By a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  Book the Second

  Chapter Nine

  An attempt to return home is fraught with frustration; an unnerving encounter backstage in Bath; another slipup, this time in a bakery; and we learn a little more about the intriguing Lord Darlington.

  C. J. COULD HEAR VOICES and just about make out some shadows on the stage. An argument was taking place.

  “Look, Beth,” a man was saying. “The woman disappeared. She did her final audition, walked through that door, and no one ever saw her again. You put out a call and she didn’t return it. We’ve got to continue the casting process. We’ve booked the Shubert because you wanted a jewel box theatre. The marketing plan is already underway; the advertising is all but completed, minus the names of the cast. All you’ve got to do is pick two of them. You’re not casting Hamlet here.”

  “Maybe she’s considering our offer before she gets back to us,” Beth reasoned. “Maybe she’s speaking to her agent. Maybe she’s hoping for more money. Who knows? Look, she’s not the first actress not to answer her phone the day we offer her the role.”

  “And she’s not the last actress in New York either. Or LA, for that matter.”

  C.J. could smell cigar smoke through the gloom, although she couldn’t see who was talking. Most likely Mr. Miramax.

  “Since you weren’t crazy about the final callbacks of the other two women we saw, I told you who you could go with, Beth. I’ve got a list of names as long as my right arm.”

  “You can have Koko’s list for all I care. C.J. Welles is my first choice for the role of Jane. She has a certain je ne sais quoi. She’s not mannered.”

  “Plenty of actresses aren’t mannered. One phone call and I could get you . . .” The male voice lowered to an unintelligible murmur.

  “I don’t want to star-fuck, Harvey. I told you that when you brought me in on the project. I can see the adverts now: ‘J-Lo is Jane Austen.’ The reason I don’t want a celebrity in the role is that I don’t want audiences to equate Jane Austen, who ought to be enough of one in her own right, with some Hollywood flavor of the month. One reason my stage production of That Hamilton Woman won so many Olivier Awards last season was because my leads weren’t stars whose personal wattage eclipsed the vibrancy of the characters.”

  “Beth. Oh, Beth,” Harvey intoned. “Your job is to direct the show. A producer’s is to write your paycheck. Also, my job is to put the butts in the seats, to sell lots of full-price tickets so that I can write your paycheck. Three days. I’m more than generously giving you three days to find the actress who did a Cinderella number. Then we go into rehearsal with someone else as Jane.”

  “Harvey . . .” Beth said gently.

  “I really don’t have more money than God; people just think I do. Renting an entire theatre for twelve weeks to cast and rehearse this show costs a helluva lot more than booking a studio in the Minskoff Building, even if it was my idea. If I can’t see from the outset how it’ll look onstage, I can’t picture it on the screen. And it’s costing us extra money just to arrange this additional day of callbacks, after you told us the actress never returned your phone call.”

  “Hey, guys! I’m here!” C.J. cried out. “Beth! I want the part!”

  “I’m only humoring you, Beth, because you’ve won two Olivier Awards in as many years,” the producer warned.

  “And because Gene, Jerry, Sam, Stephen, Mike, Sir Peter, and Julie all had prior commitments,” the director replied wryly.

  C.J. was desperate to get their attention. “Hey, folks! The red shawl Milena gave me is out of fashion,” she called out. “By three seasons.” It was infuriating. Frustrating beyond belief. They couldn’t see her through the dark void that separated the centuries, and although she could not see them either, she could hear them. And evidently, no one could hear her. C.J. impatiently shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to make more noise, but the stamping seemed as ineffective as a child’s temper tantrum. They were all talking about her and there she was, speaking up but unable to be heard. Apparently, she was on the threshold of the past and the present, and for whatever reason, she couldn’t get her body all the way into the twenty-first century.

  They must have been taking a break from the audition process because there was so much chatting going on. She tried to match the voices with the speakers.

  “What is so remarkable to me, as a writer,” said Humphrey Porter in his inimitably patrician and slightly pompous cadences, “is that Austen had written more than half her mature oeuvre by 1801, yet with Pride and Prejudice, for instance, she couldn’t get a publisher to look at it, much less offer to print it.”

