By a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  C.J. rose from her folding chair and took a deep breath. Bernie squeezed her hand and whispered in her ear, “Let’s do it, kiddo.” He smelled faintly of cigarettes and beer.

  The interior of the Bedford Street Playhouse looked like a Wedgwood box, with white sculptures standing out in relief against a background of china blue. A long folding table set up stage left was littered with stacks of actors’ headshots, scripts, and the ubiquitous paper coffee cups.

  Ralph introduced C.J. and Bernie to Humphrey and Beth, then seated himself behind the table and pushed an open box of cookies toward C.J. “Before you jump into the scene, have a ratafia cake,” the designer said, with his mouth full. “Beth baked them. Sort of to get us all in that 1801 mood.”

  “What are ratafia cakes?” C.J. asked the director.

  “Sort of like little meringues made with ground almonds, egg whites, and orange-flower water. They were a very traditional dessert back then.”

  “But,” Humphrey chimed in, “in 1801, they used to make them with bitter almonds instead of grinding sweet ones. Bitter almonds contain prussic acid.”

  C.J. frowned. “Sorry, guys, I flunked chemistry. Enlighten me.”

  “Poison,” Beth and Humphrey responded in tandem. They looked at each other and laughed.

  Beth smiled. “Prussic acid is hydrogen cyanide. Poison.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” C.J. said.

  The audition was almost as painful as prussic acid poisoning. Poor Bernie was a hopeless actor, and C.J. left the stage feeling defeated and robbed of the opportunity to have done her best work. So much for karma. She was in the corridor putting on her coat when Ralph emerged from the theatre. “C.J., they’d like to see you do the scene again with a different actor.”

  Back onstage, C.J.’s second chance was going terrifically. Beth was highly complimentary of her work and made particular mention of C.J.’s flawless English accent, praise indeed coming from a true Brit.

  As she was preparing to leave the playhouse, C.J. felt a tap on her shoulder. Ralph again. “They’d like to bring you in for a callback, C.J. So you’ll be hearing from us within the week about the specifics. Congratulations.”

  As it turned out, there were nine grueling rounds of callbacks before C.J. made it to the final cut. Personally as well as professionally, her nerves were raw.

  Two weeks after her first By a Lady audition, she stood on a chair in the backstage area, being fussed over by a professional costumer brought in by the producers. The people from Miramax wanted to see the final casting choices in full costume, by appointment, one at a time, as if they were being screentested. C.J. caught her reflection in the dressing room mirrors. “Wow! Except for the zipper in the gown, I really feel like I’m back in 1801.”

  “You look exactly like one of those pre-Regency portraits. It’s amazing,” commented Elsie Lazarus, the assistant stage manager.

  Milena, the costumer, handed C.J. a straw bonnet decorated with simple yellow ribbons. “I can’t wait to see how you look in this.” C.J. tied a bow under her chin, edged it just off to the side as she’d seen in illustrations of the period, and regarded herself in the mirror.

  “Don’t forget to accessorize,” Elsie said. She gestured to a coquelicot shawl and the cream silk reticule and ecru lace mitts that hung in a net bag on the costume rack. “All set?” C.J. nodded. “Then let’s go! Break a leg!”

  Fighting the manifestations of stage fright, C.J. stepped out onto the stage. In accordance with the lead designer’s mandate from the producers to deliver a rehearsal version of the eventual Broadway set, Ralph had constructed a pair of freestanding frames with brass-handled doors, which now added definition to the space, creating the boundaries of Jane Austen’s parlor in Steventon.

  Beth’s voice echoed from the audience. “Right, then, would everyone please humor me and put your Starbucks cups down for the next five minutes. Let’s settle. Thank you. All right, C.J., I’d like to hear the monologue toward the end of Act One as if we’ve got Lefroy onstage with you, and take it all the way through to Jane’s exit, please,” Beth added crisply.

  Infused with something out of the ordinary, C.J. began the speech she had been asked to memorize for her final audition. Perhaps it was the addition of the costume and accessories, but she had no trouble believing that on that stage in Greenwich Village, she was stepping back in time more than two hundred years.

