by Diana Norman
It was narrow and damp, the sun hadn’t reached it yet, would stay only a little while when it did. It looked blind, the windows of its tall, respectable houses shuttered, doors barred.
Number Fifteen was halfway down on the right. Two big gates with a wicket in them suggested that a courtyard lay on the other side and that the story above them was the upper floor of a lodge.
The prescribed list of occupants was nailed to the right hand gate.
Violette Vernet (propriétaire)
Manon Bercot
Jean Marcoz
Alain Sarret
One resident’s name, she knew, was not on it.
She closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them, she looked up and down the empty street. Then she grasped the ornate door knocker, lifted it and let it fall.
Chapter Nine
MAKEPEACE Hedley and Michael Murrough stood together on the stage of the Duke’s Theatre in Eastcheap, looking out on the auditorium.
‘ “A little dusting,” ’ Makepeace said, quoting.
‘Did I say that?’
‘ “A lick of paint.” ’
‘That’s all, really, dear lady,’ the actor said. ‘A bit of restoration here and there.’
‘How about bit of demolition?’ Makepeace said. still horribly calm. ‘Finish the job.’
‘It looks worse than it is,’ he said.
‘Oh good.’
It looked appalling. Empty, neglectful years had done the theater harm but thieves had done worse; the proscenium curtain had gone, so had scenery and carpets and chandeliers and candle brackets and doorknobs with their escutcheons—in one instance an entire door. The boxes had been stripped of their gilt balustrades and stools, only scars showed where plaster cherubs and muses had once romped around the high, painted ceiling and walls. The orchestra pit was empty of chairs and music stands. The backdrop roller was broken so that a canvas of Venice’s Rialto hung at an angle that threatened to tip its pedestrians into the canal.
A voice like a flute with a French accent came up from the stalls. ‘It is not so bad, cherie. The seating is intact.’
‘How can you tell?’ asked Makepeace. ‘Nailed down, is it? I can’t see under the rubble.’
‘But yes, it is.’ The flute was undismayed. ‘It need only a sweep.’
Another voice, slightly Irish, said, ‘Will you look at this now?’ A crumpled playbill was waved over the balcony of the circle. ‘They put on Romeo and Juliet with Mrs Cibber and Barry.’
There was a sound like an organ roll from beside Makepeace. ‘She speaks. O speak again, bright angel.’
‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ asked the circle.
The stalls chimed in:
‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’
There were murmurs of approbation all round the theater.
‘Look . . .’ said Makepeace.
‘How about the sound?’ demanded Murrough.
‘Not bad at all,’ the circle told him, ‘Bit sharp, fine with a full house.’
‘Cherie, anything is better than the Abbey, it was an ear trumpet.’
‘Will you all STOP?’ Makepeace said. She gained silence. ‘I’m sorry but there ain’t going to be no sounds. There ain’t going to be a play, not anything. Setting this place to rights would cost more than it’s worth. Look at it.’
The silence grew deeper. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and meant it. ‘I’d have liked to put the play on but it’s got to pay its way for Aaron’s sake. We’d be in debt before we started. This ain’t a charity.’
‘I thought it was,’ somebody said, reasonably. ‘For slaves or some such.’
‘Yes, well, I’ll think of something else.’ Even to herself she sounded shamefaced. ‘Perhaps you could put on a production in Hyde Park.’
There was a deep, reflective sigh.
‘Bracey’s making tea in the Green Room,’ somebody said. ‘We could give her some of that.’
‘Excellent idea.’
They talked about her as if she were a recalcitrant horse.
There were five of them. It seemed like more. They’d got off the boat from Dublin at Holyhead and made their way from Anglesey—God knew how; they hadn’t a penny to bless themselves with—to land on the doorstep of Reach House like a flock of parakeets. ‘We’re Aaron’s players, dear lady. How is the poor darling?’
