By a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  Although it was offered, she refused any medical treatment for her dazed behavior. So the By a Lady staff sent her home to get some rest and prepare to start rehearsals at ten the following morning. C.J. went back upstairs to the dressing room to claim her cloak and noticed a modest-sized carpetbag on the bottom shelf of the costume rack. Perfect for transporting drugs across time. What was a little petit larceny compared to the life of a dear friend? Tomorrow she would bring some beta-blockers to rehearsal and see if she could somehow get back to Bath and cure the countess. Was it possible to alter someone’s destiny? Was it right? Shouldn’t saving the life of a loved one come before all else?

  It felt very odd to be surrounded by automobiles, trucks, buses, and so much comparative bustle and noise, and to enter a modern high-rise and turn the key in the lock of her apartment. C.J. fingered the amber cross that still hung about her neck and sighed; not relieved, but disconcerted. After such a strange journey, she was back home. Or was she?

  Chapter Nineteen

  While Lady Dalrymple benefits from a new nurse, our self-proclaimed apothecary does some night crawling of her own, but a nasty surprise threatens to once again alter our heroine’s destiny.

  WHEN SHE GOT UPSTAIRS, C.J. made a beeline for the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom, her heart pounding as she looked for the state-of-the-art prescriptions that had helped postpone the inevitable for her grandmother as long as modern medicine could.

  The interior of the medicine chest resembled a well-stocked pharmacy. C.J. found a large amber-colored plastic bottle of green and yellow nitroglycerin capsules. It was nearly full. She sifted through bottles containing hexagonal Inderal tablets, each penny-candy color denoting a different dosage. Nana’s long illness had spurred C.J. to do her own research into the properties of various medications. The Internet had provided a host of information, and the Physicians’ Desk Reference had become her bible. From the little C.J. had managed to glean from the incompetent Dr. Squiffers, she surmised that Lady Dalrymple was suffering from a form of angina, in which case the nitroglycerin should effectively treat her condition or, at the very least, prolong her life. Best case scenario: the dowager countess was merely the victim of chest pain; worst case: the pills could certainly be no more dangerous than Dr. Squiffers’s antediluvian methods of treatment.

  If the modern medicines worked, C.J. would have another hill to climb to persuade Lady Dalrymple’s cook to completely alter her mistress’s diet. Caffeinated tea was probably a bad idea too. It was going to be difficult to convince her ladyship to forgo afternoon tea. Oh yes—and then there was alcohol. No more afternoon dram of sherry or evening glass of port. C.J. wondered if her “aunt” would consider the forfeit of so many of her life’s simple pleasures worth the cure. At least the countess kept a positive outlook on life, and that was supposed to be a plus when it came to the anticipation of a full recovery from the condition known as effort angina.

  C.J. only hoped that time was on her side. There was no consideration of waiting until the rehearsal. She had to get right back to the theatre. She dumped the contents of each plastic pill bottle into separate paper envelopes, carefully labeling them with a fountain pen. Then she toured her apartment for the last time, shedding several tears over what she was willingly leaving behind. Amid a tinkle of wind chimes, she shut and locked the apartment door, feeling as if her body was being stretched on a rack that spanned more than two hundred years.

  LADY DALRYMPLE WAS resting comfortably while Mary Sykes sat vigilantly by, cross-stitching a simple tapestry. “I have not yet seen Cassandra,” her ladyship remarked anxiously, accustomed to her “niece’s” nightly visit to wish her a good evening and a tranquil slumber.

  “I think she was quite fatigued,” Mary lied, wholly aware that Miss Welles had not even been home to witness her arrival at the Royal Crescent. “But she wished you a good night before she went—to sleep,” she quickly added. “Does it still hurt, your ladyship?”

  Her respiring had been labored for the past several hours, during which Mary bravely tried to conceal her alarm. “Only when I breathe,” the countess replied gamely.

  THE FRONT DOOR of the Bedford Street Playhouse had been padlocked, and as C.J. struggled to open the back door—which appeared to have been locked from within—she was approached by an unshod man who materialized from the alleyway and limped over to her, hand extended, palm up. At first C.J. didn’t comprehend what the man wanted, his speech being slurred by drink or drugs or dearth of teeth. The panhandler looked young and tolerably healthy enough to hold down a job, barring the apparent substance abuse.

