Galapagos Regained

by James Morrow

  “I shall do no such thing,” Chloe informed him.

  “It’s a more common practice than you imagine,” Mr. Parminter insisted.

  “And I’m a less ordinary person than you suppose,” said Chloe, gasping from the hideousness of her paramour’s scheme and the nausea of her sixth week. “You may have stolen my innocence, but my conscience is yet my own, and it requires me to nurture this child, even as I banish you from my life.”

  In the dreadful days that followed, Chloe repeatedly asked herself whether she believed the noble words with which she’d greeted Mr. Parminter’s idea, never arriving at a fixed answer. Fortunately, she had in Fanny Mendrick not only a shoulder on which to cry but also a friend in whom to confide. The two stage-struck young women were on the point of making their first appearances before a London audience, having been cast as novice nuns in the Olympic Theatre’s production of The Haunted Priory. Set in medieval England, this supernatural melodrama, newly penned by Mr. Buckstone, gave Chloe, as Sister Margaret, ten whole lines to speak and Fanny, as Sister Angelica, eight. Were Chloe not so miserable, the situation would have appealed to her sense of irony—for what incongruity could be greater than a ruined ingénue portraying a chaste fiancée of Christ?

  “Oh, Fanny, am I mad to imagine I might bring up a child whilst pursuing a career on the stage?”

  “As long as your ne’er-do-well father and prodigal brother remain ne’er-do-well and prodigal, then ‘mad’ is the proper word,” replied Fanny. “For all its contempt of convention, I fear the theatrical world will not accommodate your indiscretion.”

  “By my calculation the creature arrives in seven months’ time,” said Chloe. “I have but two hundred days to find employment more consonant with motherhood.” She endured yet another twinge of procreative nausea. “You’re a churchgoer, Fanny. Will I burn in perpetual flames for conceiving a bastard child?”

  “Though not a theologian, I am given to understand that the whole idea of Christ is to keep Hell’s population to a minimum.” Fanny rested a soothing hand on Chloe’s cheek. “No, friend, you will not burn, and—if I can help it—neither will you starve.”

  Two nights later, both actresses stepped on stage in the premiere performance of The Haunted Priory. Their one and only scene had taken Sister Margaret and Sister Angelica to the subterranean crypt wherein lay the remains of former abbesses, for the novices wished to investigate the legend that the ghost of Abbess Hildegard stalked the place—a ghost with a secret: the location of a buried treasure. Hugging each other to quell their fears, the novices waited in the musty darkness, and then, at the stroke of midnight, the revenant appeared, covered in a moldering shroud and speaking in a voice like a corroded penny whistle—the estimable Ellen Tree in an artfully restrained performance.

  “Yea, verily, a chest of doubloons is hidden on these grounds,” said the ghost of Abbess Hildegard in response to Sister Margaret’s query.

  “Being poised to take the vow of poverty, Sister Angelica and I shan’t spend the gold on ourselves,” Chloe assured the ghost. “Rather, we would use it to renovate the priory.”

  “Giving the surplus to the poor,” added Fanny.

  “The treasure has lain in the earth these past two hundred years,” said the ghost, “and there it will remain till the end of time.”

  “I am sore perplexed,” said Fanny. “With the hoard in question, we could found an orphanage.”

  “And save the soul of many a harlot,” added Chloe, suddenly aware of a viscous fluid migrating down her leg, warming her skin as it sought the floor. My baby weeps, she thought. The wretched thing sheds tears.

  “Our Lord preached that wealth is the worst of Lucifer’s many venoms,” said the ghost, “poisoning the souls of all who seek it.”

  The sticky dribble became a flood. Chloe’s bowels constricted. Panic clogged her windpipe. Glancing at the boards, she saw the blood pooling beneath the hem of her habit. The last line of the scene—Of all the women of my acquaintance, living or dead, you are quite the wisest, Abbess Hildegard, for you’ve given me to understand that this treasure, unearthed, would prove a bane worse than the Black Death—belonged to Sister Margaret, but Chloe could not speak it, being about to faint.

