by Lynn Kurland
“Michael,” she said with a smile. “How are you? You’re up and wandering around. Feeling strong?”
He shoved a piece of paper at her. “Here. Sign this.”
“What is it?” she asked. Good heavens, what next? Was Bernie faxing post-illness nursing demands now?
“Just sign it.”
She looked at him in surprise. Gone was the smooth, suave actor she had thought was so perfect on so many levels. In his place was a man who looked just the slightest bit wild-eyed. Was he still delirious from his Elizabethan fever, or was he just freaked out for general reasons? Victoria wondered why she hadn’t thought to bring along a ghostly bodyguard or two. Would they hear her if she started to scream?
“I don’t have a pen,” she stalled.
He threw one at her. She caught it and did her best to fumble around with it for a moment or two until she had her feet back under her. She looked at the contract-weight set of papers she had in her hand.
“A contract?” she asked in surprise. “Do you want to sign on for an entire season?”
“No, I don’t want to sign on,” he said disdainfully. “I want you to sign over.”
“Sign over? Sign over what?”
“Your theater troupe.”
Victoria knew she had to look as completely baffled as she felt. “My troupe?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently. “Sign it over or I don’t go on tonight.”
“I’ll have you blacklisted,” she said immediately, before she thought better of it.
He only laughed.
It wasn’t a pleasant laugh.
“Will you?” he said scornfully. “Try it and see what Bernie leaves of you—if he leaves anything at all. Now, don’t be dumb. Just sign the damn paper and let’s get this business behind us.” He gestured impatiently at the contract she held. “Put the name of the company down and sign it.”
“But,” she said slowly, “my troupe doesn’t have a name.”
“It has to have a name, stupid, because the name has to go right there.” He reached out and tapped the top sheaf impatiently. “On that blank line there.”
Victoria looked at the blank line. Sure enough, it looked ready for something to be written there. She looked at Michael. He seemed to be fully compos mentis, yet there was something that didn’t quite fit.
“You want Tempest in a Teapot?” she asked.
“What do you think?” he asked archly.
I think you’re an idiot, she thought immediately, but there was no sense in telling him that. If he believed her venue came with her, more power to him. She had long since resigned herself to the thought that where just desserts were concerned, Michael Fellini had long avoided his serving.
She considered.
It took quite some time, but in the end, she took the pen and wrote something down. She flipped to the end of the contract and scrawled illegible characters where her name should have gone. She handed the contract back to Michael.
“There you go,” she said, wondering if this was how it felt to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Michael grabbed it eagerly and began to read. Then he began to frown.
“The name of your troupe is Go to Hell You Overacting Windbag?” He flipped to the back and frowned again. “Is that your signature?”
She smiled without humor. “You figure it out.”
It took him quite some time. But realization came eventually. She watched it happen, like the first rays of dawn touching the morning sky. Slowly, at first, then more quickly, the truth hit him.
“Overacting windbag?” he wheezed.
“If the shoe fits, bucko.”
He spluttered quite unattractively for quite a long time.
“I’ll walk!” he thundered finally. “I’ll take the whole cast with me!”
“Go ahead,” she shouted back. “And watch me sue them all for breach of contract!”
He crumpled the contract in his hands. “You’ll regret this.”
“Will I?”
“Watch and see,” he snarled, then stomped off back toward the inn. Victoria watched him go, then shrugged and headed up toward the castle. He wouldn’t take her entire cast. She would do her quick check, then hurry back to the inn and tell Cressida that English nobility was going to be in the audience scoping out talent. Michael would find himself and his miserable personality alone at Heathrow. No one else would dare jump ship.
She oversaw the testing of her equipment, dawdled for a bit, then sighed and walked back to the inn.
The inn was unsettlingly quiet when she opened the front door. Maybe everyone was having a last-minute nap. She was about to go do a room check when Thomas opened the door to the sitting room.
“Vic,” he said with a smile, “I have someone you’re going to want to meet.”
Victoria smiled, a little sickly, to her mind, but she managed it.
“The Earl of Artane,” Thomas whispered. “Make a good impression. Your career no doubt depends on it.”
After the morning she’d had, Victoria didn’t doubt it.
The only upside she could see was that she wouldn’t have much time for chitchat. She needed to go let Michael’s understudy know he was going on, and she needed to be up at the castle in an hour.
But money called first. She put her best business face on and walked into the sitting room with the same amount of enthusiasm she might have a deluxe room in the Tower of London.
Connor stood in the inner bailey, looking wistfully at the stage, counting up all the nights he’d watched Hamlet performed there, all the nights he’d either watched or stood next to Victoria as she stood against the castle wall watching the play proceed as she had directed.
He could scarce believe those nights were soon to be nothing but a memory.
He walked slowly into the great hall. He crossed over to the dais and turned around to face the door, placing himself in the spot where he’d stood two months ago, waiting for V. McKinnon to walk through the ruined entryway and earn the fright of his life. Only V. had turned out to be Victoria.
And he’d been lost from the moment he’d clapped eyes on her.
