Passion (24 page)

Daniel looked shocked. “You—you love me?”

“Of course.” Luce almost laughed at how obvious it was—but then she remembered: She had no idea which moment from her past she’d walked into. Maybe in this lifetime they’d only exchanged coy glances.

Daniel’s chest rose and fel violently and his lower lip began to quiver. “I want you to come away with me,” he said quickly. There was a desperate edge to his voice.

Luce wanted to cry out Yes!, but something held her back. It was so easy to get lost in Daniel when his body was pressed so close to hers and she could feel the heat coming o his skin and the beating of his heart through his shirt. She felt she could tel him anything now—from how glorious it had felt to die in his arms in Versail es to how devastated she was now that she knew the scope of his su ering. But she held back: The girl he thought she was in this lifetime wouldn’t talk about those things, wouldn’t know about them. Neither would Daniel. So when she final y opened her mouth, her voice faltered.

Daniel put a finger over her lips. “Wait. Don’t protest yet. Let me ask you properly. By and by, my love.” He peeked out the cracked wardrobe door, toward the curtain. A cheer came from the stage. The audience roared with laughter and applause. Luce hadn’t even realized the play had begun.

“That’s my entrance. I’l see you soon.” He kissed her forehead, then dashed out and onto the stage.

Luce wanted to run after him, but two figures came and stood just beyond the wardrobe door.

The door squeaked open and Bil flut ered inside. “You’re get ing good at this,” he said, flopping onto a sack of old wigs.

“Where have you been hiding?”

“Who, me? Nowhere. What would I have to hide from?” he asked. “That lit le costume-change sham was a wee stroke of genius,” he said, raising his tiny hand for a high five.

It was always a bit of a buzz kil to be reminded that Bil was a fly on the wal during every interaction with Daniel.

“You’re real y going to leave me hanging like this?” Bil slowly withdrew his hand.

Luce ignored him. Something felt heavy and raw in her chest. She kept hearing the desperation in Daniel’s voice when he’d asked her to run away with him. What had that meant?

“I’m dying tonight. Aren’t I, Bil ?”

“Wel …” Bil cast his eyes down. “Yes.”

Luce swal owed hard. “Where’s Lucinda? I need to get inside her again so I can understand this lifetime.” She pushed at the wardrobe door, but Bil took hold of the sash on her gown and pul ed her back.

“Look kid, going three-D can’t be your go-to move. Think of it as a special-occasion skil .” He pursed his lips. “What is it you think you’re going to learn here?”

“What she needs to escape from, of course,” Luce said. “What is Daniel saving her from? Is she engaged to someone else? Living with a cruel uncle? Out of favor with the king?”

“Uh-oh.” Bil scratched the top of his head. It made a grating sound, like nails on a chalkboard. “I must have made a pedagogical boo-boo somewhere. You think there’s a reason for your death every time?”

“There’s not?” She could feel her face fal .

“I mean, your deaths aren’t meaningless, exactly.…”

“But when I died inside Lys, I felt everything—she believed that burning up freed her. She was happy because marrying that king would have meant her life was a lie. And Daniel could save her by kil ing her.”

“Oh, honey, is that what you think? That your deaths are an out for bad marriages or something?” She squeezed her eyes shut against the sting of sudden tears. “It has to be something like that. It has to be. Otherwise it’s just pointless.”

“It’s not pointless,” Bil said. “You do die for a reason. Just not so simple a reason. You can’t expect to understand it al at once.” She grunted in frustration and banged her fist against the side of the wardrobe.

“I can see what you’re al jacked up about,” Bil said nal y. “You went three-D and you think you unlocked the secret of your universe.

But it’s not always that neat and easy. Expect chaos. Embrace chaos. You should stil try to learn as much as you can from every life you visit.

Maybe in the end, it’l al add up to something. Maybe you’l end up with Daniel … or maybe you’l decide there’s more to life than—” A rustling startled them. Luce peeked around the wardrobe door.

A man, around fty, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a smal potbel y, stood just behind an actor in a dress. They were whispering.

When the girl turned her head a lit le, the stage lights lit up her pro le. Luce froze at the sight: a delicate nose and smal lips made up with pink powder. A dark brown wig with just a few strands of long black hair showing underneath. A gorgeous golden gown.

