“I don’t know if I’m ready to have strangers see me in a dress,” Otis said, twitching his skirts.
“I wouldn’t have guessed you were a man,” Aunt Knowe told him. “Your features are cast in a male mode, but then, so are mine. No one has ever suggested that I am a male. You’ve been in this room for over an hour, doing nothing but repeat the same lines. You all need to leave the castle. Go outside!”
Joan gurgled with laughter and said to Otis and Thaddeus, “Aunt Knowe used to sweep into the nursery, find us all squabbling, and say the same thing. ‘Outside!’”
“We leave for the fair in an hour,” Aunt Knowe said blithely. “Greywick, you’ll accompany us, of course. We never miss the fair; it’s one of the high points of spending one’s summer at Lindow.”
Thaddeus groaned, a throaty male moan.
Joan’s breath caught at a sound that he hadn’t considered beforehand or delivered in a gentlemanly accent and tone. It sent a shiver down her spine.
She’d love to hear that sensual noise during a kiss.
Thaddeus was talking to Aunt Knowe so she let her gaze linger on his profile. The truth was that she liked him, which was obviously stupid and wrong in more ways than could be counted. He hadn’t even smiled at Otis’s ballad, whereas she thought “cargo in your hold” was rather funny. No sense of humor. But then . . .
His chin. Nose. Jaw. Other men had the same collection of features, and in fact, some of them had decidedly better features.
Not that she could think of any such men at the moment.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Aunt Knowe was telling Thaddeus. “I’m well-known, and if anyone says something untoward to our Hamlet or Ophelia, I shall speak for the duke.”
“I can offer adequate protection if that occurs,” Thaddeus said gruffly.
Joan liked gruff.
Why, why was she unable to do things that seemed so simple for her siblings? Accepting the hand of a man who admired her, for example? Taking up embroidery or knitting instead of acting? Playing the princess, rather than the prince?
Her lips in a wry smile, Joan had to admit that she wasn’t particularly startled to discover that she had a penchant for a man who disdained everything she was. Her much-vaunted independence had often displayed itself in self-defeating ways. In playing the fool, in other words.
Her heart pinched at the thought.
No wonder Thaddeus disliked her.
Continued recklessness would only bring her unhappiness. As he said, what sort of model was she setting for her little sister?
Two performances and two chances to play Prince Hamlet, one before her family and the other before a real audience, would have to be enough.
After that, she would reform and become a proper lady. Even . . . marry.
“Lady Joan,” Thaddeus said. “Will you accompany us to the fair?”
She started, realizing that Otis and Aunt Knowe had left the room. “If I address you as Thaddeus, then you must address me as Joan. But at the moment I’m not a ‘lady,’” she said, getting to her feet and dusting her breeches.
“Forgive me.” He bowed. “Have you chosen a name to go with your costume? I can hardly address you as Hamlet in public.”
“Jack,” she said, stopping just in front of him. “Not Joan.”
Their eyes caught and held. “Thaddeus,” he affirmed, his voice unmistakably reluctant.
“I promise not to call you by your first name when someone might hear and think we are friends,” she offered. “Shall we?”
He caught her arm. “What do you mean?”
Joan gave him a wry smile. “I don’t want you to feel ashamed of me, any more than you want your reputation besmirched by knowing me. I am on the verge of being ruined, as you predicted.” She raised her chin. “You will be very happy to hear that I intend to turn over a new leaf. I will perform the role of Hamlet in the castle, and once at Wilmslow, and then I will . . . stop.”
Thaddeus’s brows drew together. “Stop what?”
“Childish things,” she said. “Isn’t there something in the Bible about that?”
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” Thaddeus said, his hand dropping from her arm. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Joan glanced down at her breeches. “Particularly apt given that these are the childhood garments of one of my brothers.” When she looked back up, Thaddeus was watching her face intently.
“I just wanted you to know that I understand your reprimand,” she added. “I won’t embarrass you. If you’ll excuse me?”
He moved to the side, and she hurried through the door.
She felt at home on a ballroom floor or a grand dinner. She liked people, and she was confident of herself and her place in society, no matter what unkind things were said to her.
But Thaddeus unsettled her. Made her want to needle him, which was obviously childish.
She would put that away too, this wish to bicker with him and cross swords.
Put that instinct in a box marked “childish things,” and lock it away with her dream of being an actress.
Chapter Six
Drabblefield Fair
Cheshire
An hour later, Joan ran across the castle courtyard, feeling deliciously free without heavy skirts and panniers. If women were allowed to wear breeches, even just once, there would be a revolution and they would never wear corsets and petticoats again.
“Wait for me!” Otis shouted, bunching up his skirts and trotting after her.
A large coach waited with a groom beside the door.
“My lady,” the groom said, bowing, when Joan arrived.
“Peters, if you hadn’t known the truth, would you have guessed me a woman in men’s clothing?”
The young groom kept his eyes rigidly above her collarbone. “No, my lady.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Perhaps,” he said reluctantly. “I would suggest that you lengthen your stride, my lady.”
“Thanks,” Joan said, grinning at him before she hopped over the mounting box and climbed straight into the coach.
Otis, on the other hand, had to be hoisted inside with Peters’s shoulder braced against his bustle.
“I’m sweating,” Otis moaned, collapsing onto a seat. “Melting away ’til I’ll be nothing but a set of whalebones. Why in God’s name do you women wear so much clothing?”
“I’m rarely overheated,” Joan said.
“Because you have a grasshopper’s thighs, something I know due to those indecent breeches you have on. They’re a bit tighter than proper.”
Before they could delve into the mysteries of fashion, Thaddeus arrived at the carriage with Aunt Knowe on one arm and his mother, the Duchess of Eversley, on the other. Her Grace was a small round woman who always wore pink and had a decidedly eccentric air. Joan had never been able to figure out how such a whimsical person had given birth to the most proper man in all the kingdom.
“Don’t let me forget that Viola craves pears,” Aunt Knowe said, once they were settled. “The children want new hobbyhorses, but those they can pick out themselves. My brother should be back before lunch, and he will bring the nursery to the fair this afternoon.”