As if history were repeating itself, in came Victoria McKinnon, only this time she rushed in, her hair in wild disarray, her very stance bespeaking tumult and uproar.
Connor looked at her in astonishment. Was she overwrought that her play was ending? He would have thought that now was the time for a bit of wistfulness, reminiscence, even perhaps a bit of regret that the labors of the past pair of months were over. But this wildness? Surely there was something amiss.
Victoria saw him and dashed across the great hall. She came to a teetering halt before him. Connor reached out instinctively to steady her, then realized the gesture was useless. He clenched his hands at his sides.
“What ails you?” he asked, gritting his teeth. “Are you ill?”
“He’s gone.”
Connor blinked. “Who’s gone?”
She cursed. “Michael’s gone and he took the whole damn cast with him.”
“He did what?”
“You heard me. He walked off the job because I wouldn’t sell him the rights to my company and now I’m left with a closing night, important guests in the audience, and no players. I can’t believe he talked them all into going with him. Heads will roll, I promise you.”
Connor was rarely stunned, and even less rarely without a helpful bit of advice in a crisis, even if it was limited to “strangle the fool with his own entrails and put his head on a pike outside the gates as warning to other disobedient leading men,” but at the moment, he found himself with no useful thing to offer but an expression of shock.
“Can you do Hamlet?” Victoria asked suddenly.
He stuck his fingers in his ears and wiggled them. “I beg your pardon?”
“The role. Can you do it?”
He felt a chill slide down to his very vitals. Never in his life had he experienced such a feeling of sheer terror. Not when it had been him
alone at ten-and-eight facing a half dozen fierce McKinnons, not when he’d been set against bloodthirsty MacDonalds with only a handful of half-grown lads at his back, not even when he’d seen the flash of the Frenchman’s sword out of the corner of his eye—too late to avoid it—and known he was going to die.
“Hamlet?” he croaked.
“Yes.”
He looked closely at her. There was no doubt in her eye. He considered a bit more. Surely, she wouldn’t have asked him if she’d thought him unequal to the task. And if he peed his kilt onstage, no one would be the wiser.
Reason enough to go forward.
“Aye,” he said with a confidence he didn’t quite feel.
“Good. Be on stage in ten minutes. I’ve got to run back to the inn and find more players. And get that Roderick St. Claire for me if you can. I’ll need him for Laertes.”
And with that, she turned and left him standing in his great hall, speechless.
Hamlet?
He took a deep breath. “ ‘For these are actions that a man might play,’ ” he whispered, “ ‘but I have that within which passeth show.’
A body could hope, at least.
He took a deep breath, blew out it, indulged in a brief fervent prayer, then left the great hall to await the rest of a cast he was certain would be the oddest of Victoria’s long and illustrious career.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Ambrose, Hugh, and Fulbert came rushing into the bailey and jostled each other in their haste to leap up on the stage. Connor leaped up on the stage with like athleticism, bowling Roderick over in the execution of his jump.
“Does she need me?” Roderick asked breathlessly from where he lay sprawled on the deck.
“Aye,” Connor said simply. “Dispense with the lace, however. We are wearing a more medieval look tonight.”
Roderick leaped to his feet. He fondled the lace at his throat one more time before he exchanged it, in the blink of an eye, for a rough tunic, worn hose, and scuffed boots.
“Will this suit?” he asked.
“Victoria will tell you if it does not.”
Roderick laughed. “Yes, I imagine she will. How can you not love that woman? She is formidable on every level.”
Connor would have asked Roderick how in the hell he knew that, and repaid him properly for his answers, but he was distracted by Victoria’s arrival. Jennifer trotted along at her heels.
“All right,” Victoria said, motioning for the cast to join her on the ground in front of the stage. “Here’s the thing. We’ve never rehearsed this and we don’t have time. We’re on in less than an hour. Is there anyone here who does not know their lines or, heaven forbid, what part they’re playing?”
Ambrose smoothed over the front of his tunic. “I will play the deceased King of Denmark, Fulbert will play Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, and Hugh will delight us with his pedantic and irritating Polonius. Hugh, do not overact when Hamlet stabs you during the scene with Gertrude. By the way, Victoria dear, who will play Gertrude?”
“Jenner,” Victoria said.
“How will she know the lines?” Connor ventured.
“She’s done it before,” Victoria said. “She has a photographic memory; she’ll remember the lines.”
Ambrose leaned close to Connor. “What that means is that once she reads something, she can always remember it. A handy talent, aye?”
Connor hesitated to say that he could, at present, see any of the pages of Shakespeare he’d read swimming before his eyes as he willed, so perhaps he had that skill as well. But he would discuss it with Ambrose later, when the show was finished.
“Horatio will be played by Thomas,” Victoria said, checking her list. “Fred and Megan’s husband Gideon will do their best with the rest of the minor characters. If they forget their lines, we’ll sack them after the show is over.”
Connor listened to her finalize all her preparations with a commander’s control. He nodded to himself as she voiced appreciation for their willingness to salvage the night. He admired her calm in the face of admittedly amateur actors who, in the persons of Gideon and Thomas, hoped they could get their lines down—or keep their gorge down, whatever the case might be.