  “I will think on it, Tom,” C.J. said resolutely, nearing the end of the scene. “And accord the utmost consideration to your proposal.” She crossed thoughtfully to the doorway, stopped, and turned as the lights began to fade. “Bath,” she said, her voice tinged with ambivalence. “I’m going to Bath.”

  As she closed Ralph’s door behind her and exited the stage, C.J. found herself enveloped in complete and impenetrable blackness.

  Chapter Two

  The beginning of a most unusual journey in which our heroine soon learns that Merrie Olde England isn’t always.

  SEVERAL MOMENTS ELAPSED before C.J. was able to adjust her vision. She surveyed the breadth of the polished oaken floor of the stage, her gaze lighting upon an arcaded area at the back of the house. Through the musty gloom she discerned elaborate boxes trimmed in wine-red upholstery on either side of the intimate theatre above the pit level. The rest of the theatre—including the galleries, which were divided into smaller loges—was decorated primarily in a rich shade of malachite green.

  Where am I? C.J. wondered aloud, her voice greeting her in echo. She had just exited the stage at the Bedford Street Playhouse—had stepped off the makeshift set of By a Lady into the familiar backstage darkness—or so she thought. But now she was not backstage—either in Manhattan or anywhere.

  She peered into the dim cavern illuminated only by renegade slivers of daylight seeping in from outdoors. The small, shallow orchestra stalls were furnished with hard wooden benches rather than individual seats, and the balconies encircling the interior of the auditorium on three sides were considerably close to the stage.

  Apart from the hushed, almost reverent, quiet of the darkened empty theatre, there was something else out of the ordinary, if C.J. could only pinpoint it. The playhouse looked like many she had seen in prints and photographs of some of the older theatres in European cities, but something . . . if she could figure it out . . . something was very different from anything she had ever seen. She looked up and was astonished to discover that no lights whatever were visible—no network of grids, pipes, and cables. The ceiling boasted an elaborate mural ringed in gilt, where lissome nymphs and chubby cherubs à la Boucher appeared to join several of Shakespeare’s most recognizable characters in a pastoral frolic. The sight of Shylock cavorting with half-clad dryads provoked a sly smile from C.J.’s lips.

  Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, although her heart was pounding within her chest. What the hell is going on here? Was further exploration a grand idea or a dreadful one? C.J. walked downstage—literally—as the floor was significantly raked and sloped toward the audience. A quaint little prompter’s box was nestled just below the lip of the stage. Yet here no light was affixed to the wooden podium that nearly filled the shadowy, cramped space.

  It was surreal. C.J. rescanned the playing area for clues, wondering when she might wake from her elaborate daydream. High above the center of the stage, at the apex of the proscenium arch, a familiar emblem stood out in gold relief, topped by a crown and trimmed handsomely with a carved ermine drape. It was a version of the English royal crest, bearing several lions couchant, as well as the rampant red lion C.J. recognized as the insignia of Scotland and a golden Irish harp on a field of blue. C.J.’s pulse raced with alarming rapidity. Perhaps she had ended up on another set, one for some period classic. But where? Curiosity trumping fear, she elected to inspect the backstage area.

  Through a musty gloom C.J. fought her way past huge painted flats that sat in a track, or rut, allowing them to be slid on and off the stage like pocket doors. Amid the maze of store
d scenic elements were stained glass windows, elaborate thrones encrusted in gold and studded with gemstones, a hedgerow fashioned entirely of silk leaves, and several enormous walls interrupted by high, Gothic arches.

  Once free of the forest of flats, C.J. resumed her offstage foraging, which finally led her to an imposing door at the stage level. She pushed against the heavy wooden portal, which swung open onto a narrow alleyway paved in uneven cobblestones, then negotiated her way to the street, where she was greeted with a wash of bright sunlight. She found herself as dazed as Dorothy upon her first eyeful of Munchkinland and blinked several times, attempting to adjust her vision.

  She turned back to view the façade of the building she had just exited, on which had been painted the words Orchard Street, and struggled to make sense of her surroundings. A young lady in a capacious straw bonnet elbowed C.J. as she passed, nearly knocking her to the ground.

