A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet #2)(39)

“No, no,” Harriet mused, “I’d have to rework it completely.”
“But Finstead,” Daniel persisted. “Really?”
Harriet looked up at him. “Do you think it sounds too fishy?”
Whatever mirth Miss Wynter had been holding onto burst out in a spray of eggs and bacon. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and really, it was difficult to summon any sympathy for her plight. “I’m sorry, oh, that was rude. But—” She might have meant to say more. Daniel couldn’t tell; her laughter got hold of her again, cutting off all intelligible speech.
“It’s a good thing you’re wearing yellow,” Elizabeth said to Frances.
Frances glanced down at her bodice, shrugged, then lightly brushed herself off with her serviette.
“Too bad the fabric doesn’t have little sprigs of red flowers,” Elizabeth added. “The bacon, you know.” She turned to Daniel as if waiting for some sort of confirmation, but he wanted no part of any conversation that included partially digested airborne bacon, so he turned to Miss Wynter and said:
“Help me. Please?”
She gave him an abashed nod (but not nearly so abashed as she ought) and turned to Harriet. “I think that Lord Winstead refers to the rhyming qualities of the title.”
Harriet blinked a few times. “It doesn’t rhyme.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elizabeth burst out. “Finstead Winstead?”
Harriet’s gasp very nearly sucked the air from the room. “I never noticed!” she exclaimed.
“Obviously,” her sister drawled.
“I must have been thinking about you when I wrote the play,” Harriet said to Daniel. From her expression, he gathered he was meant to feel flattered, so he tried to smile.
“You have been much in their thoughts,” Miss Wynter told him.
“We shall have to change the name,” Harriet said with an exhausted sigh. “It’s going to be a horrible lot of work. I shall have to recopy the entire play. Lord Finstead is in almost every scene, you know.” She turned to Daniel. “He is the protagonist.”
“I’d surmised,” he said dryly.
“You will have to play his role.”
He turned to Miss Wynter. “There’s no getting out of it, is there?”
She looked utterly amused, the traitorous wench. “I’m afraid not.”
“Is there a unicorn?” Frances asked. “I make an excellent unicorn.”
“I think I’d rather be the unicorn,” Daniel said glumly.
“Nonsense!” Miss Wynter chimed in. “You must play our hero.”
To which Frances naturally replied, “Unicorns can be heroes.”
“Enough with the unicorns!” Elizabeth burst out.
Frances stuck out her tongue.
“Harriet,” Miss Wynter said. “As Lord Winstead has not yet read your play, perhaps you can tell him about his character.”
Harriet turned to him with breathless delight. “Oh, you will love being Lord Finstead. He used to be very handsome.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Used to be?”
“There was a fire,” Harriet explained, her brief sentence ending with the kind of sad sigh Daniel assumed was normally reserved for victims of actual fires.
“Wait a moment,” he said, turning to Miss Wynter with growing alarm. “The fire doesn’t occur on stage, does it?”
“Oh, no,” Harriet answered for her. “Lord Finstead is already gravely disfigured when the play opens.” And then, in a burst of prudence that was both reassuring and surprising, she added, “It would be far too dangerous to have a fire on stage.”
“Well, that’s—”
“Besides,” Harriet cut in, “it would be hardly necessary to help you with your character. You’re already . . .” She motioned to her own face with her hand, waving it in a bit of a circle.
He had no idea what she was doing.
“Your bruises,” Frances said in a very loud whisper.
“Ah, yes,” Daniel said. “Yes, of course. Sadly, I do know a bit about facial disfigurement at present.”
“At least you won’t need any makeup,” Elizabeth said.
Daniel was thanking God for small favors, but then Harriet said, “Well, except for the wart.”
Daniel’s gratitude was swiftly retracted. “Harriet,” he said, looking her in the eye as he would an adult, “I really must tell you, I have never been a thespian.”
Harriet waved this off like a gnat. “That is what is so wonderful about my plays. Anyone can enjoy himself.”
“I don’t know,” Frances said. “I did not like being that frog. My legs hurt the next day.”
“Perhaps we should choose The Marsh of the Frogs,” Miss Wynter said innocently. “Bottle green is all the rage in men’s clothing this year. Surely Lord Winstead will have something in his wardrobe in the color.”
“I am not playing a frog.” His eyes narrowed wickedly. “Unless you do, too.”
“There is only one frog in the play,” Harriet said blithely.
“But isn’t the title The Marsh of the Frogs?” he asked, even though he should have known better. “Plural?” Good Lord, the entire conversation was making him dizzy.
“That’s the irony,” Harriet said, and Daniel managed to stop himself just before he asked her what she meant by that (because it fulfilled no definition of irony he’d ever heard).
His brain hurt.
“I think it would be best for Cousin Daniel to read the play for himself,” Harriet said. She looked over at him. “I’ll fetch the pages right after breakfast. You can read it while we do our geography and maths.”