I might as well have been a horse myself the way he carried on! Or was it an excuse to get under my skirt? The man had more tricks to him than a monkey. The upshot was he wanted me back in the ring for the afternoon performances, which would leave me free for the evening theatre. He had discussed it all with Mrs Foley and Mr Marriott, without a word to me.
‘Mr Foley,’ I said, putting on a deep voice like his wife would when annoyed, ‘I am not a piece of meat to be bargained over behind my back. I am now an artiste in my own right. I will have a few conditions if I am to return.’
He sobered up then, cleared his throat and frowned, but we both knew it was a game. He could read my twinkling eyes and I knew he was grinning behind that straight look.
‘I have a reputation for a fine voice and a new repertoire of songs,’ I said, very firm, ‘and if I return as Miss Tournear I require to be billed for the musical interlude as well as the horses. And paid accordingly.’
Mr Foley tugged at his left moustache, which always meant he was enjoying himself. ‘I can offer you three shillings per performance and a special benefit before we leave Wellington. That will be on top of what Mr Marriott pays you.’
‘Four,’ I said, trying not to giggle. It was a good offer.
‘Three shillings and sixpence,’ he said like a shot, which showed he valued me. I would have taken the three.
‘Done!’ I cried and threw him a deep, theatre curtsey, left foot behind, right hand prettily pointed above the heart. Oh, my heart was singing! To ride bareback again and act on the stage! Who would have dared hope for such perfection?
Tommy came hand-springing, flip, flip, over the mudflats, like some mad jack-in-the-box, to land right side up under my nose. ‘Pooh,’ he cried, ‘the stink of this new beach! How can you Wellingtonians stand it?’
It’s true that we had become used to the stench. For the first days after the quake the natives — and many settlers — had harvested the newly raised beds of shellfish with glee. Many settlers were cooking out in the open, even in the street, on makeshift fireplaces, built from their shattered chimneys. The delicious smell of freshly roasted cockles filled the air. But then the beds dried in the sun and the shellfish rotted. After another day or two even the seagulls wouldn’t touch the stinking mud. Tommy thought no one would come to the circus because of the smell, but Mr Foley said they would and he was right as usual.
‘Maria says come for a cuppa,’ said Tommy, jiggling up and down as if he were taken short. I don’t think I ever saw Tommy Bird still for more than a minute, even when he was a grown married man with children twice his size.
I looked over at Mr Foley, to get some idea of how the land lay as far as Maria was concerned. He lifted one eyebrow and gave a curt little nod, which I could not interpret, so off I went with Tommy to find out for myself.
Tommy directed me to one of the regimental tents. Accommodation was very short in town with all the destruction, and the 65th had come to the rescue with a row of tents down on the new shore. The soldiers from the garrison had come up trumps in the emergency. Tommy and I attracted a few cheery waves and shouts from a group of them working on the ruins of the Council Chambers.
‘How about a song, Miss Rosie, to help us along with the work?’ said one fellow. So I stopped and gave him a verse. It never hurts to whet the interest of a potential customer, and the garrison boys were good supporters of the theatre. Only one verse, though. Start up a chorus and we’d never get away.
My dear Maria lay on a makeshift cot, resplendent as ever in scarlet silk, even though it was not past midday. Beside her, a small infant! Maria’s smile would have lit a large auditorium, but she held a finger to her lips and whispered, ‘He’s just fallen asleep. Come and see.’
Well, he was a fine plump baby, no doubt Mr Foley’s, and Maria as happy and contented as I’d ever seen her. She settled the babe in a wooden crate which served as crib and we sat outside in the sun on canvas chairs while Tommy brewed us a pan of tea over a little brick fireplace. No lack of loose bricks in this town. Maria had put on weight. She had changed from a wild and fancy circus lady to something approaching matronly in a few months. Mr Foley, it seemed, acknowledged the boy, and afforded Maria ‘special privileges’ which meant, I gathered, that they lived together as man and wife, although in some secrecy.
‘It’s good for business,’ said Maria, shrugging her shoulders and grinning in her wicked way, ‘for Mrs bloody Foley to be seen as his wife, but they hardly look in each other’s direction these days, let alone enjoy anything — more cosy.’
