by Lou Kuenzler
“But–but I don’t want an autograph,” I said, talking fast before I could lose my nerve. “It’s me. Your daughter. Josie … Josephine.”
She took a step back and seemed to see me properly for the first time. She gave a little cry of amazement. “You? Can it really be?”
“Yes.” I blushed as those emerald eyes looked me up and down again. “I am Josephine, your daughter.”
“Good lord!” She gasped. “What a ghastly hat!”
If Mother was shocked by Doris’s hat, she screamed when she saw my hair.
I cannot blame her really. She is so pretty herself. And she is used to such fine things.
We were sitting in her dressing room amongst her jewels and furs by then, and I was telling her the whole story of how I had run away from Summer’s Place.
I had to tell her first that Father was dead, of course. My voice cracked and two tears like perfect pearls ran down her pale cheek.
“Poor man. Poor foolish Charles,” she said. Then she dabbed her eyes with a white lace handkerchief and stared into the huge looking glass above her dressing table. “Carry on, do carry on…”
I was just telling her about Black Beauty when Mother sprang to her feet.
“Neville. Neville!” she called.
A chubby man, dressed in a lettuce-green velvet suit with a gold cravat, squeezed through the door. I learned later he was Mother’s theatre manager.
“What is it, cherub?” he asked.
“Do you think I should wear mourning, Neville? I have just learned I am a widow,” she said.
“Mourning?” The plump man opened and closed his mouth like a toad catching flies. “Certainly not. It’s so very…” Neville seemed lost for words. Perhaps he was just sad to hear Mother’s news that her husband had died. “It’s so very…”
“Black?” said Mother.
“Well quite.” Neville squeezed back out of the door and Mother began to brush her golden-red hair.
“He’s right, of course,” she said. “Black clothes can make the skin look so dull… Do carry on with your story, darling.”
I did the best I could. Making her laugh with my impressions of Doris and Daisy in the laundry and even striding up and down the dressing room to show her how I had learned to walk like a boy.
“Bravo!” She clapped her hands. “Maybe we should use you as a little page in Anthony and Cleopatra. Neville would love that… Neville?” She summoned the manager again.
“Oh no! I should hate it. And anyway,” I said, firmly as Neville reached the door, “I can’t be in a play. I have to be outside. I have to find Black Beauty.”
“Horses, horses, horses! You are just like your father!” Mother threw down her hairbrush.
“Is that such a bad thing?” I bit my lip.
Mother saw at once that I was sad. Although she didn’t turn around – she was pinning up her hair – she smiled at me in the looking glass and her eyes lit up with such warmth that I felt better again at once.
“I’m sorry, darling. You must forgive me. Only, it’s all so new,” she said. “It’s like I’ve been cast in a fresh role and I must learn how to play the part. I must learn how to be your mother.”
“Ha! It might just be your greatest performance yet!” said Neville, hovering in the doorway.
Something about the way he said it sounded unkind. But I must have been wrong, because Mother seemed delighted.
“Do you really think so?” She leapt to her feet and did what I had been waiting for her to do for so long. She gathered me into her arms and gave me a hug.
She smelt of lilies and violets and expensive perfumes which probably came all the way from Paris and…
Oh no! I thought with horror how I must smell of turnip and old cabbages from sleeping in the market. I hadn’t washed once since I came to London.
“Now, Josephine, my darling daughter,” said Mother, stepping back and wrinkling her nose a little, “I have made a plan. When this play is over, I am going to give up the stage for good. We will sell my jewels.” She picked up a string of rubies and pearls from the table. “If you have found your horse by then, I will buy him from the cab driver and we’ll move to the country. We’ll get a little cottage with honeysuckle and roses around the door…”
“Sensational, my dear!” Neville clapped his hands.
