‘Um,’ I said.
‘See here!’ cried Inigo, and he came up onto the stage, his cloak billowing, and spoke the lines for me, leaving me feeling even worse, and more confused, than I had before.
‘It really is doable, my dear child,’ said Miss Crompton after I had staggered offstage, face blazing. ‘Imagine you’re speaking to a friend. Do you have any boy friends?’
Of course, at that question I utterly lost my breath and my voice and simply gaped at her.
‘Heavens, you do need coaching. Martita, help her,’ said Miss Crompton, giving me a firm but not unkind pat on the shoulder.
Martita rolled her eyes and puffed out her cheeks – but later, in the dressing room, she sat down with me for nearly twenty minutes and worked me through the lines again and again, until I almost did not feel ashamed to hear myself saying them.
‘There!’ said Martita at last. ‘There’s hope for everyone, even the idiots.’
She said it as rudely as she could, but I had learned by then that the rudeness was only for show. Her actions were kind, and that was what mattered. Beneath her snappy exterior, Martita was hiding fierce goodness and warmth. She was willing to help people she liked, no matter what it cost her.
‘She really is nice, isn’t she?’ I asked Daisy.
‘Humph!’ said Daisy, sticking out her bottom lip. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Don’t you like her?’ I said, surprised, for I had seen Martita patiently working with Daisy on her graveyard scene, showing her how to project her voice into the depths of the stalls.
‘She’s all right,’ said Daisy, wrinkling her nose, her cheeks a little red. ‘I suppose. She’s not bad.’
But there was a larger problem than my nerves: Rose and Inigo could not seem to get on.
After everyone had gone off book (which means they had learned their lines), and after the company had spent a day pacing around the stage and mumbling alarmingly at the floor (which was apparently not a mistake, but the blocking that Miss Crompton had mentioned), they all began to look up and speak their parts wonderfully.
The very best of them – and even I saw it – was Rose. She was a beautiful actress. As Juliet, she made herself seem younger, more hesitant, but with a bold, funny spark in her that I could not help liking. I even believed that she adored Lysander’s rather aggressive Romeo.
She would not stay quiet when she disagreed with Inigo’s direction, though, and their discussions usually ended with Rose speaking to Miss Crompton and setting off an argument between her and Inigo. Miss Crompton bristled and glared, Inigo became more and more Old Testament, and Rose pouted and took refuge in Wardrobe with Annie, the dresser, who had become her fast friend.
Wardrobe itself was part of our warren of pocket-small, gas-jet-heated dressing rooms on the first floor, and it was where Annie worked. She was a young, talkative woman who was as dramatic as the clothes she hemmed and darned and tacked together. She had a wildly curly fair head of hair always tied about with bright-coloured scarves. Her necklaces and bracelets glittered and clicked and her outfits shone in shades of red and purple and green.
‘Inigo’s a stupid old man,’ I heard Rose say to Annie one morning as she was being fitted for her day dress. ‘Just because he used to be a big star – now he’s an old has-been. He can’t stand to see me succeed! I hate him!’
Annie made a soothing, mouth-full-of-pins murmur in reply. And I thought to myself rather uncomfortably that, although I knew that everyone at the Rue was a good actor, I was not sure whether they were all good people.
9
It wasn’t just Inigo who didn’t get on with Rose. Martita and Simon were also cold to her, snubbing her and leaving her out of conversations, and pointedly refusing to run through lines with her offstage. At first, I thought this was rather cruel of them – and rather odd, when Simon was so friendly to everyone else, and even Martita was secretly kind. They were such friends too, that it seemed almost like bullying to refuse to let Rose in.
‘I feel quite sorry for Rose!’ I said to Daisy. ‘I know she can be a bit rude sometimes, but it’s not her who’s causing problems. It’s Inigo and Martita and Simon who are being awful.’
‘You would say that,’ said Daisy, wrinkling her nose. ‘Because you think that, deep down, everyone is as good-hearted as you are. Only they’re not. Rose certainly isn’t. Everyone’s upset with her because she’s upset them. She might be nice to the people she thinks will help her, like Miss Crompton and Annie and Lysander, but underneath she’s not nice at all. Watch her, Hazel!’
