Page 35 of Lady Like

She’d like to clean herself up before she sees Emily—the excitement of the final performance, plus a finger of whiskey before the curtain, had caused the stagehand to dump blood over her head in such a thick stream it had dislodged her mustache.

She had felt it slip midway through Macduff declaring herself from her mother’s womb untimely ripped, which really is no way for a king of Scotland to go.

Nor is half mustached any way for her to greet Miss Emily Sergeant.

But she’s far more worried that if left unattended backstage, Emily will step on a nail or fall through a trapdoor or be accosted by the three witches—played by a pair of septuagenarian sisters and an unsettling doll they have given both a name and a tragic personal history—and be scared off.

So Harry follows the stagehand to the door, where waits Miss Emily Sergeant with a small bouquet of poppies and a bottle-shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper.

“Well,” Harry says as she approaches Emily with bloody arms open. Emily shies away with a laugh. “You saw the play.”

“I did!”

“And?”

Emily presses a hand to her mouth. “It was bad.”

“How bad?”

“Quite bad.”

“God.” Harry pulls her shirt up over her face, forearms squelching against the bloody material. “I did try to warn you.”

“I thought you were exaggerating! I didn’t understand a lot of it.”

“Neither do we.”

“You’re excellent, though. Even when you’re just standing on stage, you’re hard to look away from.”

“Truly? Or are you just tossing Spanish coins because you regret coming?”

Emily’s mouth twitches. “Bit of both. Oh! And I brought champagne!” Emily peels the paper back from the bottle to show Harry the label. “Violet said to tell you the champagne is hers— she was here with me, but had to relieve the nurse before Martin got home.”

“Well, please give Violet my thanks.”

“The flowers are from me,” Emily says, color high in her cheeks. “And the champagne is really from the both of us.”

Oh God, Harry thinks. She should tell Emily about Alexander now, for that little wrinkle of Emily’s nose as she smiles cuts Harry straight to the quick.

“Would you like a tour?” Harry asks. “Everyone has to change before they go to the taproom. And we can drink a bit of this before anyone else gets to it. Do watch where you step. And your head. And where you put your hands. Lots of exposed nails.”

“Then why don’t you lead me?” Emily asks, and takes Harry’s hand.

Harry leads Emily through the labyrinthine backstage and into the wings, where the banquet table is still spread with the prop dishes and half-eaten bits of the roast made out of gelatin so none of the actors will actually eat on stage, though all of them do anyway.

“Fetch me those glasses, will you?” Harry asks, and Emily retrieves the goblets as Harry clears a spot for them to sit.

Emily sniffs the stained interiors. “Was there real wine in these?”

“Yes, King Duncan likes to get a little tap-hackled before she kicks it. Helps her get an early start on napping through acts four and five.” Harry presses the heel of her hand to the champagne cork, and it pops with much less resistance than she had anticipated.

She leaps backward as the warm foam drips over her hand.

Emily squeals, shoving the two sticky goblets under the bottle like she’s filling from a tap.

Glass in hand, Harry perches on the edge of the table, while Emily sits in the red velvet throne at the head. “To Shakespeare,” Harry says, raising her glass. “With deep regret.”

“To Harriet Lockhart,” Emily replies, lofting her own with such enthusiasm some of the champagne sloshes over the sides. “The worst king of Scotland to ever grace the London stage.” Harry clinks her glass against Emily’s.

Emily takes a long gulp, like one might a beer, then draws back, coughing.

“Easy.” Harry laughs. “Do you like it?”

Emily presses a hand to her chest, running her tongue over her teeth. “I didn’t expect it to be bubbling.”

“That’s a bit less alarming when it’s cold—you’re meant to serve it chilled.”

Emily taps a finger against her chin, pretending to consider this. “Isn’t there a saying about gift horses and not looking them in the mouth?”

“Might as well count the teeth while I’m in there.” She offers Emily her arm. “Now the tour?”

“That isn’t your blood on your shirt, is it?”

Harry hops down from the table, brushing her hands off on her trousers. “Not tonight, though we’re not known for our aim with those swords.”

Harry lets Emily run her hand along the fly lines in the wings and poke around in the costume rack.

She tries on a range of hats from past productions, and leaves the closet sporting a feathered tricorn and an Elizabethan ruff tied loosely around her neck.

As they walk, Emily finishes the champagne, drinking straight from the bottle until there’s none left.

By the time they reach the proscenium, Emily is well on her way to drunkenness.

“Is this the stage?” she gasps as she runs ahead of Harry.

“It’s so small!” A few of the stagehands still lurking in the wings glance at them.

One of them gives Harry a suggestive eyebrow wiggle with his tongue pressed against his cheek.

Harry flips him a two-fingered salute as she crosses to where Emily is leafing through a rack of backdrops like they’re the pages of a book.

She pulls back one far enough that Harry can see too and exclaims in delight, “It looks just like a castle!”

“That is the idea. Steady on.” Harry grabs Emily and pulls her backward before she learns the hard way not to put too much faith in the structural integrity of canvas.