It was Lucinda, ful y costumed as Anne Boleyn and about to go onstage.

Luce edged out of the wardrobe. She felt nervous and tongue-tied but also oddly empowered: If what Bil had told her was true, there wasn’t a lot of time left.

“Bil ?” she whispered. “I need you to do that thing where you press Pause so I can—”

“Shhhh!” Bil ’s hiss had a nality that said Luce was on her own. She would just have to wait until this man left so she could get Lucinda

“Shhhh!” Bil ’s hiss had a nality that said Luce was on her own. She would just have to wait until this man left so she could get Lucinda alone.

Unexpectedly, Lucinda moved toward the wardrobe where Luce was hiding. Lucinda reached inside. Her hand moved toward the golden cloak right next to Luce’s shoulder. Luce held her breath, reached up, clasped her fingers with Lucinda’s.

Lucinda gasped and threw the door wide, staring deep into Luce’s eyes, teetering on the edge of some inexplicable understanding. The oor beneath them seemed to tilt. Luce grew dizzy, closing her eyes and feeling as if her soul had dropped out of her body. She saw herself from the outside: her strange dress that Bil had altered on the y, the raw fear in her eyes. The hand in hers was soft, so soft she could barely feel it.

She blinked and Lucinda blinked and then Luce didn’t feel any hand at al . When she looked down, her hand was empty. She’d become the girl she’d been holding on to. Quickly, she grabbed the cloak and set led it over her shoulders.

The only other person in the tiring-room was the man who’d been whispering to Lucinda. Luce knew then that he was Wil iam Shakespeare. Wil iam Shakespeare. She knew him. They were, the three of them—Lucinda, Daniel, and Shakespeare—friends. There had been a summer afternoon when Daniel had taken Lucinda to visit Shakespeare at his home in Stratford. Toward sunset, they’d sat in the library, and while Daniel worked on his sketches at the window, Wil had asked her question after question—al the while taking furious notes—about when she’d first met Daniel, how she felt about him, whether she thought she could one day fal in love.

Aside from Daniel, Shakespeare was the only one who knew the secret of Lucinda’s identity—her gender—and the love the players shared o stage. In exchange for his discretion, Lucinda was keeping the secret that Shakespeare was present that night at the Globe. Everyone else in the company assumed that he was in Stratford, that he’d handed over the reins of the theater to Master Fletcher. Instead, Wil appeared incognito to see the play’s opening night.

When she returned to his side, Shakespeare gazed deep into Lucinda’s eyes. “You’ve changed.”

“I—no, I’m stil ”—she felt the soft brocade around her shoulders. “Yes, I found the cloak.”

“The cloak, is it?” He smiled at her, winked. “It suits you.”

Then Shakespeare put his hand on Lucinda’s shoulder, the way he always did when he was giving directorial instructions: “Hear this: Everyone here already knows your story. They’l see you in this scene, and you won’t say or do very much. But Anne Boleyn is a rising star in the court. Every one of them has a stake in your destiny.” He swal owed. “As wel : Don’t forget to hit the mark at the end of your line. You need to be downstage left for the start of the dance.”

Luce could feel her lines in the play run across her mind. The words would be there when she needed them, when she stepped onstage in front of al these people. She was ready.

The audience roared and applauded again. A rush of actors exited the stage and l ed the space around her. Shakespeare had already slipped away. She could see Daniel on the opposite wing of the stage. He towered over the other actors, regal and impossibly gorgeous.

It was her cue to walk onstage. This was the start of the party scene at Lord Wolsey’s estate, where the king—Daniel—would perform an elaborate masque before taking Anne Boleyn’s hand for the rst time. They were supposed to dance and fal heavily in love. It was supposed to be the very beginning of a romance that changed everything.

The beginning.

But for Daniel, it wasn’t the beginning at al .

For Lucinda, however, and for the character she was playing—it was love at rst sight. Laying eyes on Daniel had felt like the rst real thing ever to happen to Lucinda, just as it had felt for Luce at Sword & Cross. Her whole world had suddenly meant something in a way it never had before.

Luce could not believe how many people were crowded into the Globe. They were practical y on top of the actors, pressed so close to the stage in the pit that at least twenty spectators had their elbows propped up on the stage itself. She could smel them. She could hear them breathing.