But as he listened, he realized that something was missing.
“Victoria?” he asked, finally.
She looked at him. “Yes?”
“Who will play Ophelia?”
Silence descended.
“Oh,” Jennifer said quietly. “That is a problem.”
Victoria stared at him in mute distress.
Connor felt, after a moment or two, that there were none others there but he himself and Victoria, staring at each other, as if time had ceased to be.
“You know the part,” he said quietly. “Don’t you?”
She closed her eyes briefly and swallowed convulsively. “Yes.”
“Then that solves that,” Jennifer said brightly. “Let’s all go raid the costume shed. Well, except for those of you who can conjure up your own.”
Connor continued to look at Victoria as the others set off for the gates. He smiled encouragingly. “You will be wonderful,” he said confidently.
“I think I might be sick,” she replied.
“Retch later. Go choose a costume now. You will do the role justice as Mistress Blankenship never could have.”
Victoria nodded and turned toward the gate. She stopped, though, after a pace or two, and turned back to look at him.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
She smiled, albeit a little weakly. “For all your work on the part.” She paused. “I couldn’t put on the show without you tonight.”
“I will do my best not to disappoint.”
She looked at him for so long in silence that he began to fear that she thought him unequal to the task and was afraid to say as much. Then she shook her head.
“Connor MacDougal, I don’t think you could disappoint.” Then she smiled briefly. “But I will, if I don’t find a costume that fits. Cressida probably has sucker goo spilled all down the front of hers. I swear, if I’d seen that girl with one more Tootsie Pop in her mouth, I would have hosed her down.”
And with that, she was gone.
Connor looked heavenward briefly, then turned toward the stage to concentrate on what he had to do that night.
The evening passed for him as if it had been a dream. Shakespeare’s words came from his mouth as if they had been created for just that moment in time, to be whispered or shouted or crisply spoken as if they’d been swords meant to cut through the webs of deceit woven around him.
He remembered wordplay with Victoria as Ophelia. He sparred verbally with Hugh, listened raptly to Ambrose tell the sorry tale of the late king’s murder, tried to reason with Jennifer as Gertrude. He let Hamlet’s words become his own and speculated aloud as to the meaning of life and death.
Then he stood in the wings and watched Victoria descend into madness as if she’d done it every day of her life and found the journey too exquisite not to be shared with anyone who would pay her heed.
She was, in a word, breathtaking.
He found himself, finally, crossing swords with Roderick, who seemed to dredge up from some hidden well-spring of skill enough ability to actually seem as if he might be Connor’s equal.
In the end, there was death, as usual.
But this time, death was followed by a curtain call and thunderous applause.
Connor took his own bow as he’d seen Fellini do numerous times. He found himself a little startled and not just a little surprised by the applause he received.
He understood why Fellini liked performing so much.
But when the curtain pulled together and he stood in a huddle with his fellow actors, watching tears of relief course down Victoria’s cheeks, he found that he was almost tempted to do the same. Victoria turned to look at him.
“Amazing,” she breathed.
He laughed. He simply couldn’t help himself.
“Heaven help me,” she said with a laugh of her own, “Connor MacDougal just laughed. I think it’s time for a swoon.”
“After everyone’s gone,” Jennifer said, throwing an arm around her sister. “You were brilliant. Connor was, well, there are no words to describe it. I’ve never seen Hamlet done better.”
Connor would have thought she was exaggerating, but she was equally quick to point out that Thomas had flubbed several of his lines but that she loved him anyway, so Connor found himself with no choice but to take her words as she spoke them.
“Vikki? Gideon’s dad wants to come backstage.” Megan was peeking under the curtain. “He especially wants to meet Hamlet.” She smiled at Connor. “Hi, Laird MacDougal. You were wonderful, by the way.”
Connor would have nodded in thanks, but he was too startled. He looked at Victoria. “What now, Captain McKinnon?”
“Well, you certainly can’t shake his hand. Say hello from a distance. Claim a cold, or strep, or the plague.”
Connor grunted. “Not amusing.”
“Yes, but necessary.” She slipped through the curtain and soon was calling his name.
Connor looked at Thomas. “Your aid, McKinnon?”
“For the man who drove my sister to madness? Anything.” Thomas pulled the curtain back and waited.
Connor found himself looking at the Earl of Artane, a rather unassuming man as earls went, but then again, the man likely wasn’t training with a broadsword every day.
“Megan told me that there was a bit of a muddle with some of the cast having transportation difficulties,” the earl said, all smiles, “but I daresay that was fortuitous. A fabulous performance, sir, I must say!”
Connor bowed low. “I thank you for that, my lord. But it is Mistress McKinnon who deserves the credit. There is not a better director in all of the Apple.”
“The Big Apple,” Thomas whispered from behind him.
“Manhattan,” Connor clarified, remembering suddenly what Victoria had called it more than once. “And I daresay England has never seen her like.”
“My dear,” the earl said to Victoria, “you are truly a treasure. I don’t suppose there might be time in your schedule tonight to discuss what you’ve done in the past. We didn’t have nearly enough time this afternoon.”