Page 2 of Lady Like

“So you’ll go to this mysterious meeting?”

“So long as it doesn’t interfere with my schedule. I’m meant to see a gentleman about a horse that afternoon.”

Collin frowns. “Don’t tell me you’re purchasing a horse.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Harry says. “Where would I put it?”

“You certainly couldn’t do any more damage to this place.”

“It’s a pit, isn’t it? There’s this mold growing along the baseboards that I think might be giving me a rash.”

“Jesus Christ, Harry. You need new apartments.”

“Not so easy, I’m afraid. The Palace lets me stay here gratis, and I’m not exactly flush in the pockets these days.” Harry unfastens her garters and peels off her stockings, one hand on the basin to steady herself. “Where are you living of late? I could come stay with you.”

They both cringe—Harry at the debasement of having asked, Collin, presumably, at the idea of Harry in such proximity.

“Absolutely not.” He waves a hand at her bloody shirt front. “I’d make you undress on the front stoop if you came home in that state.”

“Perhaps I’ll ask Alexander then. I’m sure he has a room to spare.”

“Who?”

“My gentleman with the racehorse.”

“How exactly do you know this gentleman?” Collin asks. “And in what sense is he a friend ?”

“Don’t be crass,” Harry says, though the last time she saw Alexander, they had ended up naked in the Serpentine. “Alexander Bolton is a duke—or, he will be when his father kicks it.”

Collin’s forehead creases and he purses his lips, but all he says is, “Hm.”

Harry scoffs.

“What?” Collin demands. “I didn’t say anything!”

“You don’t like my friends, Collin, please, don’t make a production of pretending otherwise. Nor do you like my rooms or my job or my haircut.”

Collin groans. “ Now? You want to fight about this now ?”

“Of course not. I’m wearing entirely the wrong outfit.” Harry crosses the room and wraps her arms around his neck from behind.

“Is this a fond embrace?” Collin asks, scowl deepening. “Or are you strangling me?”

“I’m still deciding.” Harry presses her cheek to the top of her brother’s head. He smells of the same cologne he’s always worn, earthy and rich like the inside of a wine cask. She sometimes catches a whiff of it in a crowd and finds herself possessed with a fierce longing to see him again.

There had been a time when Collin felt like the only person who could truly know her.

They had spent their youth stuck in the middle of two worlds, like crumbs fallen between cushions on a sofa—their mother had been a harlot with patrons who bought her pearls and fine clothes and, when she grew tired of the bordello where Harry and Collin spent the first decade of their lives, a townhouse in Westminster.

The other molls always eyed them sideways, but so did the lofty circles in which their money allowed them to run.

Harry and Collin had shared the loneliness of displacement, and leaned upon each other when their mother made it clear hers would never be a shoulder upon which they could cry.

But as they grew older, while Harry lived her life on a stage both literal and figurative, Collin had worked his way into the society that had been so unwelcoming to them, and stopped their gossip by making himself above reproach.

Anyone who met Collin Lockhart today would be shocked that his mother had been a whore and his upbringing that of a fatherless bastard in a Camden brothel.

Whereas no one was ever surprised to hear Harry’s origins.

Rather, once explained, most responded with something akin to “Ah, now I understand.”

Harry wouldn’t have begrudged Collin his choices, had those choices not left her feeling like something Collin was trying to scrape off his shoe, lest the smell follow him. There’s a reason they’ve hardly spoken in two years, in spite of living in the same city.

But here he is, in her room, wearing the same cologne, and she is reminded that missing him is the only thing more complicated than loving him.

She almost asks him to stay. They’ll drink tea out of whiskey glasses and play dominos and she can tell him about Macbeth and he can explain what he does for a living these days and why it’s accounting.

He’ll ask her to pick up her discarded socks, and she won’t, but she will kick them out of sight beneath the sofa, and they will complain about their mother, for even dead, her shadow still blots out the light sometimes.

Collin will switch from tea to liquor as they speculate who is summoning them to this mysterious manor house, and it will be easy to pretend they still know each other as well as they once did.

But then, from behind the bed screen, a voice calls, “Harry?”

Harry and Collin both turn as a woman emerges, her long red hair undone and falling to her waist in fuzzy tangles. Full lips part her heart-shaped face, her ample figure made somehow ampler by the fact that she is dressed only in one of Harry’s long shirts, the tails rucked up above her navel.

“And that’s my cue.” Collin stands, knocks back his tea like it really is whiskey, then claps Harry on the shoulder.

“We might as well ride to Longley together—shall I meet you at eleven? I assume you can make arrangements for your own mount since you know a man with a horse.” He keeps his gaze gentlemanly fixed on the mostly naked woman’s face as he gives her a nod. “Miss Swift.”

Mariah wiggles her fingers. “Collin. It’s been too long.”

