Page 68

“I heard your conversation with Mr. Hart,” he said, blocking the entrance to her dressing room.

“Thank you for confirming my assumption that you’ve always been nosy. Now let me pass.”

Jo attempted to step forward, but Mick casually leaned against the doorjamb and studied his nails, as if he hadn’t heard her request. “He isn’t wrong, you know. Have you ever heard of women playwrights?”

“Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, and Mary Robinson to name a few,” Jo gritted through her teeth.

“Mary Robinson was a mistress of the King. That’s the only way her drivel was ever published. Charlotte Charke spent her life as a man, and Eliza Haywood… Well, she spent her life being ridiculed by the satirists.”

Jo pursed her lips. “Ah, so you have heard of them?”

“That is not my point. The point, Jo, is that they are known because of how bad they were. Women are simply not made for this.”

“What about Jane Smith?” Jo raised a brow, as she mentioned a popular contemporary playwright, quite successfully running a theater, The Incomparable, in her own right.

Mick just laughed. “She is terrible. And so is her father, who by the way, is the one who actually runs the theater. Not her.”

This argument was pointless. Mick would never change his mind no matter what Jo said. She was just wasting her precious time and giving Mick leverage to ridicule her.

Jo stretched her lips into a faux smile. “Thank you for a lovely discussion. But I’d rather go now.”

He pulled a grimace. “But you see, if they had someone to help them… Perhaps they would be better. Suppose one of them had a friend. A man. Who had decided to help them rewrite the feminine drivel? Then perhaps they would have succeeded.”

“They did succeed. Without any help. Now, please, move.”

He didn’t budge. Didn’t even move a muscle. “I can be that friend for you, Jo. I, of course, will have to be named the author of your plays, but you’ll get half the money.”

Jo let out a bitter chuckle. “What a wonderful deal. But I have another idea. If you think you’re so good, how about you write your own play and submit it to Mr. Hart? And then you won’t have to lower yourself to reading and editing my… feminine drivel.”

Jo dove under his arm and opened the door to her dressing room.

Mick stepped away at last. “Think about it, Jo. You need a friend. What if someone finds out your true background Josephine? Then the entire theater will go down in flames. You don’t want that to happen, now, do you?”

Jo turned toward him, her nostrils flaring. “What do you know about my background, Mick?”

“Everybody in the theater knows. But they keep silent because who cares if the actress is a harlot? All of you are. But a playwright?” He shrugged with a disgusted grimace. “Yes. Perhaps people watched the plays written by the king’s mistress, but a lowly whore’s daughter? Not likely.”

Jo gripped the door handle tight, to the point of her knuckles whitening. She wanted to punch Mick in his nose. Instead, she slammed the door in his face.

“Do think about it,” he called from behind the door.

Jo whirled around in her dressing room, feeling more defeated than she had before.

Then things suddenly turned for the better as something surprising caught her eye.

A bouquet of beautiful flowers stood on her vanity table.

She slowly walked toward it, something warm unfurling inside her chest before she even saw who the flowers were from.

She fished out the card and read:

Please forgive my boorish behavior. I was a cad to not tell you the full truth. I was an arse to propose what I did. And I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to get you to forgive me.

* * *

For the next two weeks, Jo kept receiving flowers, sweetmeats, and even poems from Richard.

She never responded.