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“They are most insistent, it seems. Better to be done with it than have the matter dragged out.” Elliot quickly picked up her hand and kissed the back, but the touch did not last long. “I will be back shortly.”
With these words, he was gone, following the attendant out of the box and beyond a lowered red curtain. Ophelia tried to keep her focus on the stage, but the words of the actors seemed to burrow deeper into her mind, making her uneasy.
“How know you he loves her?” one of the actors cried out.
“I heard him swear his affection.”
At the words, Ophelia sat forward. She felt crippled by the meaning in that moment. Elliot leaving her at this time was painful enough, but the possibility that he was not going to visit a business associate, but perhaps another, hurt further.
Elliot has never said he loves me, has he? Those words have never crossed his lips.
Yet, Ophelia knew how she felt about him. She loved him. The matter had not been an instant thing, but a gradual one. What had started as the first pangs of attraction and need had become a devotion to him, an encapsulating love.
The thought made Ophelia move to her feet. She left her pelisse and her reticule behind on the chair and left through the red curtain at the back of the box, following the path that Elliot had taken. She traipsed through a corridor, heading through the theatre and back toward the lobby. Unsure where to go, she fixed her focus on the lobby when, in the corridor where she walked, she caught sight of an open door beside her.
Outside of that door were voices. The sound drew Ophelia to a halt before she pressed her face to the open gap between the door and the frame, peering out. Beyond was a small courtyard between the theatre and some lodgings that appeared behind it, possibly built for the actors. In that space was a figure she knew as well as her own.
Elliot.
He was shaking his head at something, turning away and talking eagerly to someone beside him. He moved so frantically that as he shifted to the side, Ophelia caught sight of exactly who he was speaking to.
It was Celeste, dressed for performance.
At this distance, Ophelia couldn’t hear what was being said between them. For a brief second, she thought it an argument, and that gave her hope. Yet that hope did not last long. As the two of them talked, Celeste closed the distance between them and reached out for Elliot. She took his arms and buried herself in his chest, hiding there.
Ophelia jerked back from the doorway, stumbling so far that she nearly fell into the wall behind her.
This is what heartbreak feels like, then.
She was crushed, as crushed as the actors on stage had purported to be at their lovers’ betrayals in the play. When the sting of tears threatened, Ophelia left the corridor and headed back toward the theatre as quickly as she could. She didn’t glance back, not once, in case Elliot or Celeste had seen her leave.
Reaching the box, she sat down hurriedly. When the seat beside her stayed empty for some time, she soon realised that she had not been discovered watching the two of them together. What was more, Elliot’s continued absence meant he was willing to stay with Celeste.
How can he do this? How can he stand just beyond the walls of this building and woo one woman when his wife sits so near?
The tears fell freely, and Ophelia was glad of the darkness in the theatre. It meant they went unnoticed. She didn’t wipe them away but let them fall. As she waited for Elliot to return, she searched her mind, deciding whether she should challenge him with what he had done.
A memory returned, reminding her that she had no right to confront him. She was the one who had told him he could keep seeing his mistress. She could not tell him now that it upset her so much, not when she had given him permission to do so.
The last of the tears began to dry as she became wooden in her seat, staring at the actors on stage and listening to their words.
“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.”
***
“Celeste, leave me be.” Elliot prised her back from him. He’d let her embrace him in the moment, though he thought it an error, for Celeste seemed genuinely upset. Her dark eyes were wide and appeared to have tears in them; suspiciously, none of those tears fell. “You must stop this.”
“How can I stop this, Your Grace,” she asked, her voice sweet, “when I miss you so much?”
“You do not miss me.” Elliot did not fool himself enough to believe her words.
“How can you declare to know my mind? I do miss you, more than I can utter. I miss you with everything that is in my heart—every ounce of energy that I have.”
