Love's a Stage (9 page)

“Kennan is a fox, not a rabbit!” protested Frances with a smile. “And this time I shall go right to his lair. I’m going to wait outside his house until I can see him and be sure that he
is
the man Joe and I saw on the hill and then . . .”

“Don’t tell me!” said Aunt Sophie, holding up her hand to protest her niece’s confidences. “What you will do next is more than I can bear to know. Acting in a public theater, indeed!” Aunt Sophie’s chubby frame was wrenched by a frugal shudder of revulsion. “I live in dread that next I shall hear you had dressed up as a page and followed Kennan into a Pall Mall gambling hell. You’ll ruin yourself yet, missie, see if you won’t. And that is my
last,
absolutely my last, word on the subject!”

*     *     *

Edward Kennan, as everyone knew, lived in the Duke of Fowleby’s enormous town mansion. Frances had seen the Duke’s name mentioned several times of late in the newspapers as a Raphael Madonna had recently been stolen from his fabulous collection of paintings. In addition to being an admirer of the fine art, the Duke was a great theater patron and had acclaimed Kennan as the finest actor of the day.

Besides providing Kennan with a modest stipend, Fowleby granted the actor rent-free use of the east wing in Fowleby Place. There was even a separate gateway with a twenty-four-hour guard maintained for Kennan’s use. It was to this entrance that Frances directed the driver of the hackney carriage, after negotiating the hire of this vehicle on a street corner near her aunt’s residence.

Frances had waited for the cover of darkness to approach Fowleby Place. It was through a black-velvet London sparkling with the flares of a hundred thousand candles that Frances traveled. The hack moved west across the city to Mayfair, where the grand homes of the rich and powerful lay in neat, wide avenues like enormous building blocks left by giant children called away to tea. As she rode, Frances wondered how she would contrive to watch for Kennan with any semblance of discretion. A hack and pair were not to be concealed behind a streetlamp. When at last the Kennan gate to Fowleby Place was reached, however, the problem appeared to be not so much how to hide the hack, but rather, how to stop close enough to have
any
view of that famous gate! Frances was not the only lady to have come by carriage hoping for a glimpse of Kennan! Every available spot lining the pavement was occupied by not only rented carriages, but old family landaulets, jaunty barouches, and even an elegant dress chariot crested with the insignia of a royal princess. As Frances’ hack made a slow trot through the long aisle of carriages, Frances could see in their windows the graceful outline of a silk glove drawing back the curtain; the shadowed glint of a jewel. It was a popular fancy, it seemed, for London ladies to bide waiting to sight that idol of the stage Edward Kennan.

Miss Atherton’s hack had to take four separate turns around the block before another carriage pulled away, leaving room for them to stand. They were some thirty feet up the street from the gateway, but its heavily rusticated entrance arch was well lit by a quartet of the first gas lamps Frances had ever seen.

The evening passed slowly. Frances sat with her back to the horses, watching the entrance through the passing traffic. Chinks in the hack’s floorboards exposed the pavement, and cold drafts stole inside to chill Frances’ toes. Once, the hack driver left his perch and made Frances raise her ankles so he could take the horse’s nose bag from under her seat.

As the night elapsed without any sign of Kennan, the fair occupants of the other carriages began to give up and leave. It was ten of the clock before Frances found her hack alone on the nearly deserted street and the driver poked his head through the window for the seventh time to advise her that if she wanted to wait any longer he would be forced to raise the fare another sixpence. Frances lightened her purse of the coin and bestowed it on the man.

It was ten minutes later that her patience won its reward. A small closed carriage driven by a liveried coachman came up a side street that led from the mews. The carriage stopped in front of Kennan’s entrance. A moment passed before a man in a voluminous cloak and carrying a gold-tipped cane stepped from inside the Fowleby mansion and glanced up and down the length of the breeze-swept street. Kennan—the Blue Specter. From the shaded interior of the hack Frances could see the black crow’s-wing brows, the close-cropped hair with curls that framed his face. Below his high, prominent cheeks were dramatic hollows, accented with the skillful application of walnut juice, which gave off a queer orange cast under the telltale gaslights. His nose was hooked like a bird of prey; his eyes moist and bright. The face of a man born for the stage, it cast a spell on the eye. Playing Lady Macbeth opposite Kennan, Sheila Grant had been widely reported to have said, “When first he came to me on stage after the murder of MacDuff and uttered, ‘I have done the thing,’ I smelt blood! I swear I smelt blood!” Frances shivered as Kennan climbed into his carriage. There was no doubt he
was
the man she had seen on that lonely cliff.

