Now she is disingenuous. “Come, come, Miss Ricketts! What young girl wouldn’t be flattered to have such a great man take notice of her?”
She lifts her eyes. “Oh, I was flattered of course, I shan’t deny that. After all, I’d virtually grown up with Miggs and Edward Cleverly and Little Amy. My father always had one of the novels to hand. ‘Mr. Gibson will keep us company,’ he’d say if we had a moment to spare. But knowing him so well on the page made it all the stranger to meet him face to face.”
“It was Lord Royston that brought you together?”
“Yes.” She lowers her head, and I fear she will not go on.
“He chose you to act with him?”
“No, not at all. It was chance, Fate; whatever you will. It was Mr. Lamming who recommended us—Mama and myself—and Mr. Gibson accepted his recommendation.”
“He hadn’t seen you onstage before?”
“No. As I said, it was chance.” Again the lowering of her head, very pretty, very artful. But she raises it once more and looks at me. “I was so grateful to be chosen, because—well, because Mama and I were in such very difficult circumstances. …” She pauses.
I remember O’Rourke saying they were always on the edge of poverty. No doubt they were always looking for opportunities to better themselves, and this must have seemed a plum to fall in their laps. “Go on,” I say, compressing my lips.
“You see, the offer came barely a month after my dear papa had passed away.”
“I am sorry,” I murmur, thinking of my own papa. “That must have been hard.”
She nods. “It was. He’d been ill for some time and there were innumerable debts, as you can imagine—doctors’ bills, rent, laundry bills, grocers’ bills—and Mama and I had had to forgo most of our theater work to care for him. In our profession, if you are out of the public’s eye for the shortest time, they forget you; or the managers have some new sensation and don’t want you. So when Mr. Lamming offered us the engagement, Mama was so relieved she danced me round the parlour till we were both out of breath. She said that I was bound to impress the Great Man with my skills.”
“Are you sure there was no other part of you that you hoped to impress him with?”
She looks at me in a shocked fashion. “Mrs. Gibson,” she says, “how could I have thought such a thing? Mr. Gibson was the most upright and moral of men.”
“That didn’t stop ladies setting their caps at him. And I imagine your mama was not averse to using the connection.”
Anger flashes across her face and gives her small features a sudden grand and noble look, and I see for a moment how she might impress upon the stage. “You think my mama had a base motive in encouraging me?” she says. “You think she was so low and scheming that she planned to loose me before him like a golden apple? No, Mrs. Gibson, all my mother wished was to earn enough to keep a roof above our heads and remain respectable. And far from setting my cap at him, I was so nervous of meeting the Great Man that the very morning we were due to begin, I begged Mama to find some other actress to take the role. ‘No, you can do it, Mina,’ she said. ‘Remember what a great chance it is, how it could change both our lives.’” She looks rueful. “I didn’t imagine then quite how much.”
Indeed, she could not have foreseen it when she accepted the role. Nor could Alfred, when he hired her on her reputation as an ingenue. And I certainly had no inkling as I read his weekly jokes about the Thespian mother and daughter while I played cards and gossiped my time away in Leamington. “That meeting changed my life too, Miss Ricketts,” I say. “But in my case, very much for the worse.”
She is instantly subdued: “I am sorry. I fear this narrative is merely rubbing salt into old wounds. Perhaps, after all, we’d better end it here. I don’t blame you for the way you feel—indeed I hardly know how you could feel otherwise—but I do not think you will ever understand why I acted as I did.”
I could depart now; I could go with my pride intact, with nothing ventured, nothing given away. But what she is telling me draws me in. I want to know; I need to understand what there was about her that drew him, too. “No, Miss Ricketts,” I say, mollifying my tone. “What you tell me is of interest. Please go on. Tell me the whole story, if you would be so good.”