  “Hungry?” C.J. offered him an apple from her shoulder bag. The beggar inspected it closely, then grudgingly decided to accept the gift. After devouring the fruit as though he hadn’t eaten in hours, if not days, he stretched out a dirty hand, cocked his head to one side, and regarded his benefactress mournfully.

  If only someone had helped me when I first arrived in Bath, C.J. thought, carefully extracting a dollar from her wallet. It was the first time she had ever capitulated to a homeless New Yorker accosting her for alms; but she felt a pang of empathy for the man standing before her, who was, in fact, nothing like herself at all. Nothing like her present self, anyway. The morning she’d stolen the apple off the vendor’s cart in Stall Street, she had been just as destitute and nearly as dirty.

  There was a tense standoff while C.J. was afraid that the bum might try to attack her person or her purse. She tried to look confident, hoping the man didn’t smell her fear. But after about half a minute, the panhandler lost interest and slunk away down the street and out of sight. C.J. watched his retreating figure until he turned a corner.

  Back to the playhouse door. She was losing time. C.J. jiggled the well-worn iron handle. No luck. She looked up to see if there was another way. A sliver of light emanated from an upstairs room. Someone had left a window open on the second floor.

  If at first you don’t succeed . . .

  Mercifully, no one noticed the slender brunette giving her best shot at impersonating a Flying Wallenda, trying to climb the rusty, dangling fire escape ladder. Did it count as breaking-and-entering if you didn’t break anything as you ent—oops! Losing her footing, C.J. slid down a couple of rungs, scraping the length of her right leg. Dots of blood stippling her thigh and calf seeped through her pants, freckling the fabric. In about another five minutes, the long pink scratches on her pale skin would metamorphose into a red weltlike ribbon. Fighting the stinging pain, she repeated her climb.

  Goddamn! Decades of paint layers on an already rotting window sash made it nearly immovable. Her hands hurt from trying to force the window open.

  Flattening herself like a cockroach, C.J. wriggled through the open window, landing on the linoleum in a makeshift handstand. Her shoulder bag went skidding across the floor.

  Who ever thought this little caper would be easy? C.J. asked herself as she slumped against the wall to catch her breath. After cleaning her cuts with some warm soapy water, the next goal was to get into her new loaner costume and go downstairs to the stage so she could try to get back to 1801.

  She removed the blue sarcenet gown from the rolling costume rack, donned it, surveyed her image in the full-length mirror, and did a quick sartorial inventory. Underwear, petticoat, dress, hose, shoes, bonnet, gloves, reticule . . . carpetbag. C.J. placed the numerous medicine envelopes into the period prop bag, covered them with a folded blue velvet spencer, and raced downstairs to the set.

  Shit! Since she’d left the theatre just a few hours earlier, the stage had been altered. It now looked as if a wrecking crew had enjoyed a field day. Set units had been turned around or moved off their tape marks. The Austens’ parlor in Steventon was once again a work in progress. The door was gone. Her door—the one that had transported her across the centuries and back—had been moved from its position as the gateway to C.J.’s other life.

  She found the unit on its side, minus the wooden shims that enabled it to
stand freely when secured by sandbags from the backstage side. Nothing remained of the upstage-left exit area except four small Ls made with red gaffer’s tape, marking the proper angle and placement of the door frame.

  C.J. regarded the disassembled set pieces, tapped into all of her emotions, and re-created the staging for the end of the act that Beth had given her during the audition process—this time with the addition of the carpetbag—walking through the spot on the floor delineated by the red Ls.

  After another maddeningly unsuccessful attempt, it was abundantly clear that C.J. was not going to be able to travel anywhere but the backstage area of the Bedford Street Playhouse. Exhausted both mentally and physically, she shuffled off to the green room, collapsed on the sofa, and fell asleep.

  AFTER AWAKENING in a wrinkled dress with a stiff neck and a few abrasions from the itchy Betsie at her throat, her hand in a cramp from clutching the handle of the carpetbag as she slept, C.J. showered in her dressing room, ironed the blue sarcenet dress, and, after donning it again, debated what to do next. Ralph would have to arrive at the theatre well before today’s first rehearsal to finish putting the set back together—unless, to her horror, Beth just wanted to sit around a table for a read-through of the script. That was the customary way with first rehearsals, although her experiences with By a Lady had so far been anything but ordinary.