She’d let them settle in the parlor and had taken only one, the most insistent, upstairs to Aaron’s room on the principle that en masse they would be too much for him, as they were too much for her. That one had been the French actress, Adèle de Beauregard, the one they called Ninon—they all had nicknames—and there’d been a lot of kissing and cherie-ings and ‘my treasures’ between her and Murrough and Aaron but Makepeace had seen at once that here was another of Aaron’s women.
There’d been a number of them over the years, always the same as to type, but she’d only known well the two he’d married. At least, he’d called the second one his wife, being somewhat vague as to what had happened to the first—disappeared rather than deceased, apparently. There’d been a child by that particular Mrs Burke and, to Makepeace’s distress, it had gone with her.
Andra Hedley had insisted that, however outraged her Puritanism might be, she must not only receive the second Mrs Burke but be nice to her. ‘Which do ye want to keep to, pet? Your principles or your brother?’
So she’d kept to her brother, though why, if he’d had any choice in the matter, Aaron should have made the change was difficult to see; both marital peas might have come from the same pod. Both were actresses, slightly vulgar, thin, brunette, overexuberant and, to Makepeace’s mind, overfriendly. Both had treated her as if she were as risqué as themselves, presumably because she’d had two husbands, one of them titled, rich and previously divorced. There’d been a companionable women-of-the-world winking from them; the second Mrs Burke had actually complimented her on having ‘done well for herself ’—a phrase that had enabled Makepeace to bear the eventual severance of that alliance with equanimity.
Ninon, being thin, dark and animated, went down immediately as another from the formula and there was no mistaking the mistiness of Aaron’s eyes as she settled a silk-covered haunch on his pillows and smoothed back his hair in what Makepeace considered an unnecessarily proprietorial manner.
She had to leave them together in order to attend to the rest but, on the way, sought out Hildy. ‘Send Sanders for Dr Baines. And tell Constance she’s to go and sit in Aaron’s room and stay there.’
‘Is yon lad worse?’
‘He will be if he’s left alone with this one. She’s French.’
‘Aw deor.’ Hildy had run for it.
Baines didn’t arrive and Ninon had the grace to come downstairs after a short interval. The woman was reassuring though, again, irritatingly proprietorial. ‘You look after mon pauvre ve’y well, madame. He mus’ not be excited, no?’
Hospitality required she put them all up for the night. By that time the invaders, especially Ninon, had nearly everyone in the household eating out of their hands. Luchet bobbed in the Frenchwoman’s wake like a lovelorn cork. She won Jacques by taking the rest to look at his inventions and showing baffled admiration.
Marie Joséphine, however, did not succumb. ‘That one is no grande dame; she is a peasant, like me. C’est une imposture.’
‘They’re actors,’ Makepeace told her. ‘Imposture’s their trade.’
Their gossip at dinner was so enchanting that Makepeace had to frown at the maids who gathered outside the slightly open dining room door between courses so that they could listen to it. Hopkins had to be reminded to serve the gravy.
They had enough politeness, or self-interest, to include Makepeace in their conversation and expressed delight that Aaron had persuaded her to be the company’s business manager. Nevertheless her dining table had assumed the bulwa
rks of a vessel that sailed without her; she was reminded of the aristocratic dinner parties she’d had to attend with Philip Dapifer when, without one antagonistic word being spoken, she’d been left in no doubt that she was an interloper.
It wasn’t that these players overrode her personality but that they changed it. As their patron and a non-thespian she must be pandered to; she found herself being altered into a sort of bountiful bookkeeper, an elderly aunt who had wandered into a young person’s party, to be respected while she was present but oh-what-a-relief when she went.
Yet Murrough was of her own age, so was the stout woman they called Bracey. And you won’t see forty again either, you baggage, she’d thought, looking at Ninon.
To her relief they intended only to stay the one night at Reach House; they had friends in London among whom they would scatter themselves. She thought Murrough might go with them, but he showed no sign of it.
The next morning they’d packed into her coach, arranging to meet her in two days’ time at the theater to view it and begin making arrangements for the production. Ninon took a tearful farewell of Aaron but promised to come back often ‘to keep up his spirits.’
