Free A Mummers' Play by Jo Beverley

had turned out to be rags and straw.
    Simon, Simon. Why did you do this?
    For she had no doubt that he had. She remembered that dizzy spell back in Charles’s office, when she’d felt guided to Torlinghurst. But she’d not been brought here for revenge. Simon had guided her here this Christmastide to learn this truth so that she could put all this behind her, pick up her life again, and live it to the full.
    She looked at Jack. “I feel lost. I don’t exist.”
    He rose slowly and came over to the bed. She saw his deformed but beautiful hand and experienced an insight. Or perhaps it was a message from beyond death.
    “One musket ball got you.”
    He followed her gaze down to his hand. “In the ambush, yes. How did you know?”
    “I guessed. You tried to save him.”
    “Of course. I tried to save them all.” He took a deep breath. “I saw the flash of the musket and put out my hand to stop the ball. It was instinctive but futile. It went through and into him. I stood there begging them to shoot me. . . .”
    He was lost again in the past—how much time did he spend back there, begging for death?—but then he shook his head and reached out to gently touch her cheek. “Put it behind you, Justina. Please. It’s what he’d want. I remember talking once to a Portuguese priest who’d traveled in the East. He told me that there they believe that too much grief ties the dead to us and stops them from moving on. I think it’s time for us both to let Simon go. Can we try?”
    He held out that injured hand and she put hers into it.
    He drew her out of the bed and to the window. Clear in the midnight-blue sky shone the Christmas star. “I would consider myself lucky for the first time in years,” he said, “if you would stay with me and help me make something of this strange new life.”
    She turned to look at him. “Why?”
    “Perhaps because you are the one person with whom I can be myself. I’m so tired of disguises. If I have to play the duke, I’d like to be able to retreat to these rooms now and then and just be Jack.”
    “Simon loved you.”
    He understood her. “Yes, I want to marry you for his sake, too. He can’t like seeing you in servitude to the dragon.”
    Justina chuckled, and it was like the cracking of a shell. “Haven’t you realized that was a fabrication? Your great-aunt doesn’t know I exist.”
    He stared at her. “Disguises indeed! How did you get into Torlinghurst, then?”
    “I came with the mummers.”
    Now he was smiling as if it were a newfound skill for him, too. “The fair maiden Melicent!”
    “Yes, though I thought of myself as Delilah.”
    The smile didn’t fade. “A role you play very well.”
    “I don’t think so. You still have your hair and your eyes, your grace.”
    “You’re just lucky that I don’t have any coins in the pocket of this robe,” he said with a wicked twinkle.
    The ability to tease was as weak as the ability to walk might be to an invalid. But there was hope that it might grow stronger in time.
    “What forfeit were you planning to inflict?” she asked.
    “You’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps it depends on your answer to my proposal.”
    Justina realized she hadn’t said whether she would marry him or not. Moreover, she didn’t know.
    She turned to look at the shining star. “I wonder what Melicent thought when the dragon was dead and she realized she was supposed to bind herself to George for the rest of her life.”
    He rested a hand on the nape of her neck and rubbed her there. It was a touch that offered strength and caring all her life long. “Perhaps she saw that George needed her, and that was why he’d braved the dragon in the first place.”
    “The George downstairs thought he’d conquered his maiden.”
    He turned her gently to him, his hands on her shoulders. “This George has no such illusions. You have conquered me. But as I told you, I was slain years ago. I would listen to Simon speaking of his Justina, and look at