  “It makes you wonder how many other works of great genius were rejected by those who claimed superior knowledge of the profession—or of the market,” Ralph Merino concurred.

  Humphrey continued his dissertation, pleased to have an audience. “But while Jane kept her writing a secret from the outside world, scribbling in private and sliding her pages under a placemat whenever anyone walked in the door, her father believed in her work. Amazing, isn’t it? Jane was only twenty-two years old when Reverend Austen brought the manuscript of P and P to a publisher, who rejected it before he’d even read it.”

  “I was reading about the Austen home when we were researching designs for the set,” Ralph said. “In 1801, before they retrenched, I suppose, their library boasted more than five hundred volumes.”

  C.J. continued to listen to their fragmented conversations, not knowing whether she’d been hallucinating the recent events of her life, or if she had indeed somehow traveled through time; whether her journey to 1801 had been a singular phenomenon, or if she could repeat it at will. Her attempt to return to her own century had not proven entirely successful. What if she could not penetrate the blackness that lay between her and the people in the Bedford Street Playhouse? It had to be done!

  As she assayed another step toward the By a Lady staff, a gust of wind tinged with the pungent odor of cigar smoke blew toward her, filling her nostrils and stinging her eyes. C.J. cried out in pain when she slammed her shin into an immovable object. She blinked several times in an effort to refocus her eyes.

  Wait! She was here! She had done it! Returned to her own place and time. C.J. stifled a squeal of discovery when she realized that her leg had come into contact with an enormous gilt throne. But . . . she remembered seeing nothing like it backstage at the Bedford Street Playhouse. C.J. poked around, looking for familiar furniture—and to her dismay, she found it: the stained- glass panels from the Theatre Royal, Bath’s production of De Montfort, and the unwieldy silk hedgerow. She looked down at her body and realized that her saffron-colored De Montfort costume had somehow evanesced.

  There has to be something supernatural about this theatre, C.J. reasoned. Or else she would not have ended up here in the first place. Should she poke around and see if there was another “open sesame” that would lead her home . . . a wardrobe, for example? It had worked for C. S. Lewis. The taste of failure lingered bitterly on her lips. She had to try again to return to her own place and time. The notion that she might be forever trapped in the nineteenth century was not one she was willing to accept, let alone embrace. C.J. rummaged backstage, seeking trap doors and secret passages, but her search was cut short by the sound of voices close at hand.

  She followed the acrid aroma of tobacco smoke that wafted through the open door leading from the backstage area into the alley just outside the theatre. Two powerfully built men with muscular forearms stopped in midconversation when they saw C.J. leave the building and try to sneak past them. An awkward standoff ensued as C.J. and the stagehands exchanged glances.

  “What do you think you were doin’ snoopin’ around in there?” demanded one of them, crushing the stub of his cheroot beneath his boot heel. “There’s no performance today, miss.” C.J.’s heart palpitated like a pair of castanets and her mouth went dry, all sense of improvisation deserting her.

  The other man drew a small tin from his pock
et, took a pinch of brown snuff between a dirty thumb and forefinger, and inhaled it with a quick snort, his gaze never leaving C.J. as he addressed his companion. “Did you hear what Mrs. Siddons did last night, Turpin? Almost refused to go on as the Thane’s wife—seems she’d mislaid her lucky rabbit’s foot, and she didn’t want to set foot on the stage without it—seeing how it’s ‘The Scottish Play’ and all.”

  Wait! If Siddons was performing Macbeth last night, according to the stagehands, and C.J. had tried to return to the future during De Montfort, then how much time had elapsed between her attempt to get home and the present? How long had she been struggling in the void between the centuries before she was bounced back to 1801? How might she find out without appearing daft?

  The two stagehands stood like street toughs blocking C.J.’s path to the safety of the avenue beyond the alleyway. “You haven’t told us what you were about in a dark theatre, young lady,” Turpin said.

  Her brain was already addled from trying to account for the time lapse; now her heart was pounding more heavily as she fought to think fast on her feet. “I . . . work for Mrs. Siddons,” C.J. fibbed in a flash of inspiration. “I was just bringing her rabbit’s foot back to the theatre to leave it in her dressing room. She had . . . taken it home by mistake.” A dreadfully lame alibi, but she prayed it would work.

