Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  Tom spun back, knife raised.

  “Stop it!” Miracle hissed under her breath. “You’ll not set them against each other. It won’t work.”

  “If that oaf touches you again—”

  “He did me no harm. Meanwhile, you’re a keg of powder, almost too dangerous to be around.”

  “You’ve no idea how bloody dangerous I feel.”

  “Then take a deep breath,” she whispered back, “and think about buttercups.”

  “Shut your traps!” Bruiser shouted.

  Ryder almost laughed, though the tension threatened to lift off the top of his head. Whatever Miracle claimed, there was nothing to stop the thugs from shooting their victims and leaving them to die. There was nothing to stop them from first raping Miracle. The thieves had not bothered to conceal their faces. Why would they leave witnesses who could identify them?

  Yet Ryder’s brain was racing now. His only truly reliable attribute. He took a deep breath, but he did not think about flowers. He concentrated on his mare, her fine nostrils, her delicate ears.

  Beauty had raised her head to stare back up the road. As Ryder focused on that bright sensitivity, he began to feel almost supernaturally alive, as if he could see in the dark, or hear the silent hum of the planets wheeling overhead. His rage began to dissipate as he seized on their one chance of survival.

  The mare pulled back as Jeb spun about from his search of her saddlebags. “Look at this! The cove had pistols.” He waved one at Ryder and laughed. “You’re a pretty Cock Robin, ain’t you? To travel along a road like this at night without bothering to reload’em? Robbing a gabey like you is like taking a bottle from a baby.”

  “What else would you expect from a poor thespian?” Ryder asked. “As a certain gentleman of Verona once said: ‘’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.’ Words, not action, are our gift.”

  “Then you’ll have to sing for your next supper.” Jeb guffawed at his own wit.

  Ryder raised his brows in the exaggerated grimace of a fool. “Alas, although robbed of my paltry savings, I’m far too fine to arouse the sympathy of a crowd. Appearances are everything.” He pressed one hand to his chest. “‘What, is the jay more precious than the lark, because his feathers are more beautiful?’”

  “Hark at him go!” Jeb said.

  Tom tossed his knife in his hand. “That’s a damn nice jacket, ain’t it? Nicer than mine.”

  “Then I’d be happy to give it to you, sir.”

  “You ain’t doing the giving. We’re doing the taking. Strip it off!”

  It allowed Ryder a little free movement. It allowed him to delay a little longer. The music of the planets had begun to sound tinny, as if faraway brass pans were banging against iron pots. The sound was accompanied by a much deeper drumbeat in a oddly dislocated rhythm. Beauty quivered with alertness.

  “You would take my jacket, sir?” Ryder asked. “But what’s the virtue in a gift, if it’s forced?”

  “We ain’t talking about virtue, Miss Molly! We’re talking about theft.”

  Her brow furrowed, Miracle glanced sharply at Ryder’s face. As the men laughed again, he bent his head to hear her frantic whisper: “I know you can fence and box, but for God’s sake don’t try anything against three loaded pistols.”

  He brushed her ear with his lips. His new alertness sang in his blood, as if Orion blew a distant trumpet. “Then you would be sad if I were shot?”

  Her eyes widened, but only to reveal a cold, hard core of determination. “Very. You will not intervene, even if they rape me. I want your promise on that!”

  “I won’t promise any such thing, except that it won’t come to that.”

  “Stop that whispering!” Bruiser said. “Take off the bloody coat!”

  Ryder slipped off his jacket. “Here you are, sir, though I must warn you that this humble item of clothing will almost certainly prove the death of the wearer.”

  “Soaked in poison, is it?” The footpad laughed again, before he tossed his own ragged coat into the hedge and shrugged into Ryder’s jacket. “Well, if that ain’t a nice fit! Don’t look half so humble on me!”

  “What is this?” Miracle hissed. “Do you know other ways to fight—as your brother does?”

  “Not at all! But listen hard! I don’t believe I will need to defend your honor with my life, after all.”

  The jangle was closer now, accompanied by a distinct rumble and an arrhythmic trotting. It might mean succor, or it might mean more trouble, but it shifted the balance, at least for a few more minutes.

