Vital Secrets

by Don Gutteridge

  Marc sighed. If only he had found the vial in Merriwether’s room. It could have been placed out here by anyone—including Rick. However, if it had been purchased at Michaels, there would likely be a record of the sale and perhaps even a physical description of the buyer. Old Michaels, he knew, boasted that he never forgot a face. He would put Cobb onto this immediately. Remembering a pencil sketch of the actor, out of costume, on Merriwether’s desk, Marc returned to retrieve it. He would have Cobb take it to Michaels and, if necessary, to every apothecary and quack homeopath in the city. He might not be able to prove Rick was innocent of murder, but he’d be damned if he’d let the young man go to the gallows as a rapist.

  WHEN MARC CAME DOWN TO RELIEVE Cobb and send him off to make the rounds of the chemists, the rehearsal for the impromptu evening ahead was in full swing. Marc took up a stool and sat unobtrusively in the wings to watch. He had little fear that any one of the five actors would suddenly decide to sprint to the double-doors at the front of the theatre, fling back the bar, and make a run for it down Colborne Street.

  On the stage in front of him, illumined only by a single, half-lit chandelier, stood Dawson Armstrong in top hat and tails, surrounded by the three women in old-fashioned bonnets and Beasley, with a carter’s cap on his head. They were in the midst of a dramatized reading of Cowper’s “The Diverting History of John Gilpin.” Armstrong, as the hapless Gilpin, who cannot control the horse he’s borrowed to ride with his wife and family to their seaside holiday spot, was miming to perfection the struggle and strain of the runaway, even while he narrated the tale. The chorus around him added the comic commentary of his wife and various bystanders. The whole thing was highly professional and very funny. Certainly, in a town where runaway horses and wagons were not infrequent, this piece should go over well tonight. Marc himself was impressed by the intensity of concentration that these five managed after the trials of the past fifteen hours, but only Jeremiah had noticed his arrival, offering a brief smile of welcome. When “John Gilpin” came to its risible conclusion, Marc announced his presence by clapping out his approval.

  Mrs. Thedford turned, caught his eye, and said with amusement, “I hope those watching this evening are so easily entertained.” Then, addressing the others, she said, “Dawson, I think you didn’t come in quite soon enough at ‘The dinner waits, and we are tired.’ Your response here should draw the biggest laugh of the piece, so we don’t want to mistime it.”

  They re-did the middle section of the poem, agreed among themselves that it was improved if not perfect, then Mrs. Thedford said, “Tessa and I will now do ‘Lenore.’” Jeremiah stepped smartly forward with several bits of costume for the next number. Tessa, pale but remarkably composed, shook out her blond curls, draped a gossamer wrap over her bare shoulders, and sank to the floor in a lifeless pose. Mrs. Thedford donned a black lace shawl that covered her head and shoulders. Staring sorrowfully at the still, beautiful form at her feet, she began to recite one of the most haunting laments Marc had ever heard. Who the poet was he had no idea, but the grief of the speaker for the dead Lenore was agonizingly real:

  See! On yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore, Come! Let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!—

  An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—

  A dirge for her doubly dead in that she died so young. By you—by yours, the evil eye—by yours, the slanderous tongue That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young.

  Then, partway through, the sobbing diminuendos of a violin joined the grieved speaker, and Marc tore his gaze from the heartwrenching scene of woman and girl to glance over and see Clarence Beasley with the instrument under his chin. Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes as the poem neared its mournful conclusion:

  The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes—The life still there, upon her hair—the death upon her eyes.

  Marc felt the surge of his own emotion catch in his throat, and realized he had been thinking of Uncle Jabez and the sister lost to him forever. Just as Mrs. Thedford recited the final phrase, she sank to her knees with the grace of a swan settling over her eggs while Tessa simultaneously rose through the gauze of her garment till she was almost sitting up. Freeze. Tableau. Music fades. Finis.

  No one moved. For a full minute all thoughts drifted inward. The ghost of Jason Merriwether was palpable.

