by Diana Norman
Since the couple showed no sign of going, and there was no one else to do it—Sanders was still handing out playbills—Makepeace went out to order them a tray of coffee.
She must show every kindness to Félicie. If it had been Blanchard alone, he could have gone thirsty. Apart from the way he’d treated Philippa, his reference to Andrew’s honor had seemed designed to rub salt into Félicie’s perfectly justified resentment at her husband’s departure into dangerous waters for another woman.
Nor did she like the way he’d been amusedly polite to Murrough, as if to a yokel. She dreaded the party he would bring tonight; Aaron always said that aristocratic claques were the worst; the bluer the blood, he said, the lower the manners.
And what right has he got to call me ‘missus’?
On the way back with the coffee she called in at the pie shop. ‘Extra special this afternoon, Jerry. All the trimmings.’ The least she could do for her company was send it on stage with a full stomach to face whatever it had to face.
She had an all-encompassing sense of disaster.
Later, when she had occasion to go again into the body of the theater, Félicie and Blanchard were still there. Luchet sat in the row in front, his chin on the back of his chair, regarding Félicie with the adoration of a dog expecting a biscuit. Ninon, it seemed, had lost the tutor’s devotion to a younger, prettier woman—an outcome for which the actress would be grateful. It wasn’t being returned here, either. Ignoring Luchet, Félicie was leaning close to Blanchard and laughing at something he’d said.
Undoubtedly, Andrew’s wife looked heavenly. With all Andrew’s money to play with she ought to, Makepeace thought. Then she castigated herself for being sour. Money, a lot of it, could buy the high-waisted cambric robe en chemise, the gold girdle, the hair plumes, but it could not buy the style with which Félicie wore them, nor the natural curl of her hair nor a skin that appeared to be lit from inside.
Boy Blanchard nodded to Makepeace and then at the stage. ‘One hopes these little balourdises will be ironed out by tonight.’
If balourdises meant chaos, Makepeace hoped it would, too. The Widow Lackitt had just crossed too closely to the edge of the stage and her enormous skirt had caught one of the ‘floaters,’ setting light to its hem and spilling oil on the boards causing the lieutenant governer of Surinam to fall heavily on his arse, bringing Dizzy Distazio down with him. Jacques, running on with one of the fire buckets they kept all over the theater, had put out the flames but skidded and joined the others on the floor. Murrough, still with a sword hilt sticking out of his stomach, was cursing the lot of them in tones reminiscent of Jonah addressing Sodom and Gomorrah.
‘It is a comedy?’ Félicie asked hopefully.
‘No,’ Makepeace told her and called, ‘Are you hurt, Bracey?’
Bracey said she was not; in a high, steady voice she also announced she was too old for this and that the play, Murrough and the Society for the Abolition of Slavery could all go and fuck themselves.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Makepeace said. ‘The worse the dress rehearsal, the better the first night.’ Polly Armitage had told her this. She didn’t believe it.
She organized orange girls, water- and program-sellers, ticket-takers, lamplighters, ushers—all hired from Drury Lane, which had closed for the summer. She was thankful for the hundred emergencies the day threw up to be diverted from the letter in her pocket, but a sense of impending doom stayed with her.
The best efforts of the pie shop were wasted. Even the dancers whose slim frames concealed enormous appetites—their arrival had almost doubled her costs—refused to eat, though the chief ballerina said she could be revived with cold soup in the interval. Of the rest, nobody but Luchet, Jacques, Marie Joséphine, young Henri d’Abreville and one or two of Marquis de Barigoule’s musicians would touch the food. In the female walkers-on’s dressing room she was waved away. The men’s was the same; Comte de Penthémont had been given one line. Once ruler of a million French acres, whose sword had only ceased defending his king when the hand holding it had been cut off, he was crouched over a sick bowl audibly regretting that his head hadn’t gone with it.
The professionals were no better. Trotting into Murrough’s dressing room with her tray, Makepeace encountered a stare of such black hatred that she trotted out again.
