Page 8 of Lady Like

Harry sits in the Palace Theater’s most expensive subscription box with her feet wedged against the rail and her pipe lit.

The audience won’t arrive for hours, but on the stage below, painted Scottish landscapes are already being rolled from the wings.

Inverness, Dunsinane, and Birnam Wood all exaggerated so as to be seen from the galleries, though now that she’s in those galleries, all Harry can think is how they really should pay a set painter rather than have her and Mariah doing it themselves, several bottles deep at two in the morning.

Beside her, Collin is folded over like a pocketknife, the tips of his fingers steepled and his elbows resting against his knees.

His measured breaths are drowned out by the mastiff lying between them, snoring.

The dog trotted after their horses their whole ride home, sometimes falling behind when he was distracted by dandelion puffs, but always reappearing over the next knoll, and now he sprawls in the box between them, snorting in his sleep like a truffle pig on the hunt.

Collin sits up suddenly, running his fingers through his hair, and Harry watches him from the corner of her eye, hoping to find in his expression a yardstick by which to measure the day’s revelations.

But his face is blank as he watches the stagehands roll Forres Castle off the rail.

Either he’s taking the whole “bastard children of the prince regent” business better than she is, or she has simply forgotten how very good he is at sucking all his feelings in, like squeezing into a too-tight jacket.

“What day is the coronation?” Harry asks.

“The nineteenth of July,” Collin replies without looking at her. “Four months.”

“We don’t have to go along with this,” Harry says, trying to sound more certain than she feels.

“Can’t we extort him into giving us the houses outright?

Or muster an army against him? I suppose that would be treason.

Though with our claim, we may be able to play the Henry the Seventh defense and pass it off as a righteous seizure for the good of the nation. ”

“Please, Hal.” Collin leans back in his seat, matching his posture to hers. “You’ve only just become royalty, surely you can’t be a tyrant already.”

“The nerve of the man, to barge uninvited into our lives like it’s a public ball and force us to follow some arbitrary code of behavior because he thinks having a court of respectable nobles around him will make him look less profligate next time he empties the royal coffers building an Indian palace in Brighton!

” Harry says. “To say nothing of forcing me to wed.”

“Well, you are a woman of some years—”

“I would recommend you do not see that sentence through to completion.”

Collin raises his hands. “Marriage is hardly an outrageous idea, that’s all. And he did say we could decline.”

Harry had assumed that detail, hastily and halfheartedly pasted on to the meeting, was more of a formality. You can turn down your inheritance, in the same way you can rob the blind or steal from the elderly. You can, but it’s rather bad form.

And you can live in a pit above the Palace until the boards collapse and you fall through the floor.

You can keep living on less and less, shackled to a bawdy theater company to survive even though you really had hoped that by this age you’d be doing something that made you proud, rather than peevish and indeterminately itchy.

And the money. It was always about money.

She had done a quick accounting of her finances as they rode and realized that without her mother’s allowance, she could continue with her current lifestyle for approximately two and a half weeks.

Playing the men’s roles in Shakespeare has not left her an enviable dowry, and actresses have the average life of daffodils.

If she had any sense, she’d have swallowed her pride and agreed before they left the manor.

Below, the musicians make their way onto the stage below, unpacking their instruments for rehearsal. The tonal click of softly jostled strings underscores the stagehands’ footfalls. A linkboy is trimming the wicks along the front of the proscenium, lying on his belly and sliding across the floor.

“We will likely both wed eventually,” Collin says inadvisably.

“You only need speed it along a bit. What is so objectionable to you about that? Besides the legal inequality of the sexes,” he adds, preempting a tirade on women’s rights from Harry.

“You don’t think there is a man in England you could marry tolerably? ”

“Come now. You’ve met me.” Harry sweeps a hand over her gentleman’s duds.

“The aesthetic alone. You think any proper husband would let me to sit down to Christmas dinner with his family? And what are the chances that, should I somehow find this lightning strike of a man, I feel in any way tenderly toward him? And, believe you me, if I am to hand over everything I own, including my body, to someone, I must, at minimum, like him.”

Collin holds out his hand for the pipe and Harry passes it to him. “There is a compromise between marrying someone you love, and marrying a stranger to appease the prince regent. You might marry a friend.”