And yet, somehow, Luce felt calm, even energized—as if instead of panicking under al this at ention, Lucinda was coming to life.

It was a party scene. Luce was surrounded by Anne Boleyn’s ladies-in-waiting; she almost laughed at how comical her “ladies” looked around her. These teen boys’ Adam’s apples bobbed obviously under the glare of the stage lanterns. Sweat formed rings under the arms of their padded dresses. Across the stage, Daniel and his court stood watching her unabashedly, his love plain on his face. She played her part e ortlessly, sneaking just enough admiring glances at Daniel to pique both his and the audience’s interest. She even improvised a move—

pul ing her hair away from her long, pale neck—that gave a foreboding hint of what everyone knew awaited the real Anne Boleyn.

Two players drew close, flanking Luce. They were the noblemen of the play, Lord Sands and Lord Wolsey.

“Ladies, you are not merry. Gentleman, whose fault is this?” Lord Wolsey’s voice boomed. He was the host of the party—and the vil ain—

and the actor playing him had incredible stage presence.

Then he turned and swept his gaze around to look at Luce. She froze.

Lord Wolsey was being played by Cam.

There was no space for Luce to shout, curse, or ee. She was a professional actor now, so she stayed col ected, and turned to Wolsey’s companion, Lord Sands, who delivered his lines with a laugh.

“The red wine first must rise in their fair cheeks, my lord,” he said.

When it was Lucinda’s turn to deliver her line, her body trembled, and she sneaked a peek at Daniel. His violet eyes smoothed over the roughness she felt. He believed in her.

“You are a merry gamester, my lord Sands,” Luce felt herself say loudly, in a perfectly pitched teasing tone.

Then Daniel stepped forward and a trumpet sounded, fol owed by a drum. The dance was beginning. He took her hand. When he spoke, he spoke to her, not to the audience, as the other players did.

“The fairest hand I ever touched,” Daniel said. “O Beauty, til now I never knew thee.” As if the lines had been writ en for the two of them.

They began to dance, and Daniel locked eyes with her the whole time. His eyes were crystal clear and violet, and the way they never strayed from hers chipped away at Luce’s heart. She knew he’d loved her always, but until this moment, dancing with him on the stage in front of al these people, she had never real y thought about what it meant.

It meant that when she saw him for the rst time in every life, Daniel was already in love with her. Every time. And always had been. And every time, she had to fal in love with him from scratch. He could never pressure her or push her into loving him. He had to win her anew each time.

Daniel’s love for her was one long, uninterrupted stream. It was the purest form of love there was, purer even than the love Luce returned.

His love owed without breaking, without stopping. Whereas Luce’s love was wiped clean with every death, Daniel’s grew over time, across al eternity. How powerful y strong must it be by now? Hundreds of lifetimes of love stacked one on top of the other? It was almost too al eternity. How powerful y strong must it be by now? Hundreds of lifetimes of love stacked one on top of the other? It was almost too massive for Luce to comprehend.

He loved her that much, and yet in every lifetime, over and over again, he had to wait for her to catch up.

Al this time, they had been dancing with the rest of the troupe, bounding in and out of the wings at breaks in the music, coming back onstage for more gal antry, for longer sets with more ornate steps, until the whole company was dancing.

At the close of the scene, even though it wasn’t in the script, even though Cam was standing right there watching, Luce held fast to Daniel’s hand and pul ed him to her, up against the pot ed orange trees. He looked at her like she was crazy and tried to tug her to the mark dictated by her stage directions. “What are you doing?” he murmured.

He had doubted her before, backstage when she’d tried to speak freely about her feelings. She had to make him believe her. Especial y if Lucinda died tonight, understanding the depth of her love would mean everything to him. It would help him to carry on, to keep loving her for hundreds more years, through al the pain and hardship she’d witnessed, right up to the present.

Luce knew that it wasn’t in the script, but she couldn’t stop herself: She grabbed Daniel and she kissed him.

She expected him to stop her, but instead he swooped her into his arms and kissed her back. Hard and passionately, responding with such intensity that she felt the way she did when they were flying, though she knew her feet were planted on the ground.

For a moment, the audience was silent. Then they began to hol er and jeer. Someone threw a shoe at Daniel, but he ignored it. His kisses told Luce that he believed her, that he understood the depth of her love, but she wanted to be absolutely sure.