City of Ash (19 page)

“Perhaps you should send for Dr. Berry—”

I waved the comment away. “He’ll only prescribe hot tea and honey, which is what I’m drinking already. I’m perfectly well, Nathan. Better than I’ve been in some time, in fact.”

He rose and crossed the parlor to me, leaning down to kiss me lightly on the top of my head. “Good.”

The kiss surprised me, and filled me with hope too. I was reminded suddenly of a time when Nathan and I had sat together in my father’s parlor, and he had laughed delightedly at some joke, his hand brushing lightly against mine—such a small touch, but it had raised a desire so strong in me that I had wanted nothing more than to sweep him into some darkened alcove, to feel his body against mine, to touch his skin … how much I’d wanted him once.

Almost desperately, I grabbed at Nathan’s hand as he stepped away. “Do you think you might attend the theater with me one night? I should like it very much. Perhaps something at the Regal, now that you’ve a stake in its success.”

He disentangled my fingers from his, not ungently. “I’m quite busy with the new firm.” Then, at my obvious disappointment, “I’ll try, Ginny. But that’s the most I can promise, unfortunately.”

I felt a rush of relief, a little joy.

Nathan said, just before he left, “Take care of that cough, Ginny, or I’ll have the doctor here after all.”

Beatrice

O
ff with you all,” Lucius said, waving us away. “We’ve rehearsed enough today. Back at four, children.”

We all scattered, but for Mr. DeWitt, who was busy scribbling Lucius’s last changes, and though I should have gone on—I must do some errands before I had to be back again—I waited. I’d been thinking over that conversation between Sebastian DeWitt and Nathan Langley, and it bothered me in ways I couldn’t explain, and I hoped DeWitt might tell me what it had been about. Or that’s what I told myself anyway, as I stood at the edge of the apron watching him gather everything up—pen nibs and ink, and papers. When he’d shoved them all into his bag and buckled it and looked up, he seemed surprised to see me there.

“Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Wilkes?” he asked politely.

Well, I couldn’t just say “What were you and Nathan talking about last night?” because he’d just tell me it was none of my business, which it wasn’t. So I scrambled for something else, and landed on, “I’ve a few questions about your notes on Penelope. I’d thought, if you had a moment.…”

“I’m at your disposal, as always,” he said.

So easy. As if he had nothing better to do, and suddenly I was curious. “Surely you can’t always be at my disposal, Mr. DeWitt. Haven’t you other places to go? Other things to do?”

“None so pressing they can’t be put off.”

“Really? What do you
do
all day?”

He smiled. “Mrs. Wilkes, I’m like you. I eat, breathe, and sleep the theater.”

“My father used to warn me about theater people,” I mused. “He said they were all selfish. I think he was very on the mark.”

“I’ll endeavor to be different then.”

“I’m not certain you can. Certainly I cannot.”

He put his satchel over his shoulder and came toward me, a slow walk, an amused expression. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. I imagine you could be generous enough if you tried.”

“I think you have me confused with your imaginary Penelope, Mr. DeWitt. I think it only fair to warn you that we are not the same.”

“In my mind you are. There are hidden depths in Penelope, you know, just as there are in you.”

“You see, that’s why I need you. I’ve not seen those depths. In Penelope, I mean.”

“You’re not paying enough attention, then.” He was very close, more than I felt comfortable with.

I took a step back. “No one spends more time learning lines than I.”

He stepped forward. “Lines are not the only things that matter. You have more talent than that, Mrs. Wilkes. I knew it the first time I saw you in
Lady of Lyons
. Do you know what I thought then?”

“That I needed a better dress to play the upper class?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I thought: there’s a woman who loves her craft. But she’s a little afraid of it too.”

I frowned. “Afraid of it?”

“Afraid to invest too much in it. As if you had once, and been disappointed, and meant not to be disappointed again.”

I stared at him, too surprised to say anything.

“Am I right? What was it, Mrs. Wilkes? What made you lose faith in your talent? Too many unscrupulous managers? An actor or two who promised you a step up the ladder if you came to bed, and then never delivered? Or was it losing too many parts to favorites who don’t know the meaning of subtlety?”

It was as if he were reading my life. I felt as if I were an open book to him, which wasn’t a good feeling, you know, because
it meant I was vulnerable, and I’d spent too long trying not to be, and he was practically a stranger, and in a profession where one couldn’t even trust one’s friends, a stranger—especially a charming one—was more than dangerous.
Time to walk away, Bea
. But I didn’t. Instead, I heard myself saying like a fool, “All of those things.”

“You know you’ll never move higher if you don’t unlearn those lessons,” Sebastian DeWitt said gently. “If you don’t have confidence in your talent, you’ll never transcend the material. There are actors who can do that, Mrs. Wilkes. I think you could be one of them.”

Oh, he was clever. Pandering to my vanity, to the arrogance every actor had. “Why do you say that? What do you see?”

“You
were
Pauline in
Lady of Lyons
. You played the upper class as if you were born to it. And when you cried, those were real tears.”

“Stella can cry on cue too,” I said dismissively. “Any actor worth his salt can.”

“But
you
felt them. Tell me—have you ever considered giving up acting?”

I was wounded. “You think I should?”

He shook his head. “There’s a point to be made. Have you?”

“About a hundred times,” I said drily.

“What stopped you?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to be a shopgirl.”

“It was more than that, wasn’t it?”