‘She doesn’t mind about your baby?’
Maria glowered. ‘Who cares if she does? She has no right any way. Did you know she had one of her own?’
‘What? Gave birth to one?’ I laughed at the thought of Mrs W.H. Foley with a child.
‘True. Bill told me.’ (Bill it was now!) ‘A little girl called Wilhelmina. But a baby didn’t fit with the theatrical life so she left the poor mite in America — or was it Australia? — in the care of a friend. Can you believe it?’ Maria cast a fierce glance back at her sleeping Johnny. ‘I would die rather than give him away.’
I nodded, only half listening. This talk of babies made me uneasy.
‘Sit down, sit down!’ laughed Maria. ‘You are worse than Master Bird here.’ She tossed her dark ringlets, setting the blood-red glass of her earrings clashing. She wanted to settle to a good gossip but my feet simply wouldn’t stay still. The thought of being an acrobat again had me stretching my legs and cartwheeling down the beach. Maria said she didn’t miss the circus ring. Already she was expecting another and was happy as a tick on a sheep’s back with the idea.
‘I could not imagine living without the audiences,’ I said, thinking of Jack and his pleas. ‘My feet are itching just to think of being on horseback again.’
Maria patted my knee — a matronly action! ‘Wait a few more years,’ she said. ‘You will come to it. Every woman longs for babies. It has broken my heart, the ones I had to lose. Now. What have you been up to? Gentleman admirers? I won’t believe you have none, for you are turned into a beauty. Oh là là!’ And she waved her arms this way and that, in her old foreign way, though she was born in the slums of London, she said.
I told her of Jack and then of my adventure with Captain Hayes. At the mention of Bully Hayes, Maria shrieked aloud, never mind waking the baby.
‘Bully Hayes! That blackguard! You never went with him, Lily? Oh là! You are lucky to be alive.’ She looked sideways at me and grinned, half in fear but also, I believe, in admiration. ‘That pirate has stolen more women than ships, and left more broken hearts than dead crew, which they say number in the dozens. The fellow would murder a trader rather than pay for a sack of potatoes.’ She leaned in to me and I caught the sickly sweet smell of baby milk. ‘So, Lily, is he handsome? They say he is a charmer, for all his wicked ways.’
I had to admit to his charm, and confessed that I could not stop thinking about him. The way he had threatened to find me again! It preyed on my mind fearfully, when I should be thinking of poor faithful Jack.
‘Poor Jack? Nonsense,’ laughed Maria. ‘He is as handsome a man as ever I saw and rides a horse like the finest cavalryman. I’ll wager every young lady in town will be casting her eye at Jack Lacey. Watch your step there, Miss Tournear!’
Well, we finished our season, with me switching from Miss Tournear to Miss Rosie or ‘a lady amateur’ as required. I was so busy learning my songs and lines, practising my moves for the circus, and exercising with Tommy Bird to keep my body supple, that there was no time for thoughts of either Jack or the infamous Captain Hayes. Mr Foley was right. The townsfolk, and in particular the mechanicals, came flocking to both theatre and circus, ready, after a hard week righting slanted walls, rebuilding chimneys and re-shingling roofs, to drink and laugh and misbehave with a will.
But Mr Foley had a grand plan and always timed his ventures well. Just as the audiences began to tire of our songs and plays and
tricks, Mr Foley announced that we were all to go to Auckland, via a season in Whanganui. He planned, he said, to build a theatre of his own, with Mrs Foley as top billing. Mrs W.H. Foley! Maria would be none too pleased to hear the Foleys were planning a venture together again.
We were rehearsing a new melodrama when I heard the news. Mrs Foley was in one of her moods. Nothing was right. The leading man — an amateur — kept upstaging her; I was overplaying my hapless maiden scene in a way that dominated her grand entrance, and so on and so forth. We were all used to her fusses, would only put up with her because so often she was right.
‘Off to Auckland?’ I cried, earning another black look. ‘Mr Marriott might have something to say about that. Leaving him in the lurch.’