Front of house reported that ticket sales were slow. With fifteen minutes to curtain up, there were less than two hundred people in a theater built to seat over a thousand. The only heartening thing was Jenny walking into the foyer with Sanders, who’d gone to Clapham to take her back to Reach House. ‘Stephen said I might come, Mama. And I was to wish you bonne chance on his behalf in order to prove he is not the curmudgeon you may think him.’
Suppressing the desire to ask who was Stephen Heilbron to tell her daughter what she might and might not do, Makepeace kissed her and said she was grateful, which she was. Aaron hopped in on his crutches a few minutes later, and Chadwell was in attendance, too.
The boxes having been reserved by Blanchard’s party, uncle and niece were sat in the stalls near the front. Makepeace told Sanders and Chadwell to find themselves seats—there were likely to be plenty to choose from—when the performance began but until then to stand by. ‘Expecting trouble, missus?’ Sanders wanted to know.
‘Maybe.’ The sense of disaster to come was so strong that the panic-cum-excitement she discovered backstage seemed as artificial as the play about to be performed. She might have been with savages worshipping in their sacred grove. Ninon and Chrissy crouched in prayer on a rug in the wings, and Mrs Jordan was muttering an incantation. The sensible Bracey was playing a grim and ritual pat-a-cake against Jacques’s borrowed back.
Murrough, fixed and cold, was striding up and down the stage, clutching a bust of Molière, disregarding the dancers who practiced their pirouettes around him. When Makepeace crept by him to peer out through the curtains and count the audience, he woke up and almost threw her into the wings.
‘What did I do?’
‘It’s bad luck,’ Bracey said, still pat-a-caking.
Their superstitions defeated her; no whistling, no mention of Macbeth or Queen Anne. ‘Can I wish you good luck?’
‘No.’ Murrough had come off stage. ‘Go and watch the bloody play.’
It would be the first time; she’d been too busy to get other than glimpses of it at rehearsal and these had been so repetitious or so fractured as to be charmless.
As she took her seat, Aaron congratulated her on the auditorium. ‘Very stylish. I’ve heard favorable comments.’
It does look nice, she thought. The enormous chandelier gave it an opulence without spreading light to the ceiling’s small deficiencies; instead it gave the effect of a cluster of stars concentrated in a night sky. She wished it excited her more.
Aaron sniffed appreciatively. ‘There’s nothing like the theater’s smell. Sets the old blood tingling.’
She envied him. All that the combination of fish glue, wood and paint did for her at this moment was make her feel sick.
The theater was fuller than it had been; there were only a few spare seats in the stalls. But the gallery boxes—known to the cast for reasons she’d preferred not to inquire into as ‘spittoons’—were empty, as was the upper gallery with its benches for what the actors called ‘the unwashed.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Aaron said. ‘They’ll fill up at halftime at half price.’
‘Stupid system. How can latecomers keep up with the plot?’
‘If that curtain doesn’t go up in a minute they’ll know how it starts.’ They were running late. Aaron had to hold his sister back from going to see if an emergency had arisen, but just then the huge chandelier was lowered. The lamplighters used their snuffers quickly—she’d made them practice again and again—leaving only a few strategically-placed lanterns. There was a murmur of surprise from the audience.
The back of the Marquis de Barigoule’s head appeared just above the pit wall. He tapped his
music stand and took his orchestra into the overture. He’d arranged a selection of popular tunes shamelessly borrowed from other productions. The audience seemed to like it; being tone deaf herself she could only judge by the sway of others’ feet.
‘He should’ve taken a bow,’ Aaron whispered.
‘He’s afraid of being recognized. All the exiles are.’
Aaron looked around. ‘Who by? Nobody here’d know him from Adam.’
It was a sore point; there were enough émigrés in London to fill the Roman Colosseum and Makepeace had suggested to hers that, should there be sufficient seats, their friends be allowed in at reduced price. The offer had been rejected. French aristocrats did not accept charity from a lower class. Nor, while all of them might have to accept menial work, did they want to see each other doing it. Yet, watching de Barigoule’s bobbing perruque as he conducted, Makepeace felt a flush of affection for them. They irritated her, she could well understand the hatred they’d inspired in their serfs, they were cack-handed, unused to work, but there wasn’t one who’d given short measure in anything she’d asked them to do. Except Luchet, she thought. But then, Luchet wasn’t one of them—something they’d made very plain.
