Page 15 of Hit Me With Your Best Scot
Regardless of Clive Montrose’s motives for arriving at the Saint Genesius, she still couldn’t quite figure it—him—out. He might have contested for the lead in the Scottish play if he’d wished, but he’d opted for the more heroic Macduff, despite that character having many fewer lines, and the doctor, who had even fewer.
At least as interesting was the fact that he and she had never performed in the same play together before. A few weeks ago, she’d gone over to Drury Lane Theatre to play Juliet while the Saint Genesius had been offeringA Mad World, My Masters, and she’d played Juliet the year before that at Covent Garden. In her five years of performing in London, she’d appeared with nearly every other actor in Town at one point or another. Clive Montrose had been the exception—until now.
“I’m content with Macduff,” Montrose drawled. “Macbeth is pleasant enough to act, but I’ve found it refreshing to embody a character who’s still alive at the end of a play.”
“We’ve been over all this, anyway,” Charlie Huddle stated. “I decide who plays which part.Thatwas our agreement, to stop you mad people from coming to blows over it. Now, might we begin?”
“I don’t know what you lot are fighting about, anyway,” Jenny Rogers put in. “All the gents will be coming to see Persie. A rooster could play Macbeth, and they’d still come.”
“So says Witch Number One,” Gordon Humphreys retorted.
“And Lady Macduff, you old flapdoodle.”
“I’ll have you know my doodle does not flap, ma’am. It stands proud as a flagpole.”
That was the thing about actors, Persephone had found.Each wanted to be the center of attention, and every comment was likely to be followed by a cleverer or funnier one until a given scenario became outrageously silly. She adored it.
Charlie Huddle likely adored it less, but at least he was accustomed to it, and simply sat back, sipping a cup of cooling tea until the laughter died down again. “Opening scene,” he said, once they subsided. “We’ll need lots of thunder and lightning for this one, Harry.”
The head stagehand nodded, jotting down notes in the margins of his folio. “I’ll pull out the heavy metal sheets and the miner’s lights.”
“Enter three witches,” Charlie Huddle went on, and Jenny, Rose, and Sally stood to recite their lines.
As they did so, a large shadow to one corner of the rehearsal room shifted. For a handful of seconds, Persephone imagined the curse of the Scottish play had come to life after all, because the figure forming as it neared the light both wore a kilt and loomed several inches above six feet. In the next heartbeat, its face emerged from the shadows, and her heart stilled before it resumed again. Perhaps he wasn’t Macbeth, but Coll MacTaggert might have been some perfect, pagan god of the old Highlands, lit by yellow lamplight and chiseled to stunning perfection by some unknown hand.Trouble, her heart beat in a fast tattoo.Trouble.
“Good Lord,” Gordon gasped, crossing himself. “We’ve summoned the Scottish play himself.”
“You’re the one who set Claremont on his arse last night, aren’t you?” someone else asked.
“Aye,” Coll returned, his gaze settling on Persephone’s face and remaining there.
Trouble, her mind shouted at her, as if her heart hadn’t sounded the alarm loudly enough. “Good morning, MacTaggert. You’ve found us rehearsing.”
“I didnae come to see a rehearsal,” he returned in that deep, resonating brogue. “I came to see ye, lass.”
“Oh, someone fetch me my salts,” Jenny breathed. “I’m going to faint all over him.”
“I say, my good man,” Gordon put in, “what would you charge to assist me with an authentic Scots accent? That could be just the thing to wow the critics with my Scottish play.”
“With yer what?”
“He won’t say the name of the play or the character,” Persephone offered.
“Are ye soft-headed, then?”
Thomas Baywich snorted. “That is up for debate.”
“Is it true the Scots eat the babes of their rival clans?” Lawrence Valense, chimed in with the faux Scottish accent he’d assumed from the moment they’d arrived this morning.
“The lot of you heathens leave MacTaggert be,” Persephone said, before a brawl could erupt. The Highlander would lay waste to her entire troupe without breaking a sweat, she imagined, and then none of them would be fit to appear onstage for weeks.
“I can hold my own, I reckon,” the viscount—who didn’t realize she knew him to be a viscount—returned. “I’m nae here to deliver lessons to Sassenachs on how to sound like a Highlander, and I’ve nae snacked on any bairns, but if ye go back far enough, I’ve some blood I share with Banquo. Which of ye plays him?”
“That would be me,” Lawrence Valense said through his thick beard, grown, he claimed, especially for the part. Personally, Persephone thought it pure laziness, since Valense typically went after whichever bearded part happened to be available.
“Och,” the Highlander exclaimed, blinking. “Ye look more like the father of Christmas than the father of kings.”
A laugh burst from Persephone’s lips before she could stifle it. Valense’s face—the part they could see above the beard—turned beet red as the rest of the troupe joined in the laughter. “I’ll have you know, sir, that according to my research, Banquo wore a beard.”
