Terri Brisbin (19 page)

He knew she was being sarcastic. Not wishing to encourage her, he decided to ignore it.

“The length of the play will not matter to my guests,” he said, “as long as they are amused.”

“Oh, Ross, you are being dense!” exclaimed Emma. “There is scarcely anything left to my
Triumph!
”

Ross cleared his throat. “Don’t exaggerate, Emma. If Miss Lyon is indeed a playwright, then she is accustomed to revisions and edits of her work.”

From the murderous expression on Cordelia’s face, even Ross could sense that that might not quite be the case.

“At least my favorite scene is left.” Emma gave a wounded sniff. “Do you recall how I dressed in a plain cap and apron like a serving girl, so I could go meet Weldon at the harvest dance?”

“Of course I remember, Emma,” he said. He had been away from Howland Hall, attending a symposium in Cambridge on the nature of lightning bolts, but there had been plenty of people eager to tell him every detail of Emma’s scandalous behavior when he’d returned. “That is not something I’m likely to forget.”

She shrugged, smoothing her hand along his sleeve to calm him. “I know you were so angry with me then, Ross, and sent me off to that dull school because of it, but I didn’t care, because that was the first time Weldon kissed me.”

“He did?” Appalled, Ross made the calculation in an instant: his sister had let Weldon kiss her when she’d been only fourteen. “For God’s sake, Emma, let’s not put all your folly on public display.”

“A first kiss from the beloved is not folly, my lord,” Cordelia declared. “It is a mark of admiration and respect. Besides, the kiss gives great sentiment to the scene as I have written it.”

“Well, then perhaps you should just unwrite it, Miss Lyon,” Ross said sternly. “How can you call this a decent entertainment for my guests, making the bride a center of ridicule and shame?”

Again Cordelia paused, and held Ross’s gaze for so long that he began observing the little flecks of gray and silver in
her dark eyes, like tiny stars in a midnight sky. He ordered himself to look away and ended up only looking lower to see—no, to
observe—
her full, red mouth.

“If my lord prefers,” that mouth was saying, “I can move the first kiss until later in the play. We can begin with a scene that is less…inflammatory to your tastes, my lord.”

“Thank you, Miss Lyon.” He nodded, making himself look slightly to the left of her face to avoid any more of those wretched observations about her person.

“You are welcome, my lord,” she said, her voice tart. “I will find that other scene. That is, if such a scene exists.”

“But I like the kiss coming first, Ross!” Emma cried. “It was such a perfect kiss that it would be the perfect way to start.”

Ross closed his eyes for a moment, collecting himself. On board the
Perseverance,
his life had been tidy and well-ordered with the Navy’s all-male precision, but here at home—here there were females, and no order at all.

“Emma,” he began, striving to emulate Captain Williams’s authority. “Emma, you are a lady, the daughter and the sister of an earl, a peer. You must understand how improper this would be.”

“But it is not really her, my lord. It is a character,” Cordelia said with clipped, maddening reason. “Surely you must see the distinction, my lord. Besides, who will be shocked by the sight of a young woman—even a lady—kissing the man she is to marry? Isn’t that so, my lady?”

“Here now, I won’t have you offering Lady Emma your advice, Miss Lyon,” Ross said. “An impressionable young lady like my sister does not need to hear your dubious views on morality and virtue.”

Cordelia gasped, her eyes round with outrage. “You do not have the slightest notion of my views on morality or virtue, my lord, though indeed I am forming an excellent view of yours!”

Ross’s hands clasped and unclasped behind his back as he
worked to control his temper. He must remain calm, reasonable. He must recall who he was, and not sink to her level.

“You are an actress, Miss Lyon,” he said, “and as such I suggest instead of advising my sister on—on
kissing,
you keep to your acting and playwriting and such.”

“But it’s not Cordelia’s advice, Ross. It’s fact.” Emma’s curls bounced around her cheeks. “Why, I’ve kissed Weldon so many times now I can’t recall the number. I doubt there’s a person in the county who hasn’t seen us together.”

“I haven’t.” Ross stared, aghast. “That isn’t a fact, Emma, that is—that is—”

“The wicked influence of an actress.” With swift jerks of her wrists, Cordelia rolled her papers into a tight sheaf. “You might as well say it aloud, my lord, and finish what you’ve begun.”

“It’s nothing that I must say, Miss Lyon,” Ross said. How in blazes had she twisted his own words against him like this? “The whole world knows that actors and actresses live by their own version of, ah, of moral behavior.”

“You know, my lord, even if the rest of the world does not.” She clutched the sheaf of papers to her chest, her chin high and her voice ringing through the empty ballroom. “And since you are so vastly more knowledgeable and virtuous than I can ever be, my lord, I humbly suggest that you write your own play for Her Ladyship, and act every part, too.”

