Page 20 of The Lady Plays with Fire

“I don’t—” Julia began, then broke off. I don’t understand, she had started to say. But she was beginning to. What had Constantia said of the poem? A “scathing review of reviewers”? “Am I meant to be the English ‘reviewess’?” she asked, incredulous.

“So it would seem,” Lady Stalbridge answered with a sigh. “Evidently, Mr. Blackadder has decided to use his next play to respond to Miss on Scene’s review of his last.”

Julia thought back to what she had written, to that night last spring when she had sat in the crowded theater and listened to those around her who could not seem to make up their minds to be affronted or amused. She had been neither. She could not fathom why Mr. Blackadder wished so clearly to waste his talent to no good end. And she had said as much in her review.

But Miss Cooper was right. Other reviewers had been far more scathing, even going so far as to call for his plays to be banned.

“Perhaps,” offered Theo, “it’s less a matter of what she said than where.”

“What do you mean?” asked Clarissa.

“It’s quite one thing to be excoriated by a highly regarded reviewer,” explained Miss Nelson. “But I, for one, have no difficulty imagining that Ransom Blackadder would regard criticism launched by a young lady, in a magazine for young ladies, rather differently.”

“You may well have the right of it,” said Lady Stalbridge. “According to Oliver”—her stepson—“other reviewers come in for their share of criticism, but the lion’s share seems to belong to a woman meant to suggest Miss on Scene and the ladies’ magazine for which she writes.” Here she turned toward Julia. “I fear that the play, combined with the furor over your review of Othello, may renew interest in discovering your identity.” Her gaze then traveled around the table. “All our identities.”

Clarissa’s eyes were wide; she looked more girlish than ever. “That would put an end to the Magazine for Misses.”

“No.”

Inside, Julia was trembling. But she spoke with conviction enough that Lady Stalbridge stopped pacing.

“What will you do?” Constantia’s pencil was poised, as if she were prepared to take down whatever answer Julia gave.

The trouble was, Julia had no answer.

Theo flicked the corner of her notes with her fingernail, refusing to look at Julia as she asked in an unusually quiet voice, “What about Lord Dunstane?”

“What about him?”

“Well, he is known to have influence in the theater.”

“Over Ransom Blackadder, in particular,” Lady Stalbridge added.

“And you are obviously acquainted,” Theo pointed out, a knowing lift to her brow.

“Only slightly,” Julia protested. “I could hardly presume . . .”

But hadn’t her presumptuousness got her into this mess?

As she looked around at the faces of her fellow staff members—her friends—and watched their fear give way to cautious hope, she knew she had no choice.

Without revealing her secret identity, she was going to have to find a way to persuade surly Lord Scottish to intervene on Miss on Scene’s behalf with Ransom Blackadder.

Chapter 7

After dismissing his valet, Graham stood a moment longer before the pier glass, eyes narrowed, assessing.

As a lad, he’d come in for his fair share of mockery for his red hair. At the fine English public school to which his father’s will had ordered he be sent, some had seen it as the mark of a peasant, not the son of a nobleman. Did your mother lift her skirts for every stableboy, McKay? Or just the ugly ones?

He had responded with a flail of fists and a fine assortment of Gaelic oaths that none of them had been able to understand, not even the headmaster—though he’d nevertheless caned Graham for his foul mouth. Graham hadn’t been able to sit at table for a week.

Eventually, he’d learned to confine his replies to paper. Poems and dialogues tucked into his copybook, hidden beneath his blotter or in the locked wooden box beneath his bed. No one ever saw them. Those English boys fancied they’d triumphed.

At least, until Ransom Blackadder’s work had begun to appear onstage.

In the years since, Graham had had more than ample reassurance that, in spite of his schoolmates’ claims to the contrary, women did not think him ugly. Apparently, they couldn’t see the ugliness inside. How bitterness and fear had tainted his blood and eaten away at his soul like a canker.

Or if they did see it, they were willing to overlook it in favor of his chiseled jaw.