Page 47 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

She wore a black armband around one sleeve, a sign of mourning. Despite the outdoor attire she held a book, and she threw herself into one corner of the stage as if she meant to read in private, but as the other actors entered, her gaze lifted as she watched them all, calculating, assessing.

Cerys was their Hamlet.

Dante reeled, and not only at the attitude she managed to convey, of a young man who was lost, angry, grieving, and resentful all at the same time, but also wary of every step he took and every reaction around him. He could not take his eyes off her as the others trooped across the stage. Dorsey’s face had been wiped clear of the lead paint and he now wore a furred coat and crown. Brilliant, yet obvious, to use the same actor for Hamlet’s father and uncle. Mame was Queen Gertrude, weary, regal, sharp-eyed, her face drawn with worry as she tried to coax liveliness into her son.

Dorsey’s production included Polonius and Laertes, characters that Garrick had brought back to the play after centuries before him had excised them. Laertes was one of the young men of the company—Dante couldn’t recall his name—and he and Cerys bristled at each other in exactly the way of young men trying to assert dominance, both of them silently vying to claim Ophelia’s attention.

Ophelia was one of the other young girls, the one with the exotic name. She hadn’t joined the party for dinners, though she occasionally came to the parlor after. She was quiet in company, drawing no attention to herself, a confounding choice given that young women the world over strove to claim whatever notice and approval they could, especially that of men. She had dark skin, darker than Cerys, and he guessed that her ancestors had come not from Africa but points further east, perhaps the result of British forays into India or the realms of the ancient Persian Empire.

On stage, her quiet transformed to a rippling, alert quality, and while her Ophelia had no lines in the scene, she carried on an entire conversation with her Hamlet by glances alone. Curiosity, hurt, scorn, and recourse to pride appeared in the girl, and for Hamlet, anguish warring with reserve and the refusal to expose his feelings before the crowd. Dante felt his heart pierced by the sheer longing the two conveyed, a heartfelt connection and understanding that had been halted and horribly mutilated by the crime of the king’s death and the young prince’s resulting despair.

Cerys was already the most interesting, and the most intelligible Hamlet he had ever seen, even before she spoke, rising to deliver her first line, a mocking challenge to her uncle and King with a rude sketch of a bow to accompany. “A little more than kin and less than kind.”

In that one utterance Dante saw how she intended to play the character: a young man of will and fire, railing against the constraints of the world that left him powerless and slowly giving way to the darker impulses of his own heart against the pull of love and the dictates of his own morality.

The play made sense to him in a new way, with Cerys’s fiery, foiled Hamlet at the center. He had thought Hamlet a spoiled bully for his treatment of women but saw instead the bitter sense of betrayal as the young prince howled at his mother for her change in alliance and tormented Ophelia to test if she would be true. Ophelia, far from a dupe, played off this Hamlet, trying and failing to draw him from his dark course with forgiveness, tenderness, love. Garrick’s Hamlet had infamously had a mechanical wig with hair that stood up in terror when the ghost appeared. Cerys looked as if she wished to throw herself in her dead father’s arms and weep out her storm of grief.

He watched a young prince giving himself over to despair, rage, and the darker demons of his character, refusing to be swayed even as his friends warned him otherwise and his Ophelia scorned to endure his cruelty. Here was an idealistic youth raging against the greater powers he could not defeat, alienating every softer impulse and affection in pursuit of the goal he had set himself on, and determined to achieve his aim no matter what it cost him.

Dante knew how that felt.

The women in the crowd gasped, and one almost rose to her feet when Hamlet threw back the velvet drapery and stabbed the eavesdropper who turned out to be Polonius, Ophelia’s father. Even Dante felt a prickle at the audacity. A woman, even a woman playing a man, committing a murder on stage! They were all of them completely swept up in the storm of feeling Cerys injected into every word and gesture: rage, grief, resentment, despair, but was it really madness, or simply the fury of one in an inferior place, reeling from the unjust acts of the powerful, who acted only in self-interest?

More than one lady dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes when Ophelia, broken at last by her lover’s rejection and her father’s death, draped flowers around the necks of the king and queen, a warning to them all. Even Bathsheba sat riveted, her attention fixed on the action. Dante had never seen Bathsheba transfixed by anything, save perhaps contemplation of her high ambitions. Was it possible Cerys’s performance would truly win her over?

Small screams rippled through the audience when a maddened Hamlet threw himself into Ophelia’s grave, though the “grave” was no more than a square of black felt cloth thrown on the floor. The anguish of a young man’s broken heart was palpable, and Bathsheba, as covertly as possible, wiped a gloved finger across her cheek.