  “Well, it’s time to liven things up a little,” Armstrong said in a voice clear, strong, and uncontaminated by drink. He signed something towards Jeremiah, and the black man grinned and went over to the far wings. In the shadows there was a pile of what Marc had taken to be scenery-flats covered by a piece of sailcloth. Jeremiah whipped this cover away to reveal, not a stack of flats, but a gleaming pianoforte, which he began to push out onto the stage. Well, Marc thought, no wonder Ogden Frank had scratched himself bald worrying about the future of his investment. But who would play the instrument?

  It was Dawson Armstrong who sat down before it on a stool and struck a thundering introductory chord. “Ready, ladies?”

  The three women came down to the footlights. With Tessa between Mrs. Thedford and Thea Clarkson, they linked arms. Then, to Armstrong’s zestful accompaniment, they entertained Marc, enthralled him really, for the next twenty minutes with a series of trios, duets, and naughty ditties from The Beggar’s Opera, mixing male and female roles willy-nilly. Mrs. Thedford sang in the rich alto range, throaty and vibrant; Tessa’s note was descant, tremulously sweet. Thea’s voice was contralto, haunted and rippled with the shadow of longing and regret. The latter concluded this set with a solo, an aria in Italian about the heroine’s sorrow at the loss of her lover. That was all that Marc could decipher, but there was little need for lyrics here: Thea’s voice, her posture, and the sonority of the song itself were sufficient. How she contrived to complete it in such circumstance Marc did not know, but he hoped that somehow the effort was cathartic. When she finished, the women curtseyed and the four men applauded.

  Without warning or ado, Armstrong now banged out a single cacophonous chord. Beasley and the women retreated to a bench upstage. Then Jeremiah Jefferson, barefoot and stripped to the waist, leapt into stage-centre. From the pianoforte there now came a steady, rhythmic beat from the lowest keys only, a cadence somewhat like the panic of a heartbeat but not quite, for there was the thump of bravery and bravado in it and an intimation of the erotic.

  Under the chandelier’s flickering cast, Jeremiah’s skin glistened as the muscles beneath tightened and released in response to the primal obbligato of the music. His eyes were closed and his whole face upturned as if anticipating a benediction of rain. But it was the legs and bare feet that fascinated. Their dance was so intricate, so alien, so intrinsically staccato that it was impossible to tell whether it was animated by the piano’s beat or was simply a coincidental and parallel harmony. As the rhythm-thrums progressed in intensity and dissonance, Jeremiah’s feet became a gray blur, sweat shimmered and shook free, both eyes were wide open and gazed sightless before the music stopped in mid-beat and his body froze as if it were abruptly bronzed.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Mrs. Thedford said to him as all the tension in him was instantly relaxed and he became Jeremiah Jefferson, escaped slave, once again. She signed her pleasure as well, and he smiled his acceptance of her approval.

  “But how can he hear the music?” Marc said to Beasley, who was nearest him. “He’s deaf.”

  “Oh,” Beasley said, “he can feel the vibrations, especially if the notes are low.”

  “I’ve never seen or heard anything like that.”

  “Then you’ve never spent any time in the United States,” Beasley said.

  Mrs. Thedford came over to Marc and handed him a sheaf of papers. “We’re all through here now, Mr. Edwards. We’re going up to rest before supper and the show at eighty-thirty. I’ve put together, in sequence, the scripts for tomorrow with your parts marked.”

  “With all this ahead
of me, I won’t have time to attend the performance this evening, so I am glad I was able to sit in on your rehearsal.”

  “We look forward to your being part of it tomorrow.” Again, she kept her gaze steadily upon him. He could feel in it an intense curiosity and something much more ambivalent and inaccessible. It unnerved him.

  “Cobb will look after you when I leave shortly,” he stammered.

  “I find that immensely comforting,” she said with an enigmatic smile.

  When the actors had withdrawn, Marc sat on the vacant stage waiting for Cobb and staring out at the vast space where a hundred or more spectators would be scrutinizing his every twitch and stutter when he made his debut as Jason Merriwether. But his overriding concern at this moment was not the distinct possibility of stage-fright or being prematurely unmasked but, rather, a simple question: How could any one of the people he had just observed in the fullness of their generous talent have committed a brutal murder? And if not one of them, then who?