  At half past nine, the production staff began to straggle in, provisioned with coffee, bagels, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Sweating like a wrestler and swigging water from a plastic sport flask, Ralph entered the building, hefting his enormous metal toolbox, which he refused to leave in the space overnight.

  The designer looked at C.J., then at his watch. “Rehearsal doesn’t start for half an hour.”

  “I know. I thought I might as well get into costume. Save some time.”

  Ralph mopped his brow with what appeared to have been a royal blue washcloth in another life. “Don’t see why you needed to.” He gestured to the mess onstage. “I’ve got all this to deal with and get out of the way before we start,” he added, visibly stressed.

  “Do you think the door will be put back, because . . . ?”

  “Everything will be put back exactly the way it was when you saw it yesterday. I was trying to fix some things—like the shims on the stage-left door and the ones on the fireplace unit—and there’s a loose leg on the sofa that has me nervous. I expected to get everything done last night, but then I got a migraine in the middle of using the electric drill, and Beth suggested I give it a rest for the night.”

  “Because you’re running yourself ragged, darling, and I can’t afford to lose my assistant scenic designer in the beginning of the rehearsal process.” Beth strode down the aisle of the theatre and stepped up onto the stage to hand Ralph an ice-cold can of Diet Coke. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she teased.

  A young actor with curly blond hair, wearing a denim jacket and black jeans and carrying a knapsack, bounded down the aisle and dropped his pack onto a chair in the front row. Beth immediately greeted him with a hug. “C.J.,” she called, “here’s your Tom. C.J. Welles, our Jane, meet Frank Teale, direct from the Royal Shakespeare Company.”

  “By way of the Cleveland Playhouse,” Frank added. He was a real Brit. Or else he insisted on staying in character even more than C.J. did. “I was just doing Hedda out there.”

  “C.J. Welles,” the actress said, extending her hand to her costar. “By way of office temping and unemployment. I bet you made a lovely Hedda Gabler,” she joked.

  “Actually, I might have done,” Frank replied. He shook C.J.’s hand and gave her a winning smile. “But they cast me as Eilert Løvborg, alas. Nontraditional casting has not come that far in the American Midwest.”

  Well, well, C.J. was thinking, wondering why she’d never met this hottie during the lengthy audition process. Should it turn out that she would have to remain in the twenty-first century forever, she had a very cute and charming costar and a few passionate kisses in the script. Not a bad way to make a Broadway debut.

  When Humphrey finally arrived, perspiring and apologetic, mopping his glistening brow with a handkerchief edged in Harvard crimson, Beth called Frank and C.J. to the apron of the stage for a brief discussion of some script modifications. “Of course it’s one of the laws of the Theatre that as soon as you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row, one of them decides to develop a mind of his own. In this case, we’ve got some script revisions to go over before we do a first read-through with a—dare I say—entire cast. Both of you. I expect the whole rehearsal process will be an evolving and collaborative one.” She winked at Humphrey. “But it’s the deal you make with the devil, I suppose, when you work with a living playwright.” Beth ceded the floor to the dramatist as though she were passing a baton.

  “I feel as if we’ve been neglecting Jane as a writer—as the thing that defines the woman,” Humphrey urged, cleaning the lint from his tortoiseshell-framed eyeglasses with a specially treated cloth. “It’s my fault for writing it the way I did, but I feel that the way things are right now, she’s accepting the change in her life too easily.”

  “Meaning . . . ?” C.J. asked.

  The playwright thoughtfully chewed the end of his eyeglass frame. “I would like to cut Jane’s lines after Tom’s exit—you know, ‘Bath. I’m going to Bath’—and not have her leave the stage, but instead cross over to the writing table, sit down, and begin to write as the curtain falls. I want to show that she finds solace in the writing, despite the enforced move to Bath, because it salves her soul from her emotionally painful reunion with Tom.”

  C.J. dug her nails into her palms. This revision could present an enormous impediment to her ability to get back to the nineteenth century. “You mean keep her onstage at the end of the act, instead of exiting?”

