London, 1894
February
The street was too narrow to walk all abreast; Georgie and the man who wasn’t Giles fell behind, walking in silence for several moments before Mr. Van Duyvil said quietly, “All that about the devil … you must forgive my friend. He didn’t mean to be blasphemous. I’m afraid he’s … well, not used to mixed company.”
Not used to mixed company? Either Mr. Van Duyvil was very green or he thought she was.
Georgie shrugged. “We’ve heard worse, Kitty and I. Shakespeare’s full of ribald humor.”
“Country matters?” said the American.
Oh, the phrase sounded innocent enough, but it didn’t fool Georgie for a minute. She’d acted that scene last year, Hamlet propositioning Ophelia in the crudest possible of ways. Subtle in the original; less subtle as it had been acted at the Ali Baba. She could still hear the catcalls from the audience, drunken gentlemen half tumbling from their boxes as they offered to take Hamlet’s place onstage.
Of course, that had been when they’d still had gentlemen in the boxes, before the new musical comedies had begun stealing their audience and their income.
Best to nip any country matters in the bud. Georgie quickened her pace, forcing the American to lengthen his stride in response. “As long as you’re not offering to put your head in my lap.”
Mr. Van Duyvil ducked his chin into his collar. “I, er … no, it was just … er, Hamlet.”
“A man who came to a bad end,” said Georgie pointedly.
Mr. Van Duyvil looked down at her with interest. His eyes were a curious pale blue, like shadows on snow. “Would you say that? You could say it was a good end, avenging his father’s death.”
Georgie snorted. “At the cost of all of Denmark? Not to mention his mother and his bride. Seems a bit much, doesn’t it?”
Mr. Van Duyvil slowed his steps as he thought about it. “You could argue that he was expunging a stain—purging the corruption from society.”
“By killing it off?” There was something heady about the way he was listening to her, really listening. “That’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”
“Well … metaphorically.”
“It’s hardly a metaphor when the stage is covered with bodies.”
“The bodies of people who never were,” pointed out Mr. Van Duyvil. “It’s all a fiction.”
“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he would weep for her?” quoted Georgie in exaggerated tones. “But he does weep for her, that’s the point.”
“As I recall, that wasn’t quite the point—” Mr. Van Duyvil began, but Georgie swept his objections aside.
“If the characters aren’t made real to you, if you don’t mourn for them when they fall, why watch the play?”
“For the poetry?” A slow smile spread from Mr. Van Duyvil’s eyes down to his lips. “You are a passionate advocate for your art, Miss Evans.”
And you, thought Georgie, are a far more accomplished flirt than you seem.
“I was merely passing the time.” Georgie drew her arm from Mr. Van Duyvil’s, ostensibly to fix the angle of her hat. She looked up at him from under the brim. “I’m afraid we’ve been lumbered with each other, so we’d best make the best of it.”
“I wouldn’t say—that is, I’m quite enjoying—” Mr. Van Duyvil’s eyes caught hers, and he made a helpless gesture. “This whole evening has been something quite out of the common. Hugo told me we were seeing Shakespeare.”
Georgie smiled without humor. “And so it is—Shakespeare ground up like sausage and about as appetizing.”
It was the Ali Baba’s specialty: Shakespeare with song, blank verse transformed into ribald rhymes, a nudge and a wink and a few bad puns. So far, Georgie had played Ophelia in a wetted slip, sighing and swooning across the battlements of Elsinore; Rosalind in breeches, strutting through the Forest of Arden; and a surprisingly musical Lady Macbeth, rending her bodice in strategic ways as she called upon the spirits to unsex her here.
That had evoked a great deal of very predictable commentary from the stalls.
“Just be grateful it wasn’t Macbeth,” said Georgie grimly. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Birnham Wood showing its shimmy all the way to Dunsinane.”
The skin around Mr. Van Duyvil’s eyes crinkled. “Isn’t it bad luck to say the name of the Scottish play?”
“Did you think anything could make the Ali Baba much worse?”
“I didn’t mean that the show wasn’t good. It was quite…”
“Awful?”
“I was going to say unique.” They walked in silence for a moment, before Mr. Van Duyvil ventured, “If you’ll forgive my asking … why Eleven and One Nights?”
“The Grand Pajandrum—that’s Mr. Dunstan, the proprietor—thought it would be more likely to bring in the punters than Twelfth Night. Shades of Scheherazade and all that.”
Mr. Van Duyvil looked down at her with new interest. “You’ve read the Thousand and One Nights?”
“Bits of it.” Georgie wasn’t about to admit to reading. Men expected their chorus girls to conform to a pattern. It didn’t do to disrupt their thinking. Keep her head down and keep moving, that’s what she had learned. “Everyone was talking about it. You’ll have noticed the name of the theater?”
“The name of the … oh.” Mr. Van Duyvil grinned sheepishly. “The Ali Baba. Of course.”
