‘Exquisite!’ breathed James hoarsely in an ecstasy of appreciation as she posed halfway down the staircase, inviting their compliments. ‘You look like a goddess.’
‘I am happy that you approve,’ she said, but her eyes were on Edmund. She walked slowly down and stood smiling expectantly up at him. ‘Here I am, Edmund.’
‘At last!’ Edmund greeted her abruptly. Ignoring the beautiful outfit, he stared with misgiving at her dainty slippers. ‘Surely you don’t intend to go out in those flimsy things.
They’ll be ruined before we have walked a few yards.’
‘ Walked!’ she echoed in shrill horror. ‘You cannot expect me to walk in this dress. Why aren’t we using the carriage like civilised human beings?’
‘Because the short distance it can take us makes fetching out the horses ridiculous.’
‘Not half as ridiculous as walking in this dress. It would be spoiled utterly.’
‘You should have thought of that before you put it on,’ Edmund told her unsympathetically.
‘It is not a court appearance you are going to!’
‘You must not expect the ladies to be as hardy as we are,’ James intervened on Julia’s behalf. ‘Surely the carriage could take us across the field if the coachman takes it steadily.
The ground is reasonably firm now.’
Eventually, after much dispute, Julia had her way. Savagely Edmund tugged at the bell and ordered the carriage to be brought round. Julia relaxed and concentrated on trying to coax Edmund into a good mood. For once her efforts failed; he remained coldly disapproving.
Impatiently tapping her foot, Julia stared crossly at her sister.
‘Good God, Anne, what a frump you look! That gown must be at least two years old. And why have you done up your hair in such an old-fashioned manner?’
‘I thought it charming,’ Edmund observed stiffly. ‘I remember that you used to wear yours that way once.’
‘Yes, but that was years ago when it was the mode. I wouldn’t be seen dead in such a Gothic style now!’
A servant, entering to bring the news that the carriage was waiting, cut off Edmund’s angry retort. With difficulty they all crowded into the carriage. It was a tight squeeze, but Edmund flatly refused Julia’s suggestion that they should make two journeys. Anne’s offer to walk was dismissed equally curtly.
‘If we must indulge your sister’s foolishness then we will all travel together. Kit can squeeze in beside me, and there is plenty of room for you by your sister if Julia moves across to the far side.’
With loud complaints that she was squashed unmercifully, and her gown ruined, Julia clutched at Edmund, shrieking with terror as they lurched their way slowly down the deeply rutted track. Unsympathetically he pointed out that she had only herself to blame for any discomfort, as everyone else had been prepared to walk. Julia subsided into a sulky silence.
She recovered a little when they arrived, and her appearance caused a rustle of interest among the villagers congregated around the entrance to the barn. Anne suspected that not all the whispered comments were complimentary but Julia felt no such qualms. Smiling graciously to either side, she swept through the crowd, very much the grand lady.
Ferdie, clad in rich purple velvet, met them at the door. Refusing Edmund’s proffered entrance money with a grandiloquent gesture that put Anne greatly in mind of his parent, he proudly ushered them inside.
The interior of the barn was transformed. The hay had been swept away or bundled under sacking to form seating for the workpeople who were already in their places at the back. In front of them were rows of wooden benches for the farmers and local tradesmen amongst them Anne noticed Weston, standing a little apart from the rest. Julia smiled encouragingly at him and he half-moved as if to join their party, then sank back as Edmund acknowledged him with a brusque nod. Anne was appalled at the naked hatred that glinted momentarily in the steward’s eyes before he mastered his resentment.
Edmund was walking towards the front row of benches but Ferdie prevented him. ‘No, your lordship! You’re the guests of honour. We have a box for you!’ Proudly he led them to the far side of the barn where a rickety platform supported half a dozen chairs. Kit leapt up with glee, taking the seat closest to the stage. Anne followed gingerly, but her sister eyed the ‘box’ with horror.