I folded my arms. ‘I think you’re wrong!’ I said. ‘You’ll see.’
During our next rehearsal, I watched Rose with an indignant fire in my chest. Daisy always thought the worst of people and it really wasn’t fair.
We were working on the first act, and it was time for Daisy’s scene as Rosaline. She had to drift across the stage at the opening of the Capulets’ party, looking beautiful, just before Romeo saw Juliet for the first time. I stood watching, and Rose came to stand next to me.
‘Daisy is so lovely, isn’t she, darling?’ she said, leaning against me with her arm about my shoulder. I was still learning the way actors called each other darling, no matter how they really felt about each other. It seemed a very odd habit.
‘She is,’ I said.
I’m used to Daisy’s beauty by now, and find it – not boring, not at all – simply normal.
‘Do you think that tiara is a little much, though?’ asked Rose thoughtfully. ‘I’m sure it’s not, but—’
‘Oh, perhaps it is,’ I said, staring. Daisy was piled high with paste gems, to make her look truly jewel-like.
‘Daisy,’ I said, when she came over to me. ‘What if you took off the tiara? I think it would make your hair stand out more.’
‘Hmm,’ said Daisy. ‘I suppose I …’ She paused and glared at me. ‘Was that your idea?’ she asked.
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Wait, no. Rose was just—’
‘ROSE!’ hissed Daisy. ‘There, do you see?’
‘She was being nice!’ I cried.
‘She was NOT!’ said Daisy. ‘Think about it. Rose tells you that I’m wearing too much jewellery. She knows you’ll tell me, and she knows I listen to you far more closely than I do to anyone else. I’m more likely to take off the tiara if you tell me to, and if I take off the tiara I’ll look less glamorous. Which means that she’ll look better when she comes on.’
‘Daisy, that’s ridiculous,’ I protested. ‘No one is really that cunning.’
‘I am,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s not so difficult. You just need to know people. You need to be able to tell what makes them tick. I’m good at it and so, it seems, is Rose. Well, I won’t give her what she wants – see what she does then!’
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Daisy was being ridiculous. Except …
The next time she stepped out onto the stage, Daisy was still wearing the tiara. She gleamed like a star.
‘Darling Frances,’ I heard Rose say coaxingly. ‘Don’t you think that tiara’s a little too much? It’s Juliet who shines like a rich jewel, not Rosaline.’
‘Rose darling,’ said Miss Crompton, ‘it’s quite all right. You look simply divine. But – Annie my love, could you look at taking a few brilliants off Daisy’s crown?’
Annie hurried over, her bracelets jingling and her curly hair wild, and poked at Daisy’s headdress while Rose cooed happily and Daisy scowled.
I thought guiltily about what Daisy had said – and I knew that, as usual, she was right.
10
After that, it was as though someone had snapped their fingers and woken me up. I did not like being awake, not at all, but I couldn’t help seeing what I did. All Rose’s kindnesses left a bitter aftertaste.
I had thought Rose was being polite in the face of Martita’s scorn, but I realized that she never managed to have even a single conversation with Martita without mentioning dressing rooms. She was nicest to Miss Crompt
on when Martita was about, and, whenever Miss Crompton said something kind about Rose in return, Rose made sure that Martita heard. I saw the pain in Martita’s eyes, and I understood that she was cut deeply by the fact that Miss Crompton was taking Rose’s side over hers.
Rose was charming to Simon, but it was utterly hollow. ‘How lucky you are, to die so early as Mercutio!’ she told him. ‘Lysander and I have to keep on acting for hours after you.’
‘Mercutio’s a great part,’ Simon said coldly.
‘It is,’ said Rose. ‘Especially for you. I mean – the way you look. The opportunities are so limited apart from tragedies and bit parts, aren’t they? I can’t imagine you playing a romantic character. You just don’t have the – features for it. You’re a wonderful Mercutio, though!’
I saw Simon’s hands clench. I suddenly felt rather sick. I understood what Rose was really trying to say, and it made me see that all Simon and Martita’s coolness towards Rose was entirely justified.
