The blinding lights were on, he thought, blinking, but he was no longer sure how long he’d been onstage. Seconds? The set had changed—he’d have to speak to Eve, though he felt rather woozy, as if he’d left her a few hours ago and been drinking ever since. What was the stained glass doing in the back? Who’d authorized such an expense?
Someone cleared his throat, and Michael wheeled around, searching for his line.
But it wasn’t Paris nor Romeo nor even Juliet or Eve. It was an actor in a tawny frock coat with a waterfall of lace at his neck—he must speak to the costume manager as well—and the theater was empty.
Well, another theater perhaps, not the National Rose. One with hand-carved pews and an enormous painting of Henry VIII beyond its door.
The spiking adrenaline of missed cues and forgotten lines had nothing on finding oneself sucked out of a play into an unknown room with an unknown man. Sweat began to form on Michael’s back, and his mouth moved in an incoherent attempt to speak.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said, mildly incensed. “I asked you where Bishop Rothwell went.”
“I told you, John,” said a woman Michael hadn’t noticed. “He was called away.”
She stood apart from the man, arms crossed, in a gown of ethereal pink. Her words had been accompanied by a laser look at Michael that would have reduced the Greenland ice cap to a large cup of steaming tea.
Why were these people dressed for Shakespeare—or Congreve, really—yet nothing from their mouths rung of any play he’d ever seen? His gut began to tighten.
“Called away?” the man she’d called John said. “For what?”
“An emergency in the bishopric.” The “-pric” lingered on the woman’s tongue a second longer than necessary, though this time the look that accompanied it was for her companion.
She was beautiful—stunning, really—with hair like wet gold and eyes that shone an emerald green, but everything about her carriage and voice carried the expectation of being obeyed. In the instant Michael could spare to process the players rather than his own uncertain circumstances, he could see John might be an overbearing prig but the woman was flat-out trouble.
“And this…cleric?” John looked at Michael’s habit with poorly concealed distaste.
“The bishop’s colleague,” she said. “An ascetic, it seems.”
The two clearly weren’t actors—though they were nearly as irritating—and this wasn’t a set. Somehow, between stepping onstage and the lights going up, Michael had lost the National Rose. What had happened? The closest he’d ever gotten to feeling what he felt now was playing Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, when the actor playing Algernon jumped twenty-seven pages ahead, leaving Michael thrust unexpectedly into Act Three’s happy engagement to Gwendolen with all the play’s loose ends resolved, hoping in earnest for the curtain. At least Michael had known what theater he’d been in then—and what play.
“Is he capable of marrying us?” John asked, dubious.
“I should think so,” she said. “It’s woven into the burlap.”
In a remote place in his head, at a distance from the panic that had seized control of his cerebellum, the amusement in her words cut him. He may not be the most rehearsed Friar Laurence who ever walked the stage, but that was certainly no reason to impugn the character’s inner nobility.
“Then let him do it.” John’s exasperation was growing. “You’re still willing, aren’t you, my love? Even without a proper bishop?”
“Most willing.” She smiled sweetly, but Michael saw the falsehood even if her fiancé did not. “Are we not in need of witnesses, though?” she added.
John growled. “They were behind me a moment ago. Let me find them. I’ll be but a moment.” He strode out.
Perhaps this was a dream—a dream conflating all the Shakespeare and Farquhar and Marlowe that Michael had ever done—with a generous helping of Wicked thrown in for good measure. Then it came to him. The potion.
He willed his fingers open and looked at his quaking palm.
A hand snatched the empty bottle away.
“Wake up,” the woman said in a razor-sharp whisper, and now he realized the voice he’d heard had been hers. “Listen carefully. I called you here for one reason. Keep that blackguard from marrying me or I shall shrivel your man parts like dates in the Barbary sun.” She stashed the bottle in her bodice and turned, smiling, to greet her fiancé as he returned with two footmen straight out of Molière.
Michael felt as if a blast furnace had scorched him from brows to sandals. He also felt his indignation grow. No one threatened Michael’s man parts, certainly not in a theater—even if this wasn’t exactly a theater or a play…or even a space he remotely recognized.
“Are you ready?” John said.
Michael held up a finger. “Actually, I’m not.”
He felt rather than heard the woman’s exhale of relief.
“Your fiancée was just telling me how truly eager she is to begin life as your wife,” Michael said. “However, she has made me aware of a few, well, shall we say blemishes upon her conscience, and I know she wishes to unburden herself before the happy marriage is consummated.”
John blinked. “Undine…my fiancée…wishes to confess?”
Undine, was it? Like the water fairy in Giraudoux’s play? More like Ursula in The Little Mermaid.
“I most certainly do not,” she said, eyes flashing.
“No?” Michael shrugged. “Well then, let us proceed apace with the ceremony. Good sir, do you have the Book of Common Prayer?”
“Wait,” Undine said.
Michael turned, triumphant. “Aye?”
“I might have something to confess after all,” she said with an iron glare.
“Ahh,” Michael said, hand over his heart, “the heart wishes to forget, but the soul demands its redemption. Aye, let us retreat to a private place, where you can unburden yourself of everything—everything—that I and the Lord need to know.”