Page 73 of The Lady Plays with Fire

Oh, but she was foolish, too—foolish in her determination to rescue this play. After tonight, she would be the subject of whispers wherever she went, and for longer than he cared to imagine.

And he loved her for all of it, for her spirit and her heart and her strength. She would meet society’s scorn with a twinkle in her eye—and pray God, he added, pressing the ring box in his pocket against his ribs, with me at her side.

The hope and love that had flickered to life last week during Sterling’s visit were now burning brightly in his chest. For Julia hadn’t just stepped onstage intending to save The Poison Pen, or even the Magazine for Misses.

He understood that she was doing everything in her power to save him, as well—not Blackadder, but him. The man he had once been. The man he could be again.

Fingers plucked at his sleeve, and he glanced down to see Sawyer urging him to move. “You can’t stand there, my lord.” He pointed above their heads.

Graham followed his gesture to a network of ropes and pulleys, connecting the poles from which hung the heavy painted backdrops, anchored by pendulous sandbags. Being struck by any one of the objects dangling above them would at the very least render a man unconscious. Stagehands crouched high above on rough-hewn boards, waiting to drop the scenery on cue and trusting that anyone backstage would know better than to be in the way.

“Else you’ll be leaving your brains on the boards, as well as your heart,” Sawyer finished, with a sideways glance toward Julia, who was at present struggling to disguise a laugh as Fanshawe plodded his way through another verse.

“That obvious, am I?”

“I daresay, since Blackadder trusts you, you must know something about the theater,” Sawyer conceded. Even behind the painted-on brows of the sardonic Reginald Briggs, his expression was teasing. “But an actor you’ll never be.”

Sawyer was a cleverer fellow than many, but Graham wondered whether he was the only member of the cast who had worked out Lord Dunstane’s feelings for the young woman he had introduced to them as “Miss Hayes.”

“Now then, my lord,” Sawyer continued, tugging at his arm. “Haven’t you got a box to watch from?”

He did, of course. And by his calculation, that box now held one empty seat, if not more. He had visions of ushers in the vestibule struggling to keep an outraged Lord Sterling—or perhaps Mrs. Hayes, brandishing her ebony walking stick—from storming the stage.

Even aside from the cold reception he anticipated, though, tonight his box wasn’t the proper place for him. He did not want to hold himself aloof and apart. He could not bear to be so far away from Julia.

So, he made do with withdrawing farther into the wings, into the shadows, watching as she moved with striking confidence through the scene and breathed life into his words.

To his utter amazement, the audience laughed—right where he’d hoped they would, and with less bitterness than a Blackadder script usually inspired. Fanshawe even managed to play up his own death for comic effect, done in in the end not by Perpetua’s review but by his own terrible verse.

The curtain swept down at the end of the scene. Fanshawe sat up, gathered the various papers strewn across both desks, and used them to prod Julia to exit the far side of the stage. While the dresser fussed over the pins in her costume, Julia pored over the script pages, her lips moving in silence as she tried to familiarize herself with the changes that had been made. Graham took a single step toward her, wanting to offer both praise and encouragement.

Once more, Sawyer grabbed his arm as a new backdrop came whizzing down from the rafters to replace the first. With a shake of his head, Sawyer stepped to his mark as the curtain rose again on a new scene. Half of the stage was now Reginald Briggs’s quarters, less dreary than his brother’s, and the other half had become the sitting room where Perpetua Philpot would receive the editor of her magazine.

Graham retreated once more into the shadows, leaning against a battered wardrobe where costumes were stored for quick changes between scenes. Briggs launched into a speech about his poor brother and the dastardly critic.

“ ‘She killed him,’ ” Sawyer-as-Briggs explained to his manservant, “ ‘with her poison pen. I daresay she stirs up some witches’ brew of poets’ tears and novelists’ sighs, speaks some dreadful incantation to harden her heart, then dips in her quill and the words begin to flow, an evil spell that blinds her readers to everything good.’ ”

When the audience laughed, Graham eased a sigh of relief. The changes were working. Everyone in the theater had heard for themselves how terrible the brother’s poetry was. Then, to cement their perception that Briggs was in the wrong, Sawyer picked up the slim volume of his brother’s poetry as he finished his speech and began to read it, obviously for the first time. The mischievous contortions of his face, his inability even to sit still as he paged through the poems, only increased the audience’s amusement.

The lines also served to create a sharp contrast between the Perpetua of Briggs’s imagination and the Perpetua the audience had come to know for themselves. As Briggs accused her of witchcraft, she arranged flowers in her sitting room and paused to listen to birdsong. In Mrs. Cole’s experienced hands, the revised character had begun to show the requisite softness and gentleness; Julia’s genuine innocence and sincerity—the lack of makeup had turned out to be a stroke of brilliance—only amplified those traits. Just as Graham had planned from the beginning, everyone was falling in love with her.

Or . . . well, something like that.

By the end of the next scene, Briggs would be among them, and the play’s transformation from satiric tragedy to romantic comedy would be complete.

A muffled thump distracted him from the action on the stage. He sent a chiding glance to a nearby stagehand, who shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands to indicate that he had done nothing to make the noise. Graham tried to ignore it, in favor of the debate between Perpetua and her editor, who was demanding more cutting critiques to encourage circulation of his magazine.

“ ‘The public’s taste cannot be trusted. You must teach them what to think.’ ”

“ ‘But if what I tell them isn’t true, they will no longer trust me.’ ” Julia gestured with what might have been a draft of Perpetua’s next column. She was doing a masterful job of disguising the fact that she was reading most of her lines.

Fanshawe, who had crossed underneath the stage and come up to stand near Graham, nodded. “Yes, that’s it,” he whispered in a tone of astonishing encouragement.

Thump-thump! Thump!

This time, Graham felt the commotion as well as heard it. Beneath his shoulder, the sturdy piece of furniture rattled. What on earth? Next, they would be beset by rumors of a malevolent ghost.

He tried to open the wardrobe door and found it locked. “Have you a key?” he demanded of Fanshawe in a whisper.