Drury Lane Darling (21 page)

“I know all I have to know about Fleur. It is already eleven-thirty. Just be a little patient, Pamela. And if I may make a suggestion, please lower your voice. It sounds dammed odd to hear a lady’s accents issue from a gentleman’s mouth.”

Nigel scowled. “It sounds worse to hear her do her imitation of her father. Why don’t you just sit in a corner and be quiet, Pam? I’ll bring you a glass of wine.”

Nigel went off for the wine. Breslau lifted a brow and smiled. “For once, I agree with the puppy.”

A pretty redheaded ingénue who had been unsuccessfully trying her hand with Breslau for some weeks decided to turn her wiles on the young lad with him, in hopes of access to Breslau. When she came forward and put a possessive hand on Pamela’s arm, accompanied by a smile Pamela could only call wanton, Miss Comstock decided a dark corner was the safest place after all. Breslau, his blue eyes dancing, detained the redhead while Pamela made good her escape.

The next half hour was not without interest, even to an observer stuck in the corner with Nigel Raleigh and ordered to be silent. The forward behavior of the actresses and gentlemen who courted them required the vocabulary of a Lady Raleigh to do it justice. Such words as rackety behavior soon escalated to lechery. Rattle turned to rake, actress to lightskirt. Pamela watched entranced, looking from time to time to Breslau. The reporters darted from actress to actor, and back to him. She observed that Breslau’s main interest centered on the doorway, obviously waiting for some new arrival. Equally obvious, the new arrival was to be Fleur, or someone with news of her.

Pamela didn’t have to monitor the door. Nigel did that. If his father suffered a relapse from morality and came to the greenroom, he meant to beat a hasty retreat. When the witching hour arrived, the reporters crowded around Breslau, demanding the promised announcement.

He mounted a chair—perhaps as it was impossible to see the door from the floor—and began a rambling dissertation on the history of Drury Lane. Those who were interested in its history already knew its origins as the Theatre Royale under Thomas Killigrew. When Breslau began telling about Nell Gwyn’s debut there, the crowd grew restless.

“He always goes into that spiel when he’s stalling for time,” Nigel said. “Why don’t he announce that I’m dramatizing Fleur’s life? That would silence them.”

“He called the reporters here,” Pam frowned. “He must have something real to tell them.”

“My play is real!”

“I’m sure he expected to have news about Fleur by now. That’s what they want to know.”

“He don’t know any more than we do. What we ought to have done is beat the story out of Halton.”

Pamela emitted a startled squeal. “Why didn’t he? He didn’t ask Mr. Halton a
single
question!” While she mused on this, the throng’s restlessness took on an angry tinge.

“Fleur! What happened to Fleur?” someone shouted.

That was what they really wanted to hear, but Breslau hoped to forestall chaos by announcing his new play. “Next week we shall begin rehearsing a brilliant new comedy by—”

“Fleur! Fleur! Where is Fleur?”

“The marquise! Flawless Fleur!”

Breslau felt like Daniel in the lion’s den, but there was no angel to assist him. Once again he turned a harried gaze toward the door. While he stared, a bizarre apparition entered the doorway and made a melodramatic pause. Trust Fleur. Her timing was exquisite, as usual. Her costume suggested that she had taken considerable pains with this role. What rare and wonderful surprise was hidden beneath her heavy black veil? Why was her left arm in a sling? Why did she look as though she’d been rolling around in a stable? Her tattered outfit of unrelieved black suggested she was playing a widow. But then Fleur always looked well in black. He felt every assurance that she would play her part to the hilt.

“Gentlemen, the Flawless Fleur,” Breslau announced with a wave of his arm to the doorway and a bow to his leading lady.

Pamela shrieked every bit as loud as the rest of the audience. “Fleur! She’s here, Nigel! Come!”

They both sprang up and ran for a good view. Nigel was lost in the crowd, but Mr. Ryder wiggled her way to the front to hear every word. She watched, mesmerized, while Fleur lifted her elegant white hand and drew aside her veil. Pamela stared for one brief moment at an eye ringed in black. Over the left eye there was a smear of something red that was a fair facsimile of blood. A peek was all anyone had before the veil fell once more over the flawless face.

