“Is there anything else you will require?” Tom asked Mrs. de Bourgh.
She shook her head. “That will be all for the moment,” Collins said, as if conferring a great favor.
“Is Mrs. de Bourgh having a problem with her voice?” Roberta asked.
Collins regarded her disdainfully. “Of course not. She always enjoys the best of health. She abstains from speech before a shoot so her voice will be its purest and most sonorous during filming.”
Elizabeth managed to cover her mouth in time to muffle her laugh.
“I…see.” Roberta nodded. “Is Mrs. de Bourgh ready for makeup?”
Collins exchanged a glance with his employer, who inclined her head slightly. “She is,” he reported to the director.
Roberta managed to smile at this bizarre charade. “Great. Let’s get started.”
***
; Darcy recognized the particular pain at the base of his skull as his “Aunt Catherine headache.” Aspirin, heating pads, massages, and all other treatments were ineffective. The only cure was immediate removal from his aunt’s vicinity.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option today.
Playing his character’s grandmother, she was here to shoot two scenes where she bestowed sage advice. Getting into character was unusually difficult under these circumstances. His aunt had given him plenty of advice, but he found it most beneficial to ignore it.
Once filming started, Aunt Catherine broke her self-imposed ban on speaking, barking at gaffers, boom operators, cameramen, and anyone else who crossed her path. She drove the PAs crazy with requests for everything from gourmet breath mints to a footstool (exactly sixteen inches tall).
The set had never been so quiet or so tense. At lunch few people sat around, chatting and joking. Aunt Catherine, sitting in her specially ordered table and chair and feeding gourmet treats to Cecil B. DeMille, seemed to have cast a pall over everything. Many cast and crew left for the canteen or took their lunches to the break room. Jane and Charlie disappeared—perhaps around the back of a fake building so they could enjoy their sandwiches in peace. Darcy wished he could disappear as well, but he was obligated to sit with his aunt.
She and Collins were already seated. Darcy just needed to get his food from the craft services table and join them. Thus began the slowest sandwich construction in the history of the world.
When he’d talked his aunt into taking the part, he had worried that she would regret appearing in such a low-budget endeavor; now he worried that the staff of In the Shadows would have even bigger regrets.
When Darcy last worked with his aunt five years ago, it hadn’t been such a strain. Surely she hadn’t always been this difficult. Although he did recall an unfortunate contretemps over the quality of the chocolates in her trailer for the other movie. That must have been trying for the PAs, but Darcy hadn’t been considering their perspective at the time. It was only now, when Elizabeth was one of the gofers running around to satisfy his aunt’s demands, that he’d noticed her entitled attitude.
Earlier he had watched her browbeat a hapless PA and congratulated himself on not being anything like her. Of course not. I was never that bad. Although only this morning he had taken Kurt to task for forgetting his dry cleaning. No, it was simply that he liked things in a precise way, and if he could afford to have people do it that way, then why not? He wasn’t…he didn’t—
Sudden nausea hit Darcy like a cannonball to the stomach.
Aunt Catherine had shanghaied Caroline into joining her lunch table and now was treating her with regal condescension. Caroline knew how to play the game; she gushed over the older woman’s acting, clothing, choice of dogs, even her personal assistant—as if Bill Collins represented the high quality of his aunt’s tastes. In return, Aunt Catherine bestowed a beneficent smile on Caroline, like a queen approving of a lady in waiting.
When Elizabeth approached to ask a question about the next scene, Aunt Catherine regarded her like a speck of mold on her bread; unsurprisingly Elizabeth did not linger. Darcy understood his aunt’s thinking: Caroline was a bona fide star while Elizabeth was a nobody. But Darcy was beginning to wonder if his aunt had her priorities skewed.
If Elizabeth is the better person, why am I avoiding her and hanging out with Caroline?
No, that wasn’t fair. There were lots of good reasons to choose Caroline. He would work with her in the future. She wouldn’t expect too much from him. She was the kind of person he might invite to appear with him at industry events. Her family wasn’t super annoying.
So why do I wish I could eat lunch on a bench beside Elizabeth? Why does the prospect of lunch with Caroline and Aunt Catherine make picnicking on a hill of fire ants sound like fun by comparison?
He had been staring at the platter of cold cuts for an absurdly long time; on the other side of the table, a gaffer scooping pasta salad onto his plate gave Darcy a strange look. Ponder the vagaries of your feelings for Elizabeth another time, he told himself. At this point, he apparently needed all his concentration simply to make a sandwich.
As he trudged toward his aunt’s table, Darcy wondered how far behind they were on the production schedule. They should have finished shooting the first scene by now, but they weren’t even close. If only Aunt Catherine would pay as much attention to her acting as she does to her on-set amenities.
After the first hour of shooting, Perez had dropped tactful hints about making Aunt Catherine’s character less irritable. By the middle of the morning, the director had been reining in exasperation as she insisted on greater empathy, and as lunchtime rolled around, Perez was getting red in the face and Darcy worried about her blood pressure. Aunt Catherine was simply certain that her way was the best.
He felt somewhat responsible for the difficulties since he had convinced his aunt to take the part in the movie, but he reminded himself that her name in the credits would help sell tickets. They would find it worth the aggravation.
The group from True Colors had arrived mid-morning and was currently munching sandwiches on the far side of the set. They were a colorful collection. At least three were so androgynous that Darcy couldn’t tell if they were male, female, or non-binary. Several were Gothed-up with all-black clothing and dramatic makeup. One blond boy was wearing a bright green tutu.