“I couldn’t do it,” I said honestly. “To be onstage … it was all I ever thought about. I loved it. I love it still.”

“And if you were never a star?”

“I don’t know. I suppose … I’ll still be here playing old ladies ’til I die.”

“So I thought.”

I laughed a little. “It’s pathetic, really, when you think about it.”

He didn’t even smile. “It’s passion, Mrs. Wilkes, and too few people ever feel it. You owe it to yourself to nurture it. It’s why you’re here.”

How strange he was, how fervently he spoke. I’d met hundreds of actors and playwrights, but I’d never known anyone like him. “How am I to do that?”

“Run your lines with me,” he urged in a low voice that went through me the way my teeth went through those candied apricots, sheering just that smooth, and my breath went all jumpy and short. “You’re very good at tricks. I can help you to let the truth show instead.”

He had me off balance again.
This one you should run from
, and damn but wasn’t
that
the truth I should be listening to. Still, he knew just what to say. He knew what would hook me. The thought of being better grabbed tight, and I found myself saying, “All right. When?”

“How about now?”

“We can go to my hotel,” I heard myself say. “It’s—”

“Foster’s. I know.”

“How do you know that?”

He smiled. “Shall we go?”

And that was how I ended up taking him back to my room. There, he opened the window and let in the afternoon, and my thin and faded muslin curtains fluttered in the little breeze and the air smelled like horse manure and piss and sawdust and smoke with that lilt of salt mud. Sebastian DeWitt took off his coat and sat on that faded red settee and I sat on my bed and ran lines with him.

And that was all it was, just that simple, except that he made me laugh out loud once or twice when he spoke Marjory’s lines in this breathless, little high-pitched voice, and once, as he spoke Keefe, he leaped from the settee and raised his hand over me as if he held the knife that Keefe nearly plunged into Penny’s breast before he realized who she was, and it was such a sudden movement I gasped and fell back with a startled little scream, and he smiled with satisfaction and said, “Perfect!” and I liked pleasing him much more than I should.

By the time we reached act four, he was lounging on the end of my bed while I sat at the head. I spoke the last lines of the scene: “I would do anything you asked of me, my love—anything at all,” and when I said the words it was as if I’d become Penelope
Justis, and he was Keefe Hart, and he looked up at me just at that moment and the breeze stirred his hair and I was caught by his eyes. I mean, I was
caught
, you know, when I’d always thought that was just a stupid saying, and I don’t know what I might have done or said, but suddenly there was a loud and blistering curse from someone in the street below, and it cut the moment dead, and Sebastian DeWitt laughed and looked away, and I laughed too, but I was thinking
What the hell are you doing?
I felt how much I liked him as this purely dangerous thing. He reminded me of everything I wanted, everything the years had taken away from me, and I forgot how hard those things were to have and to hold on to. With him, I was just Beatrice Wilkes, who loved acting more than anything in the world.

But that was the lie. That Bea was long gone, and DeWitt was right when he said I was afraid to have her back. I
was
afraid, and with good reason. I couldn’t afford to be that person again.

“It’s—it’s getting late,” I said when we’d done laughing. “I need to think about getting back to the theater.”

DeWitt nodded and rose, stretching his arms over his head so his untucked shirt rose high on his thighs, as casually and intimately as if we were lovers, and I had to look away at the image
that
brought into my head.

He went to the window and looked out and said mildly, “I’ve been thinking … I know someone. Someone who can help us both.”

“Help us both do what?”

“Show the world what we can really do.” He didn’t turn from the window, and he spoke the way someone might speak of God. “If you can make Penelope Justis come alive the way I saw today, this woman could take us very far.”

“Woman?”
I was suddenly jealous, and don’t think I didn’t know how stupid
that
was.

He nodded, turning now to look at me. “It’s her gift—to bring artists out of obscurity.”

And maybe she had other gifts as well. Ones that made him talk like that. “I don’t imagine she would care to do much for me, Mr. DeWitt. But you … no doubt that’s a different story.”

He smiled and went to his coat, getting more wrinkled and
disreputable-looking by the minute where he’d thrown it haphazardly on the settee. “Leave that to me. Just remember what’s at stake, Mrs. Wilkes. That’s all I ask. Give me something to work with.”

He went to the door, and I was suddenly, stupidly afraid I wouldn’t see him again. “Wait, Mr. DeWitt. Do you … could we do this again, do you think? Run lines, I mean.”

“As I said before: whenever you want, Mrs. Wilkes. You’ve only to ask.” He gave me this beautiful seductive smile that said he was hoping for something more than just running lines, and I was so flustered both at the smile and at the way it dropped through me that I could do nothing but sit there and watch him close the door.

Geneva

O
ver the next few days, my cough worsened; it required that I stay home from two functions, which was probably a fortuitous occurrence, as it would lessen the gossip about my late-night café visit with Sebastian DeWitt. It also meant I could not see him, as I most certainly would have done otherwise, which I regretted. It even occasioned a letter from my father alluding to my “illness,” though it seemed so out of character for my father to concern himself over a small cough that I supposed it could have been his newest way of referring to the scandal in Chicago, as if it were some disease I’d managed, against all odds, to recover from. It was just like Papa to
label something unpleasant with euphemisms until he came to believe them true. Years from now, I suspected, Papa would frown at any mention of Marat and say, “Wasn’t that when you had the cholera, Ginny?”