A Fatal First Night

by Kathleen Marple Kalb

  “You can sit if you want,” the guard tossed out.

  “I’ll stand,” Father Michael said.

  “So will I,” Tommy agreed but pulled out a chair for me. “You should sit so he doesn’t have to look up at you.”

  I took the seat gingerly, knowing I would be handing off every article of clothing I was wearing for a thorough cleaning the second I got home.

  Albert looked absolutely awful. He seemed to have lost weight in less than two weeks in jail, going from wiry to almost slight. A brown-eyed blond, he’d always been pale, but now he was almost transparent, with large purplish shadows under his eyes. I was relieved to see there were no bruises or other obvious evidence of abuse; even though I’m not supposed to know about such things, I was sure a singer would be all too easy a target in this place.

  I reached over to pat his hand. The guard bristled a little, but as soon as he realized that I really was just resting my gloved fingers on Albert’s bony ones, he backed off.

  “How are you?” I asked, probably the single most foolish question ever posed in the history of conversation.

  “I’m alive, Miss Ella.” He shook his head. “I didn’t do it. I swear to God, I didn’t do it.”

  I nodded, acknowledging, not agreeing. And yet . . .

  “I hadn’t seen Florian in months, not since the memorial for a year since my sister . . .”

  “You didn’t invite him to the show?”

  “Why would I? He was my friend once, but after Berthe, no more.”

  “So . . .”

  “I didn’t know he was there until I walked back to my dressing room after returning my props and found the door open and him on the floor like . . . like that.”

  I stared. Either he was lying or I had a killer on the loose in my company. I took a deep breath then, miasma or not, as I gathered my thoughts. It was an improbable story, the sort of thing a man would say to save his neck.

  But if it was true? I glanced up at Tommy. He didn’t seem particularly swayed by Albert’s protestations, and he’s generally a better judge of character than I am, if only because a few years of having to decide where the next punch is coming from teaches a man an awful lot.

  Best stick to the practicalities, I thought. “Have you hired a lawyer?”

  “No. I don’t know where to—” He broke off, once again seeming panicked by the enormity of it all.

  “Well, luckily, we have a lawyer’s wife in the company,” I said briskly, glad to have something simple and straightforward to do. “I’ll ask Marie to see if Paul can have someone from his firm help you.”

  “Thank you, Miss Ella.”

  “I’d do the same for anyone in trouble. I don’t know what happened that night, Albert, but you’re innocent until they prove you guilty.”

  He looked like he might cry. “I really am innocent.”

  “Then just keep your head, be quiet, and do what your lawyer tells you, once you have one,” I told him, the same advice any intelligent person would give a friend in such terrible straits. I reached over to pat his arm, and he took my hand in an almost painful grip.

  “I didn’t do it.” He looked to Father Michael. “As God’s my witness, I didn’t.”

  Tommy and the guard cleared their throats simultaneously, and Albert quickly let go my hand.

  “Try to stay calm,” I said finally. “Do you have books to read?”

  “They allow only the Bible in here.”

  “Then I guess you’ll become very familiar with the good old King James,” I replied dryly. “Anything you can do to keep yourself quiet and your mind clear will do.”

  Albert almost smiled. “Typical Miss Ella. Books cure everything.”

  “They can’t hurt, at least.”

  “Time’s up,” the guard cut in, not unkindly.

  I stood and shook hands with Albert, who hung on to my hand a bit longer than he should have, but not so much as to get a glare this time.

  “Thank you for coming, Miss Ella. You really are an angel.”

  “Far from that.” I shook my head. “Take care and keep calm.”

  Outside, we all took deep breaths of the air, even though no one would consider the miasma near the Tombs to be fresh and clean. It was beyond prison walls, which made it quite good enough.

  “What do you think, Father?” I asked. “Is he telling the truth?”

  “How could he be?” Tommy shook his head.

