Daniel looked shocked. “You—you love me?”
“Of course.” Luce almost laughed at how obvious it was—but then she remembered: She had no idea which moment from her past she’d walked into. Maybe in this lifetime they’d only exchanged coy glances.
Daniel’s chest rose and fell violently and his lower lip began to quiver. “I want you to come away with me,” he said quickly. There was a desperate edge to his voice.
Luce wanted to cry out Yes!, but something held her back. It was so easy to get lost in Daniel when his body was pressed so close to hers and she could feel the heat coming off his skin and the beating of his heart through his shirt. She felt she could tell him anything now—from how glorious it had felt to die in his arms in Versailles to how devastated she was now that she knew the scope of his suffering. But she held back: The girl he thought she was in this lifetime wouldn’t talk about those things, wouldn’t know about them. Neither would Daniel. So when she finally opened her mouth, her voice faltered.
Daniel put a finger over her lips. “Wait. Don’t protest yet. Let me ask you properly. By and by, my love.”
He peeked out the cracked wardrobe door, toward the curtain. A cheer came from the stage. The audience roared with laughter and applause. Luce hadn’t even realized the play had begun.
“That’s my entrance. I’ll see you soon.” He kissed her forehead, then dashed out and onto the stage.
Luce wanted to run after him, but two figures came and stood just beyond the wardrobe door.
The door squeaked open and Bill fluttered inside. “You’re getting good at this,” he said, flopping onto a sack of old wigs.
“Where have you been hiding?”
“Who, me? Nowhere. What would I have to hide from?” he asked. “That little costume-change sham was a wee stroke of genius,” he said, raising his tiny hand for a high five.
It was always a bit of a buzz kill to be reminded that Bill was a fly on the wall during every interaction with Daniel.
“You’re really going to leave me hanging like this?” Bill slowly withdrew his hand.
Luce ignored him. Something felt heavy and raw in her chest. She kept hearing the desperation in Daniel’s voice when he’d asked her to run away with him. What had that meant?
“I’m dying tonight. Aren’t I, Bill?”
“Well …” Bill cast his eyes down. “Yes.”
Luce swallowed hard. “Where’s Lucinda? I need to get inside her again so I can understand this lifetime.” She pushed at the wardrobe door, but Bill took hold of the sash on her gown and pulled her back.
“Look kid, going three-D can’t be your go-to move. Think of it as a special-occasion skill.” He pursed his lips. “What is it you think you’re going to learn here?”
“What she needs to escape from, of course,” Luce said. “What is Daniel saving her from? Is she engaged to someone else? Living with a cruel uncle? Out of favor with the king?”
“Uh-oh.” Bill scratched the top of his head. It made a grating sound, like nails on a chalkboard. “I must have made a pedagogical boo-boo somewhere. You think there’s a reason for your death every time?”
“There’s not?” She could feel her face fall.
“I mean, your deaths aren’t meaningless, exactly.…”
“But when I died inside Lys, I felt everything—she believed that burning up freed her. She was happy because marrying that king would have meant her life was a lie. And Daniel could save her by killing her.”
“Oh, honey, is that what you think? That your deaths are an out for bad marriages or something?”
She squeezed her eyes shut against the sting of sudden tears. “It has to be something like that. It has to be. Otherwise it’s just pointless.”
“It’s not pointless,” Bill said. “You do die for a reason. Just not so simple a reason. You can’t expect to understand it all at once.”
She grunted in frustration and banged her fist against the side of the wardrobe.
“I can see what you’re all jacked up about,” Bill said finally. “You went three-D and you think you unlocked the secret of your universe. But it’s not always that neat and easy. Expect chaos. Embrace chaos. You should still try to learn as much as you can from every life you visit. Maybe in the end, it’ll all add up to something. Maybe you’ll end up with Daniel … or maybe you’ll decide there’s more to life than—”
A rustling startled them. Luce peeked around the wardrobe door.
A man, around fifty, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a small potbelly, stood just behind an actor in a dress. They were whispering. When the girl turned her head a little, the stage lights lit up her profile. Luce froze at the sight: a delicate nose and small lips made up with pink powder. A dark brown wig with just a few strands of long black hair showing underneath. A gorgeous golden gown.
It was Lucinda, fully costumed as Anne Boleyn and about to go onstage.
Luce edged out of the wardrobe. She felt nervous and tongue-tied but also oddly empowered: If what Bill had told her was true, there wasn’t a lot of time left.
“Bill?” she whispered. “I need you to do that thing where you press Pause so I can—”
“Shhhh!” Bill’s hiss had a finality that said Luce was on her own. She would just have to wait until this man left so she could get Lucinda alone.
Unexpectedly, Lucinda moved toward the wardrobe where Luce was hiding. Lucinda reached inside. Her hand moved toward the golden cloak right next to Luce’s shoulder. Luce held her breath, reached up, clasped her fingers with Lucinda’s.
Lucinda gasped and threw the door wide, staring deep into Luce’s eyes, teetering on the edge of some inexplicable understanding. The floor beneath them seemed to tilt. Luce grew dizzy, closing her eyes and feeling as if her soul had dropped out of her body. She saw herself from the outside: her strange dress that Bill had altered on the fly, the raw fear in her eyes. The hand in hers was soft, so soft she could barely feel it.
She blinked and Lucinda blinked and then Luce didn’t feel any hand at all. When she looked down, her hand was empty. She’d become the girl she’d been holding on to. Quickly, she grabbed the cloak and settled it over her shoulders.
The only other person in the tiring-room was the man who’d been whispering to Lucinda. Luce knew then that he was William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare. She knew him. They were, the three of them—Lucinda, Daniel, and Shakespeare—friends. There had been a summer afternoon when Daniel had taken Lucinda to visit Shakespeare at his home in Stratford. Toward sunset, they’d sat in the library, and while Daniel worked on his sketches at the window, Will had asked her question after question—all the while taking furious notes—about when she’d first met Daniel, how she felt about him, whether she thought she could one day fall in love.
Aside from Daniel, Shakespeare was the only one who knew the secret of Lucinda’s identity—her gender—and the love the players shared offstage. In exchange for his discretion, Lucinda was keeping the secret that Shakespeare was present that night at the Globe. Everyone else in the company assumed that he was in Stratford, that he’d handed over the reins of the theater to Master Fletcher. Instead, Will appeared incognito to see the play’s opening night.
When she returned to his side, Shakespeare gazed deep into Lucinda’s eyes. “You’ve changed.”
“I—no, I’m still”—she felt the soft brocade around her shoulders. “Yes, I found the cloak.”
“The cloak, is it?” He smiled at her, winked. “It suits you.”