This story and couplet are mine. The characters belong to history.
Owed
Lizzie Barry, actress of renown, was no more a motherly woman than she was meant to be a wife. Still, she felt duty strongly, and thus trod through the sooty sunlight of a London morning, navigating the filth and ruckus of the narrow streets. She approached the door of a house no more slipshod than the rest—it could not easilybe discerned from the rest—and entered without knocking. She had had business here for seven years, and the mistress of the place knew her well.
"Mrs. Barry! Fair morning it is that has brought you with it!" The old matron was understandably pleased; Lizzie never came without her purse. "The girls will be thrilled to see their mother, you come down from the playhouse so rarely these days."
Lizzie let the accusation pass. It was known, of course, that she had born the bastards of an earl and a playwright, but to keep them in the public eye would only hurt her stage career, as well as the other "opportunities" that came with it. The children were best kept at a distance. She drew the usual number of coins from her purse, keeping back a penny each to give to the girls themselves.
"I trust they are behaving themselves, and that their lessons are going well?" she queried, allowing a bit of interest to show.
"Everything as it should be, and better. Oh, they'll have things to show you…" The woman counted the coins, subtly eyeing each for authenticity, before sliding them into her own thin purse. "That little Lizzie of yours, she's ever such a wit—perhaps to much of one, sometimes,"—a wry chuckle. "She's even written you some verse. Imagine that, at her age!"
She looked up in time to see an unreadable expression cross the famous actress's face, replaced quickly with one of determination—or, maybe, defiance.
"That is well, because she resembles me in feature, and I was never one who could get by on my appearance." With a small, sharp laugh, the woman who only ever belonged to her audience crossed to the stairs and climbed toward the dormitory where two little girls waited.
Who knows what woes tread heavily behind
The staid complexion of that masked mind…
The End