  Beauty whinnied. Jeb jerked his head, then turned to stare back up the road. “Someone’s coming!”

  Still covering Miracle and Ryder with both pistols, Bruiser retreated toward a gap in the hedge. “Come on, lads! That’s enough. Bring the nag! She’s worth more than all the rest put together.”

  “If you take my mare,” Ryder said, “she will kill you.”

  The footpads glanced at each other as if shadows reached from the sky with the fingers of death.

  “We ain’t aiming to ride her, Your Fancy Lordship,” Jeb said with open bravado. “We’re aiming to sell her.”

  “I cannot impress this on you strongly enough,” Ryder replied, his mind clear as crystal. “If you take that mare, you will hang.”

  “Oh, Miss Molly is fond of his pretty horse,” Tom said in an odd singsong. “I’ll bet he’s even more fond of his pretty whore. What say we have a little fun, lads, as we go?”

  The light of two lamps appeared like the eyes of a dragon at the top of the hill. The rumble differentiated into the sound of wheels and horses trotting fast. The metallic clanging grew louder, like the clash of a medieval battle.

  “If you want the moll, bring her!” Bruiser shouted.

  Tom tried to grab Miracle by the wrist. With more speed than he knew he possessed, Ryder grabbed a handful of gravel from the edge of the ford and threw it. The thief staggered back, roaring curses. Jeb spun around and raised his pistol.

  Ryder seized Miracle around the waist and dived with her into the bank. The bullet roared past them to splash harmlessly into the stream, sending up a spurt of white water.

  “Leave the wench be!” Bruiser raced up the bank. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Still cursing, Tom sprinted after him. Dragging the mare by the reins, Jeb smashed behind them through the dark gap in the hedge to be swallowed by the night.

  His pulse rapid, Ryder stood up and offered Miracle his hand. “Not much of a knight errant, I’m afraid. You’re all right?”

  “Yes! Yes, of course.” She scrambled to her feet, but she immediately turned away, as if to gulp in a clean breath of air. “I’m sorry about Beauty.”

  Ryder stared at her silhouette, as pure as a knife blade, then retrieved the footpad’s jacket from the hedge and thrust his arms into the sleeves. “They won’t hurt her. She’s too valuable. And if Lord Hanley finds them—instead of us—because of her, our footpads are dead men.”

  “Yet your mare was your last link with home, wasn’t she? Now you have no money, no weapons, and nothing left that identifies you as anything other than a wandering vagabond—and it’s my fault.”

  Except for her assumption of blame, her perception was, as always, stunningly accurate. For the first time in his life he was entirely at the mercy of fate. It was a bloody uncomfortable feeling.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “They almost shot you. It was madness to risk that.”

  “You really think I should have done nothing to prevent your being raped?”

  She spun back and gestured angrily with both hands. “Rape isn’t the end of the world, but do you think I’d have found it any easier to bear if you were already lying dead in the road?”

  The light from the approaching lamps washed over her face. Ryder’s heart contracted as if he had been struck. Long runnels of moisture tracked down her cheeks. With one furious sweep of her hand, she brushed them away, then she laughed at him.
/>   “Yes, I’m weeping for you, you brave fool!”

  For a moment it paralyzed him. He had no idea what to make of it, for now she was smiling as if she had never had a moment’s disquiet.

  In a grand cacophony of noise, a wagon came up and stopped. Another jangled up behind it.

  Miracle curtsied to the newcomers, holding her skirts as if she wore a silk ball gown.

  “How now!” The driver of the first wagon whistled between his teeth. “What have we here, lads? I thought I heard a shot.”

  The mouth of a blunderbuss yawned in the hands of the man who sat beside the driver. Both men’s faces were shielded from the lanterns by a canvas awning stretched above their heads.

  “I’d say this ford’s a bad spot for footpads, Mr. Faber.”

  “And I’d say you were right, Mr. Faber.”

  Ryder swallowed a grin as he studied the wagon. Castle walls flickered in front of a fantastic forest. An entanglement of wooden swords, spears, and a barrel full of pikes thrust up toward the sky. As the horses shifted, the painted trees and stones rippled like images in a dream, and a row of silver shields and helmets jangled against a dozen swinging tin plates and some cooking pots.