‘Long as that’s all she keeps up,’ Hildy said, darkly.
Now, sitting in the wreck of the Duke of York’s Green Room, they wove Makepeace around with persuasion and charm, like Titania’s fairies enchaining Bottom.
Jacques, who had enveigled himself into the outing, reinforced their argument that the theater could be made good, his eyes pleading; he had found wonderful mechanisms under the stage still intact.
Would she not admit that the theater’s structure was sound, its pillared, pedimented outside impressive, only needing a lick of paint? Oh, very well, several licks, but that was nothing. Inside, they could do the clearing and cleaning themselves.
Makepeace regarded the smooth hands fluttering at her. Those of the two young men, Paul ‘Polly’ Armitage and Señor Distazio, ‘Dizzy,’ were as white as those of Jane Jordan and Chrissy Gardham, the ingenue. ‘Carpenters?’ she asked. ‘Decorators? Plumbers? That’s before we even start hiring stagehands.’
‘Oh pish,’ Mrs Jordan said. ‘There are always little men just begging to be employed in that sort of work.’
‘In Dublin, maybe,’ Makepeace said. ‘But there’s a war on over here and all spare little men are in it. You employed an English plumber lately?’
She knew that by arguing with them she lost ground. Partly, she wished to be persuaded; it had been so long since she’d been as exhilarated by a project as she had by this. Nor did a day go by without her hearing the slave shriek for her child.
But it was hopeless; to restore the theater to a place of entertainment that competed for audiences with Drury Lane and Covent Garden, as it had to, would cost more than it could ever recoup—and would thereby deeply offend the businesswoman in her, besides putting Aaron in her debt forever.
Most of all, she was no longer convinced that the play would do what Murrough and Aaron had promised her that it would. They’d given her a copy of Oroonoko to study—unwisely as it turned out because she thought it was rubbish.
The two-dimensional words on the script read badly to her, silly and flat. By making the hero a betrayed African prince, the play-wright had, she thought, used special pleading instead of portraying the enslavement of real people.
Worse, running through the drama was a comic tale involving a couple of English girls hunting husbands—to which end, for reasons Makepeace failed to grasp, one of them had to dress as a man. As for the sexual innuendo . . .
‘It’s rude,’ she had said.
‘It’s funny,’ Aaron said. ‘It relieves the tension, audiences expect to laugh as well as cry.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Wait until you see it performed, dear lady,’ Murrough had told her.
‘That last scene, I shall reduce you to weeping rivers. Didn’t it move you when Oroonoko kills the wicked governor and stabs himself?’
‘No,’ Makepeace said. ‘I thought good riddance to both of ’em.’
They overrode her; she was unused to reading a script, she lacked the expertise to flesh it out with actors’ speech, movement, pauses, dramatic effects. They promised her it would turn London audiences into wholesale abolitionists. In Dublin it had brought tears from the audience that flooded the stalls.
Oh, well, she was a newcomer to this business; she was reluctantly prepared to give way to professionals. But she’d concede to no one when it came to a balance sheet.
In the Green Room they pushed hard on their end of the scales. They were prepared to work merely for their keep—only when the play was a success and the theater established would they take a salary.
I’m keeping that damn Sir Mick already, she thought.
Look, look, they’d discovered a cupboard the thieves had missed, full of gilded plaster wreaths, garlands, pilasters and fretwork with which to decorate the auditorium, even the molds to make more.
Well . . .
It was Ninon who delivered the coup de grâce. She sprang up. ‘But why do I not think of this? We do not need the carpenter, the scene-shifter, les ouvriers, always they are trouble. We have the emigrés. ’ She stood with her arms outstretched, waiting for applause. It was slow in coming; even her colleagues were doubtful. Makepeace was mystified.
‘The what?’
‘The emigrés, the nobility, the ones who fly to England from the guillotine. They are here, des centaines des pauvres, they are starving.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Makepeace patiently.
