton had ridden out early on the bay gelding he favored, galloped over to Brixton, jumped a few fences, and when he wasn’t paying attention, the horse had taken him into the forest, to the very place that they’d so often gone when he and Violet had been . . .