  “There’s more under heaven than we understand,” the priest said contemplatively. “He certainly believes what he’s saying. Whether that means it’s true is for someone well above me.”

  * * *

  That night, after the show, sleep eluded me. After trying to fall asleep for an hour or so, I wandered downstairs for a medicinal sherry, since I could not afford to lose the night’s rest.

  I knew I’d done everything within my power: Marie had sent word to Paul from the theater, and a junior attorney from his firm would be visiting Albert as soon as possible. But it was all terribly troubling.

  I could cast aside Albert’s declaration or my own doubts or even Cousin Andrew’s odd behavior. But all of them together meant something.

  Tommy was on the parlor settee with his own medicinal libation, whisky, staring at the fire, his latest book face-down on his lap, where he’d abandoned it for the moment.

  He looked up at me and shook his head. “You should sleep.”

  “That’s what this is for.” I poured my sherry and sat down on the other end of the settee. “You should sleep, too.”

  “I know.”

  “Albert?” I asked. “Or Jamie Eagger?”

  “I could just as easily have been him.”

  “You chose to help me instead.”

  Tommy smiled. “I suppose you would put it like that. I think you probably saved me from the life.”

  “You saved me from scrounging from company to company, looking for work. And made us both a passel of money.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with money.” He sipped his whisky. “And we have a very happy and comfortable life these days.”

  “That we do.” I raised my glass to him a little, and we fell back into amiable silence for a while.

  “You believed Albert, didn’t you?” Tommy finally asked.

  “Almost. I don’t know how it could have happened that way, but . . .”

  “I almost believed him, too.” He let out a small, bitter laugh. “My mother, God love her, is convinced he’s innocent. Says the second sight told her so, and we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  She had not mentioned this when I saw her, because she knew I would not listen. Aunt Ellen is convinced she has the gift. In fact, her gift is a family that tolerates her occasional predictions and prophecies, not to mention her own exceedingly kind heart. “Your mother gives the benefit of the doubt the way temperance ladies hand out pamphlets.”

  Tommy grinned. “So do you.”

  “No pamphlets. No temperance, either,” I said wryly, lifting my glass. “But it doesn’t have to be a cold-blooded killing. Maybe it was one of those brain frenzies we’ve read about, where he just pounced on him and killed him without knowing what he was doing, then came back to himself afterward.”

  Tommy took a contemplative sip of his drink. “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “No?”

  “I was thinking that if he is telling the truth, someone really put a fair amount of work into setting him up.”

  “True,” I agreed. “They would have had to know about Florian and Albert’s sister, lure Florian backstage, and kill him. That would take a pretty serious grudge.”

  “And a lot of effort.”

  I took a slow sip of the sherry and let it melt down my throat. I’d had enough now that I was starting to relax, which was a very good thing. “So either Albert is lying in hopes of saving his skin or there’s someone out there working very hard for his downfall.”

  “Or ours.”

  “Ours?”

&nb
sp; “Trying to make us look bad, perhaps. Harm the company, ruin Louis’s premiere?”

  “Maybe. Pretty roundabout way to do it, Toms.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And it would have to be someone who doesn’t know much about the way the papers work around here. You’d know better than I, but I suspect all of this has actually been good for business.”

  He smiled ruefully. “We’ve almost sold out the extra week.”

  We had gone into the run with the plan that we would add an additional week if sales were good. That, at least, had been one question with a quick and easy answer.

  “I thought perhaps.” I took a little more sherry. “I’m glad Marie and Paul were willing.”

  “Willing and thrilled, I think. Both of them.”

  “He’s happy when she’s happy.”

  “Good man, Paul.”

  I nodded. “Not many like him.”

  “I think perhaps that duke of yours is a contender.”

  “I’m not sure I want to give up my happy life to find out.”

  Tommy shook his head. “Heller, sweetheart, if it’s right, it’s supposed to add to your life, not take away from it. Marie still has everything she had before she married, as well as Paul . . . and the little ones.”