“Like Mariah?” Harry runs her foot along the dog’s silky belly, and he snorts in his sleep.

“If liking your partner is of the upmost importance to you, that may disqualify her.”

“I like Mariah!” Harry says. Collin busies himself with the pipe.

What neither of them need say aloud is that legally, she can only marry a man.

She will forever be a woman who has loved and desired and lain with the fairer sex.

She will never not be a woman who prefers gent’s clothes, a whore’s daughter, all the things she has worked her whole life to wear like medals rather than a scarlet letter.

Those pieces of her will not simply disappear, even if she marries respectably and changes her entire personality, and neither does she want them to.

They are her foundations. The things that in her youth she had thought made her strange are now the parts of herself she holds dearest. If the prince, or whatever husband he approves for her, forces her to tuck those things away to make herself more palatable to society, there would be nothing left of the life she had built herself.

Just knowing that the prince considers them such—that he thinks of her very existence as immoral—stirs her old insecurities.

Harry presses her hands over her face. “I like my independence,” she finally says. “That’s all.”

“Yes, but that independence will be dealt a significant blow once its financial backing is pulled.” Collin puts the pipe between his teeth, then adds, “And perhaps you might think of this as more than a material opportunity.”

“An opportunity to what, exactly?”

“Let go some of your more unsavory proclivities.”

“Ah.” Harry presses a hand to her forehead. “Now I recall.”

“Recall what?”

“Why we don’t speak anymore.”

“I only mean,” Collin says, grabbing her arm preemptively should she try to storm out, “there’s a halfway point between marrying a man you hate and one you love, and there exists a similar stop between this ”—he sweeps a hand up and down, indicating her frame, same as she had, but it’s so much more annoying when he does it—“and stuffing yourself into lace and petticoats and learning to watercolor. You don’t have to give up your whole self in order to be considered more savory.

But you may perhaps express it in a way that befits your age. And new station.”

Harry stares at him, debating what vicious name to call him before she storms out, but then Collin clears his throat and says, without looking at her, “My apologies. That came out rather coarser than I intended.”

“Thank God,” Harry says. “Because you sounded like an ass.”

“What I meant to say is, let me help you.”

“Help me become more savory ?” Harry asks, smacking her lips around the word. “Like a quiche?”

“The Season is still in its infancy,” Collin says. “I’ll do the circuit with you. I know enough of the right sort of people that I could get us into the parties and balls, and I can make introductions. Not every member of the ton is dull and prim—you may meet someone you like.”

Harry considers this. The idea of having to rely upon Collin for anything rankles her, to say nothing of what his idea of a suitable husband is and how irritating it will be to watch him force that definition on her like a prophet bringing down his gospel.

But if the prince is determined to see her a bride, and she is unwilling to marry a stiff-shirted lesser noble who calls her things like my lady wife, a suitor deemed appropriate by royalty will likely only be found in the particular drains her brother orbits.

Though if she is to endure her brother’s company, she refuses to get nothing out of it other than a dull husband. “Let me stay with you,” she says. “I’ll be tossed out of my rooms at the end of Macbeth unless I sign on for the next one.”

“Won’t you reup?”

“The prince asked me to resign. Well, not asked, but he strongly implied he doesn’t approve of Sapphic Shakespeare. And if I’m to be respectable now, I can’t be taking callers in some rank Drury Lane garret. Oh, I could even bring Havoc!”

“Who?” Collin asks.

“Havoc!” She nudges the mastiff with her foot. “That’s what I’ve decided to call him. It’s the line from Julius Caesar: ‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.’?”

She expects Collin will roll his eyes, but instead, this terrible pun earns one of his rare laughs. “You’d have to promise—”

“No blood, I swear to it. At least not once Macbeth is over. Speaking of.” Harry stands and stretches with her hands behind her head. Havoc stands too, dipping into a bow with his tail in the air and his toes curled. “I’ve got a beard to adhere. You should stay and see the show!”

Collin laughs again, colder this time. “As fetching as you look in those whiskers, Hal, I refuse to sit through five acts of lamentable Shakespearean tragedy performed by women with oversized codpieces.”

“Ah, but you see,” Harry says as she picks her way to the back of the box, Havoc at her heels. “That’s the joke!”

“It’s Macbeth, ” Collin calls after her. “There shouldn’t be any jokes.”