Page 24 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“Does it matter? I am here now, counting myself a guest of Lord Andover, same as you, and making my way in the world as best I can with my little portion of wit.” Cerys glanced at Baeccon, whose jaw clenched as he worked through some inner tangle. “We cannot all have the good fortune of finding a lord to fall in love with us and smooth our way in the world.”

Baeccon glared, as if trying to work out what she meant by this, and Bathsheba glared too. Dante flexed his arm, drawing Cerys closer as if his body could shield her from the other woman’s attacks.

“Her father was Dutch,” Lady Diana said. Dante wondered if the older woman were trying to be helpful, or if she, too, wanted to draw Cerys out.

Cerys nodded. A slender coil of hair had escaped her coronet and hung gently beside her neck, adding a touch of vulnerability. She was not foolproof, nor encased in armor. She was a young and mortal woman, for all her self-possession. Her blood would run as red as his.

“My father was a lieutenant in the Dutch Navy. He drowned in the Baltic Sea, escorting a ship full of treasures to Empress Catherine of Russia.” Her eyes held a pale glimmer—tears? Dante flexed his arm again, trying to urge her closer. This instinct to protect was strange and new.

“You poor, fatherless thing,” Bathsheba said, her tone all false sweetness. “I suppose your mother couldn’t look after you properly, which is why you ran away.”

“On the contrary, my mother is happily married to Mr. Evans, and between them they run a rather large property in Newport,” Cerys said with a sweet smile. “No doubt Wales is a wild country to you, milady, but no feral animals have eaten my brother or sisters yet.”

“But if you have such a happy family, child, why would you run away at all? It seems rather ungrateful of you.”

Was he mistaken, or did Cerys lean ever so slightly on his arm? The scent of jasmine heightened. His body roused, attuned to her warm scent, the soft press of her body. Protect, he reminded himself. He would entertain thoughts of ravishment later.

No. He caught himself. No, there would be no ravishment, nor any thoughts in that direction. This girl might look as dainty as a strawberry flower, but she was playing him as easily as she played everyone else in this room, including Bathsheba. She was strumming them all like the strings of a harp, playing some melody to amuse her own ear.

“I suppose one might ask why any of us do anything unwise, Lady Baeccon,” Cerys murmured. “But sometimes, it is enough to follow where the heart calls, yes?”

“How poetic,” sneered Bathsheba, whose heart never led her anywhere that did not promise coin or pretty things. “I had thought actresses were generally shrewd.”

“They are, which is why my Miss Evans can play any part you wish.” Dorsey had been left out long enough. He strolled up to the group, his cravat a touch crooked, his breeches seasons out of fashion, but he had presence, Dante would grant him that. Even if the scent of brandy rolled off him along with charm.

“Tell me, Lady Baeccon.” Dorsey focused on her with flattering alacrity. “We’ll get up a show just for you during your visit. Lady Baeccon’s Matinee. I’m certain I could find a stage for the interim. Come, come, what would you like to see us perform?”

“I am a fan of a good pathetic tragedy,” her ladyship mused. “I should love to see Miss Evans as Isabella in The Fatal Marriage. Or perhaps Calista in The Fair Penitent?”

“You like to see your own sex duped, denied, and led to ruin?” Lady Diana quizzed her.

“I think such tales a sound warning to us all. A reminder to walk the path of innocence and virtue,” said Lady Baeccon, who had not bound herself in her life by any virtue that proved an inconvenience to her.

Dante watched the expressions moving over her husband’s face as Bathsheba spoke. A trace of the infatuation that had led him to her trap, that was still there, but he wore the bitter look of a man learning that the woman to whom he had offered the world wanted a side of something extra.

A good warning about womanhood in general. Dante reminded himself not to become too exercised by the press of Cerys’s delicate hand on his arm. She was playing a ruse, and playing it to the hilt.

“Then perhaps a rousing tragedy,” Dutton suggested. “Are you one for tragedy, Miss Evans?”

“Volumnia in Coriolanus?” Diana put in. “I do like that speech of his about crows pecking at eagles.”

“I have a taste for the comic roles myself,” Cerys said. “They tend to offer more range. In fact I was showing off my Beatrice for Mr. Manelli earlier today.”

“Were you, indeed?” Diana murmured.

“I wager you’d make an excellent Juliet,” Andover said, trying to encourage his group to get on. It was trying to blend oil and water, wherever Bathsheba had been poured, Dante thought.

“Oh, yes, the poor, doomed female, too silly to live.” Bathsheba smirked. “I can see you dying so touchingly, Miss Evans.”

“A good actress can pull off any role, yer la’ship,” Dorsey said. “Mame does a wonderful Lady Macbeth, if that’s what you want. Put you in mind of the great Siddons, she will.”

“But we are debating roles that would suit Miss Evans,” Bathsheba said sweetly. “What about the one where the slave who thinks she will marry the Sultan is stabbed to death by him?”

“Zara,” Dorsey said, happy to be helpful. “We can get that up for you. It’s in the repertoire.”

“But as the lead role, that may be too taxing for one of Miss Evans’s youth. What is something that suits her—” She paused to give Cerys a measuring gaze, allowing the listener to fill in whatever attribute they chose.

Dante was still reeling from the scent of warm jasmine, his senses on high alert from her touch. It was taking everything he had to master his baser impulses and keep from hauling the girl into his arms.