“Tetchy as hell,” Alaric said, leaning forward to speak around Willa. “Doesn’t like the doctor’s prescribing lying in, and is keeping Father dancing at her beck and call.”
“As it should be,” Willa pointed out. She strongly believed that Nature’s rule that only females carried children was unreasonable.
“Should it be that way all the time, or merely during delicate times?” North had a frightfully charming smile.
“In a just world, women would birth female babies and men would birth males,” Willa said firmly. “Some male babies are far too large to be carried with comfort.”
North looked past her at his brother, his mouth a lopsided smile.
“Yes, I am lucky,” Alaric said, grinning.
North’s face closed like a trap.
“Bloody hell,” Alaric said. “I didn’t mean it that way. Did you find Diana?”
“No, and her mother informed me that she is no longer my concern.”
From behind the green velvet curtain came the sound of a few violins being tuned. Alaric leaned forward and gripped his brother’s knee.
A beaming Lady Knowe arrived and took the seat on the other side of North. “I’ve seen this play twice already, and I am agog to see it a third time!”
“You do remember that it was authored by a woman who was as mad as a March hare?” Alaric asked.
“And responsible for no little actual drama?” Willa chimed in, curling her hand around Alaric’s arm. She still woke up at night, shaking with fear.
Lady Knowe shrugged. “Whoever claimed that Shakespeare was sane? Do you know that he left his wife nothing but his ‘second-best bed’?”
“That sounds like a commentary on his marriage, not his sanity,” Willa pointed out.
A moment later, the ballroom fell silent when a boy emerged from the curtain and paraded across the stage holding a large pasteboard placard which read,
WILDE IN LOVE
OR,
THE TRAGIC STORY OF
THE BEASTS OF THE WILD
AND THE
MISSIONARY’S DAUGHTER
Willa wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, but she patted Alaric’s knee instead. A helpmeet, she reminded herself, should offer succor in times of distress.
The boy reached the far end of the stage, turned his placard, and marched back the way he’d come. The sign now read,
The Final Performance
This brought on another wave of chatter from the audience, only hushed by the sound of violins rising in a crescendo.
A gentleman emerged from behind the curtains and stepped up onto the low stage.
“Oh God, don’t tell me he’s supposed to be me,” Alaric groaned.
“He is not so terrible,” Willa whispered.
The actor didn’t resemble her husband in the least. He had a narrow patrician face, a carefully powdered lavender wig, and a figure that seemed to have been created specifically for the current slim-waisted fashions.
“I am wearing a corset,” Alaric hissed, outraged, in Willa’s ear.
“Hush!” she whispered back. But she couldn’t help laughing.
The gentleman—who was indeed “Lord Wilde”—launched into a long speech about his passion for the wilderness, while Alaric sat back and glared, arms folded over his chest.
It seemed that the presence of the actual Lord Wilde made the actor nervous, because he fairly rattled out a soliloquy that explained his voyage to “wildest Africa.”
He concluded with a flourish, proclaiming that one hadn’t truly experienced life until one had lived among wild animals. At that point, Alaric’s expression grew ferocious, and one could definitely have described the poor man’s exit as a flight.
North leaned over. “I’d forgotten what a jolly good play this is. I daresay Fitzball could give you some hints about dress, Alaric.”
“Fitzball?”
“The actor,” North clarified, his expression positively gleeful. “Quite a star already. His soulful performance of Lord Wilde did much to increase your fame.”
Alaric’s response to this was a rude gesture, so Willa gave him a gentle kick, reminding him there were children present. Then, since they were family now, she kicked North as well. “Behave yourselves!”
“Ouch,” North rumbled.
At this point, the missionary’s daughter burst onto the stage, and Act One was off. As the play proceeded, Willa discovered that her assessment of the play was different from North’s. For one thing, there was far too much reliance on throbbing sentences. For another, the missionary’s family was given to blessing each other right and left, which grew tiresome.
She did enjoy the scene in which the missionary’s daughter fell into the deep river (adequately represented by rippling blue cloth). Her mother shrieked and moaned, casting blessings on the head of her drowning daughter.