She saw him at that moment; the tutor was ushering a glittering Félicie into her box. Damn the man; he ought to be backstage helping Jacques. And damn Blanchard and his party; twenty or more of them, all beautifully dressed, all talking at unmodulated pitch, calling for service from the orange girls, bickering over the number of programs the usher was handing to them.
Around Makepeace, the audience stirred. From the comments, it seemed partly irritated at the interruption, partly impressed by the interrupters.
The Marquis de Barigoule lowered his baton and the music stopped as he stared up impassively at the latecomers.
‘M’apologies, Orpheus.’ It was Blanchard’s voice. ‘We’re settled now—start again.’
‘Out for trouble,’ Aaron murmured.
‘What do I do?’
He shrugged.
‘That’s Sir Boy Blanchard,’ somebody said. ‘He’s a friend of the Prince of Wales.’
He would be, thought Makepeace.
De Barigoule tapped his stand again, the music began.
Being sat down for the first time that day, weariness overtook her. She hadn’t yet shown Jenny nor Aaron the note from Ffoulkes; let them enjoy the play first—if enjoyment was to be had.
She was jerked to attention. A shrill and discordant shriek of brass cut through the music, causing it to stop. A voice equally as harsh on the ear cried, ‘Hear me, you people, before ye take the downward step to vice and misery. Listen to the blast of the Lord and not to these debauchers ...’
The Reverend Deedes had brought a trumpet that he was waving and a box he was standing on before the orchestra wall. ‘Go home,’ he was shouting, ‘go to your prayers. Countenance not the filth of mountebanks unfit for Christian burial ...’
Makepeace stood up, looking for Sanders but he was already on the move, Chadwell after him.
‘. . . ye will be damned that watch as surely as these emissaries of the devil that perform Satan’s works.’
Sanders grabbed one of the man’s arms, Chadwell the other, pulling him off his box. He went limp so that he had to be dragged to the side exit, still yelling, under a shower of oranges thrown by Blanchard’s party and cheers from other sections, though whether for Deedes or his expellers was uncertain.
Aaron clung on to Makepeace’s shoulder. ‘Sit down. He’s gone.’
‘I’m going to slit his throat.’
‘You’re not. Sit down.’
For the third time, the Marquis raised his baton and started the overture. Few heard it; the theater was in uproar. Some people were leaving. Most were staying to see if there was more fun to come.
Gradually, the music and then the dancers calmed things down a little but the auditorium was still restive when Polly Armitage came on to speak the prologue and he was given a hard time of it, especially by the Blanchard boxes.
By then Makepeace didn’t care. Not content to take Philippa and Andrew away from her, the Lord was manifesting a dozen fists with which to knock her from one side of the arena to the other in punishment for stepping into it in the first place. She had wasted her money, her time and this sad company’s efforts. In the flurry of the last weeks, she had forgotten their purpose. The slave and her child stood before her, real and stark, against the tawdry background she had prepared for them.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Aaron nudged her.
She was surrounded by silence. Blanchard’s voice, amused, trying to urge his companions into jeers, was being ignored and trailing away. The curtain had drawn sideways and up in the effect Murrough had wanted and Jacques had achieved, so that she was looking at a picture, no, through the porthole of a ship taking her in to a foreign shore. The sunlight was not from lamps or an English summer, but a thicker, hotter light, infusing color into strange foliage.
The curtain was gone now, she was drawn in, the ship had landed her on scorching sand. Either her eyes were tricking her nose or Jacques had concocted a blend of aromatic grasses for his hot plates that sent out the smell of raffia and spices. From the depth of the jungle at the back of the beach came the wail of a pan-pipe and the insistent beat of a drum.
She was where she had never been before.
It was odd to hear English spoken, and the setting gave emphasis to the two young women—Chrissy, very pretty; Ninon, very dashing in young man’s attire—in their plot to hunt out and capture husbands from the unsuspecting wildlife. It didn’t matter that Ninon regretted in a French accent the fact that they’d had to leave their native London in order to do it. Here, everything was strangeness and expected to be so.