She gives me a doubting look but, after some more agitating of her bracelet, continues. “Of course, I didn’t know what to expect from that first meeting. I put on my best blue dress and hoped I would not displease him. And when he arrived at the theater in all his finery and addressed us en masse from the front of the stage, I feared I would not please him after all. He looked at us all so very sternly that I thought he might dismiss the whole pack of us on the instant. There was utter silence, I remember. Then he pulled a battered old copy of the play from his pocket and held it up: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this play will be a marvel, if you only play your parts as well as I. And to play those parts well, you will need to be disciplined, hardworking, and punctual. I will not tolerate sloppiness of any kind from any company member, young or old. I also look for a slavish willingness to bow to my opinion in all matters, however wrongheaded or obtuse. No doubt you’ve already heard that I am a positive tyrant, consumed with puffery and self-importance. Believe it, dear people, believe it! If you do, then we shall get along capitally!’ And everyone laughed in a relieved sort of way, and he jumped off the stage and began to saunter about, speaking a few words to each of the assembled company, making everyone he spoke to seem—I don’t know—brighter somehow, as if he actually gave off a kind of light. When he came up to Mama and myself, he stopped and looked me full in the face. That’s when the strangest thing happened … I cannot really describe it.”
I can, though. I can see it as if I’d been there: Alfred looking at her in that intense way of his, and she stunned, as it were, by the force of his gaze. “Try,” I say, quietly.
She bites her lip. “It was almost as if the world had stopped; or rather as if I had stopped and the world was carrying on without me. For a moment I hardly knew where I was or who I was. I simply stood there. And he bowed, and laughed. ‘Ah, the Thespian mother and daughter,’ he said. ‘I am glad to see you both. I hope you will not be as much trouble to me as the genuine domestic articles have proved to be.’” She looks at me quickly. “Believe me, I had no idea what he meant by that. I’d always understood him to have the best-regulated of households, so I didn’t know what to say. And he laughed again and said, ‘Well, you look meek enough, at any rate.’ Then Mama, seeing me so unaccountably dumb, spoke up and told him I was a good worker, and would listen and learn quicker than anyone, given the chance. And he said that was capital, and we would get on well. And he shook my hand very firmly indeed.”
“Industry and modesty combined! Your mama could not have chosen her words better if she’d intended to entrap him.” Miss Ricketts may be assiduous in excusing her mother, but I suspect she had a strategy from the first.
Miss Ricketts won’t have it, though: “Mama was simply covering up for my confusion. Actresses are not usually tongue-tied, you know; that would do us no good at all. And we’re used to being looked at—even in ways we don’t like. But the way he was looking at me was different: he was as attentive and observant of my appearance as if he were impressing every inch of me upon his mind’s eye. And all the time I could feel this strange … draining … of my thoughts and feelings, as if he were conjuring my soul out of my body.” She shakes her head. “No doubt that sounds fantastical—”
“Not at all.” For a moment I am almost impelled to tell her how the whole world once stopped for me all those years ago. It is on the tip of my tongue to confide in her. But the desire, thankfully, passes, and I affect nonchalance instead. “Alfred had a similar effect on many a young girl,” I say. “It’s a kind of mesmerism—nothing more. And surely you were aware of your own effect on him? A young lady so charming, yet so shy and modest?”
“You say that again, but truly, Mrs. Gibson, I thought only of the role I was to play a
nd the absolute need to be ‘disciplined, hardworking, and punctual.’ He’d frightened everyone into a positive state of nerves, and I was no exception. Indeed, on the first walkthrough he startled me by calling out from the stalls: ‘Jenny Wren, move forward. You are six and a half inches out.’”
Jenny Wren. His little bird. How she must have fluttered her wings to have been noticed in that way! But he was always a stickler, even with the family plays, when he would dictate every move and position as if we were clockwork creatures; and Kitty would dispute with him as a matter of principle: No, no, Papa, that cannot be right. And the rest of us would sigh and sink down where we were until he had (inevitably) won and Kitty was in tears. “He liked everything to be perfect, that’s all,” I tell her. “It had to be exactly how he saw it in his mind’s eye.”
“I knew that. So I never thought him a tyrant. And as I said, he was always extremely kind to me. Like a father, in fact.”
“First friend, now father.” I smile sarcastically. “Is there no end to his benevolent roles?”
She shakes her head: “You think I delude myself. But don’t imagine me as the woman you see before you now. Think of me as I was then—an impressionable child.”