  Yet the strangers were well armed, and other heads had jostled up among piles of trunks and cases. Every pair of hands bristled with an assortment of weapons. With a series of clicks, the guns were cocked.

  For the second time that night, Ryder raised both hands above his head.

  “Our game has just taken an entirely unexpected new turn,” he whispered to Miracle.

  “Why, so it has!” She also raised her hands. “So let’s play on and face the music! If they’ll take us with them, I think we can hide very well in plain sight.”

  “You don’t think Hanley would look for us among a troupe of traveling players?”

  “Never!”

  “What do you suppose the play is?”

  “Apparently something that involves a great deal of martial bravado.”

  The wagon driver leaned forward into the light. Three turkey feathers impaled the crown of his hat. White hair fringed out beneath the battered brim like the petals of a daisy.

  “Well, answer us, sir: Are you vagrants or villains?”

  “Not villains—Mr. Faber, is it?—victims.” Ryder lowered his hands and bowed. “You’re quite correct about the footpads, sir. We’ve just been robbed of all we possess. Even my grandfather’s watch: a loss that burns to my heart, though the wretched timepiece never kept very accurate time.”

  Mr. Faber’s jacket seemed to have been pieced together from the trimmings of a quilt. “Left you nothing, eh?”

  “Just our wits and our lives, sir, for which we are duly grateful.”

  The black gaze pierced as the driver squinted beneath his bushy white brows. “You’ve the voice of a gentleman, though I’d say that coat has seen better days.”

  “Perhaps not as interesting as the days seen by your own, sir?”

  A woman laughed. “You may not be a thief, laddie, but I believe you’re a damned rogue.”

  Ryder grinned at her. “A rogue who’d be grateful for a ride with your merry company, ma’am. And a meal, perhaps?”

  The driver pulled his mouth into a lugubrious crescent. “We’ll be hard pressed to feed our own mouths for the next few days. We’ve missed tonight’s performance of Hamlet and we’ll be canceling tomorrow’s.”

  “After we already went to the expense of the posters,” the woman said.

  “—which will leave us as penniless as yourselves,” a younger man commented from farther back in the wagon. “Worse, it’ll leave us in bloody debt and selling up our horses, most like. We only have one night at each stop. For most of our audience, it’s a once-a-year chance to see a play.”

  Ryder walked up to the team—two heavy draft animals with foreheads like blocks of limestone—and rubbed a shaggy gray neck. “Yet you seem to have most of Denmark on that wagon. What’s the problem?”

  “We’re short three of our best players,” the woman said. “I’m the queen, but we’ve no Ophelia.”

  “Horatio languishes in the cellar of an inn, where the innkeeper locked him up.”

  “And Fortinbras, who doubles as assorted other parts, broke his arm. He and Horatio got into a fight.”

  “And Ophelia?”

  “Just had her seventh baby,” the young man replied.

  Ryder choked back his reaction, which was entirely inappropriate for the circumstances. “A lady in her ninth month was playing Ophelia?”

  “Peggy makes a grand enough Ophelia when she’s not in her cups, however many nippers she’s had. The costume has plenty of drapes. But now we can’t double up enough parts. Sam there”—the driver nodded toward the young man—“is the only one of the lads who can play a girl’s part in a pinch, but he’s Hamlet. So, no play and no pay, and another long stretch till the next square meal.”

  Miracle walked around the horses to stand directly beneath one of the lanterns. She smiled up at the driver with shining brilliance, the bones of her face as pure and clear as if she were very young.

  “‘But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven—’”

  “Good Lord!” the man with the blunderbuss said.

  Her expression changed to betray a heartbreak so real that Ryder felt the cold touch of dread. She pulled a few odd leaves and stems of grass from her hair—acquired in her recent encounters with hedges and banks—then began to quote lines from another speech.

  “‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.’” She curtsied again, with every eye riveted to her face. “If you will help us, Mr. Faber, I can play Ophelia.”

