“Hurry!” Bertie commanded. “I don’t want a single page loose when the lamplighters come around.” She shuddered at the idea of fire.
But there were other hazards to consider first. It took three members of the Company to divest Mr. Hyde of his waistcoat. Her Royal Majesty was so loath to part with her overskirt that Ophelia was forced to sit upon her and wrestle it off. A miserly gentleman tried to bat the fairies out of the air with his umbrella when they went after his coin purse.
“Be careful!” Bertie yelled at them. “Don’t rip anything!”
“Mrs. Edith is going to raise a ruckus,” Peaseblossom noted. “We’re dismantling her work.”
“I’m not certain these are hers,” Bertie said. “Have you ever seen paper clothing in the Wardrobe Department?”
“No,” Peaseblossom admitted. “But who made them, then?”
Moth jumped up and down on their captive’s back. “Did you do this?”
Ariel shook his head. “I scattered them, but the theater did the rest.”
“Did we get them all?” Bertie asked him, holding the medallion. “Answer me true.”
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more,” Ariel said as though against his will. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
“Macbeth’s line,” Bertie mused. “Nothing, nothing … You speak an infinite deal of nothing. More than any man in all Venice.” She turned to Peaseblossom. “We need to go to Venice.”
“Scene change!” the fairy called out.
There was an immediate blackout. Bertie felt the Players gather around her, the rush of air as one set of buildings flew out and another replaced them. There was the rustle of pages and the sickening lap of water against docks.
When the lights flooded up, Bertie indulged in a laugh that bordered on hysteria. “Truth has indeed come into sight.”
The age-worn buildings that lined the back wall, the gondola they sat in, the water of the canal itself were all made with pages from The Book.
Ariel lay prostrate in the bottom of the boat. “I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t left on the stage to drown in paper.”
“That’s only because no one asked me my preference.” Bertie sucked in a deep breath. “We need to strike the set.”
“Mr. Tibbs will have our guts for garters!” Moth said, appalled.
Bertie overruled the protest. “I’m the Director, and I need the pages. All the pages. Take it apart. That’s an order!”
Everyone dove overboard and swam in all directions at once. Two of the girls shinnied up the barber poles and pulled off the stripes. The burlier men dismantled the other boats. Ophelia sat in the gondola, very still, with her eyes closed.
“You don’t want to jump in?” Bertie asked her.
“The weight of words is far heavier than water,” Ophelia said. “They would drag me to the bottom and hold me captive there.”
As though to prove her wrong, Macbeth backstroked through the vellum waves. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
Moth considered the proffered appendage. “Nope, you still have jam on you.”
Mr. Tibbs entered Stage Right, scattering cigar ash and sawdust in his wake. He came to a dead halt when he spotted one group tearing down the back wall while three other members of the Company captured canal water and stacked it into piles. “What in the name of the sweet god’s suspenders is going on here?”
“We had a little incident.” Bertie put herself in harm’s way between the irate Scenic Manager and the nearly demolished set.
“Who authorized constructing scenery out of paper?” Mr. Tibbs chomped down on his cigar so hard that he bit the end right off. Peaseblossom caught the smoldering chunk before it could hit the page-covered floor, whisking it off to the ash can with her little nose wrinkled up.
“I’m afraid he did, sir.” Bertie nudged Ariel with her foot. “Such a silly thing to do, I know. But who can understand the mental workings of such impractical creatures?”
Mr. Tibbs dismissed the captive air elemental with a wave of his hand and another flurry of sawdust. “This is a cursed waste of time and glue, as well as a fire hazard!”
“Just what I told him, sir,” Bertie said. “Yet Mr. Hastings seemed most taken with the idea. He even took one of the gondolas down to the Properties Department to examine the craftsmanship.”
“He did!” The revelation gave Mr. Tibbs pause. “The nerve of that sticky-fingered shoplifter! Something as large as a gondola is a piece of scenery!” He twitched, clearly conflicted.
Bertie hastened to reassure him. “If you want to reclaim it, I’ll supervise the cleanup here, sir.”
“I’ll be back in just a minute! And I’ll tolerate no more of your shenanigans, miss!” Mr. Tibbs turned on his heel and marched off.
Bertie sent a silent apology in Mr. Hastings’ direction and hoped Mr. Tibbs wouldn’t return anytime soon, as she was quite sure there were a few more shenanigans to get through.
“We got all the papers that were here,” Mustardseed said.
Moth shook his tiny head. “But I’m sure some are still missing.”
“Yeah, I feel pretty free,” Cobweb said, “and it’s not just the lack of underpants.”
When Bertie reached for the scrimshaw one more time, the words of the Sea Goddess drifted through her head, unbidden: His magic! The blood, the bones. You are his child!
Bertie had devoted countless daydreams to her mother, but now there was an unnamed “him” to suddenly consider.
My father.
