Fairchild Regency Romance

by Jaima Fixsen

  Anna smiled, listening to Henry chasing his grandfather up the stairs and Alistair humming in the dressing room. She knew the tune, so she hummed breathily along, lifting out her crumpled gowns. Alistair didn’t care that her voice wasn’t nearly as fine as his; he liked music when he was happy, and cared more that she felt happy with him than for the quality of their song. Anna hummed a little louder, glad to be home with her mother and father, her husband and son. Tomorrow, if the weather was fine, they would buy a new boat for Henry to sail in the park.

  Alistair’s humming floated closer. Before his hand could steal around her waist and his lips land in the vicinity of her ear, Anna dropped her grey pelisse and shut the lid of her trunk. Creased gowns and musty linen . . . no reason they couldn’t wait.

  BOOK THREE

  Courting Scandal

  To Ivy, the dear friend who calls me Mom.

  Chapter One

  Essentials

  London, 1805

  Laura knew perfectly well she couldn’t expect to be given what she wanted—it was up to her to take it. Just now she wanted money for her brother, more than she wanted a dress with long enough sleeves, meat for their table, or candles. Bad enough their mother must sew late into the night in these grim rented rooms. They were used to barely getting by, but watching her work with nothing but the light of the fire was painful. Thirty pounds Laura needed, an impossible sum that meant everything.

  Thirty pounds would kit up Jack so he could go to sea with Dr. Drysdale on HMS Leander as surgeon’s mate—a real apprenticeship with prospects, not like his job as an apothecary’s assistant peddling laudanum and patent remedies. Yet here was Jack’s letter drying on the windowsill saying he couldn’t raise such a sum or leave his mother and his sister. Laura set down the bodice she was trimming and traced her finger over Jack’s beautiful script. He wrote as stately as a minuet, no matter how cheap the paper, and his reasons were perfectly honorable. And foolish.

  …express my gratitude for your kind offer…with the greatest reluctance I must decline…

  Their best chance gone for lack of thirty pounds. Laura pressed her hand over her eyes and held back a bitter laugh. Dear Jack. He would never complain. His life was hard enough without being saddled with a mother and a sister. He must go with Dr. Drysdale. She’d make sure of it.

  “I need some air,” Laura said. Even if the air carried the smell of fetid streets. Glancing at her mother, she folded up the letter. “I might as well carry this round.” She slipped it in her pocket.

  The letter didn’t come up again until they sat down for a hasty meal of bread and beans.

  “Thank you for delivering my letter,” Jack said, mopping the edge of his bowl with a piece of bread.

  Laura shrugged. “Figured I might as well save the postage.”

  Jack accepted this with a grunt. They were accustomed to making do with every imaginable economy: thrice-brewed tea or straight hot water, darned socks and worsted caps, rationing out coal and sharing a single orange.

  Laura set down her spoon. “I still think you should go. We could sell the earrings,” she said. They were the last of the jewelry, tucked away in a faded velvet bag. Maman said it looked absurd, wearing pearls in her ears with a mended dress of printed cotton.

  “But what would you do while I was gone? The sewing won’t keep you,” Jack said.

  Laura shifted in her chair. “Maman, perhaps you could ask our uncle—”

  “She will do no such thing,” Jack interrupted. “And neither will you.”

  Laura bit her lip. Nine years ago, when they’d washed onto England’s shores scared, starved and grieving, they’d gone to the duke. Laura didn’t know what transpired, but she knew dukes didn’t slave for shillings and wear second-hand clothes.

  “Why not? Is he such a skinflint?” Laura turned to her mother, who shrugged.

  “Let it be, darling. Jack’s right. Your uncle made his intentions clear and I don’t like to make my sister’s life more difficult.”

  “We’re his family—”

  “Wife’s family,” Jack corrected. “That’s different.”

  Laura snorted, but beneath the table her fingers clutched her skirts. Jack’s letter was in the Thames, not with Dr. Drysdale, and she’d gone to Mayfair this afternoon, not the park. It took all her courage presenting her shabby self at her uncle’s front door, but it hadn’t mattered. Her uncle, the Duke of Saltash, was ‘not at home.’