Kennan’s carriage broke off at a smart trot, and without wasting time on lengthy ifs and buts, Frances lifted the trapdoor in her hack’s roof and shouted to her driver to “follow that carriage.” The driver gave her a look to indicate that he felt she was carrying the thing entirely too far; but when Frances desperately handed him another shilling he shrugged and slapped the reins. They kept pace with Kennan’s carriage—the poor old hackney horse was almost frisky after the long wait.

The pursuing and pursued carriages went north, then east, into the heart of town. Kennan’s carriage nearly eluded them twice; once in a section of heavy traffic, and once when it took an unexpected dive down a side street and through an alley. When his carriage finally stopped on a quiet residential side street, Frances hadn’t the slightest idea where they were.

Kennan’s destination was a four-story house of brown stock brick with small, heavily curtained windows facing the street. As they passed, Frances saw Kennan alight from his carriage, drawing his cloak collar high to disguise his features. The doorway on which he gave two sharp raps was suspiciously plain, with the understated dignity of polished mahogany. A square of light shot out from a small peeker’s hatch, and Kennan was inspected by a dark face before being admitted. The heavy door closed behind him, shutting out the curious, shutting out the night.

The lateness of the hour and Kennan’s own secretive conduct combined to convince Frances that she had come upon a rendezvous of some sinister nature. She pulled the check-strap. The hack rounded the next corner and drew in to the curbstone. Without waiting for the driver to let down the steps, Frances jumped to the pavement and began to examine the contents of her purse under the yellow glow of the hack’s flambeau. The result of her investigation was not promising, yielding only three hairpins, one handkerchief, the key to Aunt Sophie’s front door, and two penny pieces.

“That’ll be another sixpence if you’ll be wanting me to wait,” said the hack driver.

She felt a brief spurt of panic. “I don’t have it,” she said, beginning a dignified plea. “But if you will allow me credit, I will write my address for you so you can come tomorrow morning and collect whatever monies I may have outstanding to you.”

Frances directed her final words to the silent night air. The hack had driven on before her sentence was finished.

“Very well,” said Frances quietly. Her throat felt dry and her limbs trembled from nervous excitement. She was as determined as she had ever been to pursue Kennan until she could expose him for the evil man he was, and though nothing in the adventure so far had been easy, standing lost and penniless (or at least tuppence from penniless), in this curiously nondescript street, placed new strains on her courage.

She took a deep, reviving breath and walked to the street corner. Kennan’s coach had vanished and another carriage arrived in its stead, disgorging two male passengers, who signaled their coachman on his way and went into the building next to the one Kennan had entered. One of the men threw back his head and gave a hearty laugh as they climbed the steps. Warm, human sound made the place seem less desolate. It was only a street like any other, and no matter what skullduggery she found Kennan engaged in, help was surely only a shout away.

Emboldened by that thought, Frances began to stroll toward the brown brick house, with what purpose in mind she was not sure. She meant to get in if she could, though she had no idea how. There was a back way perhaps, but as all the houses on the block were connected one to the next by party walls, she wasn’t sure how one found their back. Perhaps there was an alley further on. The windows she could see were too high and small to climb through. She gave a quick smile at the idea of very proper Miss Frances Atherton gaining illegal entry to a building by climbing through a window. What a time they would have together when Frances told her brothers and sisters the tale of this adventure! For Mama and Papa there would be a watered-down version, naturally. Frances shuddered to think what those two dear and unworldly people would say if they were ever to hear about Lord Landry and the offer he made!

Her steps slowed as she approached the door that Kennan had entered. Then, as though the inhabitants of that house had sensed her presence, the peeker’s window flew open and a voice said:

“So there you are.”

There was no place to hide. She poised to flee.

The door opened and a man appeared, a bulky black silhouette against a curtain of candlelight within.

“Well, come on then, we’ve been waiting for you,” said the man. As he stepped toward Frances, the copper blush of the streetlamp covered him. His aspect emerged like a phantom of the last century. On his head, a low sausage-curled wig was heavily powdered with chalk dust. The phantom’s coat was long, of an old-fashioned “sloping away” cut. His neck and wrists foamed with lace frills—this on a man as wide as a barge, with pox-pitted skin, and a nose so misshapen by repeated breaks that his nostrils lay nearly flat to the surface of his face.