  COBB ARRIVED HALF AN HOUR LATER.

  “Did you get to Michaels?” Marc asked at once.

  “Good day to you, too,” Cobb said, staring at the piano-forte. “We gonna have some song an’ dance?”

  “Yes. And since I will be at Mrs. Standish’s boarding-house memorizing a dozen pages of script tonight, you’ll have the pleasure of humming along with it here this evening. You might want to bring Mrs. Cobb—I’m sure I can arrange for a box seat.”

  “I’ll have her get the family gems outta storage.”

  “What did you find out at the chemist’s?”

  “Several vials of laudanum were bought there last Saturd’y afternoon by people Michaels didn’t know.”

  “Did you show Ezra the sketch of Merriwether?”

  “Yup. But Merriwether wasn’t one of ’em.”

  “Damn. Did you get a look at any of the buyers’ names?”

  “I did. An’ one of them was very familiar. Hang on to yer hat, Major: it was Thea Clarkson.”

  “My God.” Marc had not been prepared for that information.

  “Want me to haul her down here? Yer idea that she might’ve been teamed up with somebody to do the cheater in seems applause-able now, don’t it?”

  “Yes. But I’m going to wait until morning before confronting her. I can’t take any chance on disturbing the equanimity of the troupe before the performance tonight. And I’m even reluctant to do so in the morning: this ruse we’re attempting must not be compromised.”

  Cobb sighed. “I think you’re more afraid of a rebellion in this province than Sir Francis Swell-Head himself.”

  “Well, at least it looks now as if we’ll be able to demonstrate that Rick didn’t drug Tessa in order to have his way with her. What possible connection could there be between Rick and Thea Clarkson?”

  “I’m sure that knowin’ the world don’t consider him a despoiler of virgins will give the lad a lot of comfort as the noose tightens ’round his gullet.”

  Marc ignored the remark. “It’s still possible that Merriwether bought his own laudanum.”

  “Possible. Michaels ain’t the only chemist in town, just the richest.”

  “It would be so helpful if I could make a direct link between the drugged sherry and Merriwether. Keep looking, will you?”

  “In my spare time, ya mean?”

  “Whenever you can. Please.”

  “You headed to yer old boarding-house, then?”

  “Yes. Have Wilkie return to guard duty, then go home to your good wife for a few hours.”

  “She’ll be thrilled.”

  MARC HAD LIVED AT WIDOW STANDISH’S boarding-house for the six exciting months he had worked at Government House in the service of Sir Francis Head. He had been happily mothered by Mrs. Standish and coddled by her live-in maid-servant, Maisie. He knew he would be welcomed there without question or comment. Moreover, he would have a quiet place to learn his lines and begin to think about the report on the murder he was to present to the governor at noon.

  Right now he wanted very much to walk all the way up to Government House on Simcoe Street and visit Rick. But he had so little in the way of good news, he felt he would most likely leave Rick more anxious and depressed than he already was. At least Cobb had got a message to him that Tessa was fine and concerned about him. But Marc would certainly demand to see him before completing his report. If Spooner had not requested a written statement from Rick, then he would get one himself, though he knew Rick well enough to realize that his initial account would be unchanged. However, some small detail overlooked might well prove to be the missing piece to the puzzle. To this point his own investigation had done little but suggest that only three people were in that room when Tessa’s cry started a chain-reaction of events and that, short of a massive conspiracy, the window of opportunity for anyone else to have committed the crime and escape undetected was about two minutes.

  Since he had to pass Aunt Catherine’s shop on his way westward to Peter Street, Marc decided to stop in and say hello. He felt a stab of guilt as he walked through the alley that led to the back door and the stairs up to her apartment. Not only was the wedding set for a week from Sunday in Cobourg, but Aunt Catherine and Beth were now plotting the fine details and, at the very least, he was expected to show some interest and give nominal approval. Daily letters could now be expected. He should have been free to participate fully in the exchange and, further, should have been allowed the luxury of leisure hours to dream, anticipate, and indulge his fondest fantasies.

