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Arthur popped up like a vole from a hole. “If it would be any use at all, I confess I have the text down by heart.” Osborn’s little duchess beamed up at him, and his nephew and nieces cheered as the lady player waved him to the stage.
“It is unlike any Hamlet you may have seen,” she cautioned him, as he joined the diminished company.
“I am particularly well acquainted with the soliloquies.” Osborn drew a deep breath. “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I—”
“You’re to play the secondary parts.” Mrs. Peasley cut across him. “That is, Your Grace. Sir. A walking gentleman, like, with a word or two here and there.”
“Ah, yes, well, each role is part of the whole, as they say,” Osborn mumbled.
“Then let us begin. We have been asked to start with ‘The Mousetrap,’” Mr. Peasley announced. He closed the curtains that flanked the proscenium.
“The what now?” asked Mary Mossett. “I don’t like the sound of that, sure I don’t.”
Footsteps and muttering were heard as the company took their places. A trill of a harp sounded as the curtain parted to reveal a king taking his ease on the garden bench, sleeping the sleep of the just. Osborn stood upstage, holding a wooden box; the lady actor, garbed as a sinister masked figure, removed something from it and turned to address the crowd.
“Thoughts black, hands apt,ehhh, oh yes,golden chain, and time agreeing—” Mrs. Peasley lifted her hands to reveal the necklace, to shocked gasps from the entire assembly. Neither she nor her husband had expected such a reaction from a seemingly simple adjustment to the text; consummate professionals that they were, they milked it for all it was worth. She drew out the rest of the speech, all the while lifting the necklace, lowering it to drape over Mr. Peasley’s neck, who shook violently in his “sleep” each time it came near. As she delivered the line, “Thy natural magic and dire property/On wholesome life usurp immediately,” she lowered it for the last time to shouts from the audience that she desist—
When the lady author ran in front of the stage and threw out her arms. “I bring disastrous news!”
“Shush!” Mr. Peasley cracked open one eye. “This is the important bit.”
To cover the disturbance, Arthur stepped forward. “Why, let the stricken deer go weep/The hart ungallèd play—”
“No, no, that’s been changed as well,” Mrs. Peasley said. “I mean, Your Grace, if it’s all the same to you, you’re to say thestricken lion—”
“Woe is me!” Asquith’s moan carried across the green to where Alwyn lurked. “There has been a disaster!”
She lies, his lion rumbled.
Mr. Peasley flapped a hand at her. “Hush, lady, you are out of order.”
“A lion?” Arthur looked confused. “Have you a text I might consult?”
Mrs. Peasley shook her head. “It was the lady apothecary who gave us the notes.”
The lady author gasped. “It is she of whom I speak!”
“What news, Mrs. Asquith?” Lowell’s duchess cried as she rose and approached the stage. “I fear the worst!”
“I suspect Miss Barrington has been abducted! And for nefarious reasons, not those under which you were taken by the duke.” Mrs. Asquith gestured to Lowell, who had joined his wife.
Alwyn could not believe what he was seeing.Does no one else suspect she lies?
His lion sniffed the air.They do, but they are cozening her to discover her plan.
Alwyn and his lion slid down the tree without shaking a single leaf, prowled around the back of the pageant wagon, and crouched behind one of the wheels.
“Another abduction?” The Duchess of Osborn added her voice to the tumult, a cool dash of water in the face of the unfolding drama. “We have only recovered from the one last visited upon us when Hallbjorn captured Ursella.”
“What an astonishing coincidence,” said Osborn, who stepped forward to the edge of the stage.
“Such as one taken from the pages of your books,” Lowell said. Mr. Barrington stood some distance from them all, wringing his handkerchief.
“My novels do not rely upon such low devices as that,” Mrs. Asquith was quick to retort. “It is true that I may be mistaken. I went to consult with her as I had slept poorly the night before and sought one of her concoctions. Her little shack was at sixes and sevens, herbs tossed hither and yon.”
“Was there perhaps a letter lying about the place?” asked Lowell’s duchess.
Mrs. Asquith squinted suspiciously and produced a scrap of parchment from behind her skirts. “There was, Your Grace. I did not like to read it myself.”