She turned away without asking his leave, her back ramrod straight and her heels clicking across the floor as she marched toward the door.

“Now look what you’ve done, Ross!” Emma wailed. “You’ve insulted Cordelia and made her leave, and now I’ll never, never have a wedding play, and you have spoiled everything!”

“Hush, Emma, she’ll come back,” Ross said, though he wasn’t sure Cordelia would. “And I didn’t insult her. I was only stating the truth, and she let her passions run away with her judgment.”

“You did so insult her,” Emma said with an indignant sob as she groped for her handkerchief. “You told her she had no morals or—or virtues!”

“I said that was commonly known of actresses. I didn’t say it of her precisely.” But Ross respected the truth enough to know when he was bending it, and right now he was bending it over backward. He sighed with exasperation as he looked after Cordelia’s departing figure. Here he’d come to the ballroom intending to ask the Lyon Company to leave, and instead it seemed that now, for the peace of his home, he’d have to ask Miss Lyon to stay.

“Miss Lyon!” he called. “Miss Lyon, wait!”

She stopped, turned and swept him another of those grandiose curtsies.

“Forgive me, my lord,” she said. “Good day, my lord.”

And having had the last word, with a swirl of skirts, she left,

“S
o we are to leave before we’ve fair begun, then, Cordelia?” Gwen twisted one of her bright yellow curls around and around her finger as she leaned against the doorway to Cordelia’s room. “True, is it? Before I’ve a chance to play the Aphrodite that you say you’d written just for me?”

“Yes, Gwen, we are leaving, and as soon as possible, too.” Cordelia raised the curved lid of her traveling trunk and began tossing her belongings inside. “Your Aphrodite is the least of it.”

“So you say, Miss Lyon.” Gwen sniffed and flipped her hair back over her shoulder. “Mayhap you’ve mucked up this booking, but I’m not inclined to leave such fine lodgings just yet for sleeping in a nasty field again.”

“Then the sooner you pack your things, the less you’ll have to regret.” Cordelia glared at the older actress. “Go, Gwen, and leave me. Go.”

Gwen sniffed again and pushed herself clear of the doorway. “Why should I want to stay, I ask you, with you in such a piss-poor mood?”

Cordelia didn’t answer, and soon she heard Gwen’s backless slippers clumping down the stairs. Although Cordelia would be just as sorry to leave this tiny bedchamber in the
gatehouse, she refused to stay another night here under the protection of the Earl of Mayne. What choice did she have, truly? She might not have two coins in her pocket to rub together, but she did have her pride.

She heard someone else in the hallway outside. Doubtless Gwen was regaling the rest of the company with an exaggerated version of her disastrous morning, but Cordelia was in no humor to discuss it with anyone else.

Unless, of course, she had no choice.

“Sweet daughter,” Alfred Lyon said behind her, his voice purposefully cheerful. “Such tales I’ve been hearing below!”

She glanced over her shoulder and made a face. “Gwen cannot resist.”

“She never can,” Alfred said, “so now you must tell me the truth. What did happen today at the hall? What manner of tempest have you swept down upon us, eh?”

“The foul wind that blows from a sanctimonious mouth.” She rolled a pair of stockings into a tight ball and jammed it into a corner of the trunk. “It seems we will not be performing at Howland Hall after all.”

“Ahh.” Alfred came to sit on her bed, resting one elbow on the edge of the trunk. He had been out-of-doors, strolling through—and likely sleeping—in the hall’s apple orchard, and while he was for once wearing conventional breeches and a shirt, he had braided his long white hair into a tight queue down his back and had tucked pink-and-white apple blossoms behind his ears like some ancient sailor gone giddy with shore leave. “His Lordship has had a change of mind?”

“It will not work, Father,” Cordelia said, fists at her waist. “I’m sorry to disappoint Lady Emma—she’s a lovely girl—but her sanctimonious fool of a brother has made our performance impossible.”

“Has he now.” Alfred drew one of the blossoms from his hair, twisting the stem in idle circles. “You know how happy
I’ve been with your management of the company, Cordelia, with those tedious bookings and billings and the rest that tax my poor old head. But this decision makes me wonder. If we are to leave here, have we another engagement waiting for us elsewhere? Have you made other arrangements that my ancient head has forgotten?”

Cordelia took a deep breath. The company had been booked for a fortnight at a theater not far from here, a theater that had inconveniently burned to the ground last week. That was why the wedding play had seemed like a magical plum falling from the very skies—until this morning, when that sweet plum had turned so sour.

“You know there’s no other engagement, Father,” she said. “Not until Bath at the end of the month.”