‘It is Wellington leaving me in the lurch,’ said Mrs Foley, her voice at its deepest and most tragic. ‘I am tired of Wellington.’ She strode up and down the stage, working herself into a rage. ‘Wellington simply does not appreciate me.’
This despite full houses and roaring applause. What she actually meant was that there was no decent newspaper to proclaim her talents. ‘We must look to civilised folk in Nelson or Whanganui for our reviews. That scribbler Stokes has eyes only for politics and Governor Grey. Not once has he set foot in the theatre, even though he attends his political meetings at Barry’s Ship Hotel, a mere five steps away. Not one review! Not one mention of a theatrical star who is gracing Wellington’s boards! If we are not appreciated, Lily, we will leave sad little Wellington to its intrigues and machinations.’
To make matters worse, the Spectator had been out of print since the earthquake. No hope then of a review of her brand new playbills from London.
‘You will come also, Lily,’ added Mrs Foley, before retiring backstage for a lie-down.
No question whether I might have a choice. She liked to have me around to carry her things and practise her lines, for I was a quick learner: almost as speedy as she at grasping the words and tucking them into memory. Mrs Foley, for all her faults, must have had at least thirty plays ready to be recalled, every word pat, at any one time. She taught me some of her memory tricks: the rhymes and connections. But you had to have a quick mind, too, which I had. I was useful also as her replacement when needed. It is not too boastful to say that when I painted my face, donned a wig and costume, and boomed my voice in imitation of that lady, the audience could be fooled nine times out of ten.
Mr Foley had lured his wife to Auckland by announcing that the great Mr Buckingham would be joining him in the theatre venture, and that he and the Buckingham family would perform in the new company.
So began a new chapter in my theatrical life: my fateful meeting with Miss Rosetta Buckingham.
[Archivist’s Note: Historians claim that Mrs W.H. Foley gave her theatrical debut in Auckland at her husband’s Theatre Royal. The Alouette journal gives us a different picture. Mrs Foley was performing in Wellington during the disastrous earthquake. An absence of theatrical reviews has concealed this interesting fact until now. E. de M.]
ACT FOUR:
One Door Opens; Another Closes
SCENE: Theatre Royal, Victoria Street East, Auckland, and the Venetian Saloon, 1856
Enter the Buckinghams
Oh, those Buckinghams! They were quite nauseatingly clever with their musical talents. Soon after our arrival in Auckland, the Foleys and I, Tommy Bird (who could sing as well as perform on the slack wire), and young Harry Jackson, a new comic performer in our theatrical group, were invited to attend a musical soirée at the Buckinghams’ home. Maria was left behind to mind the baby. Her nose was properly out of joint again with this new entente between the Foleys, but I assured her it would not last. Mrs Foley was not one to settle. Quite apart from her quest for new worshipful audiences, her rather large nose was always on the scent for a fresh adoring male to take the lead role in her life. Mr Buckingham would be too old, let alone too happily married, and Harry Jackson, not yet in need of a barber, was in any case a comedian. Mrs Foley favoured handsome tragedians.
Well, the grandly named Venetian Saloon was simply a large room at the back of the Buckinghams’ new premises in Princes Street. It boasted pleasant red velvet curtains, uncomfortable chairs, a table and a grand piano. The windows looked out onto a back garden newly planted in roses and a selection of trees from the old country.
We sat on the hard little chairs and endured a succession of young Buckingham children playing and piping and singing all manner of musical medleys. Mr Buckingham and his wife had produced nine children and were obviously still at it. The poor wife, large with number ten, dragged around, serving her special cordial and home-made cakes in the interlude, beaming with pride at the accomplishments of her tribe. Every one of those offspring, from young George and Miss Rosetta to a tiny mite of three years old, could play the piano. Master George also sang in a rich baritone although his voice surely would not long have broken. He played the flute amazingly well. Rosetta sang like a little angel, eyeing the gentlemen most provocatively. I found out later she was only fourteen, though you would have put her a good five years older. And so it went on. Walter played the fiddle, young Conrad piped a few songs and then danced a hornpipe. Mrs Buckingham sat at her piano and accompanied her husband in a long comic song which I had to admit was beautifully performed, and then went straight into ‘Villikins and his Dinah’!
