Page 36 of The Lady Plays with Fire

And yet it could not have been more obvious that he was in command.

Though it had hardly been a silent entrance on her part, no one paid any heed to her arrival or her approach as she walked down the aisle with hesitant steps and stopped a few yards from where he stood. At last, he turned, though only enough to look over his shoulder.

“Ah. There you are. I’d begun to think you changed your mind.”

She lifted her chin, rising instinctively to the challenge in his voice. “No, my lord. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Excellent.” He beckoned her closer with a wave of his arm and faced the actors again. “This is Miss . . . Hayes.” The hesitation in his voice was too brief to draw attention to the falsehood he had uttered.

At first, she could not imagine why he had given her employer’s surname instead of her own. A mocking reference, perhaps, to the fact that Mrs. Hayes insisted on introducing Julia as her relation when they were in company.

But it was also a measure of protection. Whatever happened, she might yet leave the theater with Miss Addison’s reputation intact, and for that, she could only be grateful.

“She has asked to observe a rehearsal of The Poison Pen,” he went on, “to which I agreed, in exchange for her—”

Please don’t say it. Heat prickled her cheeks.

“Willingness to smooth my way with a certain young lady of her acquaintance.”

“Skirt-chasing again, my lord?” teased one of the men who had come from the wings. He was a year or two younger than Lord Dunstane, with light-brown hair and a cleft chin, and he carried himself with confidence—like all actors, she supposed, but still, she suspected he was the one who would play the Ransom Blackadder part in Act Two.

“I hardly need to chase them, Sawyer,” he corrected mildly. “And again implies that I ever stopped.”

All of them, even the man lying face down on the table, joined in a wicked laugh.

Julia could not remember hearing a more humorless sound. Well, hadn’t she suspected for some time that Lord Dunstane was a rogue?

Mr. Sawyer then turned toward her and bowed. “What do you think of the play so far, Miss Hayes?”

“Oh.” She started at the address, then managed the shallowest of curtsies. “I, er . . .” Even a few moments of watching had shown her the vast difference between what an audience saw and what went on before the curtain rose, how little her experiences at the theater had prepared her to give an answer at this juncture.

Mrs. Cole fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. At this distance, even with no stage makeup to exaggerate her features, her expression of contempt was perfectly legible. “Yes, do tell.”

Julia lifted her chin a notch higher still. “After my brief observation of your rehearsal, I believe both Mr. Blackadder and his patron have it wrong.”

Her words were met with a chorus of oh-hos and cleared throats and the creak of two chairs as the bad poet sat up a little straighter and the barbed-tongued reviewer sat down.

Lord Dunstane regarded her with fresh interest and not, she thought, anger.

Not yet.

“The problem does not lie with Mrs. Cole’s acting,” she went on, focusing her gaze on a point just below the lip of the stage. “Both the lines originally given to her, and the revision, are ill-judged. They paint her as too crude, or too cruel. If Perpetua Philpot is to fool people into falling in love with her, she cannot—at least at first—seem to be either of those things.”

Her assessment of the problem was met with silence. Every member of the company appeared to be waiting for Lord Dunstane to speak first. And his reply, when it at last came, was delivered as quietly as his earlier critique, his voice no less wry.

“I said nothing of love, Miss Hayes.”

Her blush burned a degree or two hotter. What retort could she make? She did not think she had ever been more aware of the rise and fall of her breasts, how every effort to slow her breath only made it come more rapidly.

“Tell me,” he went on after a pause, “what would you suggest to improve matters?”

The actor playing the sickly poet made a scoffing noise. “With all due respect, my lord, what does she know? If the little miss fancies it’s so easy to play the reviewer’s part, perhaps she ought to come up here and give it a try.”

Julia whipped up her head. “I protest, sir. I never said—”

“An intriguing idea, Fanshawe,” declared the actor who had spoken so boldly to Lord Dunstane—Mr. Sawyer, was that his name? As he spoke, he came down from the stage using a small staircase off to one side, taking the steps two at a time. His nimble movements and mischievous air would have made him an excellent choice to cast as Puck, the troublemaker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When he reached the level on which the audience was usually seated, on which Julia and Lord Dunstane stood, he bowed with a flourish that could only be called theatrical. “Won’t you help us, Miss Hayes?” He held out one hand to assist her in ascending to the Covent Garden stage.

She fully intended to refuse. Mr. Fanshawe’s words had been intended as a taunt, not a sincere offer. Besides, some dreams were not meant to be fulfilled.