Being frustrated, though, didn’t eliminate his problem. He now had twenty-seven days remaining in which to find a wife, all because when he was eleven years old, his parents had written up an agreement that their sons would wed—and that their brides would be English, damn it all—before their youngest, Eloise, married the man of her choosing. And she’d been engaged for two months, now.
Well, he was fucking tired of listening to reason, tired of trying to find common ground with delicate lasses just out of the schoolroom when he was but a month shy of his thirtieth year. He was tired of wondering if one of those hothouse flowers hovering about the ballroom would swoon, should he ask her to dance. Worse, he was tired of trying to figure out which likely-looking young thing would play pretty and agreeable, and then turn into a cold shrew who had no other goal but to wed a title and rule over the dim giant with the thick Scottish brogue.
As he wandered through the mostly empty hallways and staircases of the Saint Genesius, he considered all the lasses to whom he’d already been introduced. Some were pretty enough, a few had their wits about them, and all of them, of course, had been raised to be proper English ladies who could handily oversee a proper household.
Not a one of them, he imagined, had set foot in the Scottish Highlands. Not a one of them would know how to raise good Scots bairns in a wild and rugged land, where peril waited in the deep, still lochs and the silent, brooding forests and the endless rocky hills. God, he missed the Highlands. The idea that he had to wed to please his mother bit at him like a pack of angry badgers. But damn it all, she had hold of the purse strings.
She’d outfoxed her husband, Angus MacTaggert, Earl Aldriss, and kept all of the considerable Oswell fortune in her name and under her control. And before she’d fled the Highlands, she’d made Lord Aldriss sign that paper. That was why Coll had twenty-seven days to find a bride, or Lady Aldriss would cease funding Aldriss Park.
“Excuse me, sir.”
He blinked, swinging around as a petite lass dressed like a peasant of a previous century pranced past him. A stout lad by an unadorned door nodded and stepped aside to let her enter, then took up his guard position once more. “What’ve ye got there?” Coll asked.
“Nothing for the theater guests,” the big man replied. “If you wish to pay your respects to the performers, you can wait at the rear of the theater by the stage door until after the performance.”
Coll didn’t wish to pay his respects to the performers; he’d seen but a minute of the play. What he did want, though, was a place where he could stay out of the rain and think for a damned minute without being plagued by Lady Aldriss or any more of her messengers.
He dug a coin out of his pocket. “What if I’ve a mind to take a look through that door anyway?”
The man glanced down at Coll’s palm. “Then you’d best have more blunt than that. Night before last, I had eleven gentlemen trying to crowd in behind the stage to see Mrs. Jones, and management don’t like that. So the price to get through this door is now two quid.”
“Mrs. Jones?” Coll repeated, ignoring the rest of the jabbering and the outrageous bribery sum being sought. “Who the devil is Mrs. Jones that it costs two pounds to set my peepers on her?”
With a snort, the big fellow folded his arms over his chest. “Either you take me for a fool, or you’re not from around here.”
“I dunnae know if ye’re a fool or nae, lad, but as ye might have guessed, I’m nae from around here.”
“Then Mrs. Persephone Jones is the actress who’s broken half the lordlings’ hearts here in London. She’s onstage now playing Rosalind, so if you go back to your seat, you can take a gander at her yourself.”
Generally, Coll wouldn’t even have considered paying two quid for a gander at a lass. But when his mother had dragged him and his two younger brothers down from the Highlands, she’d made it clear as glass that she was the one who controlled the purse strings, that all the blunt in their pockets was thanks to her. That made the money in his pockets tonight hers, and he had no qualms about spending it with the idea of avoiding her talons.
Putting the one coin away and pulling out two different ones, he pitched them to the door warden. “I reckon I’ll take a gander from behind the stage.”
“Suit yourself, then. But be quiet. If you make any noise in the wings, they will throw you out.”
Coll doubted any man could throw him out of a place where he was inclined to be. His brothers didn’t refer to him as “the mountain” for no reason. He’d reached four inches past six feet a good time ago, and as far as he was concerned, he had the shoulders and strength to match his height. “I’ll be a wee church mouse, then.”
The guard pulled open the door. “Be quick about it. If you get caught, I will say I’ve never seen you before. I’ve no wish to tussle with you, but neither do I want Mr. Huddle sacking me for letting you in here.”
For the briefest of moments, Coll felt a pinch of disappointment that he’d avoided yet another fight. Since he’d arrived in London, he’d fallen into one brawl that hadn’t been any of his doing, taken one punch from his brother Niall that he’d deserved, and delivered one solitary jab as a lesson that his soon-to-be brother-in-law had best remember for the remainder of his life. These Englishmen used words as their weapons, and while he’d been attempting to adapt, he still didn’t like it. At all. A fist was a weapon. Words, as far as he was concerned, were overrated.
He stepped through the door into semi-darkness. Out in the part of the theater meant for the paying public, the floors were carpeted and the walls a clean white, interspersed with dark red curtains and panels of wallpaper that depicted exotic tableaux of the Far East. Through the door, though, the floor was wooden and plain, the walls bare brick, and up above might have been a lair for giant spiders, it was so crisscrossed with rope and wooden beams and planking.
Everything felt too close to him, so much so that he had to fight the instinct to duck his head. Coll took a hard breath, putting one hand against the brick wall to brace himself. Dim and closed-in, but not to the point where he had the immediate urge to escape. Not yet, anyway. For the moment, this was still better than being gawped at by debutantes too scared to chat with him.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he moved away from the door, toward the dark curtains bordering the stage and the ring and echo of voices beyond them. Around him, an odd mix of brightly garbed actors and plainly dressed supporting folk scurried about—mice in a maze of painted trees, a stuffed horse fitted with a saddle and bridle, a scattering of thrones and plainer chairs, and giant painted screens depicting a storming ocean, a mountainside, the deck of a ship, and more he couldn’t make out.
In some ways it reminded him of a bairn’s nursery, with bits of wonder tucked into the corners here and there. The folk around him, though, looked serious-faced and earnest, with the exception of the lass standing beneath a row of hanging sandbags, her attention on the lad playing the role of Orlando onstage. Hmm. In the play Orlando didn’t win Celia, but he seemed to be doing well enough from this vantage point.
Coll studied her for a moment. She was pretty enough, with black hair and a slender waist, but he couldn’t see why it should cost a man two pounds to be closer to her than he could get from his seat in Francesca’s box.