“That is what I thought.” Alfred nodded. “Then how do you propose our little family amuses itself until then, my dear? Have you a secret hoard of gold and silver that will pay our way?”

Cordelia ran her hand back through her hair. “I am sure something will present itself, Father,” she said, though she wasn’t sure at all. “It always does for us.”

“It already did, Cordelia.” He smiled over the flower. “The Earl of Mayne did not strike me as either sanctimonious or a fool. In fact, Cordelia, he rather reminded me of you.”

Cordelia gasped. “Of me? Of
me?
Oh, Father, not at all!”

“Oh, yes.” Alfred pointed the flower at her. “He’s a handsome fellow, too, and just as unaware of it as you are of your own beauty.”

“Stop it, Father.” This was an old, old conversation between them, and one she didn’t wish to have again now. “I’ll grant you that he’s handsome, yes, but that has nothing to—”

“One moment, pray, one moment, so that I might rejoice, and give thanks to the great goddess Venus herself!” With a gusty sigh, he clasped his hands over his heart and threw back his head, the long, white plait flopping down his back. “At last
my daughter has taken notice of a handsome man! She is of mortal blood after all, a woman made of passion instead of a lovely creature carved of ice! Now if only he were an actor, a thespian, a true practitioner of the dramatic art!”

“Enough, Father. Enough.” Cordelia turned away, folding a petticoat with brisk purpose to avoid letting him see the flush on her cheeks. It wasn’t that she didn’t admire handsome men, or wished to be a hard-hearted spinster all her days. She wanted the same things that other ordinary girls wanted, to fall in love and marry and have a husband and a home and children to fill it, and listening to Lady Emma’s joy today had only made Cordelia long for such things even more.

But her life wasn’t like other girls’, and it certainly wasn’t like Lady Emma’s. There were no examples of happy wedded bliss within the company. How could there be, when they never lingered longer than a month in any one place? The romances of actors and actresses tended to be quick and intense and burdened with far more lust than love—and loud, unhappy partings.

Everywhere Cordelia looked were sorry examples of love gone wrong. The only women who risked everything for love and won lasting happiness were the heroines she played on the stage. The best any actress seemed able to expect was to find a rich gentleman who’d keep her as his mistress. Even Cordelia’s own parents had not bothered to marry, and Cordelia had only the vaguest of memories of her mother from before she’d left Father for a French marquis who swept her off to the Continent. No wonder the earl’s assumptions about the dubious morality of actresses had struck far too close to home.

Alfred cleared his throat. “I didn’t intend to upset you, Cordelia,” he said, contrite. “It was only a jest, that was all, and a poor one at that. What I want for you is happiness with a fellow of our own station. Ecstatic, mad-with-joy happiness, which for most of us lowly mortals means love.”

“Love doesn’t always mean happiness and joy,” she coun
tered. “From what I’ve seen, there’s a monstrous amount of misery and heartache, too.”

Alfred clicked his tongue, scolding. “Oh, my dear Cordelia, you are too young to be such a cynic. Someday you will find that man who will love you as you deserve, and then you’ll know your old pater was right.”

That was part of the old conversation, too, and Cordelia sighed, her hands quiet. “I am not really like the earl, am I?”

“Well, yes, you rather are,” Alfred said. “I did believe you’d much in common, and might enjoy one another’s company while we were here. That part was true. His Lordship struck me as intelligent and clever and more concerned about keeping his sister happy than being happy himself. Which is a great deal like you, daughter.”

“He is also pompous and arrogant and enchanted with the weight of his own opinions,” she declared, turning about to face him. “The amount of pleasure to be found in his company would not equal the little toe of a gnat.”

“That much, indeed?” Alfred looked back down at the flower. “Then if there is no pleasure in his company, no troubling, dangerous attraction between you two, it shall likewise be no great trial for you to return to the hall and apologize to His Lordship.”

“Apologize!” Cordelia stared, stunned. “Apologize to him, after what he said to me?”

“Yes,” Alfred said. “Apologize, or beg, or weep, or grovel. Whatever method you deem necessary to regain his favor, and our employment here for the next two weeks. Better you do that then we play the local poorhouse, with the bailiff as our audience.”

“But Father, I have never before done such a thing!”

“True enough, sweet,” he said. “Before this, you have always put the company’s welfare before your own. It’s what has made you such a splendid manager.”

“But this—this is different.” She thought of how when
she’d first met the earl, she’d thought him merely handsome, in the visual way of peers. But then she’d discovered he was intelligent, too, which was quite unlike most peers—quite unlike most men of any station, really. Perhaps she’d liked him too much for it. Why else would she have been so angry when he’d scorned her for being an actress, branding her as immoral without bothering to learn the truth? Angry, yes, but she’d also been hurt, more hurt than she’d admit even to her father. “Very different.”

