Page 11 of The English Wife

But the Ali Baba wasn’t the Gaiety.

And Sir Hugo Medmenham was no prince.

“What was that?” Mr. Van Duyvil was speaking, but she hadn’t marked him. Georgie gave her head a little shake. If Sir Hugo was suspect, then his friend must be as well, no matter how sympathetic he might seem. “Sorry. I was away with the fairies.”

“That’s a different play, isn’t it?” The words were bantering, but the tone was gentle. Mr. Van Duyvil matched his stride to hers, keeping careful pace. “It’s no matter. I’d only asked if you had been at the Ali Baba long.”

“Just over a year.” It had been a marked step up from her previous engagement, where she had been a member of a ragtag excuse for a chorus. “It’s hardly Drury Lane, but…”

At least they don’t sell us with the tickets.

That was what she had been about to say. But she caught herself in time. Just because Mr. Van Duyvil’s voice was kind, his demeanor respectful, didn’t mean it was safe to show a weakness. She’d met soft-spoken villains before, and not all on the stage.

“It’s a pleasant enough place if you don’t mind the assault on the English language,” said Georgie flippantly. “Is this your first trip to London?”

“It’s my first time abroad.” If Mr. Van Duyvil thought the change of subject odd, he didn’t comment on it. “You must think me very provincial.”

“No more provincial than any Londoner. We’re none of us worldly here.” In the quiet side street, her voice sounded too brassy, too strident, a caricature of what she pretended to be. “Where are you from, when you’re at home?”

“New York. We’ve been there since old Peter Stuyvesant, over two hundred years.” Mr. Van Duyvil gestured at the curve of the street, the soot-grimed façades of houses that looked as though they had been there from time immemorial. “That mustn’t sound like much to you.”

Georgie thought of the house where she had spent her childhood, the ruins of an old abbey built onto and around, medieval cloisters turned into garden follies; a sixteenth-century house built onto the ruins of a twelfth-century church; an eighteenth-century manor grafted onto that. The family who owned it liked to claim they could trace their roots even deeper than that, back, back, back before William the Conqueror.

“There are times,” she said drily, “when a week feels like a century.” Especially that first year in London, living from meal to meal, scrabbling to find the coin to pay her landlady. She could look back on it now, the fear, the desperation, as though it were a story told about someone else. The Ali Baba was hardly Illyria, but it would serve. So long as it lasted. The image of those empty seats nagged at her. Georgie pushed the worrying thought aside. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

“Truth or beauty?” Mr. Van Duyvil asked wryly, and Georgie had that hint again, of something beneath that mild surface, something more complex than it appeared.

Truth is beauty, beauty truth … she had believed that once, with the same confidence with which she had believed that rank meant security and lineage gentility. But a long row of family portraits hadn’t protected Annabelle.

“Truth and beauty are meant to be one and the same, aren’t they?” she said belligerently. “That’s what the poets say.”

Even if it was a lie, even if a beautiful face, a warm voice, could be nothing more than a lure, the presage to pain.

“But are they?” Mr. Van Duyvil’s question was without mockery. Georgie couldn’t tell if he was in earnest, or merely playing at it.

Truths weren’t what she offered. “You’re asking the wrong person. I work in the theater. Everything is an illusion.”

“You say that very honestly.”

There was something disconcerting about Mr. Van Duyvil’s concentrated attention. “Is it less a lie for being an open one?” she asked.

The last thing she could be accused of was being honest. He’d been gammoned, poor man. The cost of a dinner and all he would get at the end was words for his trouble, twice-used words at that. It was his friend who would go home to a warm bed at the end of the night, at least, if the way Kitty was leaning on his arm was any indication, while Van Duyvil would be left to sport the blunt.

Van Duyvil shook his fair head. “You’re too quick for me, Miss Evans. You spin webs with your words.”

Georgie shrugged. “There’s nothing in them to hold. I only work with borrowed words.”

“Aren’t all words had at second hand?” Mr. Van Duyvil tilted his head back to look at the smoke-gray sky, and Georgie became aware, for the first time, of the difference in their heights, and of how close he had been leaning, how low he had bent to listen to her. “When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It’s only our experience of it that makes it new.”

He wasn’t going to be having any new experiences tonight, not with her. With deliberate derision, Georgie said, “I thought you didn’t weep for Hecuba. Do you always argue both sides, Mr. Van Duyvil?”

Mr. Van Duyvil’s face lit with an unexpected smile. “I’m an attorney. I’m paid to argue both sides.”

“An attorney?” Georgie couldn’t have been more shocked than if he had told her he was the Prince of Wales or the dustman. Attorneys were elderly men with whiskers down to their chins; they were respectable and professional and had no truck with rakes such as Sir Hugo.

Or, more to the point, rakes such as Sir Hugo had no truck with them.

Mr. Van Duyvil smiled at her astonishment. “Like you, Miss Evans, I’m paid for my words. Except in prose, rather than verse. And rather more heretofores and wheretofores.”