  “Well, I’ll be—!” the wagon driver said into the sudden silence. “That’s better than the London stage.”

  “Which is where I learned it,” Miracle replied.

  “And your husband?”

  “We’re not married,” she said. “This is my cousin, Mr. Devon. He could help with the props and—”

  “—play Fortinbras, certainly,” Ryder said. “And possibly some assorted other gentlemen, though Horatio might be a bit more than I could manage on such short notice.”

  Several members of the troupe clapped their hands.

  Hiding his appreciation for the absurdity of the moment, Ryder managed to recall a few words spoken by Fortinbras at the end of the play.

  “‘For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune—’”

  The wagon driver whistled again. “You’ll make a damned fine Prince of Norway, sir. Anyone would think you were born to the part.”

  Miracle glanced up into Ryder’s face, an odd quirk at the corner of her mouth.

  He leaned close to answer the unspoken question. “Jack and I used to perform the plays for fun when we were boys. I can probably study up enough to remember most of the lines.”

  Hamlet climbed from the wagon and extended his hand. The youth was handsome, with bright blue eyes and a knowing smile. “Then it’s our lucky day, sir! That innkeeper won’t hold Horatio past tonight, so we expect him back in time for tomorrow night’s performance.”

  “Then you’ll take us with you?” Miracle asked.

  The youth grinned at her, then turned back to Ryder. “But will I be allowed to kiss your pretty cousin, Mr. Devon?”

  Ryder stared down at the younger man in genuine surprise. “I don’t remember Hamlet kissing Ophelia anywhere in the play. Does he?”

  “He does the way we perform it. The audience likes it.”

  “We don’t play in theaters for the gentry,” the woman explained. “Our performances are for country folk, in barns and inns and on village greens. They like something to take them out of themselves.”

  “Then why pick Hamlet?” Ryder asked. “Why not one of the comedies?”

  “Because Hamlet has everything,” Miracle said. “Passion, tragedy, buffoonery, love, insight, and
a ghost—and almost everyone is dead at the end. So, of course, I’ll be happy to kiss Hamlet. For a bed and a meal and a ride north, I’d kiss the ghost himself.”

  The young man laughed, seized her around the waist, bent her back in his arms, and kissed her. Miracle wrapped her arms about his neck and kissed back.

  Ryder’s gut clenched as if he’d been punched. He forced himself to relax his hands and look away, but cold fury boiled in his blood.

  “Come on up and join us, Mr. Devon,” the driver said, his shrewd eyes watching Ryder. “You’ve an honest face, sir, and your cousin will have the audience queuing in the streets.”

  It would never do to beat Hamlet to a pulp. Calling on as much ducal hauteur as he could muster, Ryder turned his back on the faithless Ophelia, and strode up to the wagon.

  The driver thrust out his hand. “Robert B. Faber, sir, pleased to make your acquaintance. This fellow with the blunderbuss is my brother, William B. Faber. Bill plays Polonius to my Claudius.” The dark eyes twinkled. “I like to play the villain, you understand. Hamlet there is my son, Sam: Samuel B. Faber.” He jerked one thumb over his shoulder. And that’s my wife, Mrs. Faber, back there, but all the lads call her Gertrude.”

  “You’re very kind, Mr. Faber.” Ryder shook the proffered hand and climbed into the wagon. “Larry Devon, at your service.”

  The driver glanced back at his son and Miracle.

  “Come along with you, Sam!” Mr. Faber called. “Let the lass be!”

  With the practice of a lifetime, Ryder feigned absolute indifference. Yet anguish seized him by the throat when Sam took Miracle by the hand and led her back to the second wagon, where they disappeared from sight.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MR. FABER’S TRAVELING PLAYERS CAMPED IN AN OPEN FIELD on the edge of a village about five miles farther up the road. With practiced efficiency, the troupe set up tents and awnings. Ryder was offered a nook with part of the canvas castle for shelter. A snoring actor slept beside him. Though the players had already eaten, Mrs. Faber—otherwise known as Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother—had earlier found some bread and cheese and handed him a mug of ale. Ryder suffered the generous hospitality in a hurt rage.