“Just the right amount of time, I think.” Collin retrieves his hat from the stand beside the door before he turns to Harry. “Have a good night, Hal.” Then, with the delicate bite of salting meat, adds, “Good to see nothing has changed.”

As soon as the latch clicks behind Collin, Harry rounds upon Mariah. “If only your timing was half so good on stage.”

The force of Mariah’s disdain tips her head to the ceiling. Her hair wraps around her pale shoulders like tentacles. “I was weary of waiting. And you seemed to be approaching sentimentality. I couldn’t know how long you might go on.”

When Harry doesn’t move to her, Mariah steps forward. She presses her body against Harry’s, offering a smile and a view down the open neck of her shirt that has caused so many to lay themselves at her feet like a coat over a mud puddle.

Though they have known each other since they were young, there are still days when Harry thinks that only the Virgin Mary, being told she was chosen by God, can understand what it feels like to be blessed with Mariah’s particular attention.

Mariah has always had a way of smiling, of touching the arm, of saying her lover’s name paired with said arm touching and smiling that makes a person feel sanctified.

In Camden, gifts would arrive for her in staggering quantities, umatched in both their extravagance and variety—a duke in Gloucester had once sent her a tiger cub, and a French woman she had entertained a fortnight left her a set of sapphire-encrusted gold cuffs, which Mariah had been forced to surrender in a debtor’s tribunal the next year.

The Palace house could have been filled to capacity by those who thought themselves in love with Mariah Swift.

But Harry would not count herself among them.

She does not love Mariah Swift—some days, she isn’t even sure she likes her.

But by God, Mariah does make things easy.

There is no risk of broken hearts, long attachments, or unreasonable demands like monogamy or morality or washing off all their cosmetics before bed.

“I told you not to come,” Harry says. “I said I was tired.”

“Poor darling.” Mariah teases Harry’s shirt out of the waistband of her trousers. “Come to bed and I’ll make it better.”

Harry drops her head back, staring at the ceiling.

“My God, you are dramatic.” Mariah pushes away from Harry, the coo sloughed from her voice like snow sliding from a roof. “I hoped to do something nice for you, since you told me you get so lonely after the shows—”

“I never said that.”

Mariah drops her voice in an imitation less of Harry and more of Harry as Macbeth, playing to the galleries. “ Oh, Mariah, come stay with me, for I have no one to hold and the nights are long and cold. ”

“What I remember saying,” Harry says, “is the nights are long and cold because you take more than your share of the blankets when I let you in my bed.”

Mariah juts out her bottom lip. “Let me stay. Please.”

Harry feels Mariah’s knee slot between her legs, and the friction is like sinking into a warm bath. Well, not warm. With Mariah, it’s tepid and cloudy, and Harry knows she’s probably the third person to wash themselves in it that day.

But still. It’s better than the cold.

Harry presses Mariah backward into the vanity, and Mariah braces herself against it with a gasp of delight. “Fine. Go lie down while I get this beard off.”

“You could leave it on.” Mariah strokes the whiskers, fingers trailing off the ends of the mustache and up to Harry’s temples. “The gray makes you look distinguished. You’re going to age so well.”

“Oh, I’ll never grow old. Deal with the devil, remember? They wrote that Faust play about me.”

Mariah kisses her, tongue dipping into Harry’s mouth, then turns for the bed with a wiggle of her hips.

Harry watches her, already half regretting the concession.

Because no matter how fantastic Mariah’s ass is, the fact remains that Harry is tired.

It seems these days she’s always tired, especially after five long acts of Shakespearean tragedy performed by a company of women so staggeringly untalented that she has considered a preemptive exorcism to stop the Bard haunting them as retribution for slaughtering his works nightly.

There are days—more and more of late—that the thought of a night that ended before the next day began sounds like a treat rather than a bore.

What would it be like not to pick cabbage thrown by the audience from her hair before bed, or realize too late that Mariah’s rouge would never come out of her second-best shirt?

Or to have someone in her bed each night who was more than simply convenient and transient, and didn’t try to impale Harry on stage with a real—albeit blunted—knife when she suspects Harry of eyeing the ass of smiling, bloody Banquo between acts two and three?

When Harry had stood opposite the Duke of Edgewood’s sword, even though, judging by his grip alone, she had been fairly certain she had nothing to fear, she had considered for a moment that if she were to die that day, her legacy would be seven years of giving about half of her all on a Drury Lane stage so sticky with various bodily fluids one might catch a venereal disease just by walking across it; an unpaid tab at half the public houses this side of the Thames; and a fair-weather affair with a woman who regularly tried to stab her, and not in the fun, flirty way.

She retrieves the letter from the table and reads the message again.

Longley Manor, Surrey.

March the twenty-fifth, noon.

Don’t be late.

She decides she’ll leave at half past—no need to wake before eleven.