Ways to Be Wicked (26 page)

Daisy took a visibly deep breath, her bosom cresting and falling like a tidal wave, and gave her toga a twist to recapture the breast.

And finally, when it became clear the top of the shell would remain aloft, Daisy flung her arms triumphantly into the air and crooked a knee.

The lascivious, buxom, grinning antithesis of Botticelli’s Venus.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

The applause was thunderous; hands had never beat together so violently before, and the theater resounded with stamps and cheers. Suddenly the air was filled with glittering things: coins raining toward the stage. Then a hail of flowers. Then cravats and shoes and watch fobs.

All was spectacularly successful mayhem.

From where Tom stood in the back of the theater, he could see the wild look slowly fade from Daisy’s eyes, and little by little her desperate smile made the subtle transformation from panic...to uncertainty. . .

To triumph.

Ah, well. Daisy was a diva. It was perhaps the way of divas to prevail.

The General had returned, looking considerably more sweaty and disheveled. “The damn boys with the pulleys had disappeared.”

“Sack them if you ever see them again,” Tom said flatly. “Why was the oyster chewing her?”

“I tried—several times—but when
I
pulled on the pulley, I only dangled. Couldn’t get it to open far enough.” He said this matter-of-factly, accustomed to the myriad trivial inconveniences of his size. “Several of the girls helped me get it open.”

They both took a moment to watch Daisy basking in the waves of applause.

“That bloody woman is going to do that exactly the same way every night this week,” Tom said with grim satisfaction.

The congratulatory crowds had finally cleared away from Daisy’s dressing room, leaving her alone amidst a veritable

forest of flowers. She considered whether to call a carriage to take her home. Alone. Perhaps she should stop in to see Tom before she did.

It wasn’t a conversation she looked forward to having.

A tap sounded on her dressing room door, surprising her. She quickly blotted her eyes and huffed out the nearest lamp. In the shadows, she hoped it would be difficult to see how red they had become.

“Come in,” she sang out, hoping her voice didn’t sound as thick to the person on the other side of the door as it did to her.

The door opened. The General stood in the doorway.

He said nothing at all. Merely regarded her with those intense dark eyes. She returned his stare.

“Well?” she all but snapped, finally.

“You’ve been crying,” he accused.

She turned away from him and began fussing with the petals of one of the flower arrangements. Hothouse flowers, which is what one earned when one was feted by dukes and earls. They’d been brought to her for years, a consequence of her notoriety. She wondered how much longer she could expect them.

The General, of course, was empty-handed. “You were an enormous success this evening,” he began.

“Ha,”Daisy said this to the mirror. “‘Enormous’ is the word.”

He said nothing.

She tried not to, but she did anyway: she sniffed.
Bloody hell.
And so now he knew for certain that she
had
been crying.

“I suppose I should apologize to Tom,” she said tentatively.

“Oh, I think Tom has forgiven you,” The General said with faint irony.

No one said anything for a time.

“I paid ’er a guinea. Molly,” Daisy confessed.

“I should have thought Molly could be bought much cheaper.”

Daisy almost smiled at that. “I just thought it would be so...pretty,” she said wistfully. “I wanted it to be me. All the girls were so damned...they gloated about it.”

As this was true, and partially Daisy’s fault for being such a diva, The General remained silent.

“I’m sorry I ruined yer beautiful show.” She meant it.

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “They loved it, the crowd did. They loved you.”

“But not fer the reasons I wanted them to love it.”

He conceded this with silence. “Perhaps it’s for the best.”

Daisy knew this meant that perhaps her future featured comic roles and not roles for a youthful siren, and that she might as well become accustomed to it now.

“I’m not pretty anymore, am I, Gen?”

“Oh, Daisy. You were never pretty.”

She whipped her head toward him, her eyes enormous with horrified astonishment.

He rapidly closed the distance between them then. And to her amazement, reached out, and with his thumb gently dabbed a tear on her cheek.

“Don’t ever use words like ‘pretty’ to describe yourself, Daisy Jones,” he said, softly, but firmly and unapologetically, too. “Pretty is far, far too tepid a word for what you are. And no one will
ever
forget you, you know.”