Pamela expected a clamor of questions, but Fleur had her audience in the palm of her hand. The press scribbled, the caricaturists sketched, and Lord Breslau stood with folded arms, enthralled. In the silence, Pamela examined Fleur’s costume. The black gown had a long rent at the left shoulder. A glimpse of white skin peeped enticingly out. The skirt was muddied and ragged around the bottom. What on earth had happened to the marquise? It wasn’t the badger sett that had done the damage. That wasn’t the gown Fleur wore when she disappeared from Belmont.

At last Fleur opened her mouth and spoke. Her voice was low-pitched, but every syllable was audible in the farthest corner.

“Behold, a miracle. I am Lady Lazarus, risen from the dead. They left me for dead, my body covered with straw in a hay wain carrying me toward Dover.”

That, Pamela assumed, accounted for the wisps of straw that still clung to her skirts. She must have glued them. Such were Fleur’s dramatic powers that no one enquired who “they” were. To forestall any interruption of her soliloquy, Fleur immediately went on to reveal “them.”

“They” were French spies who had broken into her apartment in the country house where she had gone to find a moment’s quiet to finish her memoirs. For many years she had been importuned by them, but her loyalty was with Britain, where the Prince of Wales himself had thrown his mantle over her when she arrived on Britain’s shore, a homeless, derelict noblewoman, cast out of her own country by the rabble.

When she refused to spy for the French, they had determined to drag her to Paris and execute her as a traitor. With God’s help and her own bravery, she had recovered sufficiently to escape the hay wain and crawl through mud to the safety of a shepherd’s hut, from whence she had made her way back home to Drury Lane.

Breslau clapped louder than the rest. He ably diverted questions that might prove embarrassing by shepherding Fleur out the door and up to his private office to “recover.”

“I shall return,” Fleur announced from the doorway.

As soon as they were out the door, she clamped a sapient eye on Breslau. Her faltering voice had firmed to ice. “And we shall see who is to be the star of
The Amazing Invalid,
sir. Rose Flanders indeed!”

Pamela squeezed her way to the door and followed. She fully expected to be shut out, but Breslau motioned her to the corner of his office, and Fleur didn’t seem to mind having a small addition to her audience. She angrily pulled her left arm from the sling.

“Mees Calmstock! Has he turned you into a player as well?” she asked, staring at the breeches.

“That is another story. We are more interested in hearing yours, Fleur,” Breslau said. “The truth, this time, if you please.”

Fleur threw back her veil, revealing the black eye and bloodied brow to have been created from makeup. “My story can wait. How dare those scurrilous critics say Rose Flanders can act! She’s no actress, and she has played six roles to prove it. Her voice squawks like an unoiled hinge. You called this gathering tonight to announce her in the lead for
The Amazing Invalid.
Don’t deny it, monster.”

“You know the old saw, Fleur. The show must go on.”

“So much for loyalty! Perhaps I should have spied for the French after all. Max, Spiedel—they are all unfaithful.” The powerful voice added a vibrato on the last syllables.

Breslau felt an urge to clap. He sat down and folded his arms. As he was attending a performance, it wasn’t incumbent on him to remain on his feet. “Where have you been?” he asked.

“What are you paying her? That insipid, simpering—
Anglaise!”

“No contract has been signed. Come now, you’ll have to tell me the truth sooner or later. You tell me where you’ve been, and I’ll tell you whether or not your plan has worked.”

“Ass! Of course it hasn’t worked. Max running straight to Lady Margaret for comfort. Let him, what do I care? If a mistress-ship is all I’m good for, I could have that from a duke or a prince inside of a week. Let Mr. Spiedel trot the boards of Covent Garden. He’ll learn soon enough what a life he’s pitched himself into. As to you giving Rose Flanders my role! Ha, she’s only a novelty. She won’t last a week. You’ll come begging to me to save your bacon.” A defiant smile parted her lips, and silvery laughter tinkled in a shower around them.

Pamela leaned closer. Fleur disdained to have a seat. She strode back and forth as she spoke, arms waving.

“You want my story? You shall have it. To begin, I was not quite determined to disappear when I went to Belmont, though I took certain precautions in case it should prove necessary. I left Maria behind, and brought only the necessities with me. It was Max’s pusillanimous behavior that decided me. His mother might live for decades. I will not wait on her death to become respectable. The plan was there, in abeyance,
vous comprenez?”

“Absolument.”

