Next came another scene between Lizzy and Wickham. At the end, Lydia spoke to him and, per Kit’s direction, there was a definite flirtation in her voice. They walked offstage together.
When Mrs. Bennet heard that their neighbors’ daughter Charlotte was to marry Mr. Collins, Olivia tongue-lashed Lizzy so hard that Casey almost started crying.
For the sake of fewer sets and a shorter play, Kit had combined some scenes. Charlotte—played by a young woman Casey didn’t really know—and Lizzy were shown on a dark stage with a spotlight on just them. Behind them, Josh and his men, wearing soft slippers, silently changed the set to become a drawing room at Rosings.
When the lights came up, Hildy, as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, was fabulous. She was haughty, disdainful, and utterly perfect. She was so good that Casey had difficulty delivering her lines as though she wasn’t intimidated by the woman.
When Hildy said that if she’d ever learned how to play the piano she would have been a great proficient, Casey believed her.
In the scene, Lizzy was to play the piano. Since Casey didn’t know one key from another, Kit had set up a tape recording that she was to pantomime. But it didn’t work. She pressed on the keys of the fake piano Josh had built, but there was no music.
The audience moved restlessly. Outside were some jeering calls from hecklers.
With panic on her face, she looked at Tate. What should she do?
He stepped forward and calmly said, “May I assist?” He then began to sing in a truly beautiful voice. If not a song of Jane Austen’s time, it was close. It was about love that had been found, then lost. A young man had to watch the woman he loved be taken from him
by death.
The melody, the words, and Tate’s tenor voice were so beautiful that the audience inside and out grew utterly silent. Even the kids who’d been running around like hooligans stopped and listened.
When he finished, the other players didn’t know what to say. What he’d done wasn’t in the script, so the lines they were to say wouldn’t make sense.
It was the audience that reacted. They spontaneously came to their feet and applauded Tate’s singing. Outside, they yelled and cheered.
Casey knew that her lines were next. She was to tease Mr. Darcy about how he’d snubbed them at the dance at the assembly hall. When the applause quieted a bit, Casey said loudly, “Perhaps, Mr. Darcy, if you had honored us in this way at Netherfield, you could have saved my sister Mary from any hint of impropriety.”
With a swish of her silk skirt, she turned away from him and went to Colonel Fitzwilliam. But before she left, she had the great satisfaction of seeing shock on Tate’s face. He wasn’t the only one who could ad-lib.
The scene finished with Colonel Fitzwilliam telling Lizzy that Darcy had broken Jane and Bingley apart.
During the quick break, Tate didn’t go to Casey’s dressing room. Coming up was the scene where she tells him what he can do with his marriage proposal. Earlier, he’d said that pre-scene kissing didn’t inspire anger onstage. “And you know this how?” she’d asked, but he’d just laughed.
Olivia helped Casey with the dress change.
“How is Lori?” Casey asked.
“No one is questioning her until the play is over.” Olivia’s hands were shaking as she fastened the back of Casey’s dress.
“Does she know that her mother was adopted?”
“Yes. Portia found out when she was seventeen. Estelle said the news made her very angry. I don’t know how the girls are going to feel about…about us.”
Turning, Casey hugged Olivia. “How could she not be pleased to know you and Kit? And Lori…” She didn’t know what to say about her.
“Let’s go,” Olivia said. “Give Darcy hell.”
Casey kissed her cheek, then ran up the stairs.
Onstage, she was alone in the parlor of Charlotte and Mr. Collins’s home when Darcy entered. Tate looked so good and his eyes were so full of love that Casey wanted to throw her arms around him.
But then he picked up a prop. It was her wineglass—the one Devlin had stolen. The glass was an antique, one of a set of four that her mother had given her to celebrate her graduation from the cooking academy. Casey used them only for special occasions, but that’s what she’d thought the dinner with Devlin was going to be. She’d been so attracted to him and he’d been so charming that she’d had visions of a future with him. Instead, he’d left her asleep on the table and had taken the wine and her pretty glass. And when she’d asked him about it, he’d flat-out lied.
Casey glanced from the wineglass to Tate’s eyes, and when she delivered her refusal of his marriage proposal, all the venom she felt came out. She practically spit the words at him.
When he left the room, he looked like a man who’d just lost everything he valued in life.
The last scene of the act was of Lizzy sitting at a desk and reading the letter from Mr. Darcy. A prerecorded tape of Tate’s voice told of Wickham’s lies. Casey remembered the video Nina had prepared and how bad she’d felt when she saw what a fool she’d been—and that memory showed on her face.