Page 33 of The Lady Plays with Fire

Graham pushed the magazine aside and picked up his pen. “I’m busy. Too busy for frivolities, Keynes.”

“Of course. My apologies. I’ll just—”

As he reached to retrieve the magazine, Graham casually laid his hand atop it.

“I myself find knitting patterns quite soothing,” Keynes ventured after an uncomfortable pause, withdrawing his own hand to shift the stack of paperwork that remained in his arms. “When my thoughts refuse to untangle themselves.”

“Given the dreck one finds beneath this cover,” Graham retorted, tapping his long forefinger against the word Goode’s, “any random page might put a fellow right to sleep.”

Keynes’s answering laugh sounded a trifle uncertain, but he agreed, “Just so, sir,” and turned to deposit the rest of his burden on the polished desk. “Shall I . . . ?”

With a flick of his quill, Graham gestured for his secretary to seat himself.

For a stretch of several minutes, only the ordinary sounds of work could be heard, the organizing of papers, the breaking of seals, the smoothing of pages. Graham dipped his quill, tapped it against the mouth of the glass inkwell, and then sat with its sharp tip poised above another pristine sheet, waiting . . .

Twice in rapid succession, he drummed the fingers of his left hand, each fingertip striking a tiny blow, momentarily blotting out those little faces and meaningless words like rational and proper.

At last, he tossed his pen aside and leaned back in his chair. Watched the traffic slice through the puddles on Half Moon Street. Blew out a breath. Picked up the magazine and leafed through it with casual disdain.

Sheet music. He hummed a few bars. Not a melody he had heard before. Tolerable, he supposed.

Some screed defending ladies’ study of botany. Who would have guessed that allowing young women to learn about flowers was so controversial?

A recipe for syllabub. Perfectly ordinary, except for the line, intermixed with the instructions for preparation, which remarked that it was the ideal dish to serve the average suitor, who was also “cloyingly sweet, insubstantial, and full of air.”

A laugh rasped in his throat before he could stop it, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Keynes pretend not to glance his way.

And then two more pages slid past beneath his thumb, and he was struck by the words Miss on Scene in bold script, the mask of Tragedy to their left and Comedy to the right, the ribbons of the masks trailing to either side to form a sort of banner across the top of the page.

Beneath that banner was a review of an opera performed a few weeks past at the Haymarket, one of the most innocuous assessments of an artistic production he had ever read in any publication. Hardly worthy of the name review at all. It left him with the same sort of feeling one might have at biting into a last winter’s mealy apple. Nothing like the review of Othello. Nothing into which a reader might sink his teeth.

Proof that “Miss on Scene” was merely a name, not a person? Perhaps a variety of would-be authors—men, women, young, old—submitted reviews for the magazine. He was no doubt wasting Keynes’s time, having his secretary chase after a figment, a figure as flimsy as that syllabub, as papery as the fictitious “Mrs. Goode” herself.

With a wry sort of smile, something like chagrin at the credence he’d placed in a single column in a silly ladies’ magazine, he returned his attention to the page. Centered beneath the toothless review was a printer’s flourish that looked—he tilted his head to the side to be certain—yes, oddly like a dagger. And then, below it, a few more lines of type:

Miss on Scene is flattered to learn that her work has earned the notice of Mr. Ransom Blackadder, who seems to imagine he has cause to fear her poison pen. She wishes to reassure him that he need not be concerned for the fate of his work at her hands.

She reserves her ‘deadliest’ reviews for plays that are not deadly dull.

“Why, that little—!”

His final word was not quite drowned out by the sound of the magazine slamming against the tabletop. The gust of air sent his discarded pen skittering a few inches farther away, and the force of the blow made the ink in the bottle shiver.

Keynes whipped up his head. “My lord, is everything all right?”

“Perfectly,” Graham snarled past clenched teeth, though he meant it. More than all right, in fact. “Ransom Blackadder would seem to have made himself an enemy, Keynes.”

And Blackadder was at his best when he had someone with whom he could spar.

“Oh.” Keynes pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose with the tip of his index finger. “Does that mean—?”

“It means that, after this, he can have no compunction about treating Miss on Scene as an adversary, albeit an unworthy one.” He picked up his quill and twirled it between his thumb and first finger, watching the faint gray and white striations on the feather blur and swirl together. “If she shows no mercy with her weapon, she can expect none from his.”

With exaggerated care, he laid the pen atop the stack of paper, closed the magazine, and pushed away from the table. “I’m sure I speak for Blackadder when I say that any revisions to The Poison Pen must take into account this latest sally and respond in kind.”

Something twitched at one corner of Keynes’s mouth. “Or unkind,” he said, low enough that Graham could pretend not to have heard. “Are you off to the theater, then, sir?” he asked in his normal voice.

“I’m going to consult with Blackadder first. Advise him. This afternoon, I’ll convey his instructions to the players.” And in a tone that brooked no dissent. Oh, aye, there would be harsh words at Covent Garden this afternoon. Mr. Fanshawe might find himself without a part—in this play, or any other.