‘Father, what are you doing?’ Elidh crossed the room cautiously, fearfully even. She hoped she hadn’t understood him aright. ‘I can’t be an Italian principessa.’ Surely he wasn’t thinking they’d impersonate royalty?
His finger stopped at a spot of the map. ‘There—Fossano. You can be the Principessa of Fossano. Now, let me see. You need a name.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Chiara di Fossano. Principessa Chiara Balare di Fossano. I think that has a nice ring to it.’
Elidh grabbed for the map and rolled it up in a fury. ‘Stop! This is nonsense. You want me to impersonate an Italian princess?’ There’d been schemes before, little scams on the road when the troupe had been short on coin, but nothing like this. This was madness even for him.
‘It’s not really impersonation, Elidh. I don’t think Chiara Balare actually exists,’ her father reasoned as if creating a fiction was somehow better than pretending to be someone else.
‘That’s not the point.’ Elidh lifted the trunk and put the map away. She wished she could put her father’s ideas away as easily.
‘What is the point, my dear? This man needs a wife to claim his fortune and we need a fortune.’ For a moment, the light left her father’s dark eyes. They were sober and sad. ‘Don’t you think I know how close we are to the edge? This time, we might very well fall off.’ He took her hands and turned them over, surveying her palms. ‘Thank goodness you haven’t stooped to doing other people’s laundry. Your hands aren’t ruined. It would give you away immediately.’
Elidh sighed, summoning her patience. How like her father. Serious one minute and back to his schemes the next. It had been an enchanting quality in her childhood. It had made every day part-adventure, part-fairy tale. Her world had been magical. It wasn’t any more. The enchantment had worn off long ago, leaving the realities of poverty and hopelessness in its wake. It was up to her to be the voice of reason. She took her father’s hands and led him to a trunk. ‘We have to think about this logically. To start, the premise is madness. You want us to infiltrate a party for nobles and impersonate Italian royalty.’ Couldn’t he hear the preposterousness of his own suggestion? What he proposed was impossible.
‘We’ve done such things before, Elidh,’ her father chided as if she was somehow in the wrong. ‘Do you remember the time your mother and I pretended to be an English lord and lady on a Grand Tour whose carriage had broken down?’
‘Yes, of course I remember,’ Elidh cut him off swiftly with a polite smile. If he got to talking about the old times, there’d be no reasoning with him. ‘But that was different. That was just for one night and it was for a free meal.’ Her father had promised to pay once their luggage had been retrieved, which it never was, and they’d scampered out of the inn before dawn to avoid detection. ‘This is about trapping a man into marriage.’ There were so many things wrong with the idea, she couldn’t begin to put them into words. She began with the most obvious. ‘He’ll be swarmed by women who are actually eligible for the honour. The odds are firmly against us, even if we were legitimately titled. We can’t risk so much on a gamble we have no hope of winning. He wouldn’t look twice at me and, if he did, he’d look straight through me and know. I haven’t the demeanour.’
‘The demeanour, bah! Do you remember when we toured Italy, Daughter? We played all the places—Naples, Florence, Rome, Turin, Milan.’ She didn’t have the heart to correct him. They had played those places. But not on the big city stages. The troupe had roamed in their caravan through the countryside, playing for various conti and duchi at their summer villas.
‘I remember.’ She remembered the warm nights, the lights in the darkness, the food, the wine. Her mother’s laughter as she charmed the noblemen. Those were good times when she was innocent and thought they were untouchable. She wasn’t so innocent any more.
‘You spent the summer in Italy with nobles, you were sixteen then. You managed beautifully. It will come back to you and, if you make a mistake, you shrug and you say “it is different in Italy.” Being foreign will cover a multitude of sins.’
‘But not a lack of clothing.’ Even if she could pull off the mannerisms, her wardrobe would give her away.
‘Nonsense. We have your mother’s costumes.’ Her father rose and moved about the room, flipping open trunks as he went, pulling out gown after gown in a whirlwind of silks and satins emerging from their tissue wrappings until the little room was a harem of colours, rich and lush, at odds with the grey pallor of the walls. ‘This one should do for an evening gown, there used to be a tiara that went with it.’ He rummaged deep into the trunks. Out came the velvet sacks of paste jewels and headpieces. They winked and twinkled in the gloom, looking exquisite at a distance. Looking real. ‘Rosie can help you alter them. She is still in Upper Clapton living with a sister. She can help us with costumes and maid duties. She played one often enough on stage, she should be an expert.’ Rosie had been her mother’s dresser and had played a maid both off and on stage.
Elidh was truly worried now. If her father was willing to alter her mother’s sacred costumes, he must be desperate indeed, all that more committed to his latest scheme. When he had an idea, he clung to it with tenacity. It would make her job of persuading him that much harder. ‘Father,’ she warned, ‘we’ll never get away with it.’ Perhaps the best way to reason with him was to play along, to pose obstacles carefully veiled as questions. ‘I don’t speak Italian, not much of it anyway.’
‘No one else does either. They will compliment you on your English. Your accent was flawless when you played Juliet on stage in Tuscany that one summer,’ her father said encouragingly, his eyes lighting again as he thought of the past. He held out his arms in an expansive gesture and turned about the room. ‘Everything we need is here. We have all of your mother’s costumes and our own ingenuity.’
Elidh tried one last time. ‘Even if you are right, it’s too much to risk on the hopes he’ll look my way.’
Her father gave a nod and tapped a knowing finger to his temple. ‘There’s more than one way to win at this. We’re not going solely for the young, rich eligible parti. That would be far too foolish. We will also be pursuing a patron. This party will gather the right sort of men I need access to in order to sell my play. If an Italian prince can convince them he’s found an Englishman to rival Shakespeare, they’ll listen.’
‘But you don’t have a play,’ Elidh put in bluntly. This was getting crazier by the moment.
‘Yes, I do. Nothing new, mind you, but I’ve given an old play a new title. It’s been years since it was out and it was only performed on the Continent. I’ve been thinking I simply haven’t had the chance to meet the right patron. After all, what sort of men buy plays in Bermondsey Street? My plan’s not so risky now, is it? There’s money to be made in the short term if nothing else, perhaps at cards if no one buys a play. I can wager some of our “jewels” for a stake.’
Dear heavens. Elidh wanted to reel and she was sitting down. Impersonating royalty, crashing an elite party, trying to court a wealthy man, trying to snare a patron, all the while fleecing people with the lure of false jewels on the side. Worst, her father was entirely convinced of his plan’s merits. She could see it in his eyes. Elidh tried a new strategy. If she couldn’t persuade him it was impossible to crash the party, perhaps she could persuade him about the dubious merits of actually succeeding. Success was not without consequences.
‘It’s mad genius to be sure, Father,’ she said sweetly. ‘Have you thought what happens, though, if we succeed? I would be trapping a man into marriage.’ Her father was a romantic at heart. He’d loved her mother deeply—surely such sentiment would work against him here?
‘Trapping him? It would hardly be that,’ he scoffed. ‘Being alone with a man in a garden with the sole intention