“Oh Mama!” I flung my arms around her neck. I didn’t care if I did smell of cabbages. “Do you really mean it? You, me and Black Beauty? In the country? That will be perfect,” I said. I could hardly believe it; not an hour ago I had been shivering in the streets, and now I was safe and warm and loved. And, finally, I had a real chance of getting Beauty back – if only I could find him.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Bard Theatre was like a beehive – always busy. Actors and actresses buzzed about backstage, singing and practising dance steps or rehearsing their lines. The young women were often wearing almost nothing but their underwear as they dashed down the narrow corridors to costume fittings, their faces powdered and their lips and cheeks bright red with rouge. Meanwhile the stagehands whistled and cursed as they painted scenery or hung huge lamps to light the stage.
Then, just moments before each show, a strange calm would descend, everyone would step into their places and the magic of the performance would begin.
Exciting as it all was, life in the theatre was not quite as I expected. For one thing, I never did get to see as much of Mother as I hoped. She was the star of the show – always on stage or in rehearsals. And she hardly ever came into theatre until the afternoon. She had to go out to lunch with gentlemen a lot. Dinner too.
“It is all part of being an actress,” she explained. “Although it really is impossible to keep slim when one must eat out every day!”
We did not live together either as I’d hoped we would.
Mother explained about that too.
“My apartment is tiny. Just a little bird’s nest really. And an actress must – well, I must – entertain gentlemen sometimes after dinner and… Well, Josephine, my darling, I am sure you understand. Daughters and admirers do not always go together.”
I didn’t understand. Not really.
“You can sleep in my dressing room,” Mother had said on my first evening. “It’ll be such fun. You can you use my Egyptian cotton shawl as a blanket, and doze on the chaise longue pretending you are in Paris.”
The chaise longue turned out to be a narrow, lumpy daybed with little gold buttons that dug into my back. But at least it was more comfy than the hard ground underneath the old fruit and vegetable wagons and the dressing room was warm and snug.
Sometimes, when I was all alone at night, I would dress up in Mother’s scarves and hats, clip her earrings on and wear her strings of pearls around my neck.
I stared into the looking glass for hours, pretending I was her.
In the daytime, I wasn’t allowed in the dressing room – especially not before a performance. I had to keep out of the way as much as possible. That suited me. I wanted to be out, looking for Beauty. I followed every rumour and every lead. Mac had heard of a cab man in Kilburn with a black horse with a white star, and Arthur the usher had seen one in the streets once or twice, whose owner called him “Jack”.
At the end of my first month at the Bard, I was just dashing out of the door, setting off on my usual round searching the Covent Garden streets, when Neville called me back.
“Time you earned your keep, Josephine Green,” he said. “You’re sleeping in my theatre. If you still refuse to appear on stage, you can carry this with you instead.” He waddled towards me with two enormous boards tied together at the top like a bib. There was a picture of Mother’s face on each side.
Miss Valentina Green
at The Bard Theatre, Drury Lane.
Seats, Boxes & Standing Room Available.
I had seen men carrying advertisements around on “sandwich” boards like this many times. Every street urchin in Covent Garden thought it was funny
to throw mud at them and see it stick against the boards at the back. They liked to spin the men around and send them wobbling into the road like spinning tops. Once in the road, the cab drivers and coachmen shouted “out of the way!” and hit the poor boardmen with their whips.
“Is there a problem?” Neville was standing so close I could smell his hot, liquorice-y breath.
“No,” I said. “No problem.”
The minute I stepped on to Drury Lane, a gaggle of street boys went wild.
“It’s a girl! It’s a girl! It’s a girl boardman!” they cried and they chased me all down Bow Street, throwing mud and rotten fruit and stones.
Mother was furious when she saw me later.
“There’s a tomato in her hair, for goodness’ sake, Neville. How dare you send Josephine out like that? I forbid you to ever…”
“It’s all right!” I said. “I like it.” That wasn’t true exactly; the board was heavy, it was hard work trudging the streets, and I frequently had to dodge rotten fruit. But towards the end of the day I had made friends with the other boardmen, and I quickly realized this gave me eyes all over London.
“Keep a look out while you’re walking,” I begged them. “If you ever see a black cab horse, with a white star on his head, let me know.”