And this ghoulish apparition appeared to have been expecting her.

“Waiting for me?” repeated Frances weakly. Curiosity stayed her flight—curiosity and ice-cold common sense. No matter how unanticipated, he was, after all, a man, not a ghost. A prizefighter, perhaps. His face bore the look of it. His clothing? There were a thousand explanations. He was an actor, or was going to a masquerade, or was a servant. In homes of the wealthy, Frances knew, the footmen were dressed so.

The man was glaring at Frances. “Aye,” he said, “and well you know it! We sent the money to Mother Blanchard more than an hour ago, and finally here you be. We asked for three extra girls; why is it that you’re the only one’at came? Blanchard had a busy house herself, eh? Never mind that, come along in with ye, we’ve waited long enough for the help, and so says Jem Beamer!”

As Jem Beamer spoke, he approached Frances with surprising swiftness and drew her along with an arm thick in muscle and fat. Frances meekly allowed herself to be pulled inside, hardly able to believe she had been graced with the rather frightening good fortune to have been mistaken for an extra domestic servant, in this house, of all houses, that she wanted to enter. Beamer dragged her quickly through a wide foyer and hall. The walls were hung in baby-blue velvet accented with stripes of gold. Everywhere one looked there were chandeliers of carved gilded wood, twinkling with teardrops of cut glass. Niches lined the hallway housing life-sized Italianate marble Venuses postured in the coy confusion of goddesses, not unhappy to have been interrupted in their baths. The effect of the place was extravagant to Frances’ fastidious eyes and preposterous after the conservative exterior.

Beamer turned the handle of a door decorated with a panel of painted greenery.

“Wait in here,” he said. “Madame la Princesse will be along in a minute.”

Frances had never heard of Madame la Princesse, nor did she know what that lady’s connection to Kennan might be, but Frances began to entertain the suspicion that if this was the site of some criminal parlay, it was taking place under quite convivial circumstances. Unmistakable sounds of jollity filtered from the inner distances of the house. There was the energetic rumble of spirited chatter that must belong to a gathering of some size. Laughter came frequently and there was the sweet undertone of a chamber orchestra.

The room Frances was in appeared to be a dressing parlor. In one corner was a screen of shoulder height covered in a soiled dimity print. Beside it was a dressing table smothered in a much-picked-over array of cheap cosmetics. A corner cupboard, a free-standing wardrobe, and an oak kneehole desk with locked drawers were arranged for efficiency only against the dirty orange walls. Here, of a certainty, was a contrast to the foyer and hall. In this room, Frances was sure, Madame la Princesse did not receive her guests. Before this reflection had time to lead to any other, Madame la Princesse herself, or so it must be, had entered the room.

“Good thing you’re here—I can use you!” cried the woman, shutting the door behind her. It was incredible! Only moments ago, Frances had thought she might have to resort to stealth to enter the house, and now she found her arrival to be considered a godsend! It was not the rapid reordering of her plans, however, that caused Frances to stare at Madame la Princesse in a manner that, once Frances realized that she was doing it, Frances ceased under the dictates of good manners. It might have been the brassy gold of Madame’s potash-water-bleached hair. It might even have been that lady’s more than lavish application of scarlet cheek-rouge, but as she was an honest young lady, Frances confessed to herself that it was the garment that Madame la Princesse was wearing, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, it was the garments that Madame la Princesse was
not
wearing that had been responsible for Frances’ having forgotten the respectful deference owed one’s elders. Madame’s body was in a state of remarkably good preservation for a woman her age. Every night since infancy when Frances went to bed, she had worn a nightgown that went from neck to wrist to toe, kerseymere in the winter, cotton in the summer, and if they had a ruffle she considered herself lucky. This was the first time Frances had seen that exotic and deliciously sinful apparel known as the negligee, hitherto experienced only on the pages of the more daring ladies’ fashion magazines that Pamela smuggled home from the Squire’s. Madame was wearing a knot of ribbon at her throat, a ruffle at her hem, one diaphanous layer of material, and not much else. Obviously Frances’ arrival had disturbed the lady before she had dressed for her company.