Mary Balogh - Slightly Wicked

She got to her feet and looked around. “This is the courtroom,” she said. “It is no longer an inn dining parlor but a courtroom, in which the very life of a noble man hangs in the balance. It is a desperate situation. There would seem to be no hope. They are all here, all the principal players of the drama.

Shylock sits in that chair.” She pointed at the chair Rannulf was occupying.

“I am Portia,” she said. “But I am disguised as a young man.”

Rannulf pursed his lips in amusement as she looked around again. She lifted her arms, pulled back her hair, twisted it, and knotted it at the back of her neck. Then she disappeared for a moment into the bedchamber and came back buttoning his caped cloak about her. She still looked about as different as it was possible to be from any man. And then she had finished doing up the buttons and looked up directly into his eyes.

Rannulf almost recoiled from the hard, controlled expression on her face.

“ ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ ” she told him in a voice to match the expression.

For a moment, foolishly, he thought that it was she, Claire Campbell, who was addressing him, Rannulf Bedwyn.

“ ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath,’ ” she continued, coming closer to him, her expression softening slightly, becoming more pleading.

Devil take it, he thought, she was Portia, and he was that damned villain, Shylock.

“ ‘It is twice blest.’ ”

It was not a very long speech, but by the time she had finished it, Rannulf was thoroughly ashamed of himself and ready to pardon Antonio and even go down on his knees to grovel and beg pardon for having considered cutting a pound of flesh from his body. She was bending over him, tight-lipped and keen eyed, waiting for his answer.

“By Jove,” he said, “Shylock must have been made of iron.”

He was, he realized, half aroused. She was very good. She could bring a role alive without any of the fancy theatrics he associated with all the most famous actors and actresses he had ever seen onstage.

She straightened up and smiled at him, unbuttoning his cloak as she did so.

“What else can you do?” he asked. “Juliet?”

She made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “I am two and twenty,” she said. “Juliet was about eight years younger and a pea-goose at that. I have never understood the appeal of that play.”

He chuckled. She was not a romantic, then.

“Ophelia?” he suggested.

She looked pained. “I suppose men like watching weak women,” she said with something like contempt in her voice. “They do not come any weaker than that silly Ophelia. She should simply have snapped her fingers in Hamlet’s face and told him to go and boil his head in oil.”

Rannulf threw his head back and shouted with laughter. She was looking pink and contrite when he lifted his head again.

“I’ll do Lady Macbeth,” she said. “She was foolish and could not sustain her wickedness, but she was no weakling for all that.”

“Her sleepwalking scene?” he asked. “Where she is washing her hands of blood?”

“There. You see?” She looked contemptuous again as she gestured toward him with one arm. “I suppose most men like that scene best. Wicked woman finally breaks down into madness because typical woman cannot be eternally strong.”

“Macbeth was hardly sane either by the end,” he reminded her. “I would say Shakespeare was impartial in his judgment of the relative strength of the male and female spirit.”

“I’ll do Lady Macbeth persuading Macbeth to murder Duncan,” she said.

And he, Rannulf supposed, was to be a silent Macbeth.

“But first,” she said, “I will finish my wine.”

Her glass was two-thirds full. She drained it in one gulp and set down the empty glass. Then she undid the knot of hair at her neck, and shook her hair free.

“Macbeth has just told his wife, ‘We will proceed no further in this business,’ ” she said. “He is backing out of the planned murder; she is spurring him on.”

Rannulf nodded, and she turned her back for a moment and stood quite still. Then he watched her hands ball slowly into fists and she turned on him. He almost got up from his chair and retreated behind it. The green eyes pierced him with cold scorn.

“ ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress’d yourself?’ ” she asked him quietly. “ ‘Hath it slept since, /

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale / At what it did so freely?’ ”

Rannulf resisted the urge to speak up in his own defense.

“ ‘From this time / Such I account thy love,’ ” she told him.

She spoke his lines too, leaning over him to do so and speaking in a low voice, giving him the impression that he was saying the words himself without moving his lips. As Lady Macbeth she whipped into him with her energy and contempt and wily persuasions. By the time she had finished, Rannulf could fully understand at last why Macbeth had committed such an asinine deed as murdering his king.

She was panting by the time she came to the end of her persuasions, looking cold and triumphant and slightly mad.

Rannulf found himself near to panting with desire. As her identification with the role she had played faded from her eyes and her body, they stared at each other, and the air between them fairly sizzled.

“Well,” he said softly.

She half smiled. “You must understand,” she said, “that I am somewhat rusty. I have not acted for three months and am out of practice.”

“Heaven help us,” he said, getting to his feet, “if you were in practice. I might be dashing off into the rain to find the nearest available king to assassinate.”

“So what do you think?” she asked him.

“I think,” he said, “that it is time for bed.”

For a moment he thought she was going to refuse. She stared at him, licked her lips, drew breath as if to say something, then nodded.

“Yes,” she said.

He bent his head and kissed her. He was quite ready to tumble her to the floor and take her there and then, but why put them to that discomfort when there was a perfectly comfortable-looking bed in the next room? Besides, there were certain bodily realities to consider.