It was too big an idea; it wouldn’t fit inside her already crowded head. She tried not to think of it, tried not to think of Nate, of where he might be or what might have happened to him by now. Longing for the quiet, reassuring presence that would have dispatched all this turmoil with one solid blow of his cutlass against Ariel’s neck, Bertie forced herself to concentrate only upon the prone figure before her. “Are we still missing pages, Ariel?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where, oh, where have you hidden the rest?” Bertie looked about them. With Venice completely dismantled, the cracks in the stage floor were once again visible, as was the half-circle of ancient trees. Bertie reached out to stroke the gnarled bark, watching as a single, yellow leaf fluttered from the rafters, drifted in a downward spiral, and landed at her feet. She peered up at the thousands of leaves rustling in the boughs of the ancient trees. “They’re up there.”
The fairies disappeared within the branches, causing pages to rain down upon the stage.
“Be careful!” Bertie yelled.
“We are!” answered four voices. After that, the only noise came from paper fluttering through the air.
“Tricky, Ariel. Tricky, tricky, tricky.” Bertie knelt next to him. “But not tricky enough.”
“You can’t be sure you have all of them,” he muttered.
“Oh, yes,” Bertie said. “I feel it, Ariel. Not in my head, or my heart, because you taught me not to rely on those. But I feel it.” She leaned very close to him, until her lips brushed against his ear. “I feel it in my bones.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Once More
Unto the Breach
With The Book’s leather cover still in her arms, Bertie felt a sudden sympathy and kinship with Juliet upon waking to find Romeo poisoned. She held what remained, the cooling corpse of something beloved, wishing to all the gods that she could turn the hourglass over and set things to rights.
The scene onstage was a tableau vivant of gloom and despair. The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Choruses gazed helplessly at the pages, stacked in some places on the stage as high as their waists, countless more filling the orchestra pit and half the seats in the auditorium.
“Fixing this is gonna take a metric buttload of glue,” Moth said.
“Are you insane?” Bertie asked. “All of these won’t fit b
ack between the covers. It’s physically impossible.”
“Maybe you could write them back in,” Mustardseed said. “The scriptwriting worked to capture Ariel.”
Bertie’s heart leapt at the idea and plunged just as suddenly. “My words don’t affect The Book, remember? I kept trying to rewrite the ending of the scene so that The Book wasn’t destroyed, but we still went to blackout. We’ll have to find another way to fix it.”
“It’s not going to be easy.” Peaseblossom shook her head. “It’s a magical object.”
“Or it was,” Mustardseed said. “Now it just looks like a pile of recycling.”
Bertie surveyed the pages piled around her. Feeble fingers of power reached out, struggling to prevent further destruction to the Théâtre.
But how long do we have before that power fades?
“There’s still magic here,” she said. “I just need to figure out how to use it.” Picking up one of the pages, Bertie held its edge against The Book’s inner spine and willed it to stick. When that didn’t work, she added, “If this page goes back in, I won’t make a mess on the stage ever again.”
“Wow,” Moth said, impressed by the enormity of her offering, but nothing happened.
“Maybe it wants something more than that,” Peaseblossom said. “A bigger sacrifice.”
Bertie closed her eyes. “If the pages go back in The Book, I’ll stop smoking.”
“Double wow!” Cobweb said, peering over her shoulder. “But it’s holding out for something else.”
“I could offer to clean up my language.” Bertie tested it, but the only page firmly fastened was the one with Ariel’s entrance—
—and just under that, a page from Macbeth.
“What the hell?” Bertie demanded.
“Ah, ah, ah, you said no more cursing!” Moth said.
Cobweb shook his head. “She said no more cursing if the page stayed in, and it didn’t—”
“There are two pages in here now,” Bertie interrupted.
“Impossible,” Ariel said.
She tested the page, but it was stuck fast and it glowed with twice the light of the ones scattered about the floor.
SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING…
“This wasn’t here before, was it?” she demanded. “I’m not imagining things, am I?”
“No,” Ophelia said. “The only page Ariel couldn’t get out was his own.”
“Then how—”
In the distance, a door slammed.
“Uh-oh!” the fairies said in one voice.
The Stage Manager stomped into the grove. “What in the name of the Bard is going on here?” He looked from Ariel bound on the floor to the lopsided piles of paper and finally to Bertie. “Who authorized this?”
“You mean the scene change?” Bertie said. “I did.”
He squinted at the pages. “This isn’t from your topsyturvy version of Hamlet. What’s going on?”
“We’re just rehearsing.” Bertie tried to shift the leather cover of The Book out of sight, but too late.
The Stage Manager leapt at her with an oath. “What have you done?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Bertie gestured to Ariel. “Our friendly neighborhood air spirit stole The Book and ripped its pages out.”
The Stage Manager’s mouth worked in silence for a moment before he recovered enough to ask the dreaded question, “When?”
Bertie hedged. “We just discovered it.”
“When did Ariel take it?”
Bertie tried to think of a plausible lie, but Ariel lifted his head and divulged, “When your Director left it under a sofa in the Properties Department.”
The Stage Manager looked back to Bertie. “You touched The Book?”
“I took it to protect it from Ariel, but he destroyed it anyway!”
“Wait until the Theater Manager hears what you’ve done.” The Stage Manager raised his voice so that everyone could hear his pronouncement. “I told him over and over again that you were a troublemaker. A destructive little menace. Perhaps now he’ll listen. See if you’re not out on your backside within the hour!”
