Page 6 of The Trick of It

“Four envelopes for Hattie,” she said, lowering her eyes to the stack and handing them out. “I like the one with the funny letters.”

“Cyrillic,” Hattie said softly, turning the correspondence in her hands. “Oh, it’s from Prince Kontarovsky. How lovely.”

Her husband grumbled something unintelligible.

“Two for you, Mal, but they really should start sending these to your office, not the house,” Ruby continued, holding out what appeared to be business correspondence in crisp, white vellum. “And … oh. One for Rhys.”

“What?” Rhys said, a sentiment echoed by everyone else at the table in dribs and drabs. “Who’s writing to me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, producing a thick, brown envelope, secured with both twine and a seal. “No return address. You could open it and tell us, of course.”

“Maybe a new fan,” Mal speculated, “who saw your turn as Mercutio last month?”

“Well, give it,” Rhys said, flexing his hand at her. “A man always needs new fans.”

It was heavier than he’d expected. It gave him pause.

“I’ll open it later,” he decided, putting it to the side and leaning over the table to grab some kippers, using his bare fingers to do so, the little fried fishies crisping pleasantly against his palms.

“Ugh,” said Ruby, watching this happen. “You are a child.”

“Older than you,” he replied cheerfully. “What else is in that stack?”

“Oh,” she said, frowning down at what was left. “Some seeds for Errol that he ordered from the Carolinas. Some accolades for Libba. An order for me. And one for Monica.”

“Libba doesn’t live here anymore,” Mal pointed out, chewing on his bread. “She’s married and all.”

“Yes, well, do be sure to shout that at the letters so they forward themselves,” Ruby told him with a roll of her eyes, tossing the remaining correspondence onto the table and flopping into her own seat. “How dare she, and so on?”

Rhys tuned them out, his thoughts moving to the envelope. He didn’t like to open things in mixed company unless he was certain what was going to come out of them. But if he was too hasty in departing, it would raise too much interest.

The only thing to do was to get through his kippers and retreat in due course, despite the itching impatience in his fingers to tear the thing apart.

“You were mentioned specifically,” Ruby said to him, startling him out of the low hum of his reverie. “By the London journalist.”

“What?” he said. “Why?”

Malcolm laughed, taking a swig of his tea. “Because you were good, fool.”

“And because of the sparkles,” Ruby added, nodding in agreement. “That was a very good idea and compounded by a very talented chemist, after all.”

Rhys gave her half a grin.

He’d spent the last month portraying Mercutio in their sister Libba’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Ruby, in all her chemical genius, had taught him how to create little curls of combustible powder in rice paper that would pop and glitter during his big speech. It had been a highlight of the production, if he did say so himself.

“Well, that dooms you, then,” Mal said darkly. “If the critics are noting you, Libba will force you to act again. And again. I hope you are prepared.”

Rhys scratched at his knotted mop of curls and grinned across the table. “Consistently.”

“I think you’re a natural hand at it,” Ruby commented. “I wish she’d cast me.”

No one responded to that.

Because Ruby was a terrible actress.

And she certainly didn’t notice or catch wise to the connotation of the silence, because everyone would have immediately known if she had.

Rhys was not an actor by trade. Not at all.