“Go and get ready,” he said. “I’ll wander downstairs for ten minutes.”

Again she hesitated and licked her lips.

“Yes,” she said and turned away. A moment later the bedchamber door closed behind her.

The next ten minutes, Rannulf thought, were going to feel like an uncomfortable eternity.

Devil take it, but she could act.

Judith stood with her back against the bedchamber door after she had shut it, and closed her eyes. Her head was spinning, her heart was thumping, and she was breathless. There were so many reasons for all three conditions that she could not possibly sort through them all to regain her customary composure.

Primarily, she had drunk too much wine. Four glasses in all. She had never before drunk more than half a glass in one day, and even that had happened only three or four times in her life. She was not drunk—she could think quite coherently and walk a straight line. But even so, she had consumed all that wine.

Then there had been the intoxicating excitement of acting before an audience—even if it had been an audience of only one. Acting had always been a part of her very secret life, something she did when she was quite, quite sure she was alone and unobserved. She had never really thought of it as acting, though, but as the bringing alive of another human being through the words the dramatist had provided. She had always had the ability to think her way into another person’s body and mind and know just what it felt like to be that person under those circumstances. Sometimes she had tried to use that ability to write stories, but it was not in the written word that her talent lay. She needed to create or recreate characters with her very body and voice. When she acted the part of Portia or Lady Macbeth, she became them.

But tonight acting had been more intoxicating than the wine she had drunk. She had played for her audience of one better than she had ever played before. He had been both Shylock and Macbeth, and yet he had been Ralph Bedard too, and she had been strangely excited, exhilarated by him. It had seemed as if the very air between them were sizzling with invisible energy.

She opened her eyes suddenly and hurried toward the screen at the far side of the room. She had only ten minutes in which to get ready—less than ten now. Her portmanteau had arrived and been brought up, she saw with relief. She would have a nightgown to wear.

But she stopped abruptly even as she bent down to open the bag. Get ready? For what? He had just kissed her again. He was coming in ten minutes’ time—less—to take her to bed. To do that to her. She was not even fully aware, except in the vaguest, most sketchy of ways, just what that was. Her knees felt unsteady. She felt breathless and lightheaded again. She was not going to let it happen ... was she?

It was time to end the adventure. But it had been—it was —such a very splendid adventure. And there would be no others. Not ever. She knew that women who fell into poverty and lived as unpaid poor relations in the homes of their wealthier family members stood little or no chance of ever changing the condition of their lives. There was only now, today. And tonight.

Judith tore open the portmanteau in haste. She was wasting precious time. How embarrassing it would be if he returned to find her in her shift or before she had relieved herself or washed herself or brushed her hair! She would think later about it, about how she would avoid it. There was a wooden settle in the other room. With a pillow and her cloak and one of the blankets from the bed, it would make a tolerable sleeping place.

He must surely have stayed away for longer than ten minutes. She was standing in front of the fire, clad decently in her cotton nightgown, brushing her hair, when his knock came at the door and it opened before she could cross the room to it or call out any summons. She felt suddenly naked. She also knew that she must be more inebriated than she had realized. She felt a rush of longing rather than the horror she knew she ought to be feeling. She did not want to end the adventure. She wanted to experience that before her youth and her life came to an effective end. She wanted all of it—with Ralph Bedard. He was breathtakingly attractive—she wished there were a more powerful word than that for his appeal.

He stood looking at her with narrowed eyes, his lips pursed, his eyes moving slowly down her body to her bare feet.

“Is it your profession or your instinct,” he said at last, his voice low, “that has taught you to understate your appearance? White cotton, with not a frill or a flounce! You are very wise. Your beauty speaks loud and clear for itself.”

She was ugly. She knew that. People—even her own mother—had always compared her hair to carrots when she was a child, and it had never been a compliment. Her skin had always been too pale, her face too disfigured with freckles, her teeth too large. And then, by a horrible cruelty of fate, just when her hair had begun to darken a shade and the worst of her freckles had begun to disappear and her face and mouth had started to fit her teeth, she had begun to shoot up into something resembling a beanpole. She had grown as tall as Papa. She had felt only temporary relief when the beanpole had begun to take on the shape of a woman. To add insult to injury, that shape had come to include very full breasts and wide hips. She had always been an embarrassment to her family and worse than that to herself. Papa had been forever instructing her to dress more modestly and to cover her hair, and he had been forever blaming her for the leering glances men tended to send her way. It had always been a severe burden to be the ugly one of the family.

But tonight she was willing to accept that for some strange reason—probably the wine, since he had drunk more of it than she had—Ralph Bedard found her attractive.

She smiled slowly at him without removing her eyes from his. Wine had a strange effect. She felt a degree removed from reality, as if she were observing herself rather than up front being herself. She could stand in a bedchamber in her nightgown with a man, knowing that he intended taking her to bed within the next few minutes, and yet smile at him with slow invitation without feeling quite responsible for what she did. The observer was doing nothing to intervene on the side of virtue and respectability. And Judith did not want her to.