Free Now Face to Face by Karleen Koen

tomorrow.

 

    Chapter Three

    I N L ONDON, BACKSTAGE IN A CROWDED THEATER, L AURENCE Slane, an actor all the rage in the city, moved the oil over his face that would take the paint and rouge from it. Behind him, down the corridor, he could still hear the applause from the audience, still hear the name Laurence Slane being called.
    “They are throwing fans and orange peels,” said Colley Cibber, who owned this theater and wrote the plays for the troupe. “Go back onstage and let them have another look at you.” Cibber was excited. It had been a while since anything had livened up audiences the way this Laurence Slane did.
    Slane moved past stacks of painted scenes—of castles, drawing rooms, forests—past the ropes that brought the curtain down, past his fellow actors and actresses, and stepped out onto the stage, ignoring the ladies’ fans that littered it.
    Directly to his right and his left were the best seats in the house, in boxes rising one above the other, those inside all but onstage themselves. Sometimes, depending on how well tickets sold, the audience sat in chairs directly upon the stage. In these boxes this evening, standing, applauding him, were a group of the King’s ministers and their wives, also some members of the famous Tamworth family, including the present young Duke and one of his aunts.
    Candles in lanterns were flickering at the stage’s end; just beyond,
    Slane could see the pit—the cheapest tickets, because the audience stood—and past it were the benches and then behind them the galleries, holding yet more people, footmen and servants in the upper ones. The clapping had increased at the sight of him, and he stood a moment, allowing it, the smell of orange peel sharp in his nostrils.
    From the pit, someone held up a rough bouquet of white roses. The signal at last. Slane felt his heart swell open with an emotion like blood lust, like the moment when a man takes his first step toward a seen enemy in battle.
    The signal meant the Bishop of Rochester would see him.
    He leaned over to take the roses and held them aloft a moment, over his head like a trophy—indeed they were a trophy—before walking off to the sound of his name called over and over again, to the clatter of more ladies’ fans hitting the stage, the stamping of feet upon the floor.
    “I am going to extend the play,” Cibber said, blinking like the rabbit of a man he was. “Four—no, five more days.”
    Most plays enjoyed only a brief life before the audience tired of them and began to throw things at the actors and actresses. “You are performing bears, like the ones baited by dogs across the river,” Cibber told the actors. “Keep them entertained, or they will turn on you.”
    Standing before a bit of chipped mirror, holding the roses crooked in his elbow, Slane removed the rest of the paint on his face. Though the face that stared back at him was calm, the mind behind it was leaping.
    He had received the signal. The Bishop of Rochester would see him.
    Weeks of the most careful maneuver and intrigue lay behind these white roses. Rochester, a bishop of the Church of England, was a leader in the Tory party, a faction of the English Parliament that King George chose to ignore—to his peril. Slane was a gosling, part of an elite corps of spies for King James III. He’d been here in London since June, to make an identity for himself, and to see Rochester, who trusted no one—and with good reason.
    They had been planning an invasion since word of the magnitude of the South Sea Bubble reached them. Jamie, the Pretender, King James III, son of James II, nephew of Charles II, brother to the traitor queens, Mary and Anne, had been crowned in 1715 in Scotland as King of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But Scotland was as far as Jamie had advanced toward his crown. His generals had lost the battles to the generals of George of Hanover, already here.
    “The South Sea Bubble has burst too many dreams,” wrote