He caught the thoughts, mentally shaking his head. Enough. With or without Shawe, she wouldn’t have looked twice at him. If ever there was a case of Beauty and the Beast . . . He unconsciously raised his hand to the savagely pock-marked skin of his lower face where the smallpox which had nearly killed him as a twelve-year-old child had left its brand.
Kane Gregory was something of an enigma to his friends and family – ‘a lone wolf’, as Augustus Jefferson, who knew him better than most, was apt to say. Born of well-to-do parents he’d had a privileged and happy childhood until the smallpox which disfigured his face killed his older and younger brothers, and his mother. The three boys had been inseparable, there being only a year between each of them, and Kane had been grief-stricken; however, his father had been inconsolable at the loss of his wife and two of his sons. After six years of heavy drinking, he had fallen off his hunter one day whilst drunk and had broken his neck, and Kane had inherited what was left of the family estate after his father’s downward spiral into gambling and liquor.
Kane had gone into his twenties a troubled young man, devoid of a foundation in his life and given to wine, women and song. This state of affairs had lasted for three years. Then something had happened, something he never spoke about, and he had disappeared from all his old haunts for two years, only to return to London at the age of twenty-five with enough money to invest in two theatres. He’d proved himself to be a shrewd businessman, building on his success until now, at the age of thirty-four, he was very comfortably well off. He was also taciturn and cynical, and did not suffer fools gladly, with a well-earned reputation for having a tongue like a whip when he was displeased with something or someone.
‘This is so good of you, Mr Gregory.’ Sybil Brannon, another young actress in the company with fluffy blond hair and doe eyes, had positioned herself in front of him, and Kane sighed inwardly. The girl was a competent enough actress but he rather suspected she thought she might take a short-cut to playing the lead female role by sharing his bed.
‘Not at all.’ Kane took a step to the side but not towards Sybil, calling over to one of the actors who had already changed and returned promptly at the prospect of a slap-up supper, ‘Mark, a word, please. I think your entrance in the second act needs to come sooner. Perhaps we can bring it forward a minute or two? When Christabel and Sophy have finished their dialogue about the sick child would be about right, I think. I’ll have a word with Leopold about it over dinner.’ Leopold was the actor-manager of the touring company.
It was a merry little party who ate and drank in the private dining room at the inn Kane was staying at, but Sophy couldn’t enter into the general jocularity as she might have done before Cat had brought up Toby’s name. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t written to her. It had been a lie that they’d agreed not to correspond whilst she was on tour. She had written to him every day to begin with, but when after the first month she had only had one letter waiting for her, care of the theatre they were playing at on the itinerary of their bookings she had written out for him before she’d left, she had curbed her pen and tried to put a brake on her feelings. But it was hard. The more so because she couldn’t share her despair with anyone.
She knew Cat didn’t like Toby. Her friend had never said, but she knew. But Cat had never seen the side to him she had seen, the vulnerable, soft, sweet side. Perhaps she should have thrown all her principles and morals aside and followed him to the West End and ultimately into his bed? He had said more than once that if she truly loved him she would want to belong to him, body and soul. And she did. Except . . . Sophy’s breath escaped her in a deep sigh. Her mother had followed that route and where had it got her?
She believed utterly in women having the vote, along with equal pay, equal job opportunities and equality before the law to free them from the domestic tyranny of men. She and Cat had talked often about such matters, and their seeing eye-to-eye on these issues had been one of the things which had cemented their friendship in the early days. But Sophy couldn’t hold with the view of some suffragettes that women should be free to take as many lovers as men and act accordingly. She didn’t personally believe it was right for men to use women for pleasure and then cast them aside when the attraction had worn off, so why would she condone women doing the same? Cat had agreed with her, and sensibly warned her not to let the view of a very small minority among the movement cloud what she felt about the real issues.