The Muse of Fire

by Carol M. Cram

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  For my mother who first introduced me

  to Shakespeare and the delights of language

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Book Club Questions

  O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

  The brightest heaven of invention,

  A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

  And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

  Henry V (Prologue, 1–4)

  Chapter 1

  London, March 1808

  For beauty lives with kindness.

  Love doth to her eyes repair,

  To help him of his blindness,

  And, being help’d, inhabits there.

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2.44–47)

  Grace’s mother used to say that London was the center of the world—sanctuary for the very best and worst of humanity. Grace grew up imagining the city as the place where dreams happened.

  How wrong she’d been.

  In the overheated sitting room, a roaring fire slicked her forehead with sweat, making her long for the fresh sea air of home. Her father loathed the cold. If he came back to find the fire burning low, he’d rail at her, remind her of her duty, accuse her of ingratitude. A log fell with sparks crackling; the clock ticked too slowly toward bedtime, another dreary day winding down. Grace read a few more pages of her book and then slipped it behind a sofa cushion and stood. She might as well go upstairs. He’d not be home for at least another hour, and it wasn’t as if they had anything to say to each other.

  She was just about to open the sitting room door that led to the vestibule and the stairs when she heard her father’s walking stick clatter against the iron railing bordering the pavement outside. He’d never come home this early. Grace stared at the closed door—her barrier between blessed silence and her father’s peevish noise. Seconds later, she heard the front door swing open and bounce back against the coatrack before slamming shut. An umbrella banged to the floor.

  “Damn me! Must I call for a candle in my own home?”

  Sighing, Grace opened the door. Her father filled the vestibule with brandy fumes and malice. When she tried to duck around him to reach the stairs, he flung out one arm with drunken strength and barred her way.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Please, let me pass.”

  He swayed backward, clutching at the doorframe to steady himself. “Why were you the one to live?” he asked. In the flickering candlelight spilling out from the sitting room, Grace saw rage chase grief across his swollen face.

  “It was an accident, Father. You know that.”

  “All I know is that you’re here and she’s not.”

  Grace was almost past him when he drove his fist into her ribs and then let go of the doorframe and swung at her head, catching the skin at her hairline with the sharp edge of a heavy gold ring. For a few seconds, Grace stopped dead, too shocked to move. He’d never laid hands on her before. When his third punch went wide and he crashed to the floor, she wrenched open the front door and bolted into the night.

  Within minutes, the frigid air dried the blood on her face and seeped through her gown, sucking at the pain left by his blows. Clouds layered like dough filled the dark sky, blotting out the stars. In the three months since coming up from the country, Grace had yet to see stars in London.

  She ran for many minutes through silent streets, then busy streets, most dark, a few lit with sputtering gas lamps. The crowds grew thicker the farther she ran—south toward the river, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. No one looked at her, not even the gentlemen strolling past, top hats gleaming in the flare of passing torches. She ran through mud from rain stopped an hour since and likely to start again before she found shelter. The first day of spring had just passed, yet the air felt more December than March. She should have taken her cloak from the rack by the door after her father tripped over his own feet and sprawled across the floor—knocked out, passed out, dead? That last possibility was too wicked to consider and too much to hope for.

  A man reeled out of an alleyway and planted himself directly in her path. He stank of gin and the privy.

  “Yer out late.”

  Grace suddenly realized the enormity of what she’d done. London at night was not the bustling, cosmopolitan, clanking place she glimpsed from carriage windows, in full daylight. At night, the streets came alive again but with people Grace knew nothing about—what they did, where they went, how they lived.

  “Excuse me, sir. I wish to pass.”

  “Ooh, a lady, are ye? A toffer, I expect. Ain’t the normal course of things to see your sort out alone, but it takes all kinds. What’s yer price?”

  “I don’t know what you refer to, sir.” Why would he not let her pass? What did he want? The stench of him closed her throat in a gag.

  “Lost yer cock-bawd, have ye?”

  Grace had never heard such words, but she guessed their meaning and blushed in the darkness. “Please, let me pass.”

  “Ah, no, I don’t think I be inclined to do that.” He seized her bare arm just above the elbow, grinding his fingers into her flesh, marking her with new bruises. She tried to wrench herself free, then gasped at the sharp pain in her ribs. He pulled her closer, his mouth now inches from hers.

  “Give us a kiss, dearie. There’s a girl.”

  She twisted her head away, but he was strong, his hands like steel talons. As he started pushing her back toward the alleyway, her gown tangled around her legs, throwing her off balance. Was this the worst of humanity that her mother had spoken of? First her father, and now this brute?

  Enough.