‘But they will work for nothing, for their food, for two pennies an hour.’ She turned to the others. ‘I walk into a hat shop yesterday to look at un chapeau de paille. Who is selling it? The Comtesse de Saisseville. I recognize her because once at la Comédie she talk all through my grand speech in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.’ Ninon closed her eyes in bliss. ‘Now she is brought down and well disposed to me. She ask that her daughter do my sewing. They all starve, I tell you. The ladies work, perhaps, the lords do nothing—they do not know what to do.’
She crouched down by Makepeace’s chair. ‘We tell them, eh?’
‘Aristocrats? French aristocrats?’ Makepeace had no high opinion of the English version; as for the Gallic . . . ‘They’d be useless. They couldn’t even run their country.’
‘No, no. They are desperate. And . . .’ Ninon’s voice cooed into Makepeace’s ear like a lover’s. ‘. . . they have servants who are desperate even more.’
‘Servants?’ She was aware that Murrough was watching her with amusement, the rest withheld their breath. She ignored them all.
Tuppence an hour, she thought. Servants, handymen, seamstresses . . . we could have every job in the theater filled at tuppence an hour.
Murrough’s voice said, ‘A bargain, madam.’
‘Whether it’s worth making is another matter,’ she said, detecting sarcasm. But a bargain . . . the word called to her like a siren. It would be something to create a little working world out of this hell-hole, provide for Aaron’s future, employment for the needy and light a flame that might, just might, start a fire to burn all the shackles and the whips, end a darkness . . . at tuppence per person per hour.
She tutted grudgingly, for the look of the thing. ‘I’ll see,’ she said.
AT first she was sorry for the exiles; they were so brave. They arrived nonchalantly, the men striding, the women tottering in their threadbare shoes with that peculiarly French upper-class walk of theirs, toe first, heel after, their work-roughened hands delicately pecking the air as they talked.
They had heard . . . but what fun to be involved in a play . . . they had taken part in beaucoup de théâtre d’amateurs . . . if they could be of service to Madame?
Ghosts of the headless dead came with them, almost visible, like chains that couldn’t be shaken off. Nostalgia gnawed at them worse than the hunger that was forcing them to shame themselves but they affected insouciance; they mig
ht have been viewing Makepeace and the theater to see if both were suitable.
She wondered why so many wanted theater work rather than other menial jobs that were better paid and came to realize it was because they’d be out of the public view. Exposing themselves within these confines—and this was a much later realization—didn’t matter because actors were dross whose opinion didn’t matter anyway.
She stood in the orchestra pit, her elbows resting on its rail, as each one took a seat before her in the front row. Ninon sat on a stool beside her, out of sight, ready to be consulted.
A few brought servants with them—for the sole purpose, as far as Makepeace could see, to have someone to announce them. The worst were those who brought their children . . .
‘You see, Countess, we’re not casting for the play, we want laborers.’
The Comtesse d’Arbreville indicated her seven-year-old son. ‘We are most strong, are we not, Henri?’
‘Indeed, Maman. I am like Hercules.’
Makepeace sank down below the partition. ‘What do I do?’
‘Send them away,’ Ninon told her. ‘They are no use.’
‘I can’t. He’s so small. They’re both small.’
Ninon shrugged.
Makepeace stood up. ‘Can you sew, Countess?’ They needed seamstresses to make costumes.
‘I embroider, of course.’
Makepeace shook her head. There wouldn’t be time to do other than suggest embroidery by putting on appliqués; what they wanted was cutters-out and good old fashioned sewers. ‘Perhaps later ...’
When they’d gone she called up to Polly Armitage, who was cleaning the stage so that rehearsals could begin, and put a guinea in his hand. ‘Run after them, tell her she dropped this when she sat down.’
The toll on her pity and her purse grew. So did her irritation.
‘Monsieur the Count, I’m afraid the work we’re offering ain’t suitable for you, but if I could talk to your man here ...’
‘I answer for Joseph.’ The Comte de Penthémont had lost an arm somewhere, an empty sleeve was pinned to the tattered sash of his uniform. Joseph, on the other hand, had all his limbs and looked competent.