“I arranged with a friend, Mr. Halton, to have a carriage waiting in case I required it. He will do anything for money, that one, even make love to Meg Crispin. My butler drove it. Halton was to be in touch with me at the assembly. I told him to bring the carriage around to the side road. He made a scouting expedition a few days earlier, and we chose a spot close to a little spinney.”

“We know the place,” Breslau nodded. “I rather wondered that you knew Sir Aubrey raised sheep. Halton told you?”

She nodded. “A little slip, that, but no one seemed to notice. I went for a walk before dinner and discovered an old raincoat and galoshes at the rear vestibule. You recall the weather was uncertain. Sable dislikes the wet, and my slippers were nearly new. After the assembly, I left Belmont to meet Mr. Halton, and when I was halfway to the spinney, I remembered I had left something behind.”

“Max’s glove, or Lady Raleigh’s diamond bracelet?”

Fleur gave a squinting look at these interruptions. “The glove. Max left it at my apartment one evening, and I kept it in case I should require an excuse to be in touch with him after one of our squabbles. I brought it with me quite by accident. I thought Lady Raleigh might leap to the conclusion I had been entertaining a gentleman if she saw a man’s glove in my room with my lingerie, so I went back for it.”

“And the bracelet?”

She gave a Gallic toss of her impertinent shoulders. “A little pourboire. I merely reminded Sir Aubrey of all we had been to each other, and he wanted me to have it for old times’ sake. Naturally I didn’t leave
that
behind! When I went back for the glove, Nigel came tapping at my door. I didn’t want to waste time talking about the memoirs, so I lay down and thought he would think I was asleep. In the confusion, I forgot the bracelet. I heard him gasp—in fact he reached out and touched it. He noticed I was cold from being outdoors. I listened at the door when he left and heard the idiot announce to you that I was dead, if you please.” She laughed a mirthless laugh.

“That was when the inspiration struck me! I had planned only to be kidnapped by French spies and turn up after Max and Spiedel had had time to consider how abominably they had treated me. And after the papers had made a great brouhaha about it, of course,” she added calmly.

“You will appreciate the value of free publicity, Wes. But then I said, Why not repay Max for his cowardice? Let them think I am dead, and let him have the experience of being under a cloud of suspicion. Let him see how it feels to be despised by society when you are innocent. As I returned to the spinney, I fell into a hole and twisted my ankle. I lay there an age, till finally Halton came and rescued me. ‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘It looks like a bloody grave.’ He is a city-bred lad, you know. He thinks milk comes from a jug. And that is when I decided where I should leave Max’s glove and my shawl. The shawl, to confirm that both Max and I had been there.”

“Very clever. But why did you invent the story about your good-luck shawl in the first place?”

“For effect. I had planned to drop it in the spinney to show where the kidnappers had taken me away. A few clues to keep the newspapermen happy and give the account of my disappearance more length. I tossed a handkerchief into the bushes as well.”

“The badger sett had the corners squared. When did you do that?”

“Another inspiration. Someone had been digging there before. Sealing up the hole, I think. I was afraid the wretched little beasts would crawl out and bite me, but I noticed the entrance had been filled in with earth.”

“Nigel said something about his mother having the holes filled up. The badgers were after her honey,” Pamela said from the corner. “But there was fresh digging, and a shovel there.”

“I had seen the shovel when I was looking for a raincoat and galoshes for my flight,” Fleur explained. “My gown was destroyed when I fell in the hole, and after I was in the carriage, I had to send Halton back for my things. Rather than decide what I needed, I told him to pick up the lot. He brought the shovel back to the badger sett as well and enlarged the hole. He was supposed to return the shovel to Belmont when he took back the raincoat and galoshes, but I assume he forgot it. I trust he hid the coat and galoshes. I didn’t want Sir Aubrey involved.”

“They came to light, but it’s no matter,” Breslau said.

Pamela risked another question. “Where did you have Mr. Halton take you when you left? We’ve looked at your apartment, and Mr. Spiedel’s, and Mr. Halton’s.”

“I was with friends,” she said vaguely.

“In Kent, actually,” Breslau added with an arch smile at the marquise.

“Well, there is no necessity to hide it from you, Wes. I joined the Coventry players at Chatham. But how did you know? We took the most impossible route from Belmont, over mere cattle trails, so no one would see us.”