Onstage, James stood with his head bent in deference to his father.
Gloucester: “We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund—”
James’s mouth twitched, and I remembered his unsettling repetitions of the previous night. Gloucester finished his speech and strode across the star-strewn floor toward the opposite wing.
“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!” He looked heavenward, made a fist, and shook it at the stars. A laugh blossomed from his lips and rang in my ears, bold and unabashed. “An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” He raised one finger, pointed out a single constellation among a hundred, and spoke more thoughtfully. “My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.” He laughed again, but now the laugh was bitter. I shifted my feet on the spot, every hair on the back of my neck standing on end. “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—”
He hesitated, whether due to doubt that I would appear or some greater unease, I didn’t know. I emerged into our star-world with one cautious step.
“How now, brother Edmund?” I asked, for the second time in eighteen hours. “What serious contemplation are you in?”
We moved smoothly through the same conversation we had had the previous night brokenly, bit by bit. James’s face might as well have been a mask. He delivered his lines as coolly as he always had, oblivious to the disbelief and fright and fury threatening to rip me in half every time I looked at him. My words were harsh and stringent as I said, “Some villain hath done me wrong!”
“That’s my fear,” he said, slowly, but as he continued he slid back into his same silky drawl. I forgot my blocking, stood motionless, my responses flat and mechanical.
When he finished again I said, sharply, “Shall I hear from you anon?”
“I do serve you in this business,” he said. It was my time to leave, but I didn’t. I waited too long, long enough that he was forced to look through Edgar and see me instead. Recognition flickered in his eyes and, with it, a spark of fear. I turned to go, and as I walked toward the wings I heard him speak again, a little faintly.
James: “… A brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practices ride easy!”
His bravado sounded suddenly false. He knew what I knew. For the moment, that was enough. The play would falter on.
SCENE 5
I wasted ten scenes or so waiting in the dressing room for James to appear. He never did, but I knew better than to go looking for him in the wings. The kind of confrontation we were doomed to have couldn’t be confined to the alleys and walkways backstage. Intermission would be my best chance to catch him before he could slip away. As the last scene of Act III approached its violent climax, I climbed out of my chair, pulling a jacket on over my bare chest. My madman’s rags made me feel naked and vulnerable.
The crossover was empty, the lights glowing dull autumnal yellow. I was reaching for the backstage door when Meredith emerged at the other end of the hall. I hadn’t really laid eyes on her all night, and for a moment I was frozen in place. She looked like a Grecian princess, draped in pale blue chiffon and voile, a band of gold across her forehead, curls falling loosely down her back. I turned and walked right at her, unsure of when I’d find her alone again, or what the rest of the night might bring. The sound of my footsteps made her look up, and surprise flashed on her face before I caught her and kissed her, as deeply as I dared.
“What was that for?” she asked, when I leaned back.
She knew she was beautiful. I didn’t need to tell her that.
“You know, you scare the hell out of me,” I said, clutching the fabric of her dress to keep her close.
“What?”
“I don’t know, it’s like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway.”
Whatever either one of us had expected me to say, it wasn’t that. She blushed, and a little thrill of joy went through me—improbable, inexplicable, given all the other circumstances of the evening. But then it was extinguished like a candle flame, blown by doubt out of existence.
“Where were you last night?” I asked.
She looked away. “I just—I had to go somewhere.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, absently tracing the notch of my collarbone with one fingertip. “Tonight. Later.”
“All right.” I couldn’t help wondering if there would be time later. What “later” even meant. “Later,” I agreed, anyway.
“I have to go.” She brushed my hair back off my forehead—a sweet affectionate gesture of hers, by then familiar and perpetually hoped for. But I worry and misgivings made my knees weak.