“Child? Even at seventeen, that is stretching a point.” Although she is so slight, I can see it would be easy for certain people to forget she was fully grown.
“You may say that. But it seemed as though I was recapturing something of the girlhood that I had lost. For over a year I’d been more of a mother than a daughter, helping to look after Papa, feed him, change his sheets, and comb his poor matted hair. It was such a delight to have someone care for me instead, to have a man pay me fatherly attention, call me his ‘Jenny Wren,’ give me little surprises of sweets and hot muffins, or do tricks with his handkerchief to make me laugh. And when he took time to sit with me to go over my lines, with such patience and good humor, I felt so very happy.”
I see them—oh, I see them—heads together over a script, he amusing her with a myriad different voices, she delighting to be amused. “That play,” I say, “what was it about? I was, as you know, in Leamington when it was performed. Living in a Fool’s Paradise, you might almost say.”
She flushes a little and looks uncomfortable. “It’s about a father’s love for his daughter. I suppose that was what made it so real. Alfred was the father and I was the daughter. Lord Royston loves Alma more than life itself, but in a fit of madness he casts her aside. However, she remains faithful and true to him, and at the end they are reunited. Even though he is dying—shot through the heart—he is able to take her in his arms and beg forgiveness. It is a very affecting play.”
“So everyone says.” I half-wish I’d seen the wretched thing now.
“But I didn’t realize quite how affected I’d be until rehearsals were halfway through. We’d walked through it with the book, and he’d shown us how he wanted us to speak and where he wanted us to stand, but the moment he took to the stage himself, he became utterly transformed. I could hardly believe it—I, who had been brought up in the theater! There was no stilted waiting at the end of each line, no waving of arms or grimacing for effect. He took his cues so naturally—speaking so fast and with such passion—as if the words were spilling not from the page, but from his heart. Then, at the very end, when he had to die in my arms, he held me with such desperate force and looked at me with such intensity that I could not remember a single line of my response. Tears poured from my eyes, while all the cast stood dumbly around, not sure if I were acting or not. I remember hearing him call out, ‘Give her some air! Smelling salts, for God’s sake!’ and quickly lifting me up and carrying me to the wings. He laid me down on an old sofa, and took out his handkerchief and wiped my face—and then his own, which was equally wet. Then he smoothed the hair back from my face, and took my hands and chafed them.” Tears run down her cheeks at the remembrance of it. “Oh, Mrs. Gibson, you cannot imagine how gently he attended to me.”
Alas, I can. My darling girl.
“But you see, I was then obliged to tell him why I was so affected, to tell him about my own father and how the memory of his last days was still fresh with me. He said, ‘My dear girl, you should not be here, doing this play! How could your mama let such a thing happen?’ But I told him Mama was not to blame; that we were without means, and that if we didn’t find employment, especially now without Papa to help us, we would end up in the workhouse. ‘This is a very good chance for me to be seen, sir,’ I told him. ‘The world will flock to a play with Alfred Gibson in it. Further roles may come to me if I am seen to act well.’ He was then kind enough to pay me a compliment on my acting, and that he would use all his influence to enable me to gain further employment. ‘But for this role,’ he said, ‘you must use your natural feelings as a well from which to draw. All my life I’ve drawn from such a well—in my writings, in my acting. And when I play Lord Royston, I plunge deep into that well. I think of someone whom I, too, have lost. Someone dearer to me than all the world.’”
I cannot speak.
“So I took his advice, Mrs. Gibson. Each time we played that scene, I thought of my father, and he (I suppose) thought of the person he had lost. But now my grief did not overwhelm me; it seemed to melt and mingle into his grief, and we seemed to be consoling each other. And each time I took him in my arms, I felt this same unbelievable happiness: It’s a far, far better thing for me to die now, looking at your lovely face and knowing your good and pure heart, than to live one more day as a man condemned. Weep for me if you can. But do not try, in mistaken mercy, to recall me to life. Let the sweet angels who already hover over me bear their burden away for ever. All is redeemed. Now there is only love between us, Alma. Only love. And then he’d close his eyes, and I’d feel his body grow so heavy I could hardly support it, and his head would fall upon my breast as if he had truly given up the ghost. There’d be such silence then! The whole theater would be stunned. But when we raised ourselves, and came down to take our bows, they’d stand and applaud with rapture. Some of them wept openly. Oh, Mrs. Gibson, it was all very unsettling. I was seventeen years old, and every night I was holding the most famous man in England in my arms, and every night I was applauded to the skies by rapt and crowded audiences who came to see me do it.”
