Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press

by Peter F. Hamilton

  *

  You might have thought that the threat of pursuit would cross our mind. Cornelius the Fifth was likely to sally forth, surely, when his favourite actors didn’t appear at the gates of the Spring Palace. A theatrical wagon doesn’t exactly chip along and a king has a lot of resources when it comes to finding people. However, the lash of royal displeasure was the one thing we weren’t fretting about. Where we were going, nobody would even have heard of Cornelius the Fifth of Doje. I tell a lie, they had a dirty little fairy tale about a king matching his description who was cuckolded by everyone from the boot boy to his own grand vizier – putting the cornuto into Cornelius – but he wasn’t a historical figure, just a figure of fun. When we packed up our greasepaint and took the road out of Doje, it wasn’t a road that led to any of its geographical neighbours. We are the very acme of travelling players, and we visit many places, and each of those places is a myth or parable or dirty limerick in one of the others. It all works out so long as we don’t put on the wrong play in the wrong place. It can bring people over all funny, when they see the fifth act of their own life story being played out before they’ve actually got there themselves.

  When we caught sight of our next stop the grumbling redoubled, because it was a dump. This was our first view of Sevengraves, which looked as jolly as it sounds. Sevengraves was a provincial town of a country that had until recently been at war. Someone had used machines or magic to punch that town full of holes and flatten its factories, and the war’s end hadn’t gone far towards getting things back on track. I couldn’t actually tell you if they won or lost, even. It wasn’t a topic of conversation any of the locals wanted to discuss.

  Nobody would be getting rich out of Sevengraves. We’d be lucky to charge five of their pence for the good seats, and we’d probably take barter for the cheaps.

  So we crept into town under cover of darkness. We had six days to get ourselves in order before we played a run at the Municipal Hall, a venue whose roof was sufficiently unsound that if you had a seat in the stalls you were advised to bring an umbrella.

  “Nine nights,” Doctor Kampfe decided, examining the dingy, mouldering place as though it was the royal command performance we’d been denied. “We’ll give them the works.”

  We actors tried a united front. “Three,” I tried, as leading man. “We’ll have no audience. Look at the place. Even three will leave us with a bare pantry.”

  “They can’t afford us,” agreed Timoti de Venezi, whom Kampfe was training up as assistant manager.

  “I’ve never seen a city so under the black cloud,” Felice backed us up. “You think they’ll pay what they’ve got to watch Alfonso do fart jokes?”

  “I think no place so needed the enrichment of life that comes with good theatre,” Doctor Kampfe answered us all. “But no, I agree a comedy would grate. We’ll play Estelle and Alexander.”

  “Saints preserve us,” said Sidney Lord Essex. “They’ll slit their own throats by the end of Act Four.”

  “It will be a grand success. I say it will.” And Doctor Kampfe carried the day, as usual “Felice and Richard, you’re Estelle and Alexander. Alfonso, you know Estevan still...” And he doled out the roles then and there, listening to representations from ambitious cast members but seldom being swayed by them, save that Sidney got a promotion to Stammers the Butler. There were still some objections about the choice of play, but not from me. Purely selfishly, I was looking forward to giving Alexander another go. Like the best romantic tragedies, E&A is riotous comedy for three acts, a spectacular declaration of love for most of Act Four and then a colossally depressing roll of deaths until the curtain call. In particular, there’s a scene in the middle where Alexander takes a potion to give him courage and turns up dressed like a fivepenny pimp picking fights with his betters, and everyone laughs, and then everyone sighs when he and Estelle finally do get their act together, and then he dies and, if I’ve done my job right, you can cut the grieving silence with a knife. Some people say the death of Stammers in Act Five is even more heart-stringy, but they haven’t seen my Alexander.

  We got into rehearsals, which involved hiring a local named Magritte for the role of Laina because we only had one actress for the mature roles and the play called for two. It was heartbreaking, actually. When we put the word out; there was a queue of women from twenty to ninety stretching all the way down the street. Everyone in Sevengraves was hungry. Timoti di Venezi went down and picked Magritte from the line without auditioning anyone, but he’s good at that sort of thing. The city where we picked him up, everything was numbered and measured to an inch of its life.

  Maybe Magritte would travel with us when we left; maybe not. Looking at Sevengraves, I’d have done anything to get out of the place.

  The play came together slowly, including a blazing row between Alfonso and Sidney over the senior clown’s limelight hogging, and two days of icy silence between Felice and me about who had stepped on whose cues in Act Four. Act Five was still ropey, but Alexander was dead by then so I didn’t need to worry about that. I could just sit back and make snide comments.

  I was doing exactly that, pondering my next witticism, when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me,” in that nasal Sevengraves accent we were all getting used to.

  I jumped up and plastered a winning smile on, because when a local turns up mid-rehearsal they’re the local law or the local gang, and anyway they want money. This chap looked too well-dressed for either, though. He was a tall fellow with a neatly-pressed shirt with a little lace at the collar and cuffs – not a fashion seen amongst the strata of Sevengravers we’d been associating with. He had a broad-brimmed, round-crowned hat in his hands, and he wore a red-lined cape with a high collar, enough so that any actor worth their salt would instantly have a certain stock character leaping into mind. His face was mild-looking, though, with thinning grey hair and round-lensed spectacles over watery eyes. He might have the get-up for the most pantomime of villains, but certainly not the presence.