Lord Wilde beat his chest, raging up and down the riverbank while lamenting that his terror of the water prevented him from saving “the sweetest maiden who ever walked the savannah.”
The reaction of the audience to this dramatic crisis was divided unevenly between those in the front rows—the Wildes—who were howling with laughter, and the rest, who were howling in terror and suspense.
Happily, it was revealed that the young lady knew how to swim, because she wiggled across the blue cloth and made it to the riverbank, ending Act Two.
“I can’t believe this nonsense,” Alaric said, in the interval before Act Three commenced.
“It isn’t very good,” Willa agreed, “although I thought the mother played her part with a great deal of spirit.”
“ ‘Dead! Dead! Never to call me Mother again,’ ” North said, deadpan.
Further along the row, past Lady Knowe, Lavinia and Parth had somehow ended up seated beside each other. Willa just caught Lavinia’s retort, “Just because you have no understanding of art—”
Act Three opened before Lavinia could complete her sentence.
The heroine’s near death had caused Lord Wilde to see at last that she was the dearest treasure of his heart. Their stolen “moment of delight,” represented by feverish kisses, was greeted with approval by the audience, especially the youngest Wildes, whose encouraging hoots could be heard over civilized applause.
The locket made its appearance, and was dropped by the heroine into her bodice; a nice touch, Willa thought.
After that, high emotions came thick and furious. The missionary and his wife uncovered Lord Wilde’s perfidious seduction, leading to much gnashing of teeth and wailing about God’s providence: “Branded with infamy! Shunned! Degraded! O, my daughter, my daughter, what will become of you!”
Before anyone could answer that riveting question, the cannibals made their attack, though it was conducted behind the scenes. To the front of the stage, Lord Wilde ate a leisurely breakfast, unaware that his lady love had not only been cast off by her parents, but had been captured by bloodthirsty cannibals, and was about to become their breakfast.
A few rending screams shook the curtains, followed by the pushing of an enormous papiermâché cooking pot onto the stage, “fire” wadded underneath. A woman’s hand was draped over its rim, the locket poignantly tangled in its fingers.
Even the children held their breaths now, waiting for Lord Wilde to finish his ham and eggs, turn around, and discover the tragedy.
He leapt to his feet with a fine roar of fury. There was nothing he could do other than fight off the cannibals and rescue his beloved’s body in order to return it to her family. But he kept the locket, falling to his knees and crying out, “Never shall I love another woman!”
A satisfied sigh echoed around the ballroom.
Until Alaric broke the mood by bursting into laughter.
Fitzball threw Alaric a withering glare and swept from the stage.
“I will credit Prudence for getting one thing right,” Alaric said, rising to his feet.
Willa looked up at him inquiringly.
“I will never love another woman,” he announced. He pulled her up, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. The audience roared with appreciation.
Willa returned his kiss, because there are rare occasions on which propriety should be ignored, and this was one of them. “Love you,” she murmured, her voice almost silent against his lips. “And you?”
“Don’t you dare,” he murmured back.
She choked back laughter because, after all, it was unnecessary to point out that he was, indeed, Wilde in Love.
The whole castle knew it.
Chapter Thirty-six
Three months later
A country cottage in Lancashire
North knocked on the door of a small, dreary cottage with a sense of profound disbelief. His exquisitely fashionable fiancée was living in a tiny house with two rooms at the most?
With a fraying thatched roof, and a fence so rickety that his horse might bring it down by a twitch on his reins? Curtains at the windows that looked as if they’d been sewn from flour sacks? Blindingly white flour sacks, but still …
Impossible.
Her favorite wig wouldn’t even fit through the door.
There had to be something wrong with the directions he’d been given. And yet, once he had bribed Mrs. Belgrave’s butler with a handful of guineas, this was the address he’d been given. No matter how often he asked, Mrs. Belgrave flatly refused to share the location of the daughter she had disinherited.
All for the crime of jilting a future duke.