  “True.” I couldn’t help smiling at the thought of wee Joseph climbing up his mother’s skirts.

  “You want one.”

  “I want a lot of things, starting with a very generous slice of Mrs. G’s opera torte. That doesn’t mean I’m going to have them.”

  “I saw the way he looked at you. He’d marry you in a second.”

  “If it were just about him and me, and perhaps baby makes three, well, that would be one thing,” I admitted. “And probably a very good one at that.”

  Tommy watched the fire. “I suppose it could be, if you both want it enough.”

  “But I can’t give up everything I have and everything I am for him. I won’t.”

  “Are you sure he’d expect you to?”

  “No. But I’m not sure what he does expect.”

  Tommy took another drink and turned to me. “Then you’d best find out before you reject him, don’t you think?”

  I sighed. “I hate when you’re right.”

  He grinned. “You must hate a lot.”

  “Aren’t you adorable.”

  “Modest too.”

  I yawned.

  “Go to bed, Heller. Everything will look different, if not necessarily better, in the morning.”

  No argument to that.

  Chapter 8

  We Duel Again

  That Sunday I slept very late and woke only with enough time to brush my teeth, straggle into my breeches, and grab a sip of coffee from the tray Rosa had left at my door before I ran upstairs to the studio to prepare for my fencing lesson with the Comte du Bois. I do not hold with breakfast in bed; unless one is truly sick, properly brought-up people eat meals at a table. But a single cup of black coffee in the late morning after a show is not a meal.

  Tommy, maddeningly superior being that he was, had already risen, gone to Mass, and headed off to a no doubt full day of virtuous activities, despite the fact that he had stayed up later than I. Naturally, I felt guilty for my sniping when I found his note on the studio door.

  Visiting Jamie’s mother. See you at teatime.

  Poor family. Poor Toms.

  Once again, I vowed to make sure he got some extra rest and care over the next few weeks. I knew he had a very bad case of “there but for the grace of God go I,” and I was beginning to wonder if there was more than that.

  Whatever was happening here, he was also wearing himself a bit thin at an already busy time. Hopefully, once the benefit was over and the Eagger family provided for, he’d be able to take some ease.

  Right. He’s no happier with ease than I.

  “Allez-y, Monsieur le Comte,” I called when I heard the knock at the door. I was in the far corner of the studio, taking my foil out of the cabinet, and didn’t turn for a moment.

  When I did, I wasn’t squaring off with my little gargoyle of a pretend count, better known as Mr. Mark Woods of the Bronx. No, this was a much larger, and genuinely aristocratic, opponent.

  Gilbert Saint Aubyn stood just inside the room. His ice-blue eyes closed on my face, studying my aspect, as I considered his. For a second, we just stood there, staring at each other, months of time and distance vanishing like so much smoke, the current crackling between us as strong as ever.

  Bashert.

  The word, in my mother’s voice, slipped, unbidden, into my mind. Not now. Not yet.

  “Alba gu Bràth!” Montezuma crowed from his perch, breaking the spell with the greeting Gil had taught him. “Scotland forever!” in Scottish Gaelic, for his Highland Scots mother.

  We both laughed.

  “Love the birdie,” Gil said.

  Montezuma preened. I shook my head.

  “A rematch, Shane?” he asked as a smirking comte slipped into the room behind him, covering the social forms as chaperone.

  “Certainly.” I turned back to the cabinet to get another foil, allowing him a moment to prepare.

  When I turned back, he had doffed his coat and jacket and was standing there in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, looking like every maiden’s dream of a wicked duke. I had somehow managed to forget that in addition to being an intelligent, well-read person and an excellent correspondent, the tall and dark Gil was also—

  “Fine figure of a man!” crowed Montezuma.

  Until that exact instant, I had no idea it was possible to blush and laugh at the same time.

