Fifteen Years Later
1817 – Brighton
Libba hated closingnight.
It was her least favorite.
The worst.
The end.
Endings were so dreadfully final, weren’t they?
So why did it always require a celebration after the final bow?
She sighed, leaning against the dressing room wall to take one last breath of the era of Ovid’sPygmalion,rendered in original dance and verse, before dousing the last light. She’d removed her toga. She’d shaken the talc from her hair. She’d let the company go ahead to the pub.
This last part was just for her. Only for her.
She sat at the vanity table and flicked off the little paste gemstones she’d glued over the beauty marks on her cheek, one by one, as she dismantled Galatea for what was likely the final time. Each glittering piece fell onto a creased flyer for the production, writ in bold, red ink.
Liberty Lennox Presents Maiden Production!
New Odalisque Theater on Ship Street!
Pygmalion!
She chuckled, running her fingers over the name Willa had given the theater, her final gift to Libba, bequeathed in hermysterious last will. She wished Willa had been here to see the production, even once.
She wished she’d been here to call her ‘Liberty,’ after she’d changed her name. She’d done it in London, some three years ago. She’d signed a paper at a courthouse with a barrister at her left.
Liberty. That was hers.
It was hers in a wayElizabethnever had been.
She wished a lot of things.
Mostly that it was not closing night. Closing night always made her so damn maudlin.
She changed into a loose, linen dress, a costume, truth be told, with an exterior set of stays that was easy to lace by oneself. She twisted her hair and speared it through with a two-pronged brass bauble she’d been given by an admirer back in Seven Dials.
She kept on Galatea’s sandals for the walk down Ship Street toward the Coin and Cauldron because they were damned comfortable, thank you very much.
And when she heard the ruckus caused by her people from half a block away, finally, she smiled.
The roar of welcome when she walked through the doors of the public house did soothe some of the sting from closing night, with several of her performers standing to cheer and welcome her in alongside her fellow Starling house wards and friends from Brighton at large.
Her eyes immediately fell on her brother, accompanied as ever by Jasper Townsend as both made their way toward her, carrying four pints of ale between them.
“Oh, gracious. For me?” she asked as they reached her, both grinning widely as she held out both hands and took one glass from each of them.
It was a silly, old tradition between the three of them, a competition for who would buy the last to the pub theirfirst drink. A thing they had been doing since the first blush of adulthood had allowed them past the hallowed doors of establishments like this one, many years ago.
And it always ended in exactly this way, with the latecomer holding two pints and expected to drain them both in short order.
“You were spectacular tonight,” Malcolm said immediately as Libba sank her top lip into the foam head on her first pint, tipping the cool liquid into her mouth. “I don’t usually go for such esoteric performances, but I really did enjoy myself.”
She responded by blowing an indignant bubble into her pint, which made her brother grin.