  As no menaces for money appeared to be forthcoming, I ushered him a little ways from the stage and asked him what he was after.

  “I’m very sorry to trouble you,” he said, in a voice that positively reeked of comfortably old money, the sort that didn’t mind spreading itself around. “I saw that you were putting on Estelle and Alexander.”

  “We’ll be up in three days,” I confirmed, and then I rattled off the prices and pushed a handful of fliers into his hand, that Timoti had cranked out on our little printing press. “Tell your friends.”

  “Ah well, it’s the matter of a friend that I wished to talk to you about,” he said, voice properly hushed. Mr Collar was someone who showed the proper respect when a rehearsal was underway. “I have a ward who is inordinately fond of the theatre, and this piece in particular. However, her condition restricts her to her bed, and I was wondering...” He wrung his hat a little, twisting the felt. “I don’t suppose you do house calls?”

  “This condition, is it catching?” I asked, because Sevengraves looked like a plague-pit.

  “Lord, no! No, it’s an illness she’s had from birth. It denies her access to what little entertainment is to be had in our poor town.” His shoulders hunched. “This is very impertinent of me to ask, I know. I’ve offended your professional –”

  “No, no.” I was thinking quickly. We were in rehearsals right now; we had a couple of days before the dress... I looked over at the stage, where Felice was getting into a serious strop with Timoti after forgetting her lines, while Sidney, as the deceased Stammers, shifted about to find the most comfortable position to be dead in. We were not ready to put on any kind of performance right then.

  “Is there some way I can contact you?” I asked, and Mr Collar took a card from his hat, deftly as a conjurer. At my raised eyebrow he gave a weak smile. “Some of us wanted to be performers, before other duties called on us.” When he left, I saw that he had the sort of limp you get after someone tries to kill you.


  *

  Mr Collar plainly had money, but he’d never mentioned parting with any of it. A private show for a bedridden ward smacked of performing purely for the exposure, which is notorious for being hard to eat and not keeping the rain off. Nonetheless, I was confident of extracting some sort of reward, if only I could make this happen, and it was plain I wasn’t getting any other kind of bonus out of Sevengraves. For even the distant chance of a few more coins, I decided to play the generous giver.

  The problem was that I couldn’t exactly walk off with the company. Doctor Kampfe was rehearsing everyone very hard, and the harder we rehearsed the more it became plain that we needed it. I needed an ally to help me enrich myself, which meant I’d have to share whatever meagre enriching Sevengraves had on offer. In the end I confided in Timoti, because he had a mind like a calculating engine and, if there was a way, he’d find it. And Doctor Kampfe listened to him, which was a singular honour.

  “Can’t be done,” he said at first, but I knew him and waited. Then he said, “Not with the full company. Sidney’s terrible as Stammers. Kampfe will lock him in a room until he knows his lines. And Edith keeps doing Lady Deerling from Marshwic’s Ball instead of the Contessa. The Good Doctor’s going to blow an artery if she doesn’t keep straight what play she’s in.” And he thought a bit and made some tea and scribbled some notes on the back of a flyer, and then he told me, “But if we had you and Felice... and John’s been understudying Alfonso and Sidney as well as playing Villon, and he can just about do all three if we jockey the script. And Magritte’s really quite a find and she can do Laina and the Contessa if she changes hats quickly enough. You four, and I could read in the other roles as needed.”

  “Which leaves us with the when,” I pointed out, but I was only play-acting. I could see he’d already thought of that.

  “Dress rehearsal in two evenings’ time,” Timoti stated. “I could suggest to the Doctor that he spends that day working with Sidney and Edith, and that the rest of you really need some time to yourselves or you’ll be no good on the night. And we could sneak off to this kid’s bedside and do a very rough rehearsed reading, because that’s all it can be. But she’ll get something.”

  “I could kiss you,” I told him.

  “You can give me half what you get.”

  “I might not get anything. He made this sound like a charity do.”

  Timoti gave me a sour look. “You’re telling me I did all that thinking for nothing?”

  “Think of it as doing a good deed to appease the gods of the theatre,” I told him. “Maybe it’ll guarantee us good houses.”

  Timoti di Venezi didn’t believe in gods. Still, he didn’t pull out. Like me, he was holding out for the chance to pass the hat round, even if it was just to Mr Collar.

  We talked to Felice and Magritte and John Worthing, and they were all game. Mostly it was the chance of getting away from the rest of the company, who were wound up tighter and tighter as we got close to the dress. I’d never have thought a day out in Sevengraves would actually hold any attraction, but it beat a day in with Sidney Lord Essex swearing and putting his boot through the flats because he couldn’t remember his death speech. I may also have over-egged the idea of how open-handed Mr Collar was going to be. We were all still smarting at losing that royal command performance.

  *

  So I sent word to Mr Collar and he sent a little card in reply with an address printed on it. I showed this to our local talent, Magritte.