I nudged Tommy. ‘Look at Mrs Foley,’ I whispered, giggling. ‘Storm clouds gather!’
Sure enough, Mrs W.H. could not bear to watch a fine performer like Mr Buckingham ‘steal’ her signature song. After the third chorus of ‘Tu la lol’ etc., where we all joined in, she rose majestically from her little chair, sailed to the front of the room and, with a poisonous nod to her host, took over, singing the sad part about the ‘cup of cold pizen’ in a voice that would have reached most of the neighbouring homes, let alone the back row of the Venetian Saloon.
Mr Buckingham held his peace, but led her back to her seat with a firm hand at the end of the item. No outsider was allowed to overshadow his prodigious family!
Perhaps that was the beginning of the falling out between the Foleys and the Buckinghams. Money came into it, of course, but you’d be mad to expect Mrs Foley to play second fiddle to anyone, especially juveniles. It wasn’t more than a couple of months before she was off back to Wellington, Nelson and Lyttelton, spreading her fame like a jewelled cloak across the colony.
Wonderful times followed. I stayed in Auckland, taking a new theatre name: Miss Rosa Fisher (from Sydney and Melbourne!). What bliss to be on stage in my own right, and not filling in for any ailing amateur lady who fancied a night off. We professionals knew how to play through illness and pain. For better or worse, as the saying goes.
Three nights a week I performed in the Theatre Royal, riding in Foley’s Circus down near Freeman’s Bay whenever the circus was in town and best of all being free from the demands of Mrs Foley. The Foleys had left their Theatre Royal to young Harry Jackson, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one, for the audiences in Auckland were reluctant to part with good money to see the plays. Harry could draw a laugh from the most surly of audiences, never fail. We could pull the tears from the hardest businessman or farmer. The reviewers were more than kind; but the crowds remained thin. Some said our prices were too high. Harry lowered them. Five shillings for the parquette and only seven for a dress box. Pit, two shillings. That made a difference for a while. I played the romantic leads, performing all the most loved melodramas and farces, but week after week the theatre struggled to make ends meet.
Auckland was more gentrified than Wellington. Farmers and local gentry don’t fancy the theatre. They prefer pretty musical evenings such as the Buckingham Family entertainments. Mrs W.H. knew the lie of the land. Off she went to the rougher communities further south.
Dear faithful Jack had turned up, of course. With the Foleys often away on tour, I was lonely for my circus ‘family’, especially Maria. I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing t
he first day Jack arrived at my boarding house door, his face alight with love and a bunch of roses in his hand. He hooked his arm in mine, wiped away the tears with his spotless handkerchief and led me down to the sea where we sat, watching the natives gathering shellfish and the townspeople promenading. I felt so happy to see him that day that I would have married him there and then, but of course there was a play to perform that night and a season of entertainment at one of the saloons where I was booked and billed. It is not easy for an artiste to live a normal life.
Jack soon had his own business, breaking in horses for the gents and ladies, and was doing well. So he was busy too. ‘Marry me, marry me,’ was his everlasting refrain. ‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ was mine.
But the fateful evening of the Buckingham Family’s Musical Entertainment for Governor Gore Browne set in train a new direction for me — and for Jack. That night would lead to more than one disaster.
The Governor of New Zealand had agreed to patronise the evening, which was to be at the Odd Fellows Hall, an imposing building in Victoria Street, which could house a decent-sized audience. Mr Buckingham had drawn up an impressive programme, featuring his four oldest children, and of course himself. Advertisements were plastered in shop windows and in the Southern Cross newspaper. Getting the Governor along was a coup as he was not known for his interest in the gentler arts.
The morning before the grand occasion there was a knock on the door of my room at the new Shakespeare Tavern in Wyndham Street. I was breakfasting in bed after a rather disappointing evening at the theatre. Jack came in, looking serious, puffing slightly, his hair not its usual gleaming sheen and his chin unshaven.
‘Lily,’ he said, plumping his backside down on the bed, causing my cup of tea to splash all down my nightdress, which did not start the conversation well. ‘Lily, there is a disaster in the Buckingham household and I am sent to see if you can help.’
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