And suddenly Daisy Jones, who had sported with dukes and earls atop her cherished nearby pink velvet settee, who’d been feted and showered with gifts by the richest men in London, felt as shy as a girl before the message she saw written in The General’s dark eyes.

Gently, without hesitation, he lifted her chin up to touch his lips to hers. And then he proceeded to kiss her in a way that stripped away all her years and experience, all notions or cynicism about romance, and left only the two of them alone.

“You know I love you, don’t you?” he said softly when he was done.

“I do know.” She sounded as breathless as a girl.

“And?”

“And I love ye, too, ye wee bugger.”

“That works out nicely for the both of us then, doesn’t it?” he said gruffly. “And speaking of that guinea, Daize ...I know of a better investment than Molly. And it has to do with Tom.”

Tom kept to his word. Every night that week, Daisy climbed in the beautiful oyster shell, struggled to free herself from it, was chewed, nearly lost a breast out of her toga, and in the end was cheered wildly. She was also supposed to sing a bawdy song, but occasionally the cheering made it all but impossible.

The theater was filled to the rafters day after day, so they added shows, keeping Daisy exceptionally busy. And Tom began to breathe a little more easily. He had no investors, he was in debt up to his eyes, but his coffers were refilling just a little, and another few weeks of this kind of roaring success would buy him enough time to rally more investors before the costs of building the Gentleman’s Emporium dragged him under, and with it the White Lily and everyone who depended upon it. . . and him.

But Daisy’s Venus so warmed up the crowds that nearly anything they would have put onstage after it would have elicited howls of approval. Fairies, pirates, damsels—it would not have mattered if he had dressed all the girls as horses and trotted them out.

An equestrian theme!

It just demonstrated that inspiration was always just one thought away.

But then he thought of a wooden horse named Bloody Hell that could be pulled on a string. And suddenly he pictured how much small boys would enjoy playing with other small boys on hobbyhorses. How much they might enjoy a
show
featuring hobbyhorses.

Or maybe puppets. . .

She was right,
The General had said.

You fight,
he’d said.
Dirty, if you have to.

There simply had to be a way to have everything he wanted, for he always had.

And so his thoughts warred with accepting that he might not be able to have the things he wanted and grappling and rejecting ways to get them.

For a few nights, he waited until his eyes were raw from lack of sleep for the creak of footsteps on the stairs.

But he saw her only onstage: a fairy, a pirate, a damsel, game but reluctant, fiery and proud.

Other nights he left looking for other female company, other arms, other hands, that could do things to and with him to remind him how easily passion could make one forget, and how much pleasure could be had from one’s own body without complications. Without involving anything other than the body.

But he’d always lost the will halfway to the Velvet Glove, where they had no doubt become lonely for his company, and instead spent an evening staring at the building he intended to transform into the Gentleman’s Emporium, sipping at a flask of whiskey and making plans. And thinking, mordantly amused, about the flawed things he suspected he loved. A dwarf choreographer and an aging diva and a little boy with a wooden horse named Bloody Hell and a beautiful, bad-tempered, achingly tender ballerina who made love as though she were both dancing and fighting for her life.

It wasn’t as though he didn’t know where she slept. As if he couldn’t have made a meal of his own pride and gone to see her.

But it was for the best, he told himself. She would be leaving, and life as he knew it would resume without her.

Augustus Beedle hadn’t aged well, but The General found to his surprise he didn’t look upon this with any particular satisfaction. His hair, once a leonine sweep, now began much farther back on his head, leaving an expanse of lined forehead; five lines, he counted, evenly spaced, like a staff of music awaiting the notes of a composition. His waistcoat bulged just a little.
How about that.
The General thought. The famously lean Beedle now sported a wee paunch.

Given the missing hair and the forehead lines, The General suspected that being married to a temperamental ballerina was perhaps more challenging than Augustus Beedle had expected.

And at this thought, The General
did
experience a twinge of satisfaction.

