Page 46 of The Rise of a Forsaken Lady
He took a quick trip to the kitchen to tell Mrs. Burcham about the Earl’s request for pheasant soup and reentered the dining room to hear Lady Penelope and Miss Bell whispering like thieves over a plan to steal the Crown Jewels. To make their culpability even more obvious, they stopped immediately while seeing him. Lady Penelope was red and Miss Bell a mottled shade of pink. He just arched an eyebrow as they looked at him.
“Is there something on my jacket I should know about?” he asked and even looked down rather facetiously at his immaculate clothing.
An unladylike snort came from Lady Penelope.
“Excuse me,” Miss Bell said, while still pink-faced. “I will be in the library, My Lady.”
With her gone, the privacy they had from before came back, but only this time, there was a sense of awkwardness to it. His eyes lit upon the card and again, trails of jealousy slithered through him.
“I imagine, Lord Allerton will ask Miss Bell and me to accompany you,” he said. “To the Opera, I mean.”
“He will,” the lady added with a sigh. “Eddie loathes archaic language and poetry, and pair them together he acts as his teeth are being pulled, one by one. He will spend hours in a meeting hall with men twice his age and debate on bland laws and systems with feverish forte, but when the mere suggestion of enjoying that aspect of our vivid culture comes into play, he balks.”
“Hm,” Heath mused, “think of it this way, would you rather a day of hunting in humid weather with a group of men hooting and hollering than curling up with a book before the fire with a cup of warm sweetened milk?”
Her nose wrinkled at the image of hunting, and he knew she saw his point. “Men have distinctly different interests than women, My Lady.”
Lady Penelope’s eyes met his shrewdly, “You don’t…do you? You knowThe Divine Comedy.”
“Well…some men,” Heath amended with a shrug. “Lord Masseur had a rather extensive library and I had a rather pressing urge to increase my mental landscape.”
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita,”Lady Penelope said in fluent Italian.
“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost,” Heath translated almost immediately.
Instantly, he wanted to cringe—which footman knewItalian? He was fearful that he had given her a reason to ask him questions—questions he was not ready to answer. “Canto one.”
Lady Penelope’s smile was a self-satisfied. As she passed by him, she stopped just beside him and looked up at him under her lids. “There is more to you than what meets the eye, isn’t there?”
Her words had a question but still felt rhetorical and he did not answer, not for a lack of words but for a lack the right words. He watched her walk away and a small smile tugs his lips. “Perhaps.”
Chapter 18
The theater in London was monstrously huge; the ground floor where the audience sat ran up to the stage. Gaslights were up ahead and lit the stage. After entering, Lord Hillbrook had extended his gloved hand to her and led her up to the stairs to a private box.
Clasped in Penelope’s unoccupied gloved hand was her slender, gold opera glasses, her program for, indeed,The Comedy of Errors,and her fan. She managed to lift the ends of her silk gown as she ascended the stairs to the private box, with Mr. Moore and Martha a few steps behind her.
A thrum of wary anticipation that had started running inside her breast from the moment Lord Hillbrook had helped her into the carriage was even harder now that they had reached the place.
She was helped into a soft-padded seat and smiled. The air was cool, and the darkness around them gave the air a sense of mystery. The patrons filling the lower seats were a dull noise in her ears. Penelope had never been to the theatre before. She had only heard tales of beautiful actresses and performances that lifted the words from the page and brought life to the inked characters.
“Comfortable, My Lady?” Lord Hillbrook asked with a smile.
“Very,” Penelope fidgeted warily while looking around the box before looking out to the stage below. It struck her that they were in the very middle, the perfect place to see all that transpired below. “Oh, this view is marvelous. How did you get us such a perfect box, My Lord?”
“I would tell you,” he said slyly. “But a man has to keep some secrets to himself.”
Her lips pressed tightly, trying to stifle her smile but then allowed herself to laugh softly. “In keeping with those that I still do not know about you.”
Stephen’s voice was low and smooth, “If you will allow me, you will know more soon enough.”
Looking quickly at him, Penelope felt her stomach twist in wariness just as a call for silence came, and a moment later the curtain lifted and the play begun with a musical introduction of indeed,The Comedy of Errors.
An offstage voice sang about the life of the great Greek city of Ephesus and then the music grew a bit ominous as the characters Aegeon, Gaoler, and other attendants entered into a lifelike hall of Duke Solinus’ palace.
Each character was dressed appropriately, with the monarch in rich blues and purples and the officers in their state uniforms. The merchant of Syracuse, condemned to death for violating the ban against travel between the two rival cities, was in drab prisoner browns and his hair was wild. The characters’ dress was so detailed that even their sandals were made to fit the time.
She felt the anguish in the merchant’s voice when he said, “Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, and by the doom of death end woes and all!”