“Instead of forty thieves, you only get your pocket picked by one—the ticket taker. Sorry. House joke.”
“Mind the puddle.” Mr. Van Duyvil took her arm, guiding her away from a damp patch that was undoubtedly more than rainwater. His touch was gentle, respectful. He made her feel almost like the lady she might once have been.
An illusion, like the stage on which they played. With murmured thanks, Georgie tucked her arm close to her side, wearing her coat like armor.
Ahead of them, Kitty’s arm was entwined with Sir Hugo’s, his lips close to her ear as they made their progress down the ill-lit street. He was saying something about Deauville, and the races, and the beautiful people who filled the stands, his aristocratic drawl weaving webs of fancy around Kitty, a thousand and one tales of wonder. Although Georgie doubted Sir Hugo would keep her for the whole of one night, much less a thousand. That Kitty was caught, Georgie had no doubt. She could see it shining in her eyes, glassy with gin and ambition.
Oh, Kitty, thought Georgie. Kitty hadn’t got over the dream that her prince would come, would see her onstage and sweep her away to a life of riches and leisure, stretched out on a chaise longue with minions bustling about, bringing her bonbons. All it took was for one Gaiety Girl to marry a marquis and the entire chorus went broody.
But the Ali Baba wasn’t the Gaiety.
And Sir Hugo Medmenham was no prince.
“What was that?” Mr. Van Duyvil was speaking, but she hadn’t marked him. Georgie gave her head a little shake. If Sir Hugo was suspect, then his friend must be as well, no matter how sympathetic he might seem. “Sorry. I was away with the fairies.”
“That’s a different play, isn’t it?” The words were bantering, but the tone was gentle. Mr. Van Duyvil matched his stride to hers, keeping careful pace. “It’s no matter. I’d only asked if you had been at the Ali Baba long.”
“Just over a year.” It had been a marked step up from her previous engagement, where she had been a member of a ragtag excuse for a chorus. “It’s hardly Drury Lane, but…”
At least they don’t sell us with the tickets.
That was what she had been about to say. But she caught herself in time. Just because Mr. Van Duyvil’s voice was kind, his demeanor respectful, didn’t mean it was safe to show a weakness. She’d met soft-spoken villains before, and not all on the stage.
“It’s a pleasant enough place if you don’t mind the assault on the English language,” said Georgie flippantly. “Is this your first trip to London?”
“It’s my first time abroad.” If Mr. Van Duyvil thought the change of subject odd, he didn’t comment on it. “You must think me very provincial.”
“No more provincial than any Londoner. We’re none of us worldly here.” In the quiet side street, her voice sounded too brassy, too strident, a caricature of what she pretended to be. “Where are you from, when you’re at home?”
“New York. We’ve been there since old Peter Stuyvesant, over two hundred years.” Mr. Van Duyvil gestured at the curve of the street, the soot-grimed façades of houses that looked as though they had been there from time immemorial. “That mustn’t sound like much to you.”
Georgie thought of the house where she had spent her childhood, the ruins of an old abbey built onto and around, medieval cloisters turned into garden follies; a sixteenth-century house built onto the ruins of a twelfth-century church; an eighteenth-century manor grafted onto that. The family who owned it liked to claim they could trace their roots even deeper than that, back, back, back before William the Conqueror.
“There are times,” she said drily, “when a week feels like a century.” Especially that first year in London, living from meal to meal, scrabbling to find the coin to pay her landlady. She could look back on it now, the fear, the desperation, as though it were a story told about someone else. The Ali Baba was hardly Illyria, but it would serve. So long as it lasted. The image of those empty seats nagged at her. Georgie pushed the worrying thought aside. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”
“Truth or beauty?” Mr. Van Duyvil asked wryly, and Georgie had that hint again, of something beneath that mild surface, something more complex than it appeared.
Truth is beauty, beauty truth … she had believed that once, with the same confidence with which she had believed that rank meant security and lineage gentility. But a long row of family portraits hadn’t protected Annabelle.
“Truth and beauty are meant to be one and the same, aren’t they?” she said belligerently. “That’s what the poets say.”
Even if it was a lie, even if a beautiful face, a warm voice, could be nothing more than a lure, the presage to pain.
“But are they?” Mr. Van Duyvil’s question was without mockery. Georgie couldn’t tell if he was in earnest, or merely playing at it.
Truths weren’t what she offered. “You’re asking the wrong person. I work in the theater. Everything is an illusion.”
“You say that very honestly.”
There was something disconcerting about Mr. Van Duyvil’s concentrated attention. “Is it less a lie for being an open one?” she asked.
The last thing she could be accused of was being honest. He’d been gammoned, poor man. The cost of a dinner and all he would get at the end was words for his trouble, twice-used words at that. It was his friend who would go home to a warm bed at the end of the night, at least, if the way Kitty was leaning on his arm was any indication, while Van Duyvil would be left to sport the blunt.