“Yet it was only acting,” I tell her, with a dismissiveness that I do not feel. After all, he had reduced me to tears on so many occasions.
“Yes, that is what I kept telling myself. Only acting, I kept saying. Immediately after the play, when half of London was milling around in the Green Room congratulating us, he seemed as indifferent as if nothing special had passed between us. But something had; I knew it had. And it passed between us every time we performed the scene.” She stops and takes a deep breath. “Every evening as I put on my costume, my whole soul longed for that moment. And I confess—yes, I confess even to you, Mrs. Gibson—that when that moment came, I no longer cared that he was someone else’s father and someone else’s husband. I simply wanted to be his darling Alma forever.”
So that’s how it all started. With play-acting. With the real and the imagined mingled together. With loss, death and blissful transformation. “And Alfred,” I say, “did he wish to be Lord Royston forever?”
She looks away. “I don’t know. He was exhilarated, certainly. He said he’d never acted so well in his life and that he owed it all to me. ‘Don’t worry about money, Jenny Wren. From now on, I shall be your protector.’”
Ah. Now we come to the nub.
She shakes her head. “I know what you are thinking, Mrs. Gibson, and you cannot imagine how apprehensive I was to hear that word. Even at seventeen I knew only too well what ‘protection’ could entail. I naturally declined his offer.”
If that is true, I am surprised at her strength of character. After all, actresses (even virtuous ones) rely on such offers to maintain themselves. But I know my husband and how little he could be dissuaded from a course of action once decided upon. “He ignore
d what you said, no doubt?”
She nods. “He said I had an ‘admirable but misplaced sense of honor’ and I did him a disservice to imagine his motives were other than disinterested. And when he put it that way, Mrs. Gibson, I have to say my refusal did seem foolish. I felt ungrateful, and stupid—and, to be honest, rather coarse.”
I remember how he had made me feel over Alice and Madame Brandt, how he made me feel stupid and ignorant and unworthy for doubting him in any way. I look at her and wonder how this poor girl, at seventeen, could possibly have withstood the force of his displeasure.
“He pestered me with notes, too, pleading to let him have the ‘simple pleasure’ of ensuring my welfare.” She shakes her head. “It was so very, very difficult!”
“But clearly not too difficult, or you would not be where you are now, set up by him in this very pleasant little house.” I cast a look around at the figured wallpaper, the paintings in the gilded frames.
Her cheeks grow crimson and she lowers her head. “I know I must seem to you a weak and immoral person to have accepted anything from him. But he was Alfred Gibson! How could Alfred Gibson, the great Public Benefactor, the great champion of the poor and downtrodden, and the savior of the lost, set out to ruin a girl of seventeen? A girl with no means? A girl who had so recently lost her father? A girl who trusted him with her whole heart?”
It would, of course, have seemed inconceivable. Although, sadly, I reflect that he was not averse to ruining a woman of forty-five who had no means and no father, and who had also trusted him with her whole heart.
She goes on: “Every day I saw how he helped others. Almost everybody in the company had some reason to be grateful to him. The last night of the performance he ordered a splendid supper for us all, with champagne and lobsters and marbled jellies and ice cream and everything you could ever have thought of. And the families of all the company were included—little Georgie and Fanny too—and all the stagehands and wardrobe women and ticket sellers. The ladies all had silver brooches from him and the gentlemen all had cufflinks. After we’d eaten, the children ran around the table in high spirits and Alfred ran after them dressed as some sort of quaint magician, giving them bonbons and toy trumpets and sugar mice. That night I convinced myself that his offer flowed from such simple kindness as I was seeing then, and it would be very ungracious not to accept.”
Girl in a Blue Dress Page 37
