by Sarah Rayne
But I have a key, thought Christian, and I know it exists. I have a key because I have my father’s; it was on his key-ring after he died. And I know this door exists, because this is the way he brought me all those years ago. Masking my face with a scarf and covering it with a hood. ‘You must keep that on, Christian, don’t forget.’ He had kept it on, because he knew this was what you did when you went out. They had gone in through the hidden door, stealthily and secretly. The warped changeling child must not be seen by anyone.
Christian shook off the past, and went swiftly along the cobblestone corridor and up the seldom-used stone steps into the main part of the house. Changes had been made in twenty years, but they were not structural changes and the layout was much as he remembered it. As he entered the deserted auditorium the past poured forward to fuse with the present again, and the remembered scents and the remembered atmosphere thrust against his mind. This was where his father had worked and laughed and become successful, and forged a reputation and created an empire. It was where Christian himself, had he been an ordinary child with an ordinary life to be lived, might have grown up. It was where he should have grown up! Black fury scalded through his mind afresh, because if the forces that had presided over his birth had been more merciful the Harlequin would have been his nursery and his playground; he would have tumbled headlong into love with such an enchanting place, as any child would. He would have been entranced by a place where nothing was quite as it appeared; where cities were made of canvas, and walls flew apart and trees flew upwards . . . Where people flew into love and into tempers, and sacked cities and won wars and discovered magical lands all on the same night. He wandered through the deserted house, no longer attempting to hold back the memories, letting them have their way, feeling them pour agonisingly through his mind, etching their images like acid.
Here was the old prompt corner where, on that first visit, he had wanted to curl up quietly and watch the marvellous make-believe that was unfolding on the lighted stage, several feet away. He had been five years old, and he had not understood; he had not known then that he was a freak, a distorted thing that must keep to the shadows. But his father had whispered that they could not stay here, they might distract people who were working, and had taken him on to the workshop where people called carpenters lived, and which smelt intriguingly of sawdust and glue and paint, and where there were bits of castles and trees and woodlands, all being built. Had it been then that he had begun to believe it was possible to create a world that was exactly what you wanted it to be?
Much later, swimming in and out of the pain of bone grafts and only partially successful skin grafts; struggling to cope with appalling procedures to build a rudimentary nose, and to construct a jaw and palate so that he could eat and speak more or less normally, he had clung to his memories of the Harlequin. He had made up stories about it, about how it was really a magic place, a place that you would never wholly know. No matter how carefully and how thoroughly you explored it there would always be a tiny part that it would not let you find, because that was the part where the theatre’s memories all lived. One day he would explore it all to his heart’s content.
It was absurdly easy to make use of the sub-basement door; to go soft-footed along the disused passage and slip into the shadows at the back of the dress or upper circle. Once there, it was easy to blur with the darkness – to become part of the darkness – and watch the progress of Cauldron’s rehearsals. The similarity with Gaston Leroux’s opera-house Phantom was inescapable, of course. As rehearsals progressed, Christian was aware of wry irony.
Danilo was startlingly right for the sidh prince. In the darkness, Christian smiled the difficult smile. Yes, he had been right about that, and it had been worth embarking on that tortuous route to get Danilo in: the boy had exactly the right pitch for the ‘Lodestone Song’, and exactly the right blend of half-mischievous, half-sinister sexual charisma.
The dancers playing the sidh were going to be good, as well. There were eight girls and eight men, which was probably about right. The scene where they raped the lodge-keeper and then his fat randy old wife, and danced bawdily around them, gleefully screeching all the time, was rampant high comedy, but the later scenes when they assisted Aillen mac Midha to half-drag, half-bewitch Mab down to their under-sea world, were spine-tingling.
The quest for the magical cauldron itself wound its way through the whole thing, effortlessly weaving together the separate strands of the plot, making of them a single glittering ribbon. It was serious and thrilling and funny, and the modern-day parallels had been properly understood by somebody and skilfully depicted. Christian saw this as rehearsals progressed, and he thought, yes, the darkness is all there. The injustices of men and the unfairness of the world. The cruelties and the slights. He knew that this was his influence, just as the light-hearted ironic humour was Fael’s. I dipped the brush into my own soul for this music, he thought, staring down at the stage. I painted all the bitternesses and all the helpless anger of my own heart into it. He wondered in sudden fear whether he had given too much away, but he thought he had not. He thought he had preserved sufficient detachment and distance, and the music had a hard, clear-cut brilliance, written with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond.
When the Fianna captain journeyed through the despoiled countries of his followers to find and bring back the legendary cauldron which would eternally feed the world, the scenes with the starving people he encountered successfully trod the narrow line between myth and present-day, never quite toppling over onto one side or the other. At one minute the people were the nineteenth-century beggars of Dickens and Mayhew, ragged and filthy and sharp of face and wit; at the next they were the homeless, cardboard-box dwellers you saw lying on the pavements of any large city, burnt out by drugs or drink, or perhaps just by the unfair hand life and governments had dealt them.