Emily is distracted by a piece of scenery just shifted from the wings and grabs Harry’s hand, dragging her over to it. “And a balcony! There’s a real balcony! What’s the famous bit with the balcony?”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“Here, help me up.” Harry guides Emily onto the platform the structure is built upon, then up the hidden stairs to the balcony itself.

It’s only a few feet off the ground, but Emily looks out over the empty audience like she’s at a great height.

“I’ll be Juliet,” she says, then points to Harry.

“Hide in those bushes there.” Harry obediently conceals herself in what is not a bush but rather a sheep moldering from As You Like It refashioned into a bush.

Emily turns toward the audience, empty bottle pressed to her chest. She takes a deep breath, then hollers, “ Romeooooo! Helloooooo, Romeo! ” She turns to Harry and says in a stage whisper, though whether the volume is an actor’s choice or a drunken miscalculation, Harry can’t be sure, “I don’t know the lines. ”

“You’ve got it in one,” Harry says. “Juliet says, Helloooooo, Romeo, and then Romeo says—” And here she cups her hands to her mouth and hollers upward in imitation of Emily: “ But soooooooft! Whatlightthroughyonderwindowbreaks! It is the east, and Emily the sun!”

“That,” Emily says with great seriousness, leaning so far over the rail that Harry almost reaches out to catch her preemptively, “is not the line.”

“ Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon —” Harry hoists herself up so she is standing on the balcony beside Emily, the rail between them and Harry’s feet wedged through the posts.

Emily shrieks in surprise as Harry lets go the balustrade, grabbing her around the waist and pinning them together, Emily’s weight in counterbalance to her own holding her in place.

The bottle falls from Emily’s hand and rolls to the edge of the balcony.

Harry expects Emily will squirm free, but instead, she relaxes, her body soft against Harry’s.

Then she reaches up and wraps her arms around Harry’s neck.

All the lines—if she ever knew them—are driven from Harry’s mind as her senses flood with the smell of Emily’s hair.

The curve of her hips. The fine bow of her lips.

“Something…something about the moon. I can’t recall the rest.”

Emily lets out a soft laugh. “That’s a shame.”

“But there’s a bit later where she leans her hand upon her cheek.

” Harry takes Emily’s hands in her own and guides her like she’s a doll, pressing their cupped palms to Emily’s cheek.

“And Romeo thinks to himself, damn, I wish I were a glove, then I too might touch her cheek.” She unfurls her hand over Emily’s, and when Emily looks at her, Harry can’t ignore how this position, with Emily’s face cradled in her hands, feels like the prelude to a kiss.

“And then?” Emily asks. She wrinkles her nose just a little, and her lips are petal pink and her skin is so soft and Harry has a hand upon her cheek…

She has waded further into these waters than she ever intended.

Harry is suddenly not just out of her depth, but has stepped off a shelf into open ocean, turning to find no sight of land.

She is going to drown at only the feeling of her hand atop Emily’s on her cheek. She can’t hold her breath any longer.

The trouble is not that she wants to kiss Emily Sergeant.

She, though, has wanted to kiss Emily since they first met, because Harry has always fallen a little in love with any woman who yelled at her, abstract and hypothetical and mostly confined to her fantasies of being tied to a bedpost and bossed about.

The trouble is that she wants to make her dinner.

She wants to fasten Emily’s necklaces for her as she lifts the hair off the back of her neck, and argue about trivial things like Harry’s inability to put anything back where it belongs.

She wants to plant flowers in a garden outside a house where they both live.

She wants to button her dresses and share a hairbrush, finding Emily’s long gold strands there among her own.

She wants to lie quietly together every evening in bed, let Emily steal the blankets and ruin Harry’s sleep.

She wants her whole life studded with remnants of Emily Sergeant.

She wants to trip over Emily with every step.

And that banal domesticity, that longing for more than Harry ever thought she wanted, tugs deep inside her.

Think of Longley, she tells herself. Think of a house, and money, and constancy. Think of what your life could be.

But it’s Emily ringing like a bell inside her heart, smiling up at her and leaning in so her nose touches Harry’s chin. “Go on, I want to hear the next bit.”

“Emily Sergeant,” Harry says, and she almost doesn’t recognize the timber of her own voice. “I don’t know what to do now that I’ve met you.”

Emily’s brow creases, and Harry is gripped by cold fear that she has been too bold. “That’s not Shakespeare.”

“No, that’s me.”

“You in the play?” Emily asks. Their hands are still stacked upon her cheek. “Or you in real life?”

And this, Harry thinks, is surely the moment.

Take the feral thing she has never truly let into her heart and domesticate it.

Let it come into her house and lie before her fire, eat at her table, and sleep in her bed.

Let it shred her window treatments and tear up the carpets.

Let love ruin her. “Which do you want it to be?”

Which is when, from the wings, Mariah Swift’s voice calls, “As there seems no good time to interrupt, I suppose I’ll step in now.”