Page 20 of Miss Dramatic
Gavin had traveled two hundred miles to get away from them, left leading roles behind to take his chances once again with the bit parts. They’d witnessed his deepest humiliation and had box seats at his worst blundering. If he never saw them again—
In the next instant, it occurred to him that Rose would hate to see Drysdale’s Players again. She’d probably leave the gathering, and maybe that would be for the best. Until she did, the awkwardness would simply have to be borne.
Nothing for it but some inspired acting. Philosophical detachment, a hint of amusement just shy of indifference.
“They’re a good group,” Gavin said. “Drysdale’s Players make up in enthusiasm what they sometimes lack in faithfulness to an original script. A flair for improvising. Well suited to comedy.”
He’d had no heart for laughter by the time he’d left the north, but he’d had all manner of insights regarding the tragic roles.
“Then you are at peace with the notion that your station in life parted you from them?” Phillip posed the question with far too much diffidence.
Philosophical detachment, damn and blast.“Tavistock meant well, and I can appreciate that. My station in life did not part me from the stage, but my sense of responsibility to my family did.”
Phillip started back the way they’d come. “And will Mrs. Roberts take a similarly sanguine view of these professional entertainers?”
Gavin fell in step beside him. “Has somebody been talking out of turn?” Or listening out of turn. Phillip was prodigiously skilled at going unnoticed, or he had been before ascending to the status of brother toour marquess.
“Nunn and I correspond. He mentioned that Mrs. Roberts had spoken disappointedly of a house party last year in Derbyshire, one involving some handsome, friendly actors who had shifted the tone of the gathering in less than genteel directions. The Almighty sees fit to visit the occasional coincidence upon us, but Nunn is not the Almighty, and Derbyshire is not exactly crawling with acting troupes.”
“This is not of your concern, Phillip.” It was nobody’s concern, save Gavin’s and Rose’s.
“My lady wife is my concern, and she noticed you and Mrs. Roberts at Nunnsuch, circling each other like cats. Now you and the widow are sharing supper beneath the stars. I won’t have Hecate’s first venture as a hostess marred by drama and upheaval, DeWitt.”
“Right. I’m to deal pleasantly with all parties under all circumstances, but not too pleasantly. I know my lines, Phillip.”
“Something went wrong,” Phillip muttered, as if Gavin hadn’t spoken. “Something between you and Mrs. Roberts went egregiously wrong. You blundered, she presumed, somebody was mistaken. I know not which, but given the nature of our guests, I’d like to see the situation resolved.”
“We had a misunderstanding,” Gavin said, which was a line he had rehearsed, mentally, over and over. “We have agreed to start afresh.”
And because Phillip was the closest thing he had to a friend, and because the whole situation would soon have him baying at the moon, he graced the night air with more truths.
“She paid me.”
Phillip ambled on for another dozen paces, while Gavin hoped that additional particulars need not be elucidated.
“She paid you,” Phillip said, “for comporting yourself in an ungenteel direction?”
“We were very genteel, for days on end. I recited more poetry to her than I’ve recited in the whole of my career in the common of the Crosspatch Arms. She ran lines with me. We debated everything. I thought we were courting.”
“Picnics?” Offered with a blend of commiseration and dread.
“Two a day, weather permitting, and walks in nature, and sedate hacks, and shared jokes, and the whole smarmy bit. Falling into bed together was simply the next delight on an endless list of delights I’d experienced with only her. The elements, the other guests, the very birds of the air conspired to abet this great romance.”
“Until Mrs. Robertspaidyou?”
True darkness was falling, a mercy, that. “I was so… smitten, Phillip. So unsuspecting. Shelistenedto me. By the day and the hour. I confided my every radical political stance and my most damning criticisms of the Bard to her. She did not care that I was a mere actor, and I doubt she would have cared had she known I was heir to the DeWitt candle fortune.”
“You fell in love,” Phillip said.
“I thoughtwehad fallen in love, and I have never been more wrong, more humiliated, more mortified… Shepaidme. I rose from the most unspeakably awe-inspiring night of my life, thinking to gather up my clothing and steal down the corridor on permanently attached wings of joy. What should I find tucked into the folds of my cravat but a great, obscene pile of coins. She hadn’t mislaid them, hadn’t put them there by mistake. She paid me.”
“And you left the money there?”
“Put it in her jewelry box with the rest of her coins. I avoided her thereafter and managed to finish out the week without making an even greater fool of myself.” The moon was rising off to the east, though Gavin could navigate the towpath in pitch darkness. “I’ve spent the night with many women, Phillip. I’m university educated, after all. But Rose sleptwithme. If I stirred in my sleep, she’d touch my shoulder—simply that—and I could return to my dreams a happier man. She breathed with me…”
How to describe a sense of oneness that had little to do with copulation? A unity of body and spirit? “I have never found such a depth of repose in slumber, though I could sense whenever she stirred as well, and that pleased me.”
Gavin left off trying to find more words, lest the last scintilla of his dignity go floating down the Twid.