Whether Tod Miller himself had understood Cauldron’s depths, his actors and his stage directors and his designer did. The pathos never quite plummeted into depressive melancholy: the humour never quite toppled over to slapstick or buffoonery. The dialogue, the situations, slid seamlessly out of one mood into another, and then went forward again as the story unfolded. Triumph welled up in Christian and he thought: I have done this! I helped Fael to build this and polish it, and that is my music they’re playing down there, and it’s good!
And on opening night everyone would know the truth about Cauldron’s creators, and Tod Miller would be exposed for what he was. He would be made to look ridiculous, and that would be his punishment for that cruel mockery of the Dwarf Spinner all those years ago.
The thing that was not good, the one ugly smear on an otherwise nearly-perfect canvas was the actress playing Mab. As Christian watched the stage, angry disbelief rose up in a thick, choking flood.
It was appalling. It was a travesty. Whoever this female was, she was monstrous: over-painted, under-dressed, with a voice like a corncrake. And she was coy – dreadful word, but it was the only one that fitted her. She was simpering and batting her eyelashes at the sidh prince. This was inconceivable. Mab was feisty and brave and a bit of a rebel. She might lead her people into battle, and she might take a dozen lovers before or after, or even during, that battle. She might commit regicide or fratricide or mayhem or nepotism if she thought it necessary, and she might flirt with dark sorcery under a sickle moon. But never, not if hell froze, would she simper.
He watched for a little longer, hearing how the woman’s harsh strident voice killed the seductive irony of the music and how the complete lack of comprehension or subtlety smeared the poetry of the scene. In the end he could watch no more. He half-stumbled from the shadowy circle, and went almost blindly back through the unlit corridors, the clotting shadows rising up chokingly all around him. Rage was filling him up; slowly at first, trickling into his brain like scarlet-fanged poison, and then coming faster, until it became a crimson roaring tide. That dreadful female was going to ruin Cauldron; she was g
oing to spoil his and Fael’s beautiful, delicate structure of love and passion and pain and heroism.
Except that Christian would not let it happen.
It was not until he went along the lower corridor that led to the disused stage door, and until he suddenly realised where he was, that a plan began to form in his mind.
This corridor was almost level with the great well that lay beneath the stage. There was a brick wall, with two or three alcoves that were sealed-off doors, but that would once have led straight to the under-stage area. He paused, staring at the alcoves. Three of them – no, four.
He glanced up and down the passageway, trying to fix his bearings. The stage had been lifted in his father’s time, and sufficient space had been allowed between the new stage and the old for storage and mechanical scene-changing, and for trapdoor entrances. But the old stage had never been removed: beneath it was a vast, dark cavern, dipping far down into the Harlequin’s foundations, and it was that cavern that lay on the other side of these walls.
The Harlequin had a curious, mixed history; Christian knew a good deal about it. He knew about the robust, raucous years of Scaramel Smith, with her mother’s guttersnipe impudence, and he knew about the gentler years, when the house was filled with player kings and queens, with music and brilliance. Gala performances and benefit nights, and nights when all London came here and the Prince Regent and Mrs Fitzherbert might be seen in the royal box . . .
He knew, as well, about the darker years towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the Harlequin had fallen on evil times, and been disparagingly dubbed as a blood-tub, a gaff, a theatre where fifth-rate melodrama was staged, and the poorer sections of the community could pay tuppence to enjoy the gruesome spectacle of murder and rape, and see blood and guts strewn all over the stage.
The under-stage area would have been utilised for those blood-tub plays. The stage-hands would have crouched in the dark, ready to operate the machines that caused fake blood to gush onto the stage, probably using some kind of hand-pump which would have sprayed the entire stage, and very likely the front row of the stalls into the bargain. This was where Maria Marten would have screamed her way out of the Red Barn, and where Sweeney Todd’s victims would have been precipitated into the sinister cellar, there to wait their transformation into man-pies. Because once upon a time, the Harlequin had been a place where people had been slaughtered, publicly and messily, by way of warning and revenge.
Revenge . . . Wasn’t that what this entire thing with Tod Miller was all about?
Christian bent down, examining the brickwork more closely. The mortar was very old indeed; in places it had crumbled, leaving what was almost a drystone wall. How easy would it be to knock through? And what would be the advantage? A hiding place? A deep, deep chasm, that might go down and down and never end . . .
And where, if you kept going down and down, you might easily find yourself entering strange, subterranean worlds, where faceless creatures prowled dripping, cavernous halls, and where vengeful not-quite-human beings made their secret lair . . .
Rossani’s song began to form itself in his mind, for this was the kind of dark underworld that Rossani understood; it was the world he came from.
The difficult smile twisted Christian’s incomplete mouth.
Chapter Ten
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti
Mia Makepiece was feeling very pleased with life.
It had taken all the coaxing and cajoling she was capable of to persuade old Gerald to back a play, but now that the deed was done, he was as pleased with himself as if it had all been his own idea.
