Chapter One
The Honorable Fenella Grantley glanced quickly along the corridor before she tiptoed past her mother’s sitting room. Lady Grantley’s avid curiosity about her only child’s plans for the day was inconvenient at best. Fenella loved her mother dearly, but she found it difficult to turn aside the questions without appearing uncivil. And her mother was bound to want to know how her evening with George had gone. Lord George Headington was rapidly becoming a thorn in Fenella’s side, but her mother’s hopes in that direction were, if not openly expressed, obvious to the dullest intelligence.
She hurried down the horseshoe staircase and across the hall to the front door. To her relief, none of the servants were around and, most importantly, Collins, the butler, was nowhere to be seen. Collins had an uncanny ability to get information without appearing to ask for it, and Fenella was in no mood for questions from anyone.
She stepped out of the house onto a frigid Albemarle Street. It was not quite midmorning and the street, normally busy with hackney carriages and delivery carts, was unusually quiet. The winter had been vicious, and on freezing days like this one, the residential streets of Mayfair tended to be almost deserted.
She turned up the collar of her sable coat against a violent gust of icy wind and quickened her step, looking for a hackney, but she had reached Piccadilly before she saw one. The wide, shop-lined thoroughfare was busy with foot and carriage traffic and she waved down a hackney with little trouble.
“Gower Street,” Fenella told the cabbie as she climbed in, grateful to be out of the wind for a minute. Alone in the musty interior she felt her spirits lift. She always felt this heady sense of freedom once she was on her way to Bloomsbury. She reveled in the sense that no one knew where she was, not even her dearest friends and certainly not her mother. No one knew where she was going or how she would spend her morning. Apart from the time she spent with Diana and Petra, life seemed, these days, to have a monotony to it. There was no sense of expectation or the possibility of surprise. She knew she had no right to feel this way; she should be thankful for her life of privilege and comfort. But somehow it didn’t seem to be enough, and however often she chided herself for being ungrateful and spoiled, she couldn’t shake off the grayness of her mood. And whenever she thought of Lord George Headington, the grayness grew darker and thicker.
The carriage turned the corner from Bloomsbury Square onto Gower Street, and Fenella fumbled in her change purse for the fare, her spirits lifting anew as she opened the door and jumped to the pavement, reaching up to the cabbie with the coins. He took them with a nod before taking a swig from a hip flask, clearing his throat and spitting phlegm onto the far pavement. Even in the bitter cold, the air was thick with the foul-smelling smoke from the sea coal fires of the poor and the heavy smoke from the anthracite heating of the houses of the rich. A day spent on London streets produced labored breathing and phlegm-filled lungs.
But Fenella was unaware of the polluted air; in her present uplifted mood, it smelled crisp, redolent of freedom. Bloomsbury was a respectable if unfashionable part of London, and one that had become familiar ground in her weekly forays over the last year. She went up the steps of a narrow, terraced house halfway along Gower Street and let herself in through a front door badly in need of repainting. The narrow hallway was equally in need of redecorating, the skirting boards scuffed, the linoleum on the floor scratched and lifting at the edges. The air was chilly despite the rattling huff from a steam radiator and the gaslight showed only dimly through its dust-coated sconce on the dingy, gray wall.
A narrow staircase rose to the upper floor from which the sounds of scales on a piano drifted down. Fenella hurried up the stairs to the first-floor landing. The piano was louder, coming from behind one of the closed, badly painted doors along the corridor. The chill light of the February morning showed through a grimy window at the far end of the corridor. Fenella opened a door halfway along.
“Good morning, everyone,” she greeted the small group of people gathered around a long table in the large room. They were all huddled in coats, gloved fingers fumbling with sheaves of paper in front of them. Another steam radiator grumbled ineffectually from beneath a window, which looked out onto the street.
“Oh, good, you’re here at last,” commented an elderly man with a distinguished mane of silver hair sitting at the head of the table. His threadbare frock coat, fingerless gloves and stringy woolen muffler did nothing to diminish the power of his presence.
Fenella refrained from pointing out that she was actually five minutes early. “My apologies, Cedric, I didn’t realize I was keeping everyone waiting.” She offered a general smile, remarking, “It’s bitter out there,” as she took a spare seat at the table, drawing her coat closer around her.
“It’s bitter in here,” a young man muttered through his muffler. “If we’re to continue meeting like this through the winter, Cedric, we need a kerosene stove or something.”
Cedric Hardcastle, an irascible man at the best of times, ran his little drama school out of this run-down Bloomsbury house on a shoestring and glared at the speaker. “If you can pay for the fuel, Robert?”
Robert muttered something and chewed the tip of a pencil, staring down at the scratched tabletop. Fenella winced. She was the only member of this troupe who could afford to supply both stove and fuel, but she tried not to draw attention to her privileged world. They were all here for one reason: a passion for drama and a longing to tread the boards themselves. Cedric had been a well-known classical actor until alcohol and memory loss had rendered him incapable of taking the stage, so he’d set up his acting school, the only one of its kind, in the hopes of making some kind of a living. It was a paltry one at best.
Fenella picked up the sheaf of papers in front of her. It was an unfamiliar script; in general, their readings were from various forms of classical drama.
“We’re reading a new play today,” Cedric announced. “And we’re very fortunate to have the playwright with us to interpret any complexities in the script. Edward, do you have anything to say before we start?” He nodded toward the shadows at the far side of the room.
Fenella looked up from the papers, wondering why she hadn’t noticed the stranger sitting on the high stool when she’d first entered the room. When he stood up and stepped forward out of the shadows, she wondered even more at her initial failure to notice him. His physical presence was significant. He was a tall man with broad, powerful shoulders and square, competent hands. Fenella had always been drawn to a man’s hands. She liked them well-manicured and capable-looking. This Edward’s certainly fit that bill. She offered him a curious and friendly smile and was rather put off to encounter something akin to a scowl. The effect of the scowl was somewhat diminished by his eyes, which were of the most penetrating, startling blue Fenella had ever come across. Thick, unruly black eyebrows matched the equally untidy thatch of black hair flopping on his forehead and curling over his collar. It gave him a rakish air. It was a pity about the scowl, she thought.
She glanced down again at the script. “Edward Tremayne” was written boldly on the title page, and beneath it, Sapphire. The only Tremaynes she knew socially, Viscount Grayling and Lady Julia, were the children of the Earl of Pendleton, but this morose individual couldn’t possibly be associated with that family. He reminded her of an ill-tempered, scruffy mongrel, with his black, overlong hair much in need of a brush. Which, of course, was most uncharitable of her, and Fenella was not, in general, uncharitable.