  Having noticed the rushing red gobbets, Fanny straightaway swooped to the rescue, saying, “You are quite the wisest woman I know, Abbess Hildegard, dead or alive, for you have taught me how this treasure would prove a burden as dire as death—and now we must away, for Sister Margaret is enduring an onslaught of the vapors.”

  Fanny curled an arm about Chloe’s shoulder, and together they staggered out of the crypt, at which juncture the set, the theatre, and the world went black.

  Upon returning to consciousness Chloe found herself backstage, sprawled across the four-poster that had served as Abbess Hildegard’s deathbed in act one. Fanny knelt beside her, cooling her brow with a damp kerchief, whilst Ellen Tree sponged away the sanguine remnants of the frightening event. Props from Olympic Theatre productions gone by loomed out of the shadows—a ball gown, a suit of armor, a siege cannon, Macbeth’s head on a pike.

  “Am I dying?” asked Chloe.

  “Not in the least,” said Fanny. “Be still. Tomorrow we feed you beef for breakfast—”

  “At my expense,” said Ellen Tree.

  “By way of restoring the blood you’ve lost,” Fanny explained.

  “Blood—and everything,” said Chloe as relief and exultation washed through her, borne on a tide of qualified remorse.

  “Don’t worry about tomorrow night’s performance,” said Fanny. “I shall collapse Margaret and Angelica into a single character.”

  “I myself once endured the very trial that befell you tonight,” added Ellen Tree. “You are likely to recover in full.”

  “For reasons known but to Himself, God decrees that certain creatures must not come into the world,” said Fanny, an observation on which Chloe was willing to let the whole cataclysmic matter rest.

  * * *

  But for the fact that the audience who’d witnessed Chloe’s improvisation during the Wednesday evening performance of The Beauteous Buccaneer included a journalist in the employ of the Times, the affair might never have come to the public’s attention. Owing to the efforts of that anonymous scribbler, however, half the city spent the following Friday gossiping about Miss Bathurst’s gallows speech. DISTURBANCE AT ADELPHI THEATRE, shouted the page-two headline for the 17th of March, 1848. ACTRESS HARANGUES AUDIENCE WITH POLITICAL RANT, ran the first subheading. MOB VIOLENCE NARROWLY AVERTED. Amongst the consumers of this narrative was Chloe herself, who, upon reading of her recklessness, felt as if she were back on the gallows, the trapdoor opening beneath her feet. Seeking to distract herself, she fixed on an adjacent article summarizing the arguments of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, including their colorful conclusion that “the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers,” the victory of the proletariat over the propertied classes having been ordained by a Wheel of History impossible to roll back—an idea she found genuinely diverting, though not sufficiently so to alleviate the misery caused by her emergent notoriety.

  Later that afternoon, upon arriving at the theatre, Chloe discovered a note from Mr. Kean attached with sealing wax to her dressing-room mirror. Report to me immediately, it read.

  Nervous and fretful, she approached the manager’s office, her palms so damp she could barely turn the doorknob. Mr. Kean stood behind his desk, mallet in hand, tapping a nail into the plaster. Upon completing the task, he decorated the wall with a framed certificate indicating that Her Majesty had appointed him Master of Revels.

  Seated on plush chairs, Fanny, Mrs. Kean, and Mr. Throckmorton greeted Chloe with tepid smiles. The presence of her disappointed swain prompted Chloe briefly to consider—and reaffirm—her commitment to chastity, the best available approximation of the virginity she’d surrendered long ago. Not only was Adam Parminter the first man to seduce her, he’d also been the last. Although a slap on th
e cheek normally sufficed to deter a suitor’s untoward advances, occasionally she’d been obliged to introduce her favorite family heirloom, Grandpapa’s bayonet, into the relationship.

  Mr. Kean offered Chloe a chair, but she declined, explaining that she prided herself on receiving bad news without swooning.

  “Naturally I should like to overlook Wednesday night’s rabble-rousing,” the manager began, gesturing towards a copy of the Times splayed open on his desk. Even at this distance Chloe could read DISTURBANCE AT ADELPHI THEATRE. “But I fear we have a crisis on our hands. Either playgoers will boycott us to protest your tirade, or a Chartist mob will show up one night hoping to witness a repetition of your outburst. Ergo, I took the liberty of printing up an addendum to be pasted onto each patron’s playbill. ‘For this evening’s performance’”—he flashed his wife a smile—“‘Anne Bonney will be played by Ellen Tree.’”