Van Duyvil shook his fair head. “You’re too quick for me, Miss Evans. You spin webs with your words.”
Georgie shrugged. “There’s nothing in them to hold. I only work with borrowed words.”
“Aren’t all words had at second hand?” Mr. Van Duyvil tilted his head back to look at the smoke-gray sky, and Georgie became aware, for the first time, of the difference in their heights, and of how close he had been leaning, how low he had bent to listen to her. “When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It’s only our experience of it that makes it new.”
He wasn’t going to be having any new experiences tonight, not with her. With deliberate derision, Georgie said, “I thought you didn’t weep for Hecuba. Do you always argue both sides, Mr. Van Duyvil?”
Mr. Van Duyvil’s face lit with an unexpected smile. “I’m an attorney. I’m paid to argue both sides.”
“An attorney?” Georgie couldn’t have been more shocked than if he had told her he was the Prince of Wales or the dustman. Attorneys were elderly men with whiskers down to their chins; they were respectable and professional and had no truck with rakes such as Sir Hugo.
Or, more to the point, rakes such as Sir Hugo had no truck with them.
Mr. Van Duyvil smiled at her astonishment. “Like you, Miss Evans, I’m paid for my words. Except in prose, rather than verse. And rather more heretofores and wheretofores.”
“Aren’t attorneys meant to be elderly and respectable?”
They came to a stop before the pale stone façade of the Criterion, marble nymphs simpering down from their niches. Mr. Van Duyvil spread his hands wide. “Mightn’t attorneys be young once, too?”
“And respectable?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like flirting. It just came out that way.
“What makes you think a lawyer is more proof against the frailties of the flesh than any other man?” Mr. Van Duyvil’s eyes met hers, as bright as ice over water. “Knowledge of the law is a trade, not a guarantee of virtue.”
Georgie’s skin heated despite the February chill, excitement and trepidation mingled together.
“If you will—” Sir Hugo jostled rudely between them.
Georgie jerked quickly aside, her heel catching on the hem of her skirt. Mr. Van Duyvil lurched forward to steady her, but Sir Hugo was there before him, catching her around the waist in a grip that belied his languid manner.
Sir Hugo gave her a squeeze before releasing her. The intimacy of his hand on her hip made the bile rise in Georgie’s throat. “I acknowledge the obvious fascination of Miss Evans’s … conversation, but there are other hungers that demand to be satisfied.”
“I presume you mean supper?” said Mr. Van Duyvil, a warning in his voice.
“What else? Would you prefer to continue to debate the number of angels dancing on pins, or shall we proceed to our table? Unless, of course,” Sir Hugo added silkily, smiling at Georgie in a way that made her skin crawl and her throat tight, “you would rather forgo the formality of a meal.”
Georgie found she was shaking, although whether with anger or fear, she couldn’t have said. “The price of this meal is too dear for me. I’m for home—alone.”
“There’s no need for that.” Mr. Van Duyvil stepped between her and Sir Hugo, shielding her with his body, his eyes on Sir Hugo’s face. “You are making the lady uncomfortable, Hugo.”
“And we mustn’t do that.” Sir Hugo turned to the waiting maître d’. “My good man, we require a table for these … ladies.”
“We have a table for you on the first floor, sir,” said the maître d’. One couldn’t turn away Sir Hugo Medmenham, even when he appeared with two rouged drabs in tow, thought Georgie. She repressed the hysterical bubble that rose in her throat. Was that what they were? Was that what they would be if the Ali Baba closed its doors?
A coin passed from Sir Hugo’s palm to the gatekeeper’s. “Then take us there. Before we grow much older.” To Mr. Van Duyvil, he said, in dulcet tones, “We must all gather our rosebuds while we may, mustn’t we, Bay? They wilt so rapidly once plucked.”
A voice whispered in Georgie’s ear. Go on, tell them if you like. Who do you think will believe you?
A voice from another day, another time, but there was something in Sir Hugo’s stance, something in the glitter of the silver head of his cane, that made Georgie snatch her coat back from the hovering waiter’s grasp.
“I’ve lost my appetite.” She reached for Kitty. “Come on, Kitty. It’s late.”
“Not that late.” Kitty made an impatient face at Georgie, rolling her eyes in the direction of the staircase. “It’d be rude to leave now.”
“Yes, terribly rude,” drawled Sir Hugo. “Who knows what pleasures the night might prove?”
“Supper,” said Mr. Van Duyvil in a clipped voice.
Sir Hugo inspected the head of his cane, the silver shimmering dizzyingly in the lamplight. “Do you have an objection to dessert?”
Mr. Van Duyvil gave up pretending. Or maybe it was all pretense, thought Georgie, shrugging rapidly into her coat. The other diners were beginning to stop and stare, but she didn’t care. “Not of the sort you imply.”