“You are a peculiar girl. Sometimes, I don’t understand you at all, Josephine,” sighed Mother. “You are prepared to make a spectacle of yourself walking up and down like a human signpost, but you won’t even step on the stage.” She hurried off to be fitted for a pair of snow white leather boots. “At least it keeps you busy,” she called over her shoulder. “… Just until we move to the country, my darling.”
She didn’t try and stop me carrying the boards again.
One day early in the new year, I had a brilliant idea.
“I am going to stick Beauty’s picture to the board on my back,” I explained to Arthur when I stopped outside the opera house on my morning route. “Think how many people will know I am searching for him then!”
I wasn’t any good at drawing myself, but I described Beauty carefully to Ivan, a boy who painted scenery at the Bard. He drew a wonderful likeness of him and we wrote underneath it in thick red paint:
MISSING HORSE. BELIEVED TO BE PULLING A CAB. PLEASE LEAVE WORD AT THE BARD THEATRE IF SEEN.
Arthur looked after the picture for me at the opera house. He stuck it on my back each morning and took it off again each night. Neville would be furious if he knew I was covering his advertisements with an image of Black Beauty, but I was getting desperate. All the leads we’d had so far had run dry. The horse in Kilburn turned out not to be black at all. Just dark grey. And Arthur never saw the mysterious “Jack” trotting by with his cab again.
Spring came and there were daffodils in the flower market, great banks of bright yellow like streaming sun.
“Still no luck with your beloved Black Diamond?” asked Mother one morning a few weeks after Valentine’s Day.
“His name’s Black Beauty,” I said, a little crossly. “And no! I still haven’t found him.” I was fighting not to lose hope. It had been so long now.
“Good!” said Mother, brightly. “I mean, not good that you haven’t found him; I’m just pleased that you are not ready to move to the countryside … quite yet. You see Neville’s putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream next and he simply can’t find anybody else to play Titania the Fairy Queen.”
“Of course,” I said. And when the play opened at Easter, Mother was truly wonderful in the part. I had seen all her different roles, but she looked most beautiful as the jealous Fairy Queen. Her hair was loose. She wore a pink satin gown with rosebud slippers and gossamer wings. She flew above the audience on strings as thin as silk and everybody gasped. Each time I saw Mother on the stage, the more I understood how impossible it must have been for her to be hidden away living the life of a country lady, with horses and dogs for company.
All London seemed to burst with life as the weather turned bright and warm. No longer huddled in their cloaks, theatregoers paraded up and down the streets in all their finery. Before the lights dimmed for the show each night, the rows of seats looked like a rainbow, the ladies wore so many different colours of satin and silk. Even the gentlemen wore bright cravats and waistcoats. The flower market looked more and more beautiful too. Like a meadow, just as Mac had promised.
As well as daffodils, there were tulips and crocuses, blue hyacinths and lily-of-the-valley.
“Buy a posy,” called the flower sellers. “Buy a posy for your love!”
“What about you, Josie-of-the-boards?” teased Old Meg who had a pitch selling violets on the corner of Floral Street. All the sellers knew me by now. “Don’t you have no one to buy flowers for?”
Meg meant I should buy flowers for a sweetheart but I didn’t have one. And, now it was spring again, all I could think about was Father. He had been dead for over a year. If only I could lay a posy on his grave. He had always loved wild flowers, pointing them out to me as I rode Merrylegs beside him down the lanes.
“No.” I shook my head. “I have no one, Meg,” I said.
I turned to step off the kerb, and narrowly missed being struck as a cab rattled past, the horse’s hooves thundering. “Look out!” Meg grabbed my arm. “What is it, Josie?” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost?”
“I think I have!” I slipped out of the board and let it clatter to the ground. “Look after that for me,” I cried, as I broke into a run. “I recognize that poor cab horse.”
Chapter Forty
The cab had stopped outside the opera house and I ran breathlessly up to the horse. I was right. I did recognize her.
It was Ginger.