  Mrs. Kean née Ellen Tree shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

  A queasiness spread through Chloe. “Am I banished for tonight only, or have you permanently cast me as woebegone Abigail in The Streetwalker and the Scalawag?”

  “Spare us your self-pity,” said Mr. Kean. “Mrs. Kean and I intend to award you three pounds in severance pay, a sum sufficient to cover your needs till some other company employs you.”

  “If I choose to remain a woman of the theatre, it will be as a dramatist, not an actress,” said Chloe. “Amongst the plays I intend to write is the saga of a second-rate highwayman doomed to compete with the reputation of his late uncle, the greatest thief of his day—rather the way the son of a famous actor might end up living in his father’s shadow.”

  A frown contracted Mr. Kean’s brow. Saying nothing, he used his handkerchief to polish the glass protecting his Master of Revels certificate.

  “Mightn’t we give Chloe another chance?” asked Fanny.

  “She doesn’t know what came over her on Wednesday,” added Mr. Throckmorton.

  “I know precisely what came over me,” said Chloe. “My father has been condemned to die of hard labor through no fault of his own—or, rather, through several faults of his own, none grave enough to merit such a fate.” Extending her index finger, she tapped the article concerning The Communist Manifesto. “I’ve already got a plot. Our second-rate highwayman takes his troubles out on his fellow robbers, dismissing them from the gang one by one. Desperate, the thieves hire a sorcerer to conjure up an avenging phantom. And so it happens that, just as Ebenezer Scrooge was visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, so is our hero haunted by the spectre of Communism. Frightened out of his wits, he re-employs his former colleagues, and they straightaway stage a series of benefit robberies, using the proceeds to feed the residents of the nearest workhouse.”

  “Lurid, but I like it,” said Mr. Throckmorton.

  “Overwrought, but oddly gripping,” said Fanny.

  “What you’ve described sounds like a melodrama,” said Ellen Tree, gazing at her husband, “but with some effort it might become a tragical romance—am I right, dear?”

  “I think not,” said Mr. Kean.

  “I’m going to call it The Bourgeois Bandito versus the Wheel of History,” said Chloe.

  “It’s time you cleaned out your dressing-room,” said Mr. Kean.

  “You’ll have to find another dagger for Pirate Anne,” said Chloe. “The one I use each night is no prop but a bayonet bequeathed to me by my paternal grandfather, who fought at Waterloo.”

  “On which side?” said Mr. Kean.

  “That’s enough, dear,” said Ellen Tree.

  “Whether the dagger is a prop or not, I don’t doubt you’ll take it with you,” said Mr. Kean, “along with everything else that isn’t screwed to the floor.”

  “With all due respect, madam, I don’t write tragical romances,” Chloe told Ellen Tree. “I write chillers about escaped lunatics,” she added, fixing on her former employer as she swirled out of his office, “melodramas about gentlemen infected with lycanthropy, and sweeping sagas of intrepid lady explorers who take jungle gorillas for their lovers. If ever you need a potboiler, Mr. Kean, don’t hesitate to look me up.”

  2

  Chloe Finds Employment on the Estate of Charles Darwin, to the Benefit of Certain Giant Tortoises, Exotic Iguanas, and Rare Birds

  Needless to say, she did not intend to write a play about a second-rate highwayman, or any such spectacle for that matter, no melodrama seething with ghosts and ghouls, no plum pudding spiced with virgins imperiled by mad monks—and yet Chloe fervently hoped the theatre would remain her primary means of support. Although she disagreed with Mr. Shakespeare’s conclusion that all the world was a stage, in truth the stage was all she knew of the world. Aided by the faithful Fanny, she compiled an exhaustive list of London houses, then called upon each manager in turn, presenting herself as Mademoiselle Jeanne Feuillard, newly arrived from the Comédie-Française. In every instance she was rebuffed—such was the imprecision of her French accent, the notoriety of her final performance as Anne Bonney, and the transparency of her claim that, although she resembled the actress whose image graced the posters in the Adelphi Theatre lobby, she and that deranged young woman were two different people.

