Page 2 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“Devilish is right,” Cerys returned. “Some might call him swarthy.” Though she was one to talk, given her own bloodline.

“Well-proportioned.” Rhoda tapped a finger to her lips. “Don’t think that’un has need to pad his coats.”

Cerys snorted. “Likely he wears a corset.”

“Did you see the fit of his pantaloons?” Dot demanded.

Tryphenie howled and pretended to fan herself, because as usual, she’d misplaced her fan.

“I was too busy being burned to cinders by his scathing reprimand to take note of his unmentionables,” Cerys said.

“Oh, is that who you tangled with the other day in the Colonnade.” Mame plucked out a melted piece of brass that might have been a wall sconce, then added it to her pile of scraps.

“He was among a group of gentlemen that Dorsey wanted us particularly to meet⁠—”

“Meaning a group o’genmum Dorsey wanted to show ye off to,” Mame clarified.

“Well, yes, I suppose so.” Cerys brushed cinders off her gloves. “One of them asked how we were liking the grandeur of Cheltenham. Apparently the town has enjoyed tremendous expansion ever since the King took the waters here a score of years ago or so. I, in my native honesty, noted that the Colonnade started well, but peters out to a dirt track. Why, there’s nothing but a plank bridge crossing the river and a muddy slough beyond! You all saw it, didn’t you?”

She swept her audience with a gesture beseeching response, and every head nodded or shook sorrowfully in acquiescence. Every ear hung on her words. For a moment, the spell of the theater fell across them, and Cerys remembered why she loved this. Why she was good at it.

Why she was soiling one of her few pairs of gloves with ash and charcoal so she might cling to this dream a bit longer.

“Well,” she huffed, striking an operatic pose with the back of a hand pressed to her forehead. “You might have thought I’d slain the man’s mother and impugned his family honor. You might have thought I’d run my carriage wheel over his favorite hound! He near took my head off in telling me that my terribly insightful observations had already been registered by others in a position to know better, and the matter was being addressed.”

She sniffed. “Then he told me, if I had further suggestions for improving the city, I might take them up with the Paving and Lighting Commission.”

Rhoda whistled. “So. A genmum as weren’t taken in by our lovely Cerys. Have we ever seen such a thing?”

Mame, who had been right there with Dorsey to offer Cerys a place with the Players, reflected. “No.”

Dot tapped her chin. “There was that blade in Stow, where we did The Fatal Marriage, what said her Isabella could never match that of Siddons.”

Cerys pressed a hand above her heart. “No one can match Sarah Siddons. She is peerless. The very observation is redundant.”

Tryphenie poked at a twisted length of metal that jutted up beside her like a fanatical sheaf of wheat. “La, that bloke was just trying to lure her away from us to become his mistress. He asked Dorsey how much to turn ’er over.”

Cerys stared. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. “He did not.”

“The plump gent in the antique frock coat and the bag wig three decades out o’ fashion?” Tryphenie widened her eyes. “Did indeed.”

“Cerys, gel, Dorsey is approached with an offer for you everywhere we stop,” Mame said. Her voice came thin and weary, like a thread stretched too long from a spindle. “Sometimes two or three a night.”

“Men wantin’ ta take ye under their protection,” Rhoda clarified, as if Cerys didn’t understand the full, mortifying implications.

“I am not a hog to be haggled over at a market fair!”

“We know that.” Dot kicked at a mound of crumbling plaster. “But do they?”

“And they approach Dorsey with these offers? Not me? Unbelievable.”

She ought to believe it. She’d seen enough in her life to know how the world worked. Great ones laid down the laws and customs that gave them power and filled their pockets, then looked aside at the suffering their rules and customs produced. Lesser folk struggled to keep body and soul together—some with larger demons to slay than others—and Dame Nature came in with tempests and snows, hail and rain, and laughed as she brought all her creation, high and low, shivering and sobbing to their knees.

Cerys tugged with renewed force at the net of fallen timbers hiding the trunk beneath. The hard edges bit through her thin cotton gloves. Her hands had gotten soft, joining the theater troupe. She’d lost the calluses from hard work, though she knew how to hide the scars with gloves of kid and silk.

She also knew how a canny woman could watch and guard, fight and win, and hold the very fabric of her world together with naught but will and nails and her clever wits. She’d seen her mother do so; she’d seen her friends and other mothers be wily and wise, and prevail. Cerys meant to do no less.

“They go to Dorsey as he’s the man as has charge of you,” Mame remarked. She poked at a teetering chunk of plaster wall, still clinging to its paper. “They’d go to father or brother or husband, if you had one.”