“Ginger?” I cried. “Can that really be you?” Her bright chestnut coat was as dull as rust, her legs were bowed and her breathing rasped like a creaky door in the wind. But I knew it was her. Her ears were laid flat against her head – just as they always had been when she first came to Birtwick, before James and Mr Manly showed her kindness.
“Ginger?” She lifted her long thin neck and her ears pricked as I called her name. Lady Magpie’s son, George, must have ridden her flat out until she was broken – just as he had done with Linnet and so many other horses who had been ruined by the cruelty of life at Earlshall. I tried not to think about Beauty and his shattered knees. I tried not to imagine him looking like Ginger.
“It’s me, Ginger, old girl,” I said, slipping my hand under her bridle, and rubbing the side of her tired face. “It’s Joe Green, do you remember?”
Ginger sighed and let the weight of her head fall against me. I wasn’t sure if she did remember or if it was just exhaustion.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Oy! What are you doing?” cried the driver, cracking his whip at me as two fat gentlemen climbed into the cab. It rocked and groaned as they slammed the door and Ginger shivered under the weight.
“Get out of the way,” ordered the cabby. “You are holding up my fare.”
“No!” I said. “This horse can’t go anywhere. Don’t you see? She’s tired to death.”
Lines of old dry sweat were caked into her coat and it didn’t look as if she’d had a square meal for weeks. As her sides heaved, her ribs stuck out like the bones of a corset.
“Hurry up, driver.” One of the fat red-faced gentleman stuck his head out of the window.
“We have a lunch in Piccadilly,” hollered his friend.
“No!” I said again as the edge of the driver’s whip caught my shoulder. I thought of Mother’s jewels and how she had promised to buy Beauty. Well, there were so many jewels … surely we could buy two horses. “Wait!” I said, as the driver raised his arm to crack his whip again. “I’ll buy this horse from you. I’ll buy Ginger.”
“Ginger?” spat the driver. “This is Lady.”
“That nag? A lady?” The red-faced man laughed.
“She is Ginger,” I said to the
driver. “And I’ll buy her off you for ten pounds…”
“Ten pounds? You’re having a laugh.” The driver sniggered. “She’s not mine to sell anyway. I only hire her by the day.”
“Twenty pounds, then,” I said. “Surely your bosses wouldn’t argue with that?”
“Er…” The driver rubbed his eyes in confusion. “Twenty pounds?” he muttered. I saw a bead of sweat drip down his long thin nose.
“I’ve had enough of this!” growled the red-faced passenger. Another cab had pulled up behind us and the two fat gentlemen opened the door and began to squeeze out. “We’ll get someone else to take us, if you’re going to stand here bartering all day.”
“Wait,” said the driver. “I’ll take you.”
“Thirty,” I said and the driver shook my hand as the two fat men waddled away and took the cab behind us.
“See!” I kissed Ginger on the nose. “Didn’t I tell you it would be all right? You’re saved. All we need to do is find Mother and get the money to pay for you.”
“Wait here!” I told the cabby as Ginger stumbled to a stop outside the Bard.
“Thirty pounds, remember,” he said, rubbing his hands together. I was sure he would tell the cab company he sold Ginger for twenty and keep the difference, but I didn’t care. Just so long as I could set her free.
“Don’t go anywhere!” I dashed in to the theatre and ran towards the dressing rooms downstairs. “Mother,” I called. “Mother, I need thirty pounds.”
“Thirty pounds?” She was lying on the chaise longue nibbling turkish delight but sat up like a jack-in-the-box as I burst in. “Thirty pounds? Whatever do you need with that kind of money, darling?”
“I need to buy a horse…”
“Your horse?” She looked surprised and a little flustered. “You found him?”
“No, it’s not Beauty I’ve found. It’s Ginger. She was Beauty’s friend. She was special to James – He was my friend and…
“Darling. Darling. Darling. Slow down!” Mother raised her thin white hand to her brow as if she had a headache. “Let me get this straight; you want to buy a horse who is a friend of your horse and you want thirty pounds to do it?”
