Page 50 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

But that kiss. The raw and elemental charge of his kiss had knocked her off her feet like an artillery blast. That kiss made her feel, inside, as if she were a firework sputtering sparks, a wire that burned hotter in his presence.

But he couldn’t know that. She couldn’t allow him to know that.

She wiped a bead of sweat from her brow and tossed her sword to her other hand, flexing her wrist. Kiddell was being relentless this morning.

Perhaps Dante had meant something else. Something like, I never understood love until now. After all, much of her interpretation of Hamlet rested on her belief that he had truly loved Ophelia, but found himself torn from her by circumstances and his own confusion of grief.

No, she mustn’t think the word love in relation to Dante. That was foolish. Mame already feared Cerys would be a fool, and for many reasons, Cerys refused to be one. She was pretending an infatuation for him to annoy Bathsheba Baeccon. She was after a theater for Dorsey’s players. A venue of their own, gracious as a Greek temple, noble as a Roman forum, as comfortable as the old Covent Garden had been, where Dorsey’s company could dazzle and transport and delight audiences night after night, to their mutual enrichment.

Kiddell stepped back and put up his sword. “I’ve killed you three times already.”

“I let you score a touch.” Cerys rolled back her shoulders. She was sore from yesterday, her first time stage fighting in a while, but she wouldn’t tell Kiddell that.

“A hit, a palpable hit,” Meek said, repeating a line from the play. Fred, who sat next to him in all the gangly grace of a boy just turning to manhood, knobby wrists draped over his knobby knees, nodded in assent.

“You don’t think we’ve practiced enough?” Cerys asked.

Kiddell’d had her up in the early hours, claiming they had to be done in the grand saloon before the gentry morts rose and the morning calls began. An early morning mist beaded the tall windows, showing the fog rising from the far folds of the Cotswold hills, like the breath of some great animal still at slumber. Cerys liked the early morning hours just after dawn—they were her favorite part of the day, that unformed beginning where everything felt possible, the day’s dreams capable of becoming reality. But she liked to use them to walk outside and cut flowers and gather the plants that were best taken in the early morning, heavy with dew and promise. Not be beaten about the head with a sword.

“I thought we were convincing enough in our performance,” she said.

“Our fight doesn’t have enough going on. We could draw it out. Make it longer.” Kiddell took his stance. “En garde.”

“Does it need to be longer?” Cerys took her stance, one hand in the air, and parried his thrust. “We only need to make the point.”

“Longer,” Meek said.

Fred drummed his hands on his knees. “Great fun when the ladies faint. You need to stagger about a bit more, Cerys, when he hits you. Play up the suspense.”

“Everyone knows Hamlet is going to die. I don’t need to drag it out interminably.”

“Never to rise again,” Meek said soberly.

“See?” Cerys flipped her sword in his direction. “Meek agrees with me.”

“Meek agrees with everybody,” Kiddell said.

Meek bobbed his head. He was Fred’s age, perhaps a year younger, very intelligent with some concepts, and utterly incapable of grasping others. Dorsey had found the boy on a turn through Little Dean, escaped from the workhouse where he was starved and beaten because he couldn’t follow the rules. Meek didn’t speak on his own, only echoed what he heard or was told, but he never wearied of repetitive tasks—indeed, he seemed to prefer them—and as long as they took turns looking after him and kept him from wandering off when curiosity took him, he seemed perfectly content with his place in the company.

“And you need to make more of a flourish when you kill Claudius,” Kiddell remarked as Dorsey wandered into their makeshift theater, stepping over a coil of rope and inspecting their sword fighting kit. “You just turned and stabbed. No drama in it at all.”

“The goal is to be sudden,” Cerys said. “Like when Hamlet kills Polonius. He doesn’t pause to think. He’s angry and hurt, and he strikes to hurt another. He knows he has to move before he can think about it, because thinking will paralyze him.”

“I made a good enough show of it, with my death throes.” Dorsey poked through the pile of foils in their bag. “Knocking over the throne, that was a nice touch, eh? Got that from Garrick.”

“We ought to have a packet of pig’s blood she can puncture,” Kiddell said. “Then you can spout gore. That’d bring on the fainting, for certain.”

“That’d ruin the bearskin, ye nodcock,” Dorsey replied. “I’d never get the blood out.”

“It’s clear Kiddell doesn’t do our laundry,” Cerys said.

“Women’s work.” He raised his sword. “Will you pay attention this time, or do I have to kill you again?”

Kiddell claimed to be the younger son of a lordly father, turned loose to make his own way in the world. He found Dorsey in Northleach and said he was joining up as a lark, but he’d stayed with the company for six years. Cerys held his claim in suspicion, since the sons of gentlemen became gentlemen, and the sons of lords were dispatched into the law, priesthood, or military. Kiddell’s knowledge of the family of the Lords Chedworth had led Cerys and Mame to conclude that he must be the natural son of one of them, with no hope of inheritance or acknowledgement. He didn’t need to pretend to noble blood to impress them, but Cerys was well aware that the world classified one by birth, and treated one accordingly.

“So it is settled then?” Cerys watched Dorsey as he hefted one of the stage foils, peering down the blade as if inspecting a real sword. “You’ve secured our investors.”

“Baeccon looks like he might renege,” Dorsey reported, “but the others have as good as laid down their coin. Your gentleman says I ought to write out a contract. Then it’ll hold up before a magistrate.”