  Slack-jawed with amazement, C.J. stood in the middle of the street and gaped at the framed sign prominently displayed outside the elegant stone edifice: EASTER SUNDAY! APPEARING TONIGHT AND TOMORROW EVENING! COURTESY OF THE THEATRE ROYAL AT DRURY LANE. MRS. SIDDONS IN DE MONTFORT BY JOANNA BAILLIE. And beneath it: TUESDAY NIGHT: SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, WITH MRS. SIDDONS AND MR. KEMBLE.

  Brother and sister costars as the Bard’s bloodiest couple; now that would be an interesting production indeed, especially with the greatest tragedienne of the . . . C.J.’s heart fairly stopped. Mrs. Siddons? Sarah Siddons? And what in heaven was Joanna Baillie, an unknown—to C.J.—female playwright, doing sharing the bill with William Shakespeare? Where was she?

  The rest of the notice did much to enlighten and, even more, to intrigue her. FRIDAY NIGHT, DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND, MR. KEMBLE WILL REPEAT HIS PERFORMANCE AS HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK. Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest when she read the date at the top of the announcement: APRIL 5, 1801, THEATRE ROYAL, BATH.

  Bath? 1801?

  A stupefied C.J. looked across the road, arrested by the sight of the lacy Gothic architecture reaching toward the sky from behind a cluster of low, narrow buildings. Her gaze was drawn heavenward, tracing the fantastic height of the stone spires and the graceful, yet impressive, flying buttresses. The church bell tolled twelve, its chiming reverberations lingering in the air like a melodic gray cloud. It was all too sudden, too new, and too wondrous an experience to instill panic—yet. She had recently read an article about conscious dreaming: because she’d been eating, sleeping, and breathing By a Lady and everything she could get her hands on about the time period, perhaps she was somehow willing this strange and thrilling journey to occur. Whatever trick my mind is playing, how can I not keep going to see how it all ends? thought C.J.

  Wending her way up a slender, curving lane and through a claustrophobic alley that obligingly trapped the intoxicating fragrance of freshly baked bread, C.J. threaded past women with delicate fichus crisscrossed over high-waisted, lightweight Directoire gowns, lending their wearers a slightly pigeon-breasted appearance. She narrowly avoided a trio of bawling children who resembled their modish parents in costumed miniature, and practically tripped over an aging macaroni in his dandified Sunday best, with impeccable cravat and high black Tilbury hat.

  Her investigative perambulations took her along the aromatic Stall Street, undoubtedly named for the vast profusion of vendors purveying their various wares: everything from piping hot currant muffins to milk, from fragrant fresh-cut flowers to remarkably unappetizing unplucked fowl suspended by their feet from horizontal wooden poles. C.J.’s nostrils were further assailed by the smell of sweet rolls wafting through the air, the fragrant aroma of apples being baked to order on a small coal stove, and the earthy odor of ordure. She soon found herself in a crowded public square, facing a low, shaded colonnade.

  “Shall we step inside the Pump Room, your ladyship?” asked a well-dressed passerby of his elderly companion.

  The somberly clad dowager attired in a full-skirted ensemble more befitting to the late eighteenth century nodded curtly, closed her parasol, and allowed the younger man to escort her inside.

  The Pump Room?!

  How had this happened? Minutes earlier—or so C.J. thought—she had walked off the set of By a Lady into the darkened backstage area of a Greenwich Village theatre in New York City in the United States of America, which, if the Orchard Street theatre poster had proclaimed the proper date, was only twenty-five years old!

  C.J. stood in the middle of the flagstone square as a tide of humanity swept past her very much confounded person. A watercress-laden cart built like a giant wheelbarrow rumbled by, pulled by two small boys who paid no heed to pedestrian traffic. Jumping back to avoid being trampled by the pair of ragamuffins, C.J. backed into the bow-shaped window of Pelham’s Bookstore, just opposite a corner of Bath Abbey.

  Bath Abbey?!

  She turned back to look at the Abbey, which was indeed the church she had glimpsed from the Orchard Street theatre. Across the square, several fashionably dressed men and women strolled in and out of the Pump Room, the women wearing voluminous bonnets or wielding delicate parasols to shield their fair complexions from the sun. Momentarily seized by vanity, C.J. glanced about her to see if any other ladies sported fringed coquelicot shawls like the one she had been given by Milena, the By a Lady costume designer, who’d insisted that Austen herself wore one in 1798. None did. Oddly enough, she felt hopelessly out of date amid the scantily clad women in their revealing white Directoire gowns. If she had worn a frock like that under the bright stage lights—particularly the backlighting—the entire audience would have been able to tell how much she’d eaten for breakfast and whether she’d had a bikini wax.