  “You could go. I’ve a plan to look after us, Jack,” Laura said, her eyes on the scratched table. Saltash wouldn’t help and Maman wouldn’t ask, but she had one last idea. She hadn’t doubted herself this afternoon, but now her stomach threatened mutiny.

  “What is it this time?” he asked. Over the years she’d thought out a dozen brilliant ways she could keep them hosed and shod, but none of them were practical enough for Jack. “I forbid you to turn highwayman.” His smile faded. “Even if we had a pistol, I doubt we could buy the shot.”

  Maman smiled, reaching to wrap one of Laura’s errant curls around her finger. “You and your ideas. How you would have shone! Do you remember France?”

  “A little,” Laura admitted, gratefully escaping into the past. Soft carpets, parquet floors, slippers of satin with embroidered toes, a velvet-eared pony. And her favorite, a small theatre in their English-style gardens done in shell-pink and gold. All ash now, scattered in the wind. Her last memory of their home was of it burning.

  “You would have made all the gentlemen laugh and fall immediately in love with you,” her mother said.

  “And now I charm the grocer. Much more to the purpose, I think.” Laura forced a smile. Jack would never leave, not so long as he thought they needed him. She would get the thirty pounds. And a career, something that paid better than stitching…tonight.

  They cleared away the dishes and Jack retired to his room to brood and study from borrowed books. Her mother sat down to the pile of sewing. Two of the costumes still needed alteration and they were due within an hour at the theatre.

  “Let me manage it.” Laura plucked an old-fashioned lace stomacher from her mother’s hands. Maman insisted they were fortunate just to be alive, but days like today Laura didn’t agree with her. Maman wasn’t meant to be so exhausted, suffering from chapped hands and pricked fingers. In France, when she held a needle, it was for embroidery. “You rest. I can carry them over and finish there,” Laura said as she folded up the sewing. Her scheme wouldn’t work if she had Maman for company.

  “It’s not too heavy?” Maman asked. These days she looked like a stiff wind would blow her out the door. She hadn’t noticed Laura taking in the burgundy silk bodice and lowering it an inch.

  “Of course not.” There was enough gauze in the bundle to lighten the stiff taffetas and heavy brocades. “I’ll make sure to ask Mr. Rollins for next week’s costumes.” Whether or not he’d send them after her plan unfolded tonight…

  “Are you unhappy?” Maman asked. “When you smile there’s always a frown still in your forehead.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry,” Laura said, to herself as much as to her mother. “Go to sleep, Maman.”

  Her mother hid a dainty yawn behind her fingertips. “Very well. Good night, Laure.” When Maman said her name, the French pronunciation always came out.

  Slipping her feet into pattens, holding her bundle close, Laure Seraphine Edouard Lecroy-Duplessis, now simply Laura Edwards, whisked down the stairs and into the street.

  Peter Sharp, who kept the back door of the theatre, was waiting for her. “Running a little late, aren’t we? Twice now Her Mightiness has sent down asking for her dress,” he said.

  Laura shifted the bundle to her hip and laid her free hand on Peter’s arm. “I need you to help me.”

  “I already fobbed off Her Mightiness,” he said, flashing his gap-toothed, jack-o-lantern smile.

  Laura pushed away her qualms. It was too late. She’d already altered the costume. “Good of you, Peter, but I’m afraid I�
��m asking for much more.”

  “You in trouble?” he asked, lowering his head and dropping his voice. The muscles in his forearm jumped beneath her fingers.

  “Not exactly. I need a better job.” She explained the predicament in a rushed, staccato whisper. “I want Her Mightiness’s.” It wasn’t fair to ask, but she couldn’t manage without him. It was no small thing, plotting to dethrone the theatre’s reigning actress, Mrs. Sylvia Long.

  “You? An actress?” Peter scratched the back of his grizzled head. “That’s no kind of a job for a girl like yourself. Not so easy as it looks, either.”

  “Peter. I can do it. You know I can.”