“How narrow you are in your tastes,” said Sir Hugo, but it was enough to drive the color to Mr. Van Duyvil’s cheeks.
“And what of your fiancée, Hugo?” Mr. Van Duyvil’s voice carried, causing stares from a party coming up the stairs from the theater below. “Would she approve?”
There was a charged silence, broken only by the muted sounds of conversation and cutlery from the surrounding rooms.
Sir Hugo broke his gaze first, turning to Kitty with exaggerated solicitude. “My dear, this company wearies me. Shall we leave them to their supper and their virtue?”
Kitty nodded her head and put her hand in the crook of Sir Hugo’s arm. “There’s champagne at the Alhambra.”
“We’ve a matinee tomorrow, Kitty,” Georgie warned.
“We can sing those songs in our sleep.” Kitty’s smile was bright, but there was desperation in the way her fingers curled into the fine cloth of Sir Hugo’s coat. “Don’t fuss, Georgie.”
Don’t fuss. That was what Annabelle used to say, too, so sure of herself, so sure that nothing could touch her.
“Hugo—” Mr. Van Duyvil stepped forward to intercept them.
Sir Hugo merely ushered Kitty past him. “Good night, Miss Evans. Bay. I recommend you try the oysters.”
Arm in arm, not looking back, Sir Hugo and Kitty strolled down the stairs and into the fog. In the mist, they shimmered like ghosts before disappearing around the curve of the street.
And Georgie stood there, watching them go, feeling her chest rise and fall beneath her bodice, her hands damp in her gloves.
Georgie wanted to run after her friend and grab her back—but Kitty wouldn’t thank her for it. She had to remember that.
“Sir?” said the maître d’. “Sir. Will you be wanting a table?”
“No,” said Georgie too loudly. She looked fiercely at Mr. Van Duyvil, daring him to challenge her. With deliberate crudity, she said, “You’d best go fishing for your oysters elsewhere.”
Mr. Van Duyvil blinked several times. He wrenched his eyes away from the misty street and back to Georgie. “I’ll see you home.” Hastily, he handed the long-suffering maître d’ a fistful of coins. “For your troubles.”
Georgie was already halfway down the stairs. “I’ll see myself.”
Mr. Van Duyvil hurried to catch up with her, his greatcoat billowing around him. “Let me put you in a hackney, at least.”
Georgie thrust her hands deep in her pockets and kept walking, setting her face against the wind. “There’s no need.”
“There’s every need.” Cutting around her, Mr. Van Duyvil signaled to the rank of cabs waiting down the street from the Criterion before turning back to Georgie, two deep lines furrowing the skin between his eyes. “He doesn’t mean ill.”
Georgie looked at him incredulously. Did he really believe that? Perhaps. A man might gamble and whore and still be accounted a good fellow provided he held his liquor and paid the most pressing of his debts. “Not to you, maybe.”
The cab pulled up in front of them. Mr. Van Duyvil put a hand to the door, but didn’t open it. He looked down at Georgie, saying slowly, “I don’t understand.”
Georgie shook her head, impatient with herself and with him. “A man might keep his word to his friends. But what’s a woman to him?”
“I—” Mr. Van Duyvil blinked, his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. “Would you like me to go after them?”
Georgie started to laugh, but Mr. Van Duyvil’s face was serious. “Spare your sword, Sir Galahad. They wouldn’t thank you for it, either of them.”
“Did you want a ride or not?” called the cabbie.
More coins, jingling in Mr. Van Duyvil’s hand. Rich American, Kitty had said. Either he was or he was making a good show of it. Mr. Van Duyvil opened the door, stepping back to allow Georgie to enter. “Take this lady—”
Georgie’s lips pressed into a thin line. She was hardly going to tell him her address. Not even if he was what he appeared, an innocent abroad.
Mr. Van Duyvil shut the door and took a step back. “Take this lady wherever she instructs you.”
Georgie felt the breath that she had been holding release. She felt both relieved and yet … not disappointed. Ashamed? If this Mr. Van Duyvil was genuinely kind, then she had used him ill.
He may have been friends with Sir Hugo, but there was something terribly forlorn about him, alone on the street corner, outside the Criterion.
“Good night, Mr. Van Duyvil,” said Georgie, grudgingly.
“Good night, Miss Evans.” He tipped his hat to her, and then, the words almost lost beneath the crack of the coachman’s whip, something that sounded like, “I’m sorry.”
Georgie tightened her hand around the leather strap as the cab jolted forward. She willed herself not to look back. What was the point? It was hardly likely that her path and Mr. Van Duyvil’s would cross again.
But she looked back all the same, to see him standing there still, dwindling away to a creature of mist and fog as the dray horse’s hoofbeats echoed hollowly in Georgie’s ears.