They emerged just as Act Two began. Will pulled Chloe down on a chair, allowing silent, smiling nods to serve as introductions for the moment. Chloe was surprised: both Charlotte Daicheston and Sophie York were watching the stage intently, completely ignoring the rustling audience around them, even though many of those people were looking only at the two women. She would have thought people like them—people whose names were always in the gossip columns—went to the theater only to see and be seen. But Charlotte, in particular, was so absorbed that her knuckles were white on the box railing. Chloe turned her own attention to the stage. The king, or ex-king now, was hulking about his eldest daughter’s house, demanding to keep a hundred armed men.

Chloe felt a certain amount of sympathy for Goneril, the king’s eldest daughter. Who would want to keep a bunch of feckless soldiers about? Look at the problem her father had with their servants, and they weren’t even armed. The footmen were always in brawls of some sort or another, and her father had a separate butler’s fund just for use in bailing the servants out of prison. Still, it was heartbreaking to watch the old king divested of all his trappings, all his kingliness….

For his part, Will couldn’t keep his mind on the play at all. He felt absolutely astonished. Chloe was watching the play, her chest quietly rising and falling as if nothing at all had happened in the corridor. Whereas he was distinctly uncomfortable in his tight pantaloons. Even sitting with his legs crossed wasn’t helping, given the proximity of Chloe’s round arm. At least her dress didn’t cover every single inch of her body. He looked speculatively at the part of her arm that was visible. Her skin was a flat, creamy white, and her wrist so delicate that he felt as if it might snap at any moment. He shifted his legs again. This was not the right thing to be dwelling on at the moment.

By the time intermission finally came around, Alex, for one, was thoroughly bored. Shakespeare was one thing. For God’s sake, they had acted King Lear themselves when he was a schoolboy at Eton. But this wasn’t King Lear. This was a stupid, adulterated muddle. He couldn’t believe his own eyes when the Fool started dancing an Irish jig. It was clear already that this Cordelia was not going to die, not if the theater manager had anything to do with it—and he already had had entirely too much to do with the whole play. Who were these new characters, for example? And some had definitely disappeared. He knew damned well that Gloucester used to have a bastard son, because that was the role he played at school! He felt nothing but relief when the curtain finally fell on the end of the third act.