  Beth had insisted they not worry in advance over insurmountable obstacles or impossible decisions. Thus they had not yet worked out where they would set up house other than that Beth would remain with Aunt Catherine and entertain conjugal visits whenever Marc’s normally insignificant duties let him loose from the garrison. Only when “things settled down,” in Aunt Catherine’s polite phrase, would they turn their attention to the question of whether Beth would move into officers’ quarters with him or whether they would rent or buy a house he could only occupy intermittently. And the spectre of his being transferred to the Caribbean or India or Van Diemen’s Land was not acknowledged at any level.

  Hearing a footstep on the back stairs, Aunt Catherine bustled in from the shop. “Oh, it’s you, Marc! I was expecting George back.”

  Marc was quite happy to miss the sullen George Revere.

  “Come on upstairs, I’ve got news from Beth.”

  Marc wanted to ask “good or bad?” but dutifully followed Beth’s aunt up to her parlour, where she fetched a freshly opened letter from the mantel. She smiled broadly, then looked a mite sheepish.

  “Beth has ordered me to confess to a little conniving behind your back.”

  “For my own good, I assume?”

  “I couldn’t put it any better. But since you’ve done nothing but dither about arrangements for a honeymoon—using that god-awful army of yours as an excuse—we’ve gone ahead and done it ourselves.”

  “A month in New York or London?”

  Aunt Catherine laughed, quite at ease now and more certain than ever that her niece had found a man to match her own spirit and particular humours. “Three days and four nights at Sword’s Hotel on Front Street—the bill to be sent to me.”

  Marc was touched. “That is more than kind,” he said.

  “Well, it isn’t Paris, but at least you won’t spend your honeymoon being interrupted by the silly chatter of seamstresses and the loud complaints of over-indulged dowagers looking for the perfect hat!”

  “May I see Beth’s letter?”

  “Certainly. And you’ll see there that you and your bride are booked on the mail packet out of Cobourg that’ll get you to Toronto before supper time. Now I’ve got to get back to the shop. Can you stay for a meal?”

  “I’ve got a lot of work that can’t wait. Sorry.”

  “No need to be. Drop in tomorrow if you can.” With that she headed down the stairs. “Ah, George,” he heard her say, “just take those th
ings right through to the girls.”

  Marc read eagerly through Beth’s letter, written several days after her last one but, not surprisingly given the state of the mail service, nearly overlapping it. He was searching for the slightest negative remark, but the only one that even remotely qualified was a reference to Thomas Goodall’s depression over the low commodity prices tempered, Beth assured him, by the healthy progress of Baby Mary and the decision that they had just taken to store their grain and wait for better prices in the spring. According to Beth, the cash they had received from the army as a result of Marc’s visit in March and Owen Jenkin’s generosity had made the decision possible. Hence, the chances of Thomas, Winnifred, and child pulling up stakes and rushing off to the edge of the earth beyond the Mississippi had been temporarily forestalled. All the other news was upbeat, some of it bordering on the naughty, the letter ending thus: “Auntie, stop reading here. Darling, I long to be in your arms, anywhere but most especially in bed. I count the days and the hours therein. Be well. Your loving wife-to-be, Beth.”

  Marc found himself trembling. It was actually going to happen. And that knowledge immediately gave him the strength he knew he would need to face the morrow.

  THIRTEEN

  When Mrs. Standish and Maisie ceased fussing over him, Marc retired to his former room and opened the package of scripts that Mrs. Thedford had given him to study. All three of his scene-sequences were with Mrs. Thedford, which simplified any rehearsal required, and left the rest of the cast and their contributions more or less intact. First up were the two excerpts from Macbeth wherein Lady Macbeth tries to drive her waffling mate towards the assassination of King Duncan, followed by the murder scene and its aftermath. These scenes had not been rehearsed yesterday but were obviously ones that Mrs. Thedford and Merriwether had performed often. Next up was a series of excerpts from Antony and Cleopatra, cleverly selected, edited, and sequenced to trace the tempestuous affair from its inception to final farewells, concluding with Cleopatra’s suicide at stage-centre. Lastly, there was the closet-scene in Hamlet where Hamlet beards and upbraids his mother.