Seven Scarlet Tales

He was here. It was going to work. I could stop worrying and throw myself into the performance until, much more quickly than I expected, that scene came up.

Leo looked good in tights. He had powerful thighs and the kind of full, shapely calves that were so fashionable in eras past. We sparred all over the stage, verbally at first, and then I took my faux-swings at him until he spoke the fateful words. I had been asking for it, and I was going to get it.

I twirled out of his way but he caught my arm in the exact iron-clamp grip that I’d been goading him towards all these weeks and dragged me across to the bench. When I turned my feet inward, so he had to haul me bodily, he didn’t let up the pressure but played his part with utter conviction. If I got hurt, it was my own fault. I’d told him so often that he’d finally internalised it.

I let my fists fly and my feet scissor-kick when he yanked me over his lap on the bench. He did everything I’d taught him. He took my wrists in one hand and twisted them into the small of my back. He clamped my ankles between his. He got me helpless and restrained and then he raised his arm and brought his palm down flat and hard on the seat of my skirts.

I was wearing petticoats so it didn’t hurt particularly, even though he was giving it his all, but the sound was fantastic, echoing out into the auditorium like gunshots. I overacted the outrage and pain, trying to remember what a normal person would do in this situation. I had to work hard to disguise my enjoyment, though.

While he whaled away on my behind and the safety curtain rolled slowly down, I was feeling the smart, and I couldn’t help looking out towards Peregrine Sands, to see if his expression had broken its stern mould, while I gasped and struggled under Leo’s hand. It hadn’t, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

I probably shouldn’t have looked at him.

Perhaps that was a mistake.

The curtain fell and Leo held his hands to his chest and muttered, ‘You OK, Cal?’

‘That was bloody brilliant,’ I said, crawling forward off his lap. ‘The business. Thank you for keeping it real, darling.’

‘It’s so weird, though,’ he said, helping me to my feet. ‘I keep worrying that I might get arrested, or something.’

I tapped his cheek, smiling into his anxious brown eyes.

‘You can’t get arrested for acting,’ I said.

‘Yes, you can.’

‘Don’t worry.’

At the after-party, I longed for Sands to show his face, but he didn’t. I questioned everyone I knew in the audience about his reactions and any remarks he might have made, but apparently he’d sat in silence, spoken to nobody and left as soon as the curtain fell.

I got a bit drunk and flirted with Leo.

‘You’re not one of nature’s doms, then?’ I said.

‘One of what?’

‘Oh, never mind. What’s this?’

The theatre manager had appeared at my elbow.

‘This was handed in at the stage door for you.’

It was an envelope. I opened it to find a postcard. The picture on the front was a rather artistically framed shot of a man’s hand closed around the top of a riding crop. On the back, in jagged black ink, was written: ‘You, Ms Reddish, are a very bad girl. Your come-uppance awaits.’

‘What’s it say?’ Leo peered over my shoulder, but I had dropped it straight away into my handbag.

‘Nothing. I’m just going to the ladies’.’

I stood against the cubicle wall with my heart pounding.

Who was it from?

Every cell of me wanted it to be Peregrine Sands. But the chances were that it was just some perv in the audience who’d come for the spanking scene alone.

It was a nice picture, but I should disregard it. Kiss Me, Kate was bound to throw up a few oddballs. And I was the oddest of them all, probably.

I took the postcard from my bag three weeks later at the awards ceremony and perused it under the table while the others necked back champagne and star-spotted.