They exchanged bows. Once upright again, they took a quiet moment to eye each other, assessing. The General saw Beedle whisk a look over his clothes, trace their genus to Weston, and do the math of their cost in his head, for his face ultimately reflected a begrudging approval.

What he lacked in height, The General had always made up for in flair. Beedle had never been able to compete in that regard, at least.

“You’ve been missed,” he said finally. “Your gift for sets has been unsurpassed, and your eye for choreography—”

“It’s been a very long time, Beedle,” The General said wryly. In other words, doubting the sincerity of all of this.

Beedle smiled wryly, acknowledging the little jab. “Your talent was exceptional, and I did enjoy working with you. Should you need a—”

“I’m happy where I am.” The General thought of Daisy for a moment: warm, round, loud, honest, kind, proud Daisy. “Very happy.”

Beedle cleared his throat. “I should like to say that I’m grateful for this opportunity to apologize for our misunderstanding.”

“Maria was not a ‘misunderstanding,’ Beedle.”

The General had forgiven Beedle, for despite the friendship between the two men, it wasn’t precisely Beedle’s fault that Maria had chosen not to love a short man and that The General had chosen to drown his broken heart in all manner of liquor in every major city on the Continent. But The General’s strategy required keeping the other man off-balance and feeling guilty and uncomfortable for the time being.

In other words, he needed him in the proper condition to do a favor. For this was his sole mission today. It was a mission, coincidentally, that Tom Shaughnessy knew nothing about. And the mission was entirely for Tom’s sake.

“She is well?” he asked solicitously. Keeping his voice ever-so-slightly strained. Brave-sounding. “Maria?”

Beedle smiled tiredly. “Yes.”

“Very good.” Again, just a hint, a crucial hint, of noble strain in his voice.

The General allowed the silence to stretch until it was officially awkward. And then:

“You’re familiar with the White Lily, Augustus?”

A small, appreciative smile. “Yes. Tom Shaughnessy’s theater. Beautiful girls.”

“I thought you might be interested to know, Augustus, that I’ve formed my own
corps de ballet,
very talented dancers, all. And they were all employed by the White Lily.”

Augustus Beedle’s eyes went gratifyingly wide. “Where can I see them?”

“Well, that’s just it, Augustus. They will be featured as part of a new, grand entertainment center. A ...Family Emporium.”

“Shaughnessy’s idea?”

“Yes.”

“Then no doubt it will be wildly successful.”

“No doubt,” The General said. “And I’d like to beg a favor of you, Augustus.”

“Anything,” Beedle promised.

“We could also use a blessing from an exalted source. Specifically, a very well-known patron of the ballet.”

It took Beedle but a moment.

And then he smiled. “That, my friend, should not be difficult.”

Sylvie was sitting quietly with Josephine in the sunny room, next to where all the hammering and swearing normally took place, stitching a rent in a fairy wing, when the housekeeper, Mrs. Pool, interrupted them.

“Ladies, a Viscount Grantham and a Lady Grantham are downstairs.”

Sylvie stood so abruptly that her fairy wing tumbled from her lap and lay upside down on the floor, like a big butterfly shot from the sky.

“They are looking for a girl named Sylvie Lamoo . . . Lamosomething. A right fancy name. They thought she might have come to the White Lily.” Mrs. Pool gave a merry laugh at the absurdity of the very idea. “Mr. Shaughnessy sent me up to find you. Shall I send them away?”

“I—” It was an airless squeak. Sylvie gaped for a moment at the housekeeper. Then she turned and gaped at Josephine.

Then she smoothed her hands nervously over her hair, and nervously down her skirt, then gave up on the grooming and simply bolted down the stairs.

Near the door of the theater, near the stage, three people stood. Two men, one very tall and fair-haired, an air of easy importance and casual danger, rather the sort of air Tom Shaughnessy wore like a coat. This must be Viscount Grantham.

The other man was Tom. His face was quiet, oddly pensive. He didn’t smile when he saw her. Simply watched her, standing very still. She felt his eyes on her, physical as hands drawing her to him.

But it was the third person, the small person, the woman, who riveted Sylvie.

She slowed, then stopped a few paces away from her, and stared, folded her hands into her skirt in front of her.