Fates and Traitors by Jennifer Chiaverini

worshipper, Junius.”
    In more introspective moments, he wrote of his childhood in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, as the scion of Jewish silversmiths and lawyers on his father’s side and of strict Anglicans on his mother’s. When he felt more lighthearted, he amused her with stories of his early years as an actor, of tromping through the provinces with a company of players in search of an engagement, some coin, and a clean bed; of performing
Macbeth
for the Prince of Orange in Brussels shortly before the Battle of Waterloo; of his professional feud with the acclaimed actor Edmund Kean, who had been so jealous of his young rival’s popularity that he had hired mobs of ruffians to disrupt his performances. Though Mary Ann never favored Junius with a reply, with every letter she felt herself drawing closer to him.
    Then, a few days before Christmas, an urchin brought her a letter that was almost too painful to read, for when she broke the seal his wife’s name leapt off the page. “I will confess my history to you,” he had written, “my triumphs, my mistakes. There must be no secrets between us.”
    Junius was eighteen, he wrote, when he met Adelaide Delannoy while touring in Brussels. She was one of his landlady’s three daughters, and although she was more than four years his senior and not pretty, or so his friends had complained, she was well educated and had impressed him with her cleverness and keen business sense. When Junius and his company of players left Brussels to tour elsewhere on the Continent, Adelaide had followed him, taking upon herself the roles of his assistant, adviser, and closest companion. “You will judge me, and well I may deserve it,” Junius acknowledged. “Upon our return to England in May 1815, we married at St. George’s in Bloomsbury. Our daughter was born in October.”
    A daughter? Junius and the theatre manager had mentioned only a son. Mary Ann read the passage again, and counted the months, and at once she understood why Junius and Adelaide had been obliged to marry.
    The child, Amelia, had died at nine months of age, and grief had driven Junius into fits of melancholy and madness. “Now you know the reason for the mad and bad behavior of those days of years past,” he wrote, “although most of the fantastical tales you might have heard were greatly exaggerated.”
    Mary Ann had heard no such tales, young and sheltered as she had been—a lifetime ago, or so it seemed.
    Junius’s sorrow had been assuaged, he wrote, though never entirely forgotten, by the birth of his son, Richard, in June a year past. Since then Adelaide had devoted herself entirely to the boy, and to her family in Brussels, whom she often visited.
    â€œWhatever passion I felt for her as a lad of eighteen has since faded,” Junius wrote, his regret evident in every dark stroke of the pen. “As has hers for me, or so her nightly indifference proves. For years I believed I would plod through life a proper, dutiful husband, accepting that true love and beauty and the quenching of desire were lost to me forever. But then I discovered you, my darling angel, and having discovered my heart’s desire, I must pursue it.”
    The next day he came to her in the market. He did not speak, but his eyes burned blue fire as he took her hand and folded it around a small piece of stiff paper. Her heart raced at his touch and she trembled, not trusting herself to speak. Only after he bowed and departed did she open her hand and discover a single ticket for that evening’s performance at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand.
    It was opening night of a new melodrama in three acts,
Zamoski, or, The Fortress and the Mine
, but Mary Ann saw almost none of the performance. Soon after the curtain rose, Junius slipped into the empty seat on her right, laced his fingers through hers, and when the hero first appeared onstage, he quickly led her away under the