  “That’s the Saint Agatha Orphanage.” Her eyes accused me of false representation. “No way any of us are getting rich out of those kids.”

  “They’ve got a rich benefactor,” I insisted.

  “There ain’t any rich benefactors in Sevengraves.” Her opinion of her home town was even lower than ours.

  “Don’t bail on me,” I begged her, with the implied rider, Don’t rat on me to the others. She gave me a sour look, but she didn’t need the leading man of the company pissed at her, so she kept quiet. That way, I at least got Felice, Timoti and John to the place before they realised the whole venture was fool’s gold.

  “Oh you are kidding me.” Felice threw up her hands in grand theatrical tradition. “This place has more holes in it than the damn theatre!”

  I put on the face I used when playing sanctimonious bores. “I told you this is for a poor child who can’t leave her bed. This is good karma.”

  “They don’t have karma in Sevengraves,” Felice spat. “That was that other place. They had money there, too.”

  “So what, we’re going to turn around and go back, are we? I mean, they’ll feed us, at least. A free hot dinner’s nothing to be sniffed at right now, eh?” Horrifying to admit it, but I had a point. Food was scarce in Sevengraves and we’d been on short commons since we arrived, especially as our Doje coinage had come across the worlds-border as tin and nickel. So we, Doctor Kampfe’s Famed October Players, would do our charity gig at the orphanage just in case they had some gruel going spare.

  Mr Collar met us at the door and ushered us in. The place gave a bad name to dingy and escaped being run-down only because it had never been up. Crowded, too: orphans were the only war surplus Sevengraves had going spare. Timoti went first, alongside Mr Collar’s awkward limp, giving our excuses ahead of time – the reduced cast, the need for books, the general cack-handedness of the tat we were about to foist off on his bedridden ward under the name of art. Mr Collar rallied magnificently.

  “Gentlemen and ladies of the stage,” he addressed us. “It matters not the missed cues or entrances, but I beg you, place your hearts and souls into this. Make this not a rehearsal but a true performance of your piece. It is likely the only chance my ward will ever have to see it played.”

  As you can imagine, that extra pressure made us all feel delighted with ourselves for the rubbish we were about to perpetrate.

  And then we were in the poor moppet’s room, and true enough she was a wan little creature, propped up on pillows and wearing a nightdress gone sepia with age and washing, but obviously fine once. Timoti arranged some screens to give our fourth wall some boundaries and sorted the props out, and we had a quick huddle to agree entrances and exits. Then we turned around and they were all there. They had filed in so meekly none of us had noticed.

  Either side of Miss Ward’s bed the orphans were crammed in shoulder to shoulder. They sat on the counterpane, too, and in front, lined up all the way to the screens. We were confronted with a genuine sea of faces, all dirty and hungry and pale and huge-eyed, ages from ten to seventeen. I’ve never known children sit so quietly. I think it was because they had absolutely no hope whatsoever. I don’t think they actually knew what they were about to see.

  “Erm...?” I signalled Mr Collar, who had been displaced into the doorway.

  “My ward was insistent that the performance must be for all, not just for her,” he said, sounding choked up with pride at the sentiment. From my point of view, it’s very easy to be generous with someone else’s time and effort, but I couldn’t exactly say anything in front of that massed and hollow attention.

  And besides, part of me was thinking, this is probably the biggest house we’ll see in Sevengraves.

  With that sentiment, I turned to my fellow thespians. “Let’s make this count,” I told them.

  We made it count.

  I don’t know how we did it, putting on a ten role play with five of us, and half of us having to crib from the book. It should have been as terrible a piece of coarse acting as any amateur rep company ever mishandled, but instead...

  I was glorious. I have never been better than that matinee at the orphanage. I swear I was Alexander. Actually, that’s not true; Alexander could never have Alexandered as well as I. They screamed with laughter when I was funny and they sighed when I was a lover. And when I died – when I died, my God they were weeping – those children without parents from a town without a future, and I made them weep.

  And the others were all
right, I suppose. Felice was word perfect, and when she took the poison at the end I saw half the audience get halfway up to beg her to stop. Magritte played the comic duo with John to perfection – better than ever she could with scene-stealing Alfonso. And Timoti clicked through his roles with clinical perfection that, if it did not move hearts in itself, allowed the rest of us to move them more through his support.

  And when we took our bow, there was no applause. Now mostly that’s bad, but sometimes you play a tragedy just right, and the audience is shocked to stillness by the sheer intensity of what they’ve seen, and it means more than all the standing ovations in the world. And that’s what we got from them. They’d have given us anything we asked for, in that moment, so it was a shame they were penniless orphans who didn’t have anything to give.

  But we didn’t care, because we were full of that elation peculiar to actors post-performance. We bad farewell to the children and were just about to exit with empty pockets and full hearts when Mr Collar met us at the door.

  Well, he was thankful, of course, and extremely complimentary, and we would have taken that as our due except that he was holding out a decent-sized pouch.

  “It’s not very much,” he explained to us. “Obviously Saint Agatha’s can’t reimburse you, but I have a little put away myself. I hope it’s in order.”