Page 5 of A Backstage Betrayal (The Empire)

CHAPTER FIVE

G race Treadwell, playwright, wife of Jack and daughter-in-law to Lady Lassiter, was spending her afternoon knitting. Sort of. If she was absolutely honest, she was sitting in the morning room at Lassiter Court, staring out at the park which surrounded it, with a tangled ball of yarn in her lap.

She shoved the yarn onto the settee, stabbed it with the needles and stared at it reproachfully. Ruby had recommended knitting as a way to relax mind and body so that Grace’s creative juices could bubble away unchecked. It had not worked. So far, Grace’s only flash of insight had been that she really, really hated knitting.

She crossed to her desk – optimistically arranged by Lady Lassiter’s butler, Fenton Hewitt, each morning, with clean paper and pens, a full ink pot and a small vase of flowers – and stared at it. Next to the desk sat the waste bin, which Hewitt discreetly emptied every night. Grace sat down and picked up her pen, unscrewed the lid, and the nib hovered over the cream foolscap. The house seemed to hold its breath. Act I, Scene I , she wrote. The comfortable living room of Mrs Angelina Carstairs. A young man in evening dress, Jimmy, is pacing back and forth across the stage.

She stared at the words she had just written. What does ‘comfortable’ even mean? , she wondered. Comfortable for whom? Should Angelina have a comfortable living room or a luxurious one? Actually, would she call it a drawing room? Could it have a mezzanine level?

She crossed out ‘comfortable’ and ‘sitting room’. Jimmy was a bit of a boring name. She put a line through that, too. The page now looked more of a mess than her knitting. She groaned, screwed up the page, threw it in the bin, and started again. Act I, Scene I. Half an hour later, those unimpeachable words were still alone on the page. Eventually she abandoned words altogether and drew a series of rabbits instead, innocently going about their bunny business while a fox peered at them from the edges of the page. The fox, she realised, had the look of a certain London critic. She drew a drop of drool, hanging from the fox’s jaw.

This was no good. She needed something to happen.

She closed her eyes and spread her fingers out over the paper, trying to conjure it into existence – the important something that would shake them all up, would shake her out of this tight, miserable rut.

Tyres crunched on the gravel outside. She put the cap back on her pen and looked out of the window. Lillian coming back from London was welcome, but not the really important something that Grace needed. She went out into the hall and Hewitt opened the door, so Grace walked out into the chill, damp air. Lillian stepped out of the driver’s seat, as elegant as ever in a purple day ensemble under her fawn cape, in time to receive her daughter-in-law’s embrace.

‘Lillian, darling! How was town? How is Evie, and how is her show going? We must have tea and you can tell me everything.’

‘Good afternoon, Grace! Tea would be lovely, and town, Evie and I are all very well.’

It was only then that Grace realised Lillian was not alone.

The passenger door of the car opened and out stepped a handsome, broad-shouldered man in his mid-forties. His hair was rather long, and very dark, his features aquiline, and he wore a loosely tied black silk cravat around his throat. In spite of the cravat and the hair, there was something military about the way he carried himself. He would, in form and figure, be an excellent illustration of the word ‘dashing’. He smiled at Grace, showing perfectly white teeth, and the corners of his eyes crinkled charmingly.

‘Grace,’ Lillian said, indicating her companion with studied carelessness, ‘allow me to introduce His Excellency, Grand Duke Nikolai Goranovich Kuznetsov. He is going to be our guest here for a while. Nikolai, this is Grace Treadwell.’

Grace blinked. This was certainly something.

‘I have heard you are a very clever writer, Mrs Treadwell,’ Nikolai said, approaching, then taking both her hands in his and shaking them. ‘I, too, am a wordsmith. I so like that phrase “wordsmith” . . . so evocative of the process, banging them out in the dark one by one, like sword blades.’ Grace looked up at him. He was as tall as Jack, and his eyes were very dark. ‘We shall drink to the Muses together late into the night, you and I, Mrs Treadwell. I shall teach you the folk songs of my homeland, and we shall smash our glasses into the fireplace and summon Virgil himself from the flames.’

He said all of this while still holding her hands.

‘Oh, are you Russian?’ Grace said. Perhaps Jimmy could be Russian , she thought. And not called Jimmy.

Nikolai shook his head. ‘No, my dear lady, I am from Marakovia. It is a beautiful country, full of romance and mountains, palaces and peasants. We are steeped in the most marvellously tragic histories. A gold mine for writers.’

He grinned, and Grace was decided. She liked him very much.

‘I’m sure Grace would love the folk songs, Nikolai,’ Lillian said. ‘But shall we start with tea? Hewitt,’ she added to the hovering butler, ‘I hope you are well. Would you see to that, and then to the luggage? His Excellency will be staying in the green bedroom.’

Nikolai finally released Grace’s hands, then offered his arm to Lillian and accompanied her into the warmth of the house, while Grace scampered to keep up with them.

‘Have you been to the theatre?’ she asked, as Nikolai handed his hat to Gladys in the hall.

‘We have,’ Lillian said. ‘Jack’s bought a new rat trap and Nikolai prevented a riot.’

‘Oh,’ Grace said. ‘Mr Poole’s speech about the theatre rat didn’t work, then?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Wait a moment . . . Did you say Nikolai prevented a riot?’

‘Tea, Grace,’ Lillian said, passing her cape to the maid, ‘and we’ll tell you all.’