  The word grabbed hold of her thoughts and snapped at her fear. She was taller than the filthy man, who held her as though she were a helpless animal trembling at an unknown fate. How dare he?

  To take arms against a sea of trouble . . .

  How many hours had she spent with her mother reading and rereading that play, studying it and breathing life into Shakespeare’s lines? Her mother once told her how t
he great Mrs. Siddons herself had sometimes donned a long black cloak and played Hamlet. Grace had been captivated and wanted her mother to tell her more. But as usual, when Grace pushed too hard about the past, her mother turned away and would not speak further. For weeks after, she refused to open the worn volume of Shakespeare, demanding that Grace concentrate on her needlework and learn to be a wife.

  Grief for her mother and hatred for the new life she found herself in flooded Grace with strength. While the man was still laughing at having secured his prey, she raised her free elbow and jammed it full into his face. Teeth snapped against bone, and a howl of pain shredded the night. He let go of her so suddenly that she staggered backward, then turned and darted across the street, just missing an oncoming carriage. She veered into another street—this one empty of people. She had to get back to a more crowded area, perhaps find the constables. And tell them what? All they could do was return her to her father’s house, bedraggled and cold. Her word would count as nothing against the testimony of Mr. Tobias Johnson, a respected man of property from the West Country.

  Lights glowed up ahead. How could there be so many people in London but no one to help her? A knife-blade agony sliced across her chest, and her knees buckled, hitting the slick cobblestones with a smack. More bruises, but what did that signify now? She gave in to the shivering, the clattering of her teeth sounding as loud in her head as the carriage rattling past the cross street up ahead. She rested her hot, wet cheek against her arm. Foolish girl. That’s what her father would say, and he’d be right. Where did she expect to go—a woman of her class alone in London at night? The street was silent now, plunged into comforting darkness, her assailant long gone. Even if he stumbled within a yard of her, he’d not see her.

  She would have to go back to her father’s house eventually. But for just a little while longer, it felt good to stay still and alone.

  * * *

  Ned made one last circuit backstage at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The prompter, the callboys, and the scene changers had all gone home, and he’d already checked the dressing rooms and made sure the props were put back in the property room and the painted flies were stored upright. Ned loved the theater best late at night. Like an exhausted dowager, the massive building settled itself for quiet after the noisy delights of the evening performance. Snuffed candles nestled in their metal flashings, machinery stopped clanking and creaking, and all the performers tottered off to drink and bed.

  Mr. John Philip Kemble himself had promoted Ned from scene changer to stage manager at the beginning of the season, and Ned was determined to prove his worth. Before getting taken on at the theater, Ned had toiled in one dirty job after another—shoveling coal, stacking wood, and even for a few terrible months scraping out and carting away night soil. At the theater, Ned spent every evening from September to May in a blaze of light and heat. He liked to think of himself as the linchpin around which every performance at the theater revolved—actors and actresses, stage machinists and scene changers, callboys, dancers, musicians, even animals when they had them, which thank God wasn’t every night.

  Tonight, he’d his hands full when Thomas Renfrew had drowned his nerves with so much gin he’d barely made it through his first scene as Horatio before lurching into the wings and splashing vomit all over Ned’s new boots. Fortunately, this time, Mr. Kemble had been too preoccupied playing Hamlet to an adoring audience to notice Renfrew’s shaking hands and stinking breath. Kemble had warned Ned before about keeping Renfrew sober, and Ned didn’t relish another dressing-down from the great man.

  He felt his way down the long corridor that led from the wings to the small room next to the stage door.

  “Cold as a whore’s backside out there,” said Mr. Harrison, the stage-door keeper. He nodded toward the door from his overstuffed chair. The chair was covered in thick brocade streaked green with mildew and set as close to a brazier of hot coals as it could get without catching fire. The company joke was that Mr. Harrison would need to be buried with his chair because no one had seen him rise from it in ten years.

  “I’d have thought whores had warm backsides,” Ned said. He cracked open the door leading out of the theater onto Bow Street. A swirl of damp air tossed bits of rubbish across the wooden floorboards.

  “What do you know about it? The talk round here is that you keep away from the women.”

  “I’m dead on me feet after a night’s work. Got no time for ’em.”

  “Fine lad like you? When I was your age . . .”

  “Good night, Mr. H.”

  Ned stepped into the street and shut the door behind him. He’d heard Mr. Harrison’s stories many times—of how in his day he’d had ladies clamoring for a glimpse of him leaving this very stage door. And it didn’t do to get him started on all the actresses he’d had his way with. Ned had no desire to be like Mr. Harrison, but if Olympia ever showed any inclination . . .