  “You say the lines to me well enough, but—”

  Well enough? Night after night she had him in stitches, earning chuckles from the stagehands and quelling glares from the curtain pullers. Last week Peter’s sniggers had brought down an acid complaint from Mrs. Long and a threat to speak to Mr. Rollins, the manager.

  “It’s different on stage. What will you do when they cuss at you and hurl fruit?”

  “Throw it back if I catch it. Throw a kiss if I don’t.” For years she’d watched from backstage corners and cheap seats in the pit, deciding how to improve a glance or a gesture, how to fix the pitch and cadence of the words. She was eighteen, and her legs and her bosom would never be any better. Unlike Her Mightiness, Laura had a backside for breeches parts. She needed this chance.

  “And there’s another thing,” Peter said, still trying to dissuade her. “What about them lizards that prowl the green room? That’s no place for you. I’m not letting you turn harlot.”

  “I won’t. That’s not always necessary. Think of Lucy Green.”

  Peter grunted. “Lady Eversdale? Don’t count on that. She got lucky. Knew she had to choose eventually but managed to pick the right one, one that would marry her. I’ve kept my door twenty years and that’s only happened once.”

  “Yes, but even before, when they called her the White Hart—”

  “That worked because she played the foil to yon temptress, Mrs. Long, who’s got neither whiteness or a heart, so’s I can tell.”

  “I’ll be the new White Hart then,” Laura said.

  “You know I love you,” Peter said. “But you’re no Lucy Green.”

  She didn’t have the inches, or the alabaster skin. But she could act, even if it was only in front of Peter and the stagehands. Before the pikes and the blood and the fires, she’d spent her days in a menagerie of actors and writers—the best from the Comédie-Française. Her father, the Comte, had loved nothing better than staging one production after another in his private theatre to audiences of family and houseguests. The obliging directors always found parts for him and his pet of a daughter. For her fifth birthday Laura had a costume with jeweled slippers and fairy wings and a speech of forty lines. They would have praised her no matter how badly she’d done, but afterward, when her fingers were still tingling and her face flushed, Laura overheard the lead actress, still in a Marie Antoinette wig and with her face done up with patches, whisper to her counterpart, “A shame perhaps, that the little girl is born what she is. A natural talent.”

  The actor, busy ungluing his false mustache, gave a grunt. “She’ll be like her father. Stage everything she likes in her own theatre and play games with us. We aren’t toys, Berthe.”

  The leading lady pouted, coy as a cat. “No? But I like to play.”

  It was then the actor saw Laura’s eyes in the mirror. Hastily shushing his companion, he brought her back to her father. “A talent and appreciation to rival your own, my lord. You must watch her or I think she’ll hide herself in one of our wagons and run away to Paris!”

  Her father laughed and brushed a careless knuckle over Laura’s chin, already talking about the next play, the next part. There were not many, and the last stage he climbed was a scaffold.

  “I’ll be better,” Laura insisted to Peter. She’d have to be. “Besides, I’d rather queen it in the green room than fetch and carry for Her Mightiness and mutilate my fingers with her everlasting sewing! Please, Peter. I won’t tell a soul you’ve helped me.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, moving away from her like she’d confessed to a disease. “She’ll have your head. And Mr. Rollins will—”

  “Not if I bring down the house,” Laura said. “I will, Peter. You know I can. Please.”

  After a bit more pleading he gave in, but kept up a steady mumble of foreboding as he showed her where Mr. Rollins hung his keys.

  “Wait here,” Laura whispered when he hesitated outside the dressing room door.

  “Nope, I’m all in,” he said. “You’d better shine, my girl, because it’s both our jobs if you don’t.”

  “What kept you?” Sylvia Long snapped as Laura and Peter sidled into her dressing room.

  “I lost a button,” Laura lied, advancing behind her. Mrs. Long sniffed, her attention on the application of a second layer of rouge.

  “You’ll have to help me into it. I won’t have it smearing my face. What are you doing here?” she asked, fixing her eye on Peter through the mirror.

  “I’m just the muscle,” Peter said. Before Sylvia Long could speak, Laura threw the gown over her head, muffling the shrill scream. A manicured hand lashed out, scoring Laura’s arm, but a second later, Peter had the claws pinned behind her back.