Makepeace heard Aaron draw in a deep breath. ‘That’s my woman.’
Even when the Widow Lackitt hustled on, familiar in her sex-starved monstrosity and causing laughter, one was not allowed to forget that she wasn’t the only man-eater in this wilderness and that other predators lurked in the grasses.
How have they done it? Makepeace wondered. Flat forgettable words on a page, a ridiculous plot, had been dilated into three dimensions and given substance. This was not a life reflecting hers nor anyone’s in the audience but a glimpse of demigods and goddesses flirting and bickering and deceiving each other in a Caribbean Olympus.
And she had derided them.
Was that Polly Armitage, who fainted into the arms of his male lover in a pretence of overwork at the end of the day, this square-jawed, iron-headed bastard of a governor? Yes, it was—because he said he was. Could Dizzy, an inveterate gambler and pain in the backside, be dependable Blandford, that hero and friend to the slaves? Yet he was, because Dizzy said he was.
Here was skill, more than skill. Insubstantial dross was being transmuted into insubstantial gold. She was watching alchemy.
A pillar of ebony seven foot tall strode onto the stage and Makepeace knew that, like the Queen of Sheba at the sight of Solomon, behold, the half was not told her. A woman sitting behind her gasped, ‘Oh, my.’
A red robe had been wrenched off one shoulder showing gleaming black muscles, the creature’s feet griped at the boards like prehensile hands as it paced restlessly back and forth on the end of its chain. It should not be chained; splendor like this was masterless.
Makepeace and Murrough had argued over the play. ‘It’s not about slavery,’ she’d said, ‘it’s about one exceptional slave. Oroonoko’s a prince, he’s as contemptuous of his fellow slaves as any white man.’
‘He’s the spirit of Africa,’ Murrough had said. ‘It may not be the great play but, by God, I’ll show our temerity in enslaving a continent. ’
And by God he’s doing it, Makepeace thought as she watched. Africa stood there on stage. The shame of capture was not Oroonoko’s but that of the colorless pigmies who’d inflicted it on him.
From that moment the play was Murrough’s, in hi
s mouth uninspired lines became the deep cry from a million yoked throats. The laughter of the audience at the antics of Widow Lackitt was near frantic because it knew they were mere interludes in something terrible. Even in the romantic moments of Ninon and Chrissy and their swains, it was kept aware of the pulse of Oroonoko’s blood by a barely audible but unceasing drumbeat.
And there was another continual presence, this time silent—a thin black woman and her child, unacknowledged by the other characters yet always onstage, sometimes driven by whips from one side of it to another, sometimes curled in a corner, never leaving hold of each other, watching tragedy and comedy with the same dull faces.
When Murrough had told her the Countess d’Arbreville and Henri were on the payroll at the highest rate, she’d demurred. ‘They don’t have speaking parts.’
‘The loudest,’ he’d said.
The audience wasn’t allowed to forget the two figures; they were the heart of the matter. The broken heart. She couldn’t bear to look at them.
At the interval Aaron turned on his sister with the greatest compliment of one impresario to another—envy. ‘They’re doing you proud,’ he said.
‘Shall I go to them?’
He shook his head. ‘Let ’em keep the bit between their teeth.’
Jenny said, ‘I can’t bear it, Ma. What do they do to Oroonoko? What will happen to the woman and the little boy?’
‘They aren’t in the script.’
They walked out to the foyer to listen for compliments. ‘Wonderful! ’ ‘Isn’t he magnificent?’ ‘My dear, I’ve been transported!’
Makepeace thought of the letter in her pocket; even enchantment couldn’t make problems go away.
In the street outside, a crowd had gathered to buy the half-price tickets for the rest of the performance and was growing as passersby were attracted to the unmistakable buzz of success. The doorman was bringing it up to date on the plot so far. ‘He may be a savage but he’s more Christian than those what caught him. They’ve got his poor wife an’all, an’ she’s going to have a baby an’ I don’t know what’s a-going to happen ...’