  “One wonders what you’ve been saying in that bird’s presence,” Gil observed, his own amused smile somewhat diluted by a sharp expression of assessment in his eyes.

  Did he really think I’d said that of someone else? Not my lookout to correct him if he’s that much of a fool. I tossed him a foil, and he caught it, not cleanly.

  “Seems I still throw better than I catch.”

  My blush intensified as I remembered when I’d said that to him, soon after he’d rather awkwardly thrown me a much-needed dagger . . . and I’d thrown an entirely unexpected embrace at him. “I seem to remember you catching rather nicely not so long ago.”

  “The game is all in a good partner, isn’t it?”

  “We shall see.” Fencing was likely safer than that line of conversation. I stepped into position with a smile. “What makes you think you will prevail this time?”

  He grinned, the naughty little boy expression that melts my heart. “Nothing at all. But one must try.”

  “En garde, then.”

  Gil can hold his own, but he’s nowhere near my level, and as usual, he took a few moments to acclimate to dueling a woman. I didn’t start at the top of my form, either, with the attraction rushing back, but I quickly recovered my balance.

  “You seem to have stayed rather sharp,” he said as I blocked a thrust and attacked.

  “Fairly.”

  “Fencing with the comte?” At that question, the intensity in his eyes matched the sound of steel on steel.

  “And Richard III, of course.”

  “Ah, yes. Henry Tudor prevails. What’s this I hear about a murderous Richard?”

  “Not murderous toward me, thankfully.”

  He almost missed the parry at that, and I knew he was remembering my last misadventure, which had ended with me swashbuckling to safety from a man bent on killing. “Glad to hear it.”

  “Mostly,” I said, pursuing the attack, “I have been researching my roles and learning the score.”

  “No tea dances?”

  “I am persona non grata with Mrs. Corbyn at the moment.” Aline Corbyn had tried to throw her last unmarried daughter at his head and had failed.

  “Ah, yes. Miss Pamela. Did I hear she made a more congenial match? If somewhat enraging to her formidable mama?”

  Pamela Corbyn had since run off with a livery driver. And much joy to both o
f them. “I did not sing at Miss Pamela’s wedding.”

  “Elopement, did I hear?”

  “Yes. She’s apparently ridiculously happy in a small garden apartment in the borough of Queens.”

  “Better love in an apartment than none in a castle.”

  I looked too long in his eyes then and almost missed his advance. “Oh, well played.” I parried, regrouped and started back in.

  “And you?”

  “What of me?”

  “No elopements?”

  I laughed as I attacked, then met his eyes again. We both froze for a moment. I decided he’d earned what he so clearly wanted. “No time for such nonsense, thank you. And, anyway, I wouldn’t elope.”

  “You’re right.” Even as he played right past it, I could see his face relaxing at the acknowledgment. “You’d expect your man to stand before God and the world and make his vows.”

  I began a new attack. “The man who wins me will have to do it right.”

  Gil smiled and parried. “And a lucky man he’ll be.”

  “At any rate, we have little romantic drama offstage here.”

  “I am still, however, considering the appropriate response to that assault upon my honor, Miss Shane.”

  “Really.” I almost missed the parry again at his direct reference to my pulling him into a kiss after I swung to safety. I still don’t know what came over me, other than playing the swashbuckling hero in the moment. Which, I guess, would make him the fair maiden. “Well, it was a truly terrible offense, Your Grace.”

  “Indeed. So awful an insult I haven’t been able to forget it.”

  His voice was light and teasing, but his eyes burned into mine. The kiss, my first and only, had been entirely inappropriate and wrong, of course. But amazing.

  “Ah.” I smiled a little and backed him off. “Well, I suppose I shall have to pay the price for my rash actions.”

  “You could be facing a life sentence.”

  “I’m not sure I want clemency.” Parry.

  “What do you want, Shane?” Attack.

  “What do you?”

  I could have launched one more attack and cornered him, and he knew it. But the duel was now beside the point.