Lady Like

1

When the letter arrives, Harriet Lockhart assumes it’s another death threat, and leaves it on the mantelpiece with the others, unopened, for six days.

Since taking up a life on the Drury Lane stage, Harry has received so many threats of various kinds—­death, slander, public humiliation, the like—­that she has considered using them to paper a wall in her bedroom. They are all written on cards of a quality denoting the sort of wealth that can afford both a fetish for stationery and to waste it on a virulent missive to a stranger after deeming her existence—­or sometimes, simply the rumor of it—­so provocative that it threatens their own moral foundations.

The letters all follow roughly the same script: salutations, colored with a hyperbolic descriptor—dear Miss Lockhart, you whore, villain, rascal, bellend, etc.—­followed by an accusation of Harry’s perceived wrongdoing, whether that be her raffish manners or her chosen roles on the London theater circuit and how often they were written for men or require her to take her top off or both, or her seduction of some such gentry daughter or country cousin or even one or two dowager countesses. Of late, many had touched on how it is Harry’s fault that the Duke of Edgewood’s good luck at the card tables had come to a close, as it was she who had revealed he had no particular skill at pinochle but, rather, cards up his sleeve.

It was certainly not Harry’s fault that he challenged her to duel when she made his trickery known. Nor was it her fault that he was such a poor swordsman he practically fell into her blade. And she hadn’t killed him, for God’s sake. He’d only lost an eye.

And yet the letters continue to arrive, one of life’s few constants being polite society’s need to remark upon other people’s business.

And an unmarried actress of four and thirty years assaulting a member of the peerage—­to say nothing of her penchant for men’s suits and short hair—­is certainly business.

Yes, the threats would make remarkable wallpaper. But it’s unclear how long Harry will remain in these Drury Lane apartments now that a great deal of people who seem to want her dead have the address. That, and the theater will evict her if she doesn’t sign on for the next production, and she is reaching an age where a career performing bawdy adaptations of Shakespeare’s most lamentable tragedies in an oversized codpiece is less funny than it once was. Though considering the increasingly dire straits of her finances since her mother’s death, plus her lack of any real skills beyond looking good in a fake beard, she may not be able to afford a noble exit.

All things considered, it would be a waste of good death threats. Not to mention paste.

So The Letter sits unopened upon the mantelpiece for six days until the night she returns from the Palace Theater, her shirt still stippled with sweated-­off cosmetics and pigs’ blood, and finds it waiting upon the table before the fireplace.

And, in the armchair beside it, her brother, Collin.

Harry stops just inside the doorway and stares—­not at the letter so much as at the man who it would seem has plucked it from languishing in obscurity. Unexpected guests are not unusual in Harry’s home, often because she invites people when deep in her cups and then forgets once she’s sober, but her brother has never been the sort to enter Harry’s rooms if he can help it. Something about unwashed socks in places socks have no business being. She also has not spoken to him in almost two years, other than a brief exchange, weak as watered-­down gin, at their mother’s graveside.

But now here he is, perched on the edge of her armchair like the cushions might stain his suit if he leans against them.

And they might—­she never takes off her blood-­soaked shirt before sitting to unlace her boots.

“What are you doing here?” Harry demands of her brother. Since she usually tosses her coat onto the back of the chair upon which he’s seated, she drops it on the floor instead.

“Good to see you, Sister,” Collin replies. Then, as though he can’t help himself, he picks up the coat, folds it neatly, and drapes it over the arm of the chair.

Harry sinks onto the sofa across from him, kicking off her boots with her toes pressed into her heels. “What are you drinking?” she asks as Collin raises his glass.

“Tea.”

“Sanctimonious. Why’s it in a tumbler?”

“Because you don’t own any other drinking vessels.” Collin takes a sip, then adds with his lips to the rim, “Nor spoons.”

“Can’t seem to find any of my good hairpins either.” Harry retrieves a bottle of whiskey and a glass from the side table and pours her own drink. The bottle is half full, and Harry wonders if that will be enough to sustain her through a visit with her brother. “Do shout if you step on one.”

Collin sets his cup beside the folded paper with Harry’s name on the front. “You got a letter.”

“I get a lot of letters,” Harry replies.

“Still an endless string of love poems in your honor?”

“It’s been more of an assortment lately. Fruits with the nuts.” Harry rubs a strip of sticky wax from her forehead, which had been holding her fake eyebrows in place. She considers peeling off her false beard, but the mustache is fiddly and liable to tear without a mirror. “Why does this one matter so particularly?”

“Because.” Collin reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat and withdraws a second letter, which he tosses onto the table beside Harry’s. Harry picks up the two pieces of parchment and holds them up for examination. The calligraphic handwriting, the corners creased with military precision, the sapphire drop of sealing wax stamped with a vaguely noble emblem—­they’re identical. The only difference is that one bears her name and the other Collin’s.

And Collin’s has been opened. Presumably by Collin.

He watches as she cracks the seal on her letter and smooths it out on the tabletop. In the same monkish hand from the front is written:

Longley Manor, Surrey.

March the twenty-­fifth, noon.

Don’t be late.

“It seems,” Collin remarks drily, “that we are being summoned.”

Harry is no great fan of summonses. The last time she was summoned with an official letter on quality paper it was to stand before a Cornwall judge on a trumped-­up charge of public indecency. And while it was true she had shown her breasts on stage during a production of Twelfth Night, in her defense, it had been an accident. Or, if not entirely an accident, an impulsive decision, which should have counted for something. A crime not so much premeditated as wildly under-­meditated.

“Hold on—­we?” Harry says, her attention snagging suddenly upon his phrasing. “What does yours say?”

Collin flicks his letter open and reads, “ ‘Longley Manor, Surrey. March the twenty-­fifth, noon. Do not let your sister be late.’ ”

“It does not say that.” Harry reaches across the table and plucks the parchment from Collin’s fingers.

“Whoever sent them must know us,” Collin remarks. “As they’ve preempted your customary tardiness.”

“What do you think we’re being summoned for?”

“Probably to kill us.” Collin inclines his tumbler and adds, “Kill you, at least. Don’t know what score might be unsettled with me.”

Harry runs a hand over her hair, shorn short as a gentleman’s since her first season at the Palace. “I’m not sure I’m ready for another public scandal. I’m trying to make myself scarce.”

“Scarce?” Collin repeats incredulously. “You’ve been playing Macbeth at the Palace since February.”

“Only four nights a week,” Harry replies, then adds, “plus matinees.”

“Your face is on the posters.” Collin produces a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes at some imagined blot on the table before setting his glass upon it. “And that business with Edgewood.”

“You heard about that?”

“He’s parading around London with a jeweled patch over his eye, swearing oaths against your name. Good God, Hal. Aren’t you tired of making your life a public spectacle?”

“Did you come all this way just to criticize me?” Harry retorts. Though she had long ago resolved to care less what Collin thinks, her brother’s disapproval has always irked her in a way no one else’s does. If anyone should understand her less conventional choices, it should be him. They are rivers that flow from the same source, after all.

“I came . . .” A vein flexes in Collin’s forehead as he clenches his jaw. “Because I was concerned for you,” he says. “For both of us. And for what these letters might mean.”

Harry stares at the handwriting on the page, trying to force herself to recognize it, like picking the face of an old friend from a crowd.