  The stagehands eyed C.J. suspiciously, then must have decided that she was telling the truth and that her despair was born out of fear of being sacked by the great Siddons. Warily, they let her pass. She walked quickly through the alley and out into the street, whistling an English country dance melody she remembered to mask her panic.

  “I knew she was no actress!” the shorter man remarked to his confederate, as though he’d just won a wager. “If she’d whistled like that inside the theatre, she’d catch a canvas drop on her head before she knewed what hit ’er. Just like the old days in His Majesty’s navy, eh, Turpin? They whistles and you unfurl the sails.”

  “I must say as I do miss that life,” Turpin sighed wistfully. “Bein’ cooped up in a dark theatre don’t compare to the open sea, do it, Mr. Twist.”

  “No, it don’t indeed,” agreed Twist, rubbing his tobacco-stained thumb and forefinger together. “Maggoty hardtack and stinkin’ wages a convict would take as an insult,” he added, mocking Turpin’s elegiac tone. “To be sure, those were the days.”

  C.J. hurried away from the Theatre Royal, pausing to glance at a copy of The Bath Herald and Register being hawked by a ragamuffin no older than nine or ten, but she failed to catch the date printed at the top of the broadsheet. Paper was dear, so the few large pages were covered margin to margin with print so fine it was nearly impossible to read without spectacles. “Pay, pay, or go away,” the boy scolded in a childish singsong. The church bells tolled three times, their reverberation lingering in the spring air like a perfumed angel.

  A warm and glorious scent prompted C.J. to follow her nose toward its source. The smell of fresh baking led her not far from the Abbey to a bow-windowed stone building in the North Parade Passage, which, C.J. recalled from her twenty-first-century travels to Bath, was billed as the oldest house in the city.

  Sally Lunn’s refreshment house was doing a brisk business for mid-afternoon, and C.J. could not suppress her craving for one of the eponymous famed rolls, a slightly sweet giant brioche, ordinarily served hot with butter. What a lovely treat they would make for her “aunt” Euphoria. She patiently waited her turn, amused at how the elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen elbowed and jostled their way to the counter, clamoring for the bread like a bunch of starved peasants or—closer to her own experiences—like the Sunday-morning crowd at Zabar’s appetizing counter.

  C.J. found herself admiring to the point of covetousness the gown of one of the young ladies, a fashionable light blue sarcenet. Gazing about her as she waited her turn, C.J. was rather surprised to see so many women, not all of them in the bloom of youth, attired in so much white. The Directoire neoclassical, or Grecian, look, so popular in 1800 and 1801, did little to conceal any imperfections in one’s figure. Some of the gowns were alarmingly sheer even for evening wear, but many ladies were attired thusly in mid-afternoon.

  “May I help you, miss?” A cheery voice from the other side of Sally Lunn’s counter politely inquired if C.J. required assistance with her purchases.

  “Oh yes, thank you. A half dozen of the Sally Lunns, please.”

  The rosy-cheeked, strawberry blond shopgirl was only too eager to help. C.J. marveled at how the girl managed to maintain such a sweet disposition amid the crowd of patrons jockeying for position each time a freshly baked tray of buns was brought up from the ovens.

  “Over here, Lucy,” a man’s voice called, brandishing a note as though bidding at an auction.

  “At your service, Mr. Churchill, as soon as I help the young miss.”

  C.J. thrust her hand into her reticule, and finding no money, of course, was struck by the horrifying realization that she could not pay Lucy for her purchases.

  The shopgirl was about to hand over the wrapped parcel of warm rolls when she noticed C.J.’s ashen expression. “Something the matter, miss?”

  A long arm, clad in a deep cranberry-colored sleeve, reached past C.J.’s face. “Here you go, Lucy,” spoke a quiet baritone voice. “For Miss Welles’s cakes.”

  C.J. turned around to see the Earl of Darlington completing the financial transaction on her behalf. He must have offered Lucy a generous gratuity for her services, for she reddened and bobbed up and down a number of times, profusely thanking the handsome aristocrat.