“I expect it is, Cordelia,” Alfred agreed. “But you have always done what is proper for the good of the company, and I expect you will do so again. You are the most honorable actress I’ve ever known, for all that you’re somehow my daughter.”

“Oh, a pox on honor.” She looked down at the flower in her father’s fingers. He was right, of course. The good of the company must come first. Without it, they were no more than a ragtag pack of wanderers—exactly the kind of gypsies that the earl had so blithely dismissed.

Alfred took her hand and gently pulled her down to sit on the bed beside him. “If it makes it easier, then I shall come with you to the hall this evening. We can begin by thanking His Lordship for his hospitality and the largesse of his kitchens, and proceed from there.”

Wondering where the heat of her anger had gone, she shook her head and sighed. All she felt now was tired, and oddly sad. “It’s better that I go alone, Father. I’m the one who made the mess. I should be the one who tidies it up, yes?”

“Didn’t I say you were a most honorable creature?” He smiled, smoothed her hair behind her ear, and tucked the flower there, beside her temple. “Pride has a bitter taste when swallowed, but thankfully no lasting purgative effects.”

She looked up at him sideways. “Who wrote that?”

“I don’t know.” He raised his thatch of white eyebrows with
pleasant surprise. “It’s rather good, though, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall claim it for myself.”

“Only if I don’t take it first.” She rose, pushing the flower more firmly into her hair as she grinned. “I believe it would do most wonderfully as advice for my bride to deliver to her older brother.”

“Take thy revenge as ye may, rascally child.” Alfred winked, then laughed. “No wonder I’ve never doubted that you’re my daughter, eh?”

The nightingales were singing in the orchard, the new moon had risen and stars hung high in the sky, and still Ross had not apologized to Cordelia Lyon.

He knew he had to do it. If he didn’t, his sister was going to have a headache that would prohibit her from speaking to him for the rest of their lives, or so she’d sworn in the note brought by her grim-faced lady’s maid. He didn’t believe the dappled blotches on the paper that were supposed to be Emma’s tears, but he did believe her resolve. Emma was stubborn enough to outlast Father Time, if she wanted to. Ross hadn’t answered her note, because the only answer Emma would accept was that the Lyon Company was once again producing her
Triumph of Love
.

He shoved back the tray with the dinner he’d barely touched. He hated eating alone, and eating alone here, in his library at his desk among his papers and books, only seemed more bleak.

Her blasted wedding play. Three days ago, she’d never known such a thing existed, and now she was convinced she and Weldon couldn’t be married without it.

He swore to himself, using one of the choicest sailor’s oaths he’d learned on board the
Perseverance
. But it didn’t sound right from his mouth, and it didn’t help, either. He couldn’t put this wretched apology off any longer. He had to find Cordelia Lyon now, and without bothering to pause for a coat or a hat, he left for the gatehouse.

The evening was clear, the air warm. He didn’t doubt that Cordelia and the others would still be awake at this hour. Those people stayed up all night long, didn’t they? No, the real question was what exactly he was going to say, and as he cut through the gardens, he tried to frame an apology that would admit enough for her to accept it without humiliating him. He’d make it brief, neat, so that there’d be no confusion, no possibility of—

“Oh, my lord!” She stood before him as if his thoughts had been brought to life, there with the pink-and-white petals from the apple trees drifting about her like lazy snow. The gown that had seemed so tawdry earlier now seemed elegant and ethereal enough for the moon goddess Diana herself. She’d draped some sort of gauzy, sparkly shawl over her shoulders that twinkled like tiny stars pulled from the night sky, like—

Like he’d become some third-rate poet, dreaming of goddesses in hackneyed prose. Ross shook his head in disgust. What in blazes was it about the Lyons that did this to him?

“You frown, my lord.” She looked down, her fingers twisting in the hem of her shawl. “I know I displeased you this morning, but I—”

“No, no, not at all.” He cleared his throat. Now was the time to apologize—now,
now
. “That is, Miss Lyon, I was in fact coming to find you. To talk about my sister’s play, that is.”

“You were?” She searched her face, worry replacing her first surprise. “Oh, my lord, then I
am
too late!”

“Too late?” Blast, he must sound like a wooden parrot. In all the learning he’d acquired in his life, why hadn’t he ever studied what to say to beautiful young women under the stars? “To be sure, it must be nearly nine, but that is hardly too late for—”

“I was coming to apologize, my lord,” she said in a rush, “to say that I was sorry for being prideful and rude to you, and for disrespecting your wishes, and disappointing Lady Emma, and I hope that you will forgive me and not send us
away, so we can still perform for your sister’s wedding. There, my lord, I’ve said it. There.”