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‘Why? I’m never going to be invited to the Sapphire ceremony, which is just as well because I don’t think you’re allowed to wear holey jeans.’ Katie slipped the magazine into her bag to read later and Claire glanced at her watch and jumped to her feet.
‘Whoa, look at the time. Less than five minutes to go. Sure you won’t change your mind and come?’
‘No, thanks. You can drool for both of us.’
Nathaniel walked centre stage and stared into the darkness. He didn’t see the audience. He wasn’t thinking about the critics.
He was King Richard II, the doomed king.
He opened his mouth to deliver his opening lines to John of Gaunt when a spotlight illuminated the front row of the audience.
Holding the crown in his hand, Nathaniel looked down and his eyes locked onto a familiar face. Familiar and yet unfamiliar. Twenty years had wrought changes, but not so many changes that the features were unrecognisable.
Shock froze time.
The features blurred.
And then the past rushed forward with terrifying speed and his concentration shattered like glass dropped onto concrete. The momentary lapse released a lethal cocktail of memories and they swirled around his head, delighted to be free after so many years incarcerated in the locked vault of his brain.
Shouts and terror. Stop it, stop it! And blood. Blood everywhere. Do something …
He felt helpless. Utterly helpless.
His heart pounding, Nathaniel stared down at his hands clasping the crown. There was no blood. His hands were clean. But still he couldn’t move, his brain frozen by the ghosts of his own inadequacy. The knowledge that he hadn’t acted, hadn’t done something, gnawed at him….
Guilt crawled over him like a poisonous insect and he wondered how it was possible to shiver and sweat at the same time.
Dimly aware of the ripple of speculation that slowly spread through the audience, Nathaniel fought with ruthless determination to close down that side of himself.
Richard, he thought desperately. King Richard.
He gripped the crown and tried to slip back into his character’s skin. But it no longer fitted him. Control slid from him like a cloak.
Each time he opened his eyes he saw the same face looking at him from the front row reminding him that he wasn’t King Richard II—he was Nathaniel Wolfe, an actor with a family background more dramatic than anything penned even by the Bard himself.
If Shakespeare had been alive, Nathaniel thought bitterly, he would have written the Wolfe family history as a tragedy in three acts.
No comedy. No happy endings. Just life at its darkest.
Desperate now, he tried to claw his way through that darkness back to the surface but he could feel himself sinking, drowning in the thick mud of his past.
Why choose this moment to come back? Why now, when they’d all rebuilt their lives?
Anger ripped through him, hot and sharp.
He had to warn Annabelle. That, at least, he could do. He had to contact her right now.
The ripple of speculation grew to a restless buzz from the audience. People who had assumed he was pausing for maximum effect, suddenly realised that something was terribly wrong. Silence turned to mur mur and murmur to conversation.
Bracing his shoulders like a fighter poised for impact, Nathaniel tried one more time to deliver his opening lines but he couldn’t even remember them. Sucked back in time, the layer he put between himself and the world simply melted away.
Stripped of his camouflage, he was forced into the skin of the one character he’d avoided playing all his life.
Nathaniel Wolfe.
Last time, he’d let her down. This time, he wouldn’t.
‘Ladies and gentleman …’ His voice, cold and devoid of emotion, carried to the back of the auditorium. He made a point of not looking at the man in the front row. It took all his self-control not to stride into the audience, grab him by the throat and knock him out cold. ‘Tonight’s performance is cancelled. Please see the box office for a refund.’