  Lord Darlington took the package of warm rolls and proffered his arm to C.J. “Miss Welles, allow me to express my pleasure at seeing you again. I trust the past two days have found you in tolerably good health?”

  “Then two days, and not one, have passed since the day we met?” replied C.J., puzzling it all out.

  “Today is Wednesday, Miss Welles. You missed Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth last night.” C.J. frowned. Her expression did not pass undetected by her companion. “But I tread upon rocky terrain. Forgive my momentary lapse; I had quite forgotten my aunt’s directives regarding your attendance with me at such a performance.”

  “Wednesday,” C.J. repeated. Had she been trapped in the void between centuries for two 1801 days? Was it truly possible, then, that from the time of her inexplicable departure from the Bedford Street Playhouse all the way through every event in 1801—her homeless state, her incarceration and subsequent trial, her weeks under Lady Wickham’s brutal thumb, and the brief time she had spent in Lady Dalrymple’s protection—only twenty-four hours or so had elapsed in the modern era?

  “I suppose my lengthy journey from London has addled my wits a bit, and I am more fatigued than I had anticipated,” C.J. hastily added, remembering Lady Dalrymple’s revised version of her history and desperately hoping to conceal her mystified bewilderment from her admirer.

  Darlington gazed down at her with a hopeful gleam. “And if I am not pressing my luck too far, tomorrow evening is the date I had fixed to expect to see you at the Assembly Ball in the Upper Rooms.”

  C.J. smiled gratefully. “I have been out of sorts since my arrival in Bath,” she added truthfully. “My little escapade at Sally Lunn’s is a fine example of my muddled mind. You saved me from dreadful embarrassment,” she confessed. “I had thought to bring my aunt a treat, but discovered, right in the middle of the transaction, that I lacked all means to pay for it.”

  The earl studied her face for a moment. “Think no more of it, Miss Welles. I am glad to have been able to be of service.” Darlington boldly slipped his arm through C.J.’s own. Mercifully, he was too polite to make a comment on the state of her ratty yellow muslin.

  C.J. glanced at their linked arms. She felt immensely—and surprisingly—at ease in his company, as if she had known him far longer than the duration of an afternoon tea. “Are you not taking liberties with me, your lordship?” she asked anxiously. Fir
st, arrested for thievery; now, for all she knew, she might be branded a whore for such brazen behavior. Every time C.J. thought she had gotten a handle on their mores or manners, these Georgians threw her a curve. A proper lady did not address the servants as equals, and yet she drank her tea out of a saucer!

  Darlington inclined his head toward her and said softly, “I confess, Miss Welles, I have developed a rather intense curiosity about you, which I am in perhaps too great a haste to explore.”

  C.J. suddenly realized that observing what she imagined were the maidenly proprieties of the early nineteenth century was going to prove the hardest acting assignment of her life. Oh, why couldn’t she have ended up in an era where libertinism among women was perfectly acceptable?

  Darlington’s arm was warm and protective and even through his sleeve, she could feel his well-formed musculature. She enjoyed their proximity. No wonder women went mad back then; they had to stifle all their sexual urges, and even when they married, they were expected to grit their teeth and think of England rather than enjoy themselves. C.J. had always imagined that such women were dreadful prudes. Now that she was actually in their world—with such lax attention to personal hygiene and the inability to bathe frequently and fully—she allowed that prudery probably had little to do with the matter. All the teeth gritting might have had a lot more to do with stench than sensuality.

  “Do not mistake my meaning, your lordship. I thought perhaps . . .” from reading Jane Austen novels, “. . . that you and I would have to have some sort of . . . understanding . . . between us for us to so publicly promenade.”

  Darlington immediately withdrew his arm and regarded his companion with grave concern. “Believe me, Miss Welles, it was never my wish to cause you either anxiety or apprehension. Bath can be quite sophisticated or quite narrow-minded, depending upon the observer of the behavior. Lady Dalrymple, who has rather singular views on human nature, might be included in the former category, whereas my aunt Augusta is most decidedly in the latter.”