Rose was utterly flirtatious with Lysander, whispering and canoodling with him in dark corners, but she was smug about receiving letters from other admirers too, and this made Lysander horribly jealous. Once I heard him shout at her and shake his fist in a most threatening way. Lysander was as sharp and angry as Rose was cunning and manipulative, and I realized that their romance was as empty offstage as it was true in the play. Lysander, I had learned from reading some of the magazines Daisy lent me, was truly famous, and so it was a clever move to charm him – but not at all an honest one.
Rose was only really friendly with chatty Annie in Wardrobe – and so Annie spent hours pinning and tucking Rose’s outfits, and, even barefoot in her white balcony-scene nightie, Rose looked a vision. Martita, meanwhile, grumbled about Rose and made bored faces during her fittings, and the Nurse costumes Annie turned out for her looked dull and boxy, more nunlike than anything else.
‘It’s a joke,’ she said to us, staring into the mirror in our dressing room. ‘I could be sixty!’
‘You don’t look sixty,’ I said encouragingly. ‘She doesn’t, does she, Daisy?’
‘Um,’ said Daisy, staring at her hands. ‘No, I suppose not.’
Daisy was still unaccountably quiet around Martita. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought she was shy – but I knew that the Honourable Daisy Wells does not believe in shyness. I was rather confused, but also highly amused, for it was so odd watching Daisy at a loss for words. Once, when Martita spoke to her unexpectedly kindly, I even saw Daisy stammer as she replied, a blush creeping across her face.
‘You’re quite right, I look seventy,’ said Martita gloomily. ‘It’s all Rose’s fault. I didn’t come to England to be a character actress!’
‘Why did you come to England?’ I asked. I was curious about this. Martita’s accent marked her out from the rest of the company – she was like me, a girl from another country trying desperately to find her place in England.
‘I came to be a star, of course,’ said Martita. ‘And Portugal isn’t such a good place at the moment. Have you heard about it?’
I made a polite noise. Sometimes I forget how much Deepdean protects us from the rest of the world. We had seen a glimpse of what was going on in Europe on the Orient Express last summer, but since then I had not had time to think much about anything besides murder and my family in Hong Kong.
‘There is a very unpleasant man in power,’ Martita said matter-of-factly. ‘People are attacked if they do not agree with him. But really I left last year because my parents would not let me stay with them any longer. We had … an argument. And so in the middle of the night I dressed as a servant girl, got on a horse and rode away from my town, all the way through the country to the seaside.
‘When I got there, I commandeered a ship, and I made it sail all the way to England, and when I arrived I stole another horse and rode it all the way to London. I had always wanted to become an actress, you see, and I knew London was the best place to do it. When I got here, I was utterly destitute. I tried to get jobs, but I didn’t manage it.
‘I was living on the streets when Frances found me. She can behave rudely, but inside she is the kindest woman in the world. She took me in and let me stay with her and Theresa, and I have been acting at the Rue for almost a year. Frances has been better to me than my own mother, and I …’ She hesitated. Now I understood why Martita always looked so sad when Miss Crompton preferred Rose to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for I really was. I liked Martita more and more. However … ‘Is – is that story all true?’ It sounded like something from a rather silly adventure novel.
Martita paused, and then she winked at me. ‘The last part is,’ she said. ‘And some of the rest. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which. Actresses are supposed to invent their lives, aren’t they? Now, will one of you put this horrid cloak thing on me properly? I can’t seem to do it up.’
‘You shouldn’t have said that to her!’ cried Daisy as soon as Martita had left the dressing room. ‘Anyway, how could you know it wasn’t all true? Think of all the fantastical things that have happened to us!’
‘She didn’t commandeer a ship, Daisy.’
‘She might have!’ snapped Daisy with a blush.
‘You just like the idea of Martita as a pirate queen,’ I said, smiling.
‘Be quiet!’ cried Daisy, folding her arms, and I could not make her say anything more about it.