It was good to be back in London. A girl got screamingly bored stuck up in the north with nothing to do and she had told Gerald so, winding a finger in his hair (the bit he had left), and saying he could have no idea how much she missed her life in London. She managed to make it sound as if she had walked away from a string of glittering West End successes and abandoned a dazzling career in order to marry him, and as if she had turned her back on a social life crammed to overflowing, instead of that rotten, shoddy house in its rotten, shoddy backstreet, and no offers of work except provincial tours with fifth-rate companies.
And so Gerald, who could not bear to think of his dear one being deprived of anything, had started to make cautious forays into the fringes of the theatrical world. There had been a few consultations with agents – Mia had enjoyed that, because of course she had insisted on going along, and of course Gerald would not have dreamed of leaving her out of it. She had enjoyed sweeping into offices where once she had sat for hours on hard chairs waiting to be told there was nothing doing at the moment, except maybe chorus in panto at Christmas. And the end of it all had been the introduction to Tod Miller and the explanations about the show he was apparently so keen to put on if only he could find a backer or two. Really, you had to be swept along by the man’s enthusiasm, said Gerald, and Mia suppressed a yawn and said she supposed so.
Finally Gerald had agreed to put up some of the money, and Sir Julius Sherry had agreed to put up a bit more, and Tod Miller’s bank had some kind of involvement as well (Mia had never found out what that was, because it was nothing to do with her and boring anyway), and the Harlequin had somehow been available as part of the deal. And they were all set for a smash hit, which meant that Mia was set for a smash hit which was the important part, and everyone was prophesying that Cauldron was going to have the longest run in history.
Mia could not see why they were all going so raving mad about Cauldron. To Mia it was a weird old thing, full of peculiar creatures and situations that were supposed to be one thing but somehow changed into another. People going on quests for cauldrons filled with food to feed starving peasants, and people being spirited away by inhuman creatures with unpronounceable names.
And the music! Well, mournful was the only word for most of it. Music ought to be bright and loud so that you wanted to get up and dance. Proper music was lively songs with catchy tunes, or it was raunchy with a good, strong beat so that it got played in discos and on Radio One. This belly-aching row was not going to get within a million miles of any disco. And as for the settings – all Mia could say was that if drab blues and greens, and sets filled with pouring violet smoke were people’s idea of beauty, they were not hers! You could not see your hand in front of your face in some of Flynn Deverill’s settings! Dreary, that was the word for them; in fact this was the dreariest show she had ever been in, and the sooner they opened and got the thing recognised as a hit (and Mia herself acknowledged as a star), the sooner she could move on to something better.
The dreariness was considerably lightened when, ten days before the first night, the anonymous note was delivered to her.
It was very intriguing indeed. Mia read it as soon as it arrived by the second post, and then tucked it quickly into her pocket because if Gerald saw it he might very easily get the wrong idea.
Cara Mia, it began, which was a rather nicely-turned compliment about her name. You must by now be aware how much I admire you. You have made me believe that my feelings are returned. I think that the time has come for us to explore our emotions a little further. I shall be in the theatre at nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, and will wait there for you. Come in through the stage door, wait just inside and I will come to you.
I have booked a table for two at Marivaux’s – but that is not until eleven. How we spend the intervening two hours is entirely up to you, but I am certainly yours to command for those hours . . . I will not write now of the physical sensations you have aroused in me ever since I saw you, but will hope to demonstrate them to you.
There was a scribbled initial that might have been anything at all, and the writing was a rather decorative slanting hand that she had never seen before.
Well! Well, as a love-letter it was peculiar. A bit old-fashioned, as if
the author was not very used to writing such notes, or as if he had got the phrases out of some old book. But people did not often write love-letters these days; they phoned, or they simply asked you out and you went on from there. But the intention was unmistakable.
Mia studied the indecipherable initial again, and felt a tingle of pleasurable anticipation as she ran over the possible identities of the letter’s author. Danilo sprung instantly to mind: he and she had exchanged a great many smouldering looks during their scenes together, and there was a tradition of leading ladies and leading men having it off. Method Acting, some people called it, although why they could not admit to it as plain, honest bonking, Mia could not see. She would certainly not object to it being Danilo who had sent the note, although as an ordinary member of the company Danilo would not be very likely to have a key to the Harlequin, which was prudently and thoroughly locked up each evening at six. Also Mia doubted whether he could afford Marivaux’s.
Flynn Deverill could almost certainly afford Marivaux’s, for all that he went around dressed like a disreputable drop-out most of the time. And he was one of the Harlequin’s trustees as well as being Cauldron’s design director, which meant he might very well have a key. Mia found herself hoping that the note was from Flynn. It was true that he had not, so far, appeared to respond to the signals she had thrown out, but that might be just his way. It would be extremely gratifying if it did turn out to be Flynn; Mia would make sure that it became known within the company. It would be necessary to keep it from Gerald, but Mia had had considerable practice at doing that.