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She looked them full in the face. There was still starlight in their eyes. And she was still flying into love with them. And someday soon, they were going to shake the amber from their wings and fly away altogether.

“Ask Mrs. Alderwalsey to buy the tickets,” she said. “Be sure to tell her that you’re asking Mrs. Roberts next.”

Georgie’s grin was wolfish. They leaned closer, their voice dipping into its lowest register. “You are a menace.”

And it was as though she was back on the tower roof. Everything fell away but their look, their touch.

They pulled back slightly. “Tonight, I will take you to the theater.”

“Barn,” interjected Miss Quiddington. “Or a room at the inn, if we’re lucky.”

Elfreda pressed Georgie’s fingers before letting go, and smiled at the actresses, less awkwardly.

“In any case,” she said, “a night to remember.”

It was a promise she made to herself. However few or many nights she had with Georgie, she would treasure them all.

27

The night was lucky. The strollers played at the inn, on a stage demarcated by a green curtain and paper screens. Wire contraptions of hoops and nails had been hung from the ceiling, a candle stuck on each spike. Benches arranged at the front of the house served for boxes, and the standing audience jostled behind, stamping their feet and sloshing their pints, sending up roars of mirth well before the kettle drum beat the preamble to the opening entertainments.

“I should have brought my lute!” squealed Agnes when she saw the orchestra pit, three chairs at stage right set up erratically to avoid drips of wax from the crude chandeliers. In the chairs sat farmers with fiddles, hired on for the evening. Georgie recognized Robert Peach. The youth was much better with a bow than a fencing foil.

Crammed to capacity, the room was close, smoky, odorous, and suffocatingly hot. Mr. Arbuthnot’s company lacked elaborate properties, varied scenery, and celebrated talents. But the specially written prologue—spoken with wonderful naturalness by the theater manager himself—painted the village of Twynham as a wellspring of gentility and taste, and throughout his delivery, Georgie sensed an upswelling of beneficence from the Quality seated around them on the benches. The next moment, the pantomime commenced, with such an explosion of antic buffoonery even the most genteel spectators could be excused a few uncouth bellows and guffaws. The majority needed no excuse and shook the house.

Mr. Arbuthnot’s strollers had been lucky, but beyond that, they possessed whatever alchemy transforms the ordinary into something more, that guides an audience into waking dreams. The room was no longer a room but a series of worlds.

Elf was nearly crying with laughter, gripping Georgie’s hand, utterly focused on Harlequin, who whacked at nothing with a mop stick. Here was everything Georgie loved combined: the noise, the heat, the motley crowd, the spectacle, the feeling of aliveness too big for one body to hold. And Elf, holding on to them. The two of them holding on to each other, sharing it all.

She let go of their hand to applaud wildly when Charlotte and Louisa sang and danced between the acts. But she gripped them again during the play, which Mrs. Alderwalsey had requested from the repertoire—Macbeth. Georgie would have chosen something less grisly and tragic. Much Ado. All’s Well. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The performance, however, riveted completely. Sally had complained about the actors who’d deserted after the fire, over half of the company’s men, and all its male principals. This loss proved a boon, making for exhilarating casting. Women played Banquo, Donalbain, and Macduff. A gentleman of color played Macbeth, his expansive interpretation of that noble villain the most perfect Georgie had ever witnessed. Mrs. Arbuthnot played Lady Macbeth with a fiendish intensity. It mattered not at all that the dagger derived obviously from a drawer in the inn’s kitchen. Or that the witches appeared to the sound of thunder made by mortar and pestle.

When the afterpiece ended, and the cheers of approbation died down, illusion faded, and the revelers found themselves back in a beery public room. The innkeeper rapidly reclaimed his tables, and members of the company sat and ate a hearty supper, joined by Sir Hugh and other notables, while the rest of the audience poured rowdily out the door, or lingered in groups, conversing, laughing, and, in some cases, drinking additional pints.

Mrs. Alderwalsey received compliments on behalf of the strollers, enthroned on one of the fiddler’s chairs between the chandeliers. Georgie, Elf, and Agnes went to her to express their gratitude for their tickets, which she’d bestowed upon them free of charge. Mrs. Roberts, standing nearby with Jane Ratcliff’s mother, looked over with a sour expression, and Georgie guessed the price of her ticket had been set rather higher. Jane Ratcliff herself wasn’t in attendance, but Jane Slater was, only she was Jane Worrell now. She met Georgie’s eyes from across the room, then turned away as she was greeted by a second Jane—Jane Tetley, now Jane Avery. The two Janes put their heads together, whispering. Georgie gazed at them, an odd little pull in their chest, not exactly longing for the good old days, when every village gathering provided an occasion for mischief, but rather wistfulness. Their former accomplices were all but strangers, and there was no crossing the gulf between then and now.

Except both Janes suddenly returned their gaze and smiled. Their smiles were not the vapid, wifely smiles Georgie expected, but the familiar smiles, lively, and a little bit sly. And Jane Slater—no, Worrell—glanced at Elf and then at Georgie, and her smile shifted, became a tad more meaningful, and Georgie laughed aloud.

Before they could approach, the Janes were departing on their husbands’ arms, but even as the physical distance increased, the gulf seemed smaller. Georgie faced the uncomfortable thought that, perhaps, when they’d called on the Janes, they had been the one whose behavior made confidences impossible. They’d sat awkwardly with a teacup, imagining the Janes not so much busy with marriage as essentially altered by it. That was the law of the land. Marriage legally dissolved a woman’s personhood. But the law was just a story. Its claims were enforceable, not true. The Janes weren’t wives, or rather, they weren’t only wives. Maybe Georgie would have understood that more readily if they hadn’t thought of the Janes as the Janes in the first place. Each Jane had always been and was still living her particular life.

They wanted to rush after Jane Worrell and Jane Avery and apologize, but it wasn’t the time or the place, and what would such an apology do anyway?

They’d call again soon. They wouldn’t spend the visits apologizing. They’d spend the visits paying attention.

The claws of self-recrimination retracted, and hope unfolded its wings.

“It was Jane Worrell, wasn’t it?”

Georgie blinked. “What do you mean?” Elf was studying them with a slight smile. “What about Jane Worrell?”

Elf raised her brows…and puckered her lips.

They stared, speechless, caught entirely off guard.

“You’re blushing,” she informed them.

They recovered and leaned in, lowering their voice. “Because what you’re doing with your mouth makes me think about where your mouth has been.” They straightened, noting the result of their words with satisfaction. “Now who’s blushing?”

Elf scowled, pinkly. “I’m right, though.” She peered after Jane Worrell with intrigue. “She’s the one you kissed. And she knows, doesn’t she?” Elf whispered it. “How does she know?”