  It fleetingly occurred to C.J. that she had stumbled onto a film set. Boy, those people at Miramax work fast, she thought. But no camera equipment was in sight, and no one was dressed in a fashion other than that which seemed appropriate for 1801. This seemed much too lengthy for one of those conscious dreams. Had she hit her head when she left the stage in New York? She could not be going mad. She looked down at her feet to see if her delicate kidskin pumps had metamorphosed into a pair of ruby slippers.

  No one seemed to take notice of her. Could they see her as she could see them? C.J. rubbed her rear end, which felt slightly bruised where she had bumped into the lead framing of the bookstore windowpanes. Well, she could certainly feel pain.

  At first, the thunderstruck revelation that she might actually be in Bath, England, in the year 1801 felt like a fantasy come to fruition. This acknowledgment was almost immediately followed by a pang of anxiety that zigzagged like lightning through her body upon the sudden realization that she had absolutely nothing with her, save the clothes on her back and what was in the small reticule dangling from her wrist. She slid open the drawstring, hoping to locate some cash, then realized that it would have been useless had she indeed discovered dollars, the coin of an as yet infant realm. Imagine finding a penny or a five-dollar bill bearing the likeness of a man who would not achieve immortality for several decades to come! A small tortoiseshell comb and a white linen handkerchief edged in lace were all that she found inside the prop purse, and they had been placed there back in a twenty-first-century New York City dressing room.

  Full of wonder, C.J. left the square to further explore her surroundings. Bath Abbey looked much the same to her as it had when she’d visited it in the twenty-first century, its unusual fan vaulting still reminding her of the wings of giant swans or, if you spent too much time staring up at them, a kaleidoscope. But instead of the weather-worn, honey-colored stone buildings she’d recalled, C.J. was fairly blinded by the gleaming whiteness of the eighteenth-century façades, made even more resplendent in the glaring sunlight. So this is what Bath looked like in its heyday! Now she began to understand why the spa city—the playground of the aristocracy—was considered one of the brightest jewels in the Georgian crown.

  She journeyed through the town, keeping the river Avon at her right elbow; and
with an uncanny sense of memory she found Great Pulteney Street, as long as three football fields and the widest thoroughfare she’d seen thus far. Stepping off the curb to cross the avenue, C.J. suddenly became overwhelmed; and when a wobbly and uneven stone caused her to lose her footing, she stumbled to the pavement. A rush of thunder filled her ears, and glancing up she saw four black chargers pulling a shiny burgundy-colored carriage about to bear down upon her prostrate frame. An attempt to scramble to her feet resulted in another minor catastrophe as she became tangled in the hem of her narrow skirt, sending her back to the ground. Never before had C.J. felt so terrified.

  The enormous coachman on the box bellowed out a warning, tugging on his team’s reins to restrain their flight. C.J. caught a glimpse of his deep green, two-tiered Inverness cloak and high black hat before flattening her body against the road and rolling away from the thundering hooves.

  The spectacle raised quite an alarm among the onlookers. A rail-thin lady in an overdecorated bonnet gasped in fright and clutched the arm of her companion, an elderly gentleman of ruddy complexion who still favored the cockaded tricorn, now some twenty years out of fashion. “Oh, I do hope the young miss is all right,” she murmured, eyes closed, fearing the worst.

  Still dazed, C.J. lifted her head and wiggled her legs, thus verifying their ability to function. After a moment or two, she concluded that she was more affrighted than injured, but her pale yellow muslin had taken quite a dusting and appeared to be beyond reasonable repair. She tried to speak, but no sound would come out. After several more moments passed, she began to catch her breath. How lucky she was to be alive, and apparently in one piece. Still, words deserted her.

  “The poor lambkin. And she never even raised a cry for help. Not so much as a whimper. Do you think she’s a mute, Sir Samuel?” The birdlike woman glanced anxiously at her companion. The gentleman extended a gloved hand to C.J., who shakily placed her palm in it, allowing him to lift her to her feet.