‘You can’t expect me to climb up there. I wouldn’t dare!’
‘Of course you can,’ Edmund told her curtly as he saw the boy’s crestfallen face. ‘Thank your papa for all the trouble he has taken to make us so comfortable, Ferdie. Tell him we are eagerly looking forward to the play.’
The boy went away, mollified. Julia turned her back on Edmund and made a great deal of fuss about clambering up with James’s anxious assistance. Once up, she waited icily while he dusted off her chair with his handkerchief before seating herself with an air of long-suffering resignation that would have done credit to an early Christian martyr about to be thrown to the lions. It was unfortunate that Edmund, for whose benefit it had been assumed, was not even watching.
A series of bumps, scuffles and squeals from behind the tattered green curtain that cut off the far end of the barn, indicated that the actors were moving into place. An enthusiastic drum roll called the audience to order, and the curtain lurched up to reveal a very bare street in Venice.
Across the front of the stage a dozen tallow candles, pushed into lumps of clay screened by rickety tin reflectors, lit the scene. A pair of actors Anne had not previously seen came on and began discussing the Merchant’s business problems.
‘There’s Ferdie!’ Kit exclaimed as a diminutive Bassanio entered, wearing the clothes in which he had greeted them earlier, enhanced by an overlarge scarlet cloak, a sword and whip. In truly professional manner he ignored Kit’s excited wave and started to pipe out the tale of his difficulties in a shrill treble that occasionally plunged disconcertingly to a deep bass growl.
‘That’s my whip he’s carrying,’ Kit confided in an audible whisper. ‘He liked it so much I said he could borrow it for tonight. Doesn’t he look a proper dandy!’
Portia, when she appeared, proved less averse to acknowledging her friends in the audience. She bounced on, winking broadly at Edmund, and addressed her best lines to him rather than to her fellow actors. Weston, in the second row of benches, received similarly flattering attention. Julia sniffed in disgust, giving an ostentatious yawn, but Edmund ignored her pique and grinned back at Rosy.
Anne smiled as she watched Portia bend to fold her pintsized suitor to her ample bosom.
Ferdie, totally obliterated, struggled to the surface like a drowning mariner to gasp out his unconvincing regrets for leaving her. The play was proving enormous fun. She greatly preferred it to the pretentious London theatre performances she had seen. There the ranting of mediocre actors had induced only boredom: the audience had paid scant attention to them, talking loudly to each other throughout. These Delamares were so gloriously bad that their play became hilarious. Her ribs ached with suppressed laughter.
Edmund, she could tell, was equally diverted by the ridiculous accidents that befell the actors, the sheer absurdity of the whole show. Her sister was not. Rigid with disgust, she sat glowering at the antics on the stage.
Still, it was her own fault if she was bored, Anne thought. Knowing her sense of humour to be quite different from theirs, she and Edmund had both warned her she would not enjoy the evening. Anne was surprised that despite this Julia should show so unattractive a side of herself to Edmund when he was already annoyed at the fuss she had made earlier about the carriage. Sitting there like the spectre at the feast was scarcely the way to placate him. Up to now Julia had been more cautious.
Despite the slight confusion the shortage of actors occasioned, the play went smoothly until Shylock’s entrance. Clad in a long grey robe he staggered very unsteadily on to the stage.
‘The fellow’s drunk!’ exclaimed James with a censure that Anne felt he was the last to be justified in.
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Mr. Delamare’s tendency to sway gently as he spoke was disconcerting, hut he managed to deliver his lines with thunderous effect and an obvious determination to act everyone else off the stage. They fought back with enthusiasm, especially his eldest daughter. Anne’s quick glance at Edmund found him shaking with mirth. How could Julia remain so glum and unamused?
The play moved rapidly forward to the Trial scene. Portia, Haunting her ample limbs in skin-tight breeches, swaggered into the courtroom to a riot of cheering from the rear of the barn. She kissed her hands delightedly to them, and smiled in unmistakable invitation at Edmund.
