Page 50 of The Lady Plays with Fire

“Nay, m’lord,” Mr. Fanshawe ground out as he set about collecting his script. “Apologies. I only meant—”

“I know what you meant. Go on,” he said to Julia, jerking his chin as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Let’s hear it.”

She quailed beneath his cool regard and nearly lost her courage. Had he too grown tired of her interference?

“The first rehearsal I attended, you said that everyone ought to want to—” She willed herself not to blush. “That they ought to desire Perpetua Philpot. That if they did, it would make it easier for her to stab them in the backs.”

He regarded her with wry amusement—she’d still never seen a genuine smile. “Aye. I did say . . . something to that effect.”

“Well,” she said, forging bravely—or foolishly—ahead. “Shouldn’t Reginald Briggs want her too?”

“What makes you so certain he doesn’t?”

“He says the most awful things about her, in his poetry.”

“That’s how some men declare themselves, Miss Hayes,” said Mr. Sawyer, chuckling darkly as she tried to block out the memory of his conversations about women with Lord Dunstane, the rakish exchange about his rough night in particular. “Some men can’t show their feelings any other way.”

“In some cases”—Lord Dunstane pushed away from the proscenium and began to walk across the stage, tossing the words over his shoulder to Sawyer as he passed between the man and Julia—“not even when they are being paid to act. Scene.”

He spoke the direction so quietly that she didn’t immediately realize what he meant. Not until she saw that he’d stepped to Mr. Sawyer’s mark did she understand that he intended to act the part of Briggs.

One of the unusual—sometimes, she was tempted to say remarkable—things about The Poison Pen was that the principals never actually met, though they were onstage together throughout, verbally sparring with another. But they spoke to one another only through their writing, from opposite sides of a stage divided, as it were, by a partition, albeit an invisible one. They lived in two worlds—even the scenery was split between the artist’s garret and the lady’s boudoir—worlds that had no point of overlap, save for his poetry and her reviews.

“ ‘You squander your gift on the masses.’ ” Julia read Perpetua’s line from the script. She could not meet Lord Dunstane’s steady gaze.

“ ‘Your only talent is to call forth the mob,’ ” he recited in his turn. He knew everyone’s lines by heart.

His commanding presence served him well onstage. She wondered whether he had acted before. Though his voice was still quiet, she suspected he could be heard in the farthest seats.

Back and forth the exchange went, the two of them speaking to one another, past one another, over one another, coming ever closer to the invisible wall that divided them. She tried to invest Perpetua’s words with anguish, and sometimes with heat. Perpetua didn’t really despise the poet, she had decided. Or at least, not for his poetry. She envied his popularity, his creativity. His freedom.

As the scene wound to a close, Julia drew herself up to her full height, a meager attempt to counterbalance Lord Dunstane’s imposing stature—Mr. Sawyer was not nearly so tall—and tossed her head defiantly. “ ‘You claim I can’t even read—’ ”

Lord Dunstane took one final step toward the center of the stage. “ ‘You say I’m not worth the printer’s ink—’ ”

They were standing so close now that when his chest rose on those words, his cravat nearly brushed her upturned chin.

Then the shared line, spoken together, that ended the scene and cemented their tangled fates: “ ‘Yet we both know, you write for me alone.’ ”

For a moment, they held their positions, no movement but their breathing, the imaginary wall between them thin as a pane of glass. No, thinner. A skim of ice at the edge of a quiet pool as winter turned to spring. It would melt away at the slightest touch—if either of them dared to reach out a hand.

Mr. Sawyer broke the spell with mocking applause. “Very instructive, sir. I see now what you mean. They think they want to kill one another.” He had gone to stand beside Mr. Fanshawe and now jostled him with an elbow, much to the other actor’s annoyance. “But really, they’d rather kiss.”

Julia turned sharply away under the guise of returning the script to the desk.

When it came to disguising her growing feelings for Lord Dunstane, she’d turned out to be a terrible actress.

“Now you know what that looks like,” sniped Mrs. Cole, “maybe next time you’ll make a more convincing job of it.”

“That’s enough for today.” Lord Dunstane put an end to their bickering. “Go home. All of you.”

Julia trudged off the stage with the rest of the actors, they to the dressing rooms below, she to the entrance of the theater. At the door, she paused to glance back.

Indifferent as to whether his command had been obeyed, he had seated himself at Briggs’s desk and was swiftly scrawling something across one of the prop scraps of paper.

Probably more suggested revisions. Though part of her wished it might be a letter to Blackadder, resigning from his commission as the playwright’s go-between and washing his hands of the whole production.

As much as she wanted to put a stop to Blackadder, she needed to know that the play wasn’t the only thing drawing her and Lord Dunstane together.