  “Quiet down and we won’t harm you. You just aren’t going on stage tonight is all,” he said. She struggled to wrestle free, yowling through the crumpled petticoats until Peter clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Everything all right?”

  Laura spun round before the inquiring stagehand could throw open the door. She widened it a crack, speaking in a low voice. “I got the waist measurement wrong. Won’t take me a minute to let it out, but you know…” All the staff were familiar with Mrs. Long’s tantrums. The stagehand nodded and vanished down the corridor, glad he wasn’t to blame. Laura locked the door.

  “Can she breathe?” Laura asked, alarmed by the bite marks on Peter’s finger and the arm he had hooked around Mrs. Long’s neck. Her heels drummed on the floor. She wrested a hand free, raking her nails across Peter’s face, but a cuff, a curse, and a look from him quickly drained the fight from her.

  “She can breathe,” he said, binding a handkerchief over Mrs. Long’s mouth. “Just.” With surprising efficiency, he fastened her hands and feet with stockings. Peter could look quite terrifying when he wanted to, Laura realized, noting the pallor of Mrs. Long’s face and her dilated eyes. That scar, the missing teeth…

  “Do you think we hurt her?” Laura whispered as they bundled her into an armoire and locked the door.

  “Her pride, yes. And if Mr. Rollins doesn’t kill you, you’ll have to watch your back the rest of your days. She’ll be fine. It’s you and I who are bleeding.” He inspected his wounded finger, motioning with his head to the scratches on Laura’s arms. They were bright enough she’d have to powder over them.

  “Old cat,” Peter said. Something thumped in the cupboard. “Quiet, you, or I’ll have you carted away.” His eyes crinkled at Laura. “Expect I’ve lost my job, and I’ll look a right mess tomorrow”—he probed his left cheek—“but I did enjoy that. You better get dressed.”

  The bell rang, warning that there were only five minutes till curtain. Breathless, cursing her clumsy fingers, Laura struggled with the fastenings of the gown, taking a few tentative steps in the heavy silk. Turning to the mirror, she plucked up a stick of charcoal and stretched up the curve of her brows. The burgundy of the gown didn’t flatter her, but balanced with rouge on her lips and rice-powdered skin, the effect was tolerable. Besides, move and speak right and no one would notice the dress. She’d never bared so much décolletage, but the altered costume seemed to frame it all rather nicely.

  Someone pounded on the door. “Hurry up, Sylvia!” Mr. Rollins said.

  “Almost ready,” Laura said, her mouth full of pins as she speared a wig of gold ringlets over he
r own hair. She moved, dipped, took an exploratory jump, but the piece stayed in place. There was a flurry of bashing against the armoire that Peter silenced with another thump.

  “Well?” Laura turned back to Peter, grinning as she curtsied, stretching out her arms.

  “You’re the very devil,” he said. “Go. Start a riot.”

  Heart pounding, she slipped into the dark corridor, hastening past the backstage moths who didn’t see past the wig and the gown. Only when Laura stood in the wings, her toes just outside the glow of the stage, did she meet the prompter’s eyes and realize he’d noticed the switch. She asked for silence with a single finger pressed to her rouged lips.

  He answered with a hint of a shrug. On your head be it.

  At least her furtive glance showed the Duke of Saltash’s box was empty. She could face that hurdle later. The music swelled, racing to the finish, still barely discernible above the rumbling audience. Some buffoons in the pit were calling for Mrs. Long. Well, they were in for a surprise. Laura crossed herself once, silently begging for help from every possible source: the ghost of her father, the Virgin, the lucky ribbon tied round her thigh.

  The music stilled. Laura fixed a saucy smile on her face, cocked her hip, and swept onto the stage. Staring myopically into the lights, she pulled in the gasps, the brilliance, the finery of it all, making it part of her own skin. Her lips slid back from her teeth and the words leapt from her throat, curveting into the boxes, prancing off the ceiling.

  Surprise gave her a second’s advantage. She would not waste it. By the end of the prologue, she would steal their hearts.

  Chapter Two