Dante leaned forward, forgetting about Bathsheba and everything else, entirely arrested as a newly hardened Hamlet set his mind on revenge. Dante wasn’t the only one holding his breath as the final tumultuous scene unfolded, with poisoned swords changing hands and the poisoned cup standing in dire foreboding on the small table covered with a purple cloth. The older widow sitting next to Lady Diana shrieked when the Queen reached for the dread goblet: “Gertrude, no! You’ll die!”

Nobody laughed. Dante had never been part of an audience so silent, so fixated on the relentless tragedy. He was not alone with his gasps and exclamations as he watched the combat between Cerys and their Laertes. They fought in the French style, their lunges and parries a lethal dance. He flinched every time a blow seemed to land, especially when Cerys, taking a blow to the midsection, clutched a hand to her belly and stumbled backward. Logically Dante knew they would have taken care their stage blades could do no damage, and he saw how the heavier, stronger actor playing Laertes adjusted his steps so the lighter, faster Cerys had an advantage. But the whole notion of it, a woman, sword fighting, even in play—he’d never seen such a thing before. Cerys Evans had steel to her core.

Dante wasn’t the only one who sucked in a breath when Hamlet, alerted that he wielded a poisoned blade, turned and plunged his sword into the chest of King Claudius. Dorsey staggered backward, his face full of astonishment and fear, turning over his throne with a resounding crash. The woman next to Lady Diana screamed and fainted, slumping in her chair. Without taking her eyes from the action, Diana pulled a vinaigrette from her reticule and waved the bottle beneath her neighbor’s nose. The sting of ammonia, tempered with lemon, floated through the air.

The poor widow roused only to sob through the rest of the scene as a staggering Hamlet wrested the poisoned cup from Horatio and pretended to down the last of it so Horatio could not. Dot, on her knees, held Cerys in her arms as she delivered her last speech, celebrating Hamlet’s triumph even as she looked upon the horror and futility wrought by his acts.

Dante shivered at the sorrow and rage in Dot’s voice as she bid her sweet prince good night and closed her friend’s staring eyes. The actors dimmed the lamps as they exited, leaving one to shine on the carnage left behind, Cerys in the center, so still Dante was not certain she was breathing.

Utter silence swelled in the room, edged by the murmur of wind outside and the stifled sobs of a few ladies. Bathsheba stared stonily at the stage, her eyes gleaming.

Andover stood and clapped loudly. “I say! Bravo.”

His hearty tone broke the spell. Dutton leapt to his feet and joined the applause. “Indeed, bravo!”

One by one the other men stood, and even a few women. Lady Diana drummed her closed fan on one gloved palm. Her neighbor clutched a handkerchief to her face with one hand, vinaigrette in the other, valiantly striving to bring her emotions under control. Pearson Thompson, overcome by the press of feeling, whooped and threw his hat into the air.

Lord Baeccon turned and spoke low into the ear of his wife, who didn’t bend her head or change her expression, but nodded briefly. She clapped a few desultory times as the actors assembled for their bows, the ones sprawled on the stage helped up by their peers. Dot hauled Cerys to her feet and the two women grinned with delight at one another, then stepped forward, arm in arm, to bow together to the admiring audience. Dante applauded as hard as he could.

Ophelia came forward and put her hand in Cerys’s, who gave her a look of frank delight, then bowed as Ophelia curtsied. Mame curtsied on the arm of Dorsey, who made an extravagant bow, sweeping back his furred cloak and enjoying the boos and hisses mingled with the applause that told him his king had been properly villainous. But when he handed Cerys forward, the sustained applause was for her, and she bowed and bowed again, her face alight.

Dante rubbed the center of his chest, buttons of his coat scraping his palm. There was an ache he’d never felt before. He didn’t have the words for it. He felt he were being stretched in two directions. He was larger than he’d ever felt before, swelling with this unidentifiable sensation, and yet at the same time he felt he could be snipped in two and done an irreparable injury.

Andover stepped forward, took Cerys’s hand, and kissed it. The move seemed incongruous, dressed as she was, but she responded with a curtsy, and the woman returned. A woman who had brought a nuance to Shakespeare’s hero in a way Dante had never seen.

Andover brought her forward into the crowd, where she might accept their praise and congratulations. The lights brightened again, the lamps turned up as servants brought candles into the room. Dante could see how the makeup had accentuated her features, darkening her brow, hollowing her cheeks. This close, the softness of her face and the grace of her breeches-clad form made it seem impossible she could ever be mistaken for a man. Yet the illusion of the stage still clung, and Dante felt he looked upon her with dimensions enlarged and deepened by the entire world of thought and feeling that she had created on stage.

The limpid ingenue, the competitor matching wits with Bathsheba, the little twit hiding on the chaise that day in the library, and the harpy who had raked him over when he was being dull and sullen—they were all aspects of her. So was the talented actress who could draw an audience into her hand and manipulate their emotions at her whim.

Who was the real woman? Had he even seen her yet?