‘What a disgusting exhibition!’ muttered Julia. ‘The female is shameless.’
‘A dashed handsome filly, all the same,’ said James incautiously.
‘If your taste is for ditch drabs.’
‘Nothing like as lovely as you, of course, my dear…’
‘Any comparison can only be insulting. The slut should be whipped at the cart-tail,’ Julia hissed viciously.
Edmund paid no heed to her furious comments. Laughing at Rosy’s entrance he waved back. Anne smiled too, glad to see on his lace an expression of pure enjoyment such as he had not shown since his return home; an expression she remembered well from the old carefree Edmund of six years before.
As if sensing her regard, he turned. Their eyes met in a moment of laughing sympathy that seemed to blot out everything around them and left her cheeks tingling, her heart beating fast.
It was in that instant that she knew that her childhood infatuation for Edmund was gone for ever—to be replaced by a far more disturbing emotion. She could no longer deny that she loved him with a deep and abiding passion. If only he had felt the same!
Edmund’s rich chuckle showed his amusement as an unidentified wag at the back of the barn offered his aid to Portia to ‘sort out the miserable old codger’. Quite unabashed, Rosy waved her appreciation of the offer and launched into her ‘ quality of mercy’ speech with gusto. She ploughed remorselessly through it, mispronouncing half the words and altering others with little respect for sense or scansion, finishing with a hearty slap of her thigh that sent the flesh quivering.
Mr. Delamare clearly resented the shift of interest from himself to his daughter, and strove valiantly to regain the audience’s attention. It was evident that he had been fortifying himself during his time off-stage. His gait was more unsteady than ever and his speech faintly slurred. He glared menacingly around him as he lurched to the centre of the scene, and waved his knife so threateningly as he demanded his bond that the actor playing his victim flinched back in genuine terror. Caught off balance, Shylock stumbled and drove the weapon deep into his own hand.
The audience gasped as they saw the blood begin to drip slowly from the wound. Mr.
Delamare stared unbelievingly at the reddened blade for a full minute before thundering-out, ‘ Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?’ His fellow actors looked even more shocked than the audience as the speech rolled on. Anne remembered hearing that they were deeply superstitious about Macbeth. Even to name it in a theatre was desperately unlucky; to quote from it anathema.
When the prompter’s frenzied whispers went unheeded Cordelia slid across from her place beside Rosy.
‘No, Pa! Not the Scottish play,’ she hissed, tugging at his sleeve. ‘It’s the Merchant tonight! Shylock!’
Eventually her words pierced his alcoholic haze. He halted in mid-sentence and switched rapidly back to his former role, declaiming loftily, ‘ A trifle time. I beg thee, pursue sentence.’
A little shakily, the rest of the cast followed his lead. With a magnificent effort Mr.
Delamare completed his scene and reeled away across the court room,-making his final ‘ I am not well’ totally convincing.
He staggered out, almost falling off the front of the low stage when his foot caught in one of the candles. It toppled over and lay unnoticed as Mr. Delamare recovered his balance by a supreme effort and finally disappeared. The audience tittered nervously, and all attention swung back to Portia.
Rosy was wholly uninterested in her fellow players. While Shylock was staggering eloquently off she postured voluptuously for the benefit of her admirers in the audience, filling in the interval before her next speech with a complete disregard of what was happening in the play meanwhile. Even when her cue came and she replied to the thanks Bassanio was offering, she ignored him and fluttered her eyelashes over his head in Edmund’s direction.
It was not until a cloud of smoke drifted across the stage in front of her that anyone realised that the candle her father had dislodged had been knocked into a wisp of hay. Suddenly it caught, flaring brightly. Before anyone could move to stamp it out the flames were licking at the curtains. Within seconds they too had caught fire. The flames spread to the pile of hay on which the prompter was