  But that thought was best put out of its misery. Beautiful, sparkling Olympia, who lit up the stage every night in comic roles and breeches parts, wasn’t for the likes of him. Besides, she was too busy being taken in by Renfrew, the poncy bugger.

  Out on the street, a carriage rumbled past, splashing Ned with cold mud. He had no illusions about the swells. For every carriage carrying a respectable couple away from the theater, another passed with men stuck on ladies who’d never be wives. Some of the women who traded flesh for guineas maintained expensive homes in Mayfair and commanded their own stable of servants, but most plied their wares in foul alleyways, in the boxes at the theater, and behind bushes in the parks. Ned knew all about them. They had his pity but rarely his custom. He wasn’t like his friend Alec.

  Ned headed toward his lodgings on Hart Street. No one at the Foundling Hospital where Ned and Alec spent six years of their short childhoods had held out much hope for the royally christened Edward Plantagenet. Ned would have liked a commoner name—Parker or Brown or Bishop, like Alec Bishop. He knew of one boy they’d christened William Shakespeare and another Julius Caesar. The girls had gotten off easier, although Ned remembered a girl named Prudence Cock. She’d died a few days shy of her fifth birthday, which was perhaps a blessing.

  Halfway along Bow Street, Ned tripped over something soft lying in his path. He exhaled a curse. There had been talk of installing gas lamps to light up London’s murky streets, but apart from some of the broadest thoroughfares, most of London was blacker than a whore’s despair—never mind her backside. Nothing was visible in front of him, but he sensed movement. A child perhaps. How many children had he seen die? Too many to remember—and it was a big reason he steered clear of the whores.

  He dropped to his knees.

  “Are you hurt?”

  The voice that answered was female and not a child.

  “Leave me alone.”

  In the darkness, Ned was just able to make out a long body stretched across the narrow strip of pavement. It—she—seemed to be dressed only in a dark gown—the fair skin of one bare arm faintly glimmering. He reached out and touched it, felt it tremble in the bone-damp chill.

  “You’re freezing,” he said.

  “Please, go away.” Her accent sounded posh, not rough like his. What kind of a lady lay bare armed in the middle of the street? Well, he wasn’t the kind of man to just leave her there.

  “’Ere, let’s get you up.” Ned tried hooking his arm around her waist. She pulled away, but when he did not increase the pressure, letting her understand with the lightness of his touch that he meant her no harm, her muscles relaxed a fraction.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Come on. I’ll get you somewhere warm.”

  “I’m not what you think.”

  “What? Oh!” Ned dropped her arm, thankful for the darkness. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I don’t need, I mean, I weren’t looking for . . .”

  He heard a soft, wet sound different from the ones she’d made before. He leaned closer, smelled blood and dirt but no g
in, and realized she was laughing.

  “I don’t suppose I could go much lower,” she said, “but I assure you I am respectable.” Her laughter stopped, and Ned sensed fear. “You will not harm me?”

  “I’ll get you someplace warm and fix you up. I ain’t one to leave a helpless female in the gutter.”

  “Helpless?” She shifted her body away from him again, wriggling to loosen his grasp on her arm. “I’m not helpless.”

  “Maybe not, but it ain’t weak to take help when it’s offered, like.”

  To his relief, she stopped moving. “I suppose you are right. I am very cold. Do you know of a place where I may go to get warm?” She sounded remarkably matter-of-fact, like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be lying in a tangled heap in the mud. Ned held her arm as she clambered to her feet. A groan, quickly suppressed, made him shudder. Someone had hurt her badly. He peered around the dark street. Whoever had done it might not be far off, and Ned had no wish to get between an enraged cock-bawd and his whore. She said she was respectable, but she would say that, wouldn’t she? He wasn’t worried about taking on most any man, but he didn’t want to make things worse for the girl.

  She seemed to sense his nervousness. “Thank you for helping me up. I can make my own way now.”

  Ned wrapped one arm around her shoulders, taking care to avoid touching her ribs, which he suspected were bruised, maybe even broken. “Don’t be daft. I ain’t leaving you out ‘ere.” He’d take her back to his lodgings and stay close to her side. Alec would laugh at him—fancy hardworking, pure-hearted Ned bringing a woman back to their room! But Ned wasn’t going to let Alec stop him from doing what was right.

  Together they shuffled forward. For a moment, the girl leaned against him, the top of her head even with his chin, making her tall for a female. He tightened his hold. She took another few steps, and then her knees gave way. He swept her into his arms, marveling at how light she was—like a bundle of dry sticks but with hard angles. One of her elbows poked his stomach. She winced when he adjusted his grip.

  The moon broke free of the clouds, and he saw her face for the first time. Dried blood streaked her forehead, the cut near her forehead jagged. “Who did this to you?”