Page 19 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“You are from Italy, are you not?”

“My father was. My mother is not. I grew up in England.” He snapped the sketchbook shut.

“A pity, as you seem to hate us all.”

“Only some.” He tucked the leatherbound folio under his arm, an obvious preparation for departure.

Cerys planted her fists on her hips and scowled at him. “You need me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

At least it was his turn this time, though he appeared to be choking on the words.

“For this commission. I will help you craft a design that will win over Dorsey. It will fulfill his every wildest dream, and then more.”

“And what benefit do you derive from this arrangement?”

Her heart gave a nervous little stutter. She would almost call it excitement, but that could not be. She only felt this breathless rush right before the curtain lifted on a performance.

“I should think it obvious. I gain a theater.”

A home. A solid place to reside, at last. A structure firm and tall and strong that she’d had a hand in the making of. An accomplishment that could last.

He looked away, and the excitement collapsed into a small anxious knot.

“Good day, Miss Evans.”

That was all he said. No agreement. No approval. Just that curt acknowledgement, not even meeting her eye, and he strode out the door.

Cerys bit her lip and looked around the library, suddenly quiet and empty, and all of a sudden, with the imposing Mr. Manelli vanished, lacking anything that appealed to her to stay.

This had to work. He had to help her. She had to do something to prove her worth to the troupe. To the world.

She must have some way to prove her value. For what was left for her if she didn’t?

CHAPTER SIX

He would not be working with her to design a theater, of course. He would not be doing anything with Miss Cerys Van Der Welle Evans. He must remember she had shown herself from their first meeting to be one of those arrogant and over-confident young women who assumed her taste and opinions were superior, and therefore everyone about her must bow to her wishes.

She said she’d grown up in an abbey. Her family was wealthy then, and old, if they’d taken over one of the religious houses stripped from the Church during the Reformation and granted to favorites of Henry VIII. She was a spoiled, willful little princess who had never gone without a single comfort, never been deprived of a toy in her life.

Well, she would be deprived the pleasure of toying with him.

She had liked his library, though. And she had praised his designs for his house.

That was not the point. Having been hounded out of the study by her supremely distracting presence, Dante took refuge in the room he’d been allotted for his bedchamber and tossed his sketchbook onto the table. He sorted through the drawer to find the old papers, pencil marks erased, that he kept for scraps. Parchment was costly, and an architect must be thrifty. He pulled a chair to the window, pushed it open to admit air and light, and fell to making sketches.

He entered the reverie almost at once. This was what he loved: creating beauty out of thin air. It was almost a kind of ease, to give vent to the images pressed in his head. Every word the minx spoke had charged something in him, like lighting a fuse that led to a firework. Her theater would combine classical elegance with modern convenience. He would take the old patterns and articulate them in a new way. He would create a showcase worthy of her beauty, and⁠—

Dante put down his pencil and stared at the sketches that had emerged. There was the front of a theater, built like a Roman temple, with the pediment and columns and the decorated frieze. There was the spacious curve inside, with tiered balconies that gave every member of the audience an obstructed view of the stage. Boxes placed so conversations and chatter wouldn’t overpower the actors. The whole offered a sense of intimate grandeur, of elegance and inspiration that still had its roots in the earth, in the tragedy and comedy and absurdity of human experience. Filled with the same kind of wisdom he thought he detected in the eyes of the little minx, for all her youth.

And there in the margins, from every angle, profile, three-quarters, and staring straight at him as if she might peer through his eyes into his soul, was the minx. He’d sketched her half a dozen times in a variety of expressions: the glower she’d thrown at him at Thompson’s baths. The look of wonderment that softened her face as she regarded the proportions of the library. The amusement, curiosity, and irritation that animated her features when conversing with him.

Devil take it, she’d burrowed into his head and infected his imagination. Dante crumpled the papers in his hand.

His father had always said Dante shouldn’t draw figures. Andrea had been encouraged by his son’s early readiness to take up the pencil, the crayon, the bit of charcoal. He’d coached and chided, tried to confer everything he knew all at once—and perhaps too soon—on the growing boy. And his father, a gifted sculptor to whom the human form came naturally, as if a language he was born knowing, had cried with dismay, again and again, at each halting effort that emerged from Dante’s hand.

By the time Dante was old enough to begin the first stages of his apprenticeship, he knew not to show his father the clumsy hands, the disproportionate features, the awkward bodies that emerged from his pen. Instead he turned to drawing buildings, finding a soothing coherency in the rules of balance and symmetry and simple engineering that explained how a structure came together.