Much Ado In the Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page A

else will they get to do Shakespeare in a real castle?”
    “Mmmm,” John said skeptically. “Hope you have good understudies. Did Thomas give you enough money for understudies?”
    “Thomas gave me more than enough,” Victoria assured him.
    And that was true. Her brother had been outrageously generous, footing the bill for accommodations, food, transportation, and salaries for the whole of a month-long run of Hamlet on yonder blessed isle. She still wasn’t sure why, but she’d determined immediately upon hearing the offer that she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
    Well, she might cast sidelong, suspicious glances at it, but she wasn’t going to do a full-on inspection.
    Not in his presence, while he was awake, that is.
    Of course, his money hadn’t covered Michael Fellini’s complete fee, but she’d managed to make that up out of her own savings. Again, another story for another time and one she would never discuss with her parents or her brother.
    But she could ruminate about it plenty in private, which she was going to do as soon as she could escape the table.
    There was no time like the present. She smiled at her folks.
    “I’m a little tired from all this relaxation. I think I’ll head upstairs. Iolanthe, thank you for dinner.”
    “And me?” Thomas asked politely. “No ‘thank you’ for me?”
    “I thanked you by not jabbing a fork between your eyes.”
    Thomas only laughed.
    Victoria took her plate to the sink, then fled upstairs before she said anything she would regret to her still-chuckling brother.
    She shut herself in her room and tried to walk out her frustrations. She needed to be off and doing, not sitting and waiting for her vacation to be over so she could be off and doing.
    She paced from one end of the room to the other, going over her mental lists, checking off the items she had already accomplished and considering the things still outstanding. It was no small feat to move an entire production to another country. In fact, if she ever second-guessed herself, she might have suspected she was out of her mind. But since she never engaged in that kind of self-doubt, she was unfazed. She knew she could pull this off and do it well.
    Her opinion of her skills had not come without price. Whatever good things she could say about herself, she had earned. She was a director of substantial theater, rubbing shoulders with the very gifted, preparing and presenting to the world a quality of art that was equal to anything seen on Broadway.
    Never mind that her company performed a very, very long way from Broadway. Never mind that her stage was in a loft above a New Age teashop. Never mind that her prop room was in the cellar next to where vats of things cunningly labeled “herbs” were kept, which left her costumes always smelling faintly like health food store. People could come to the theater, then relax with some chamomile during intermission. It was a great set-up and she was grateful for it.
    And now England, with an honest-to-goodness castle to use as her backdrop. Did it get any better than that?
    Well, it might, if Michael Fellini would be as interested in her as a woman as he was in her as a director.
    But given that there was nothing she could do about that until she had him alone in backwoods England, she turned her thoughts to what she could control. She looked around for something useful to do. Unfortunately, her bags were packed, her bed was made, and the eight-hundred-page treatise on Elizabethan politics she’d brought with her was over and done with. She should have bought that pithy little tome on farthingale construction with her. One could never know too much about the time period.
    She sighed. What she needed was a good romance. A good love story was nothing more than research where she was concerned. She had to direct romantic plays from time to time; she might as well know something about how they were supposed to go.
    It was a certainty she had nothing of the