There wasfail spectacularly, and then there was…this.
“What the devil,” he repeated through clenched teeth, “are you doing here?”
She held up a sheaf of parchment. “I ran out of paper whilst enumerating my production suggestions for the manager of the Olympic Theatre. As I was exiting that stationer’s shop”—she pointed over her shoulder—“I glimpsed you here.”
He closed his eyes.
“I fully confess I should not have eavesdropped,” she said quickly. “I just… It occurred to me that you might be using the new calling cards for the first time, and I didn’t want to miss the moment.”
“We didn’t get that far,” Jacob said dryly.
“Did you tell him you were Sir Gareth Jallow?”
He held up the calling cards. “I’m not Jallow, remember?”
“That’s right. You deserve to make it as yourself.” She twined her fingers with his. “Why don’t you duck around the corner for a moment? That way, you can deny any knowledge of how some publisher’s young assistant was beaten into a whimpering mess by a woman.”
Jacob let out an angry breath and felt a fragment of his embarrassment vanish with it. To Vivian’s eyes, he hadn’t been summarilyhumiliated by a lad almost half his age. In her eyes, Jacob was a hero. A brave warrior daring to show his face where it was not wanted. Unafraid to face his fears, to confront the obstacles in his path.
But he didn’t want to be the loser who tried and failed.
He wanted to be the hero worthy of capturing her heart.
29
As much as Viv yearned to bang on the publisher’s door until the scornful apprentice reappeared so she could brain him with her boot, a stint in gaol for assaulting an Englishman would not improve her circumstances or Jacob’s.
So she gnashed her teeth, clenched her fists, and furiously scripted a satisfying alternate ending in her head as they rode together to the Wynchester residence.
Viv: Do you know who you’ve disrespected?
Publisher: [in dawning horror] Sir Gareth Jallow?
Viv: Mr. Jacob Wynchester!
Spontaneous flock of Demeraran chickens: [pecks holes in every sheet of paper and gums up every printing press with rivers of chicken shite]
Outwardly, Jacob voiced no anger or even mentioned what had happened. A casual onlooker might have thought him unbothered—or at least worn down to apathy after a lifetime of worse incidents—but Viv was close enough to feel the stiffness in his spine and the tightly coiled tautness of his muscles.
If that hateful wretch had only known whom he was speaking to! Of course, having to be a prize-winning poet of nationwide fame in order to be treated like a human was just as heinous. If the bar for acceptance was so high that even Sir Gareth had doors slammed in his face, how could anyone else have the ghost of a chance?
As Jacob handed Viv down from the horse, a suspicion formed.
“When you arranged for my play to be performed, what specifically did you say about the playwright?”
“That you are very talented and that they would be fools not to host your debut.”
“You said that about Miss Vivian Henry?” she asked as she followed him up to the house. “Or ‘V. Henry,’ scribe of undisclosed sex who will be assumed to be masculine?”
“I praised Miss Vivian Henry.”
And the theater manager had said yes?
“What else did you say about me?” she insisted. “Do they know—”
“I did not lie,” he replied evenly. “If your question is whether I preemptively described you as a formerly enslaved immigrant Black female maid-of-all-work and advice columnist from Demerara, the answer is no, those topics didn’t come up. In the interest of expediency, I refrained from unnecessarily volunteering an overabundance of irrelevant details.”
“Who I am isveryrelevant,” Viv said. “It’s a play about equality and suffrage. I’m uniquely qualified to depict the reality of—”