“Is that so?” Bertie walked over to the Chorus Member standing guard over Ariel and retrieved her sword. She turned and flicked it over the Stage Manager’s shirtfront, slicing through the fabric. “Call me a destructive little menace again.”
“It’s the plain truth!” The Stage Manager scrambled away from her.
“Shut up.” Bertie followed him. “Or the next thing I cut off will be an ear.”
“The Theater Manager will hear about this!”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Bertie poked a hole in his earlobe. He squealed like a piglet, clapping his hand to the wound and falling to the stage alongside Ariel. “I will not be threatened. Ever again. Not by you or anyone else.”
“Beatrice.” The Theater Manager strode onstage. “What is going on here?”
Bertie let her sword arm fall. “A little housekeeping, sir.”
The Theater Manager looked from Ariel to the Stage Manager to Bertie’s bloodied sword. “This doesn’t look like Hamlet. Why are these men playing captives?”
“Because I threatened to kill them if they moved.” Bertie lifted the leather husk of The Book and held it out to him. “This is how Ophelia escaped before.”
The Theater Manager sucked in a breath. “She’s done it again.”
“It wasn’t her this time.” There was another shudder underfoot, and a shower of sparks fell from the overhead lighting as Bertie pointed down. “It was him.”
“The only page that would not come out was my own,” Ariel said with a groan.
“You were written a slave,” the Theater Manager said slowly. “I suspect that someone else must free you. Someone who wields more power than Prospero. Someone who can unlock the fetters of the written words that bind you here.”
Ariel looked at Bertie, a thin edge of triumph in his gaze. A howl built in his throat before he cried, “I knew it. It is in your power.”
Bertie pointed her sword at him. “Even if the Théâtre falls down around my ears, I’ll never set you free—”
“Silence!” The way the Theater Manager said it made it so. “When I gave you my permission to change things, I warned you this might happen!” His unprecedented ferocity lashed out against Bertie’s anger and anxiety.
She returned his glower with a glare of her own. “And you should have told me it was Ophelia who escaped! But we can trade blame and accusations later. Right now you have to tell me how to fix The Book.”
His right hand spasmed. “I don’t know the answer to that, Bertie.”
Her gaze slid immediately to the water-maiden, standing still and silent on the fringe of the gathered crowd. “How did you get your page back into The Book before?”
Ophelia stepped forward to answer the summons, albeit reluctantly. “I … I don’t know.”
“Come now,” Bertie coaxed, struggling to keep her voice even and calm. “Think back. You must remember your return.”
Ophelia bit her lip, eyes clouding as the darkest depths stirred. “I … was in the lobby. The Stage Manager was there.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Bertie wished she’d cut his ear all the way off and not just pierced it for him. “Then what happened?”
Ophelia grasped Bertie’s hand, her grip iron and ice. “Everything was red with blood.”
“It took a blood sacrifice to get your page back in?” Bertie blanched at the idea.
The Stage Manager whimpered, no doubt fearful Bertie would put his head on the chopping block without a second’s hesitation.
“And the page?” Bertie whispered.
“One minute I had it, the next it was gone.” Ophelia looked bereft, her next words no more than flower petals strewn on a grave. “Do you doubt that?”
“What do you mean?” Bertie said with a frown. “I don’t doubt you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It’s my first line in the
play,” Ophelia said. “I heard the words echo in my head, so I asked him that very question… .”
“She’s forgotten what really happened, if she ever knew.” The Theater Manager shook his head. “I don’t know how her page was returned to The Book, or I would surely tell you how to fix this.”
The scrimshaw revealed the truth in his words to Bertie as the sun reflected on a still pond, but when she looked harder, the water wavered. Secrets swam under his surface; some were delicate things, no more than an air bubble breaking, while others were hard and dark and sharp. One of them jabbed at her as he said, “I, too, wanted to be a playwright. But you already have more power over the written word than I ever did.”
“Not by choice.” Bertie stepped back before she could stop herself.
“No,” he said. “Perhaps not. All the same, it’s yours, and with it the responsibility. You are the only one with the ability to repair The Book, and you must do so with haste. I’m not sure how much longer your trees will keep this place standing.”
As though to illustrate his point, another hunk of plaster slid down the wall of the auditorium and landed in the aisle. Whispers filled Bertie’s ears:
The Theater Manager. You’re the only one with the ability… .
Ariel. I knew it. It is in your power.
Even her Mother, speaking to the Mistress of Revels about the stars in an infant girl’s eyes. She’ll have magic enough because of the cursed things.
Some unseen, golden scale tipped, and Bertie lifted her chin.
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
She thought of Nate, and the “Drink Me” bottle backstage, broken into smithereens, its power to change less potent than the determination already unfurling inside her. Variegated vines wrapped around her bones, steadying her, planting her feet in a stance favored by Commanding Generals and Pirate Captains. “Do me one favor?”
“Yes?”
“Get him out of my sight.” She pointed at the Stage Manager.
Eyes Like Stars: Theatre Illuminata, Act I Page 17