  “Mademoiselle Feuillard—c’est-à-dire, Miss Bathurst—you are not without talent, but neither are you without reputation,” said the manager of the Majestic with an extravagant sneer.

  “The next time I wish for my theatre to break out in a riot, you are the very mischief maker I shall call upon,” said the proprietor of the Trochaic.

  “I share your compassion for the downtrodden, Miss Bathurst, but this is a commercial enterprise, not Sherwood Forest,” said the owner of the Odeon.

  Sixteen houses, sixteen rejections: it was time to try something else—but what? Adrift in the great city, friendless save for Fanny, penniless save for Fanny’s patronage, Chloe had reached the frayed end of her ragged rope. Hunger became her daily fare, cold her nightly portion, conditions that might well have advanced to malnutrition and la grippe were her rooming-companion not possessed of so charitable a nature.

  “A gift of bread on a pauper’s table, a donation of coal to a friend’s warming-pan—these are the measures by which Christ assays our souls,” Fanny explained.

  “Then you’ll not be wanting for a berth in eternity,” said Chloe.

  “Promise me you’ll avoid that degraded sorority to which our profession is oft-times compared.”

  “No, dear friend, never that—you have my word.”

  “Have you considered the milliner’s trade?” asked Fanny.

  “I was not born to make a lady’s bonnet, but to have a gentleman’s hat land at my feet as the curtain falls,” said Chloe.

  “Perhaps you should become a flower-seller like Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii.”

  “Nydia’s business prospered only because she was blind. The condition is easy enough to feign, but I would rather be despised than pitied.”

  “A seamstress? A laundress? A draper’s assistant?”

  “I have a better idea.”

  And indeed she did. An aficionado of Miss Austen’s novels, Chloe had long ago assimilated the universally acknowledged truth that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and of late she’d deduced the logical corollary, that a wife married to a prosperous man yet burdened with a slew of children must be in want of a governess. To wit, she would tutor the progeny of the well-to-do, a vocation at which, though she had no particular fondness for either children or gentlefolk, she could imagine herself succeeding.

  Shortly after sunrise each morning, Chloe slipped out of bed and purchased the Times, scrutinizing the tiny print under SITUATIONS AVAILABLE: TUTORS AND GOVERNESSES until her eyes crossed and the typography floated free of the page like a leaf fallen on still water. She responded by post to thirty such advertisements and subsequently secured a score of private interviews. Beaming a soft smile and assuming an equally dulcet voice, s
he began each such audience by informing the lady of the house that, owing to her theatrical experience, she was competent to teach not only elocution, singing, and French but also history, geography, and ethics, for the loftier dramas in which she’d appeared (or at least seen performed) had treated extensively of these subjects, most conspicuously Monsieur Crébillon’s Rhadamistus and Zenobia, Herr Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena, and Voltaire’s Alzire.

  “Ethics, you say?” snorted the prickly Lady Routledge. “Do you truly believe there’s a moral lesson to be gleaned from a piece of thundering nonsense like Rhadamistus and Zenobia?”

  “By populating his play with bestial kings, Crébillon shows us that authority knows nothing of virtue,” said Chloe. “The playwright assails the arrogance of those who imagine their blood is purer than that of the masses.”

  Lady Routledge seemed to be experiencing an unpleasant odor. “A worthy theme, I’m sure, though not one to which His Lordship and I would expose our sons.”

  “Then we have poor, trusting Clara in Maria Magdalena, seduced by her boorish fiancé, who deserts her for the mayor’s daughter,” said Chloe (enduring a pang provoked by the memory of her liaisons with Mr. Parminter). “Ere the curtain falls, the unfortunate girl has drowned herself and Herr Hebbel has laid bare the foibles of bourgeois society.”

  “My sons do not need anything laid bare for them, Miss Bathurst, and certainly not by you. As for the infamous Voltaire, I’ve heard he was a sworn enemy of God.”

  “Not so much of God, My Lady, as of organized churches. In Alzire Voltaire reveals how the Christian army that destroyed the Inca Empire left little of value in its place.”

  “Alas, Miss Bathurst, this interview should have ended before it began.”