11
And then, on Monday, when Daisy and I had been members of the Rue for just under a week, a great bunch of hothouse flowers arrived for Rose. They were huge deep blooms the colour of the Rue’s seats and quite as plush-looking. The card with them only said:
To the Star
Rose was absolutely delighted with them, and paraded them around the Rue. Miss Crompton smiled, Martita rolled her eyes, Simon shrugged, Inigo sniffed, Lysander glared, and Annie treated everyone who came into Wardrobe to a long description of all the roses in her mother’s garden. (Annie spoke almost constantly, a cloud of chatter that enveloped anyone who went near her.)
Theresa trimmed the flowers and put them in a vase, and that seemed to be the end of that.
That afternoon, though, I came upon Lysander in the under-stage corridors. He was talking to Rose in a low, angry voice and pressing her up against a rack of heavy costumes.
‘Who sent you those roses?’ he was asking. ‘Where are they from? I didn’t send them. Who else do you have on the hook?’
‘Lysander, stop it!’ cried Rose, struggling away from him. ‘I’m sure they’re just from one of my admirers. You know, all those silly stage-door Johnnies who wait for me outside the theatre. Get off! You’re hurting me!’
‘Good,’ said Lysander roughly, seizing her wrists. ‘You’re hurting me. I thought you cared most about me, but if I find out there’s someone else …’
‘There isn’t,’ said Rose, a note of panic in her voice. ‘Lysander, they’re just from a fan – and I can’t help it if I have fans, now!’
Lysander sneered, and then he dropped her hands and stepped away. Rose was left panting, glaring after him with an expression that was half rage and half fear.
And then came the second bunch of roses.
They were there when we arrived at the Rue on Tuesday morning, and the first we heard about them was Rose’s shouts from her dressing room. The whole company converged on her (Daisy, of course, in the lead) and found her room filled with the scent of roses. Some of their petals had fluttered to the floor, and I thought for one horrid moment that their red splashes were blood.
‘Whatever is it, Rose dear?’ asked Miss Crompton, while Theresa knelt down and began to tidy up efficiently. Martita, behind her, snorted and turned away.
‘Someone’s THREATENING ME!’ cried Rose. Her face was pink with anger. She had something in her hands, a square of white card, and she thrust it at Miss Crompton.
‘Ooh, let me see,’ said Daisy, nosily contriving to pop her head over Miss Crompton’s shou
lder. I stood on tiptoe to get a look, and at last I saw, too.
ROSES ARE RED
VIOLETS ARE BLUE
YOU OUGHT TO BEHAVE
I’M COMING FOR YOU.
Daisy read it out loud. There was a silence, and then Simon laughed. We all looked at him, and I felt the hair on my arms prickle.
‘What?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows at us all. ‘It’s a joke, right? I mean, it’s not real. No one does that for real!’
‘Of course it’s real!’ snapped Rose. ‘How dare you! I bet you’re the one behind it. You’re trying to frighten me off, all because I’m the star and you’re not.’
‘Rose!’ said Theresa. ‘Calm down, my girl.’
‘I shall deal with this,’ said Miss Crompton firmly to the company. ‘Theresa, stay with me. The rest of you, go. Inigo, begin the rehearsal, if you please – a scene that Juliet doesn’t appear in.’
We all scurried back out into the corridor. I felt oddly ashamed, as though I’d seen something I was not supposed to. Daisy, though, was pinching me repeatedly.
‘Ow!’ I said. ‘Stop it! I know, I know.’
‘I should hope you do!’ hissed Daisy. ‘I knew it was only a matter of time before we discovered a mystery at the Rue! Hazel – we are back on a case again!’
12
But our efforts to discover who was behind Rose’s bouquet did not come to much. Jim at the stage door told us that the flowers had been brought by a Covent Garden delivery boy, and when we went to Covent Garden (Daisy had a sudden and desperate desire to buy Aunt Lucy flowers on Wednesday morning) we found that the order had been placed by an anonymous child with a scrap of paper and a ten-shilling note.
‘Blast,’ said Daisy. ‘They must have been paid to do it. But by who? It’s not as though we can narrow down Rose’s enemies, either! Anyone at the Rue might want to upset her.’
‘Not Miss Crompton!’ I argued.
Death in the Spotlight Page 4