  “Another duck heard from.” Beth immediately recognized her leading lady’s obvious discomfort with the proposed new staging. “C.J., you’re going to be so good in this role. That’s why I went to the mat for you. And I’m sure you can take any direction and play it so that it works beautifully. Let’s try what Humphrey suggests when we run through it. Just make a different, but equally strong, choice at the end of the act.” She looked visibly upset, as though she was already beginning to regret putting her neck on the line for an actress who was turning out to be an uncooperative diva.

  “While you guys futz around, I’ll just start putting things back together,” Ralph announced to no one in particular. He went upstage-left and began to repair the shim on the door unit.

  A first rehearsal for her Broadway debut was not the time to begin acting up instead of acting. But how could C.J. explain things to Beth and Humphrey without their deciding which to do first: fire her or commit her to the Bellevue psychiatric ward?

  “I know this may sound like a silly request,” C.J. said, punting, “but I like to work organically—put all the elements together from the getgo—so . . . well . . . does anyone mind if I try to see how the whole thing feels in my body, with the blocking and the dialogue?” She indicated her blue dress with a tug. “The costumes too. I’m weird that way. But it just helps me get into character and stay there right from the start. Milena gave me this dress to wear for rehearsals, so I thought—”

  Beth heaved a little sigh and rewarded C.J. with an indulgent nod. “Our very own Daniel Day-Lewis. Oh, what the fuck. Why not?”

  C.J. gave the director a grateful smile. “Many thanks! Just give me a minute, okay?” She retreated to a dark, quiet corner behind the set where she had placed the carpetbag containing the pills for Lady Dalrymple. The only way to convince Humphrey that his original instinct was the right one was to play the revised scene the way they wanted to see it, thereby demonstrating its reduced effectiveness. “Let’s do it,” C.J. called out resolutely. “I know there aren’t any lines in this new version, but I just want to see how the different blocking feels.” C.J. crossed to the writing desk and sat there for a few moments pretending to write, i
magined that the curtain was falling, then crossed the diagonal length of the stage and grabbed the carpetbag as she exited through the same upstage area that had previously opened for her onto another century. But all she found in the gloomy light on the other side of the set was a stack of dusty flats leaning against the brick wall of the theatre. Silently she beat the backstage side of the door frame with her head.

  Humphrey came up onstage and sat cross-legged with his face in his palms. “I don’t know. In a way I’m glad that C.J. wanted to get right up and try the new ending because, in fact, now that I’ve seen it on its feet, it diminishes the energy that we’ve been building up through the whole Jane/Tom confrontation. I thought the new way would be a more dramatic moment. But maybe it’s not.” He sighed theatrically. “I’m sorry if I wasted everyone’s time.”

  “Don’t be ludicrous, Humphrey.” Beth ruffled the playwright’s hair and gave his shoulders a brief rub. “The upside about working with a living playwright is that it’s all a work in progress until the curtain falls on the final performance.”

  Elsie made a production number out of clearing her throat. “Don’t you guys go all improvisational on me when we get into the run,” she warned, shooting the actors a threatening look. “You’ll be a stage manager’s nightmare.”

  Humphrey and Beth bent their heads together for a brief conference.

  “Okay,” Beth said, emerging from their tête-à-tête. “Humphrey doesn’t think that his suggestion worked after all. For the time being, at any rate. And at the moment I’m inclined to agree with him.”

  C.J. raised her hand to offer a further contribution. “I’m figuring this out as I speak here. You don’t want the audience to view the retrenching as forcing Jane to give up her writing. Because she had no way of knowing that she was going to, in effect, suffer writer’s block once she got to Bath. So get this,” C.J. continued, her urgency to convince the playwright and director increasing with every word. “Tom leaves. I say my line alone onstage, realizing the magnitude of the change in my life as I know it. Then I survey the room, taking a last look at what I shall be leaving. Then it occurs to me that I need to pack, and the first things I would pack—because I am, after all, Jane Austen—are my writing implements, which are sitting right out there on the table. So I pick up a carpetbag and cross to the table, open the bag, and place my scribbling paraphernalia—the manuscript, the pens—and the tapestry I’m working on in the bag. I take my deep breath while I’m standing just above the table, say the lines about going to Bath softly instead of resolutely—as though I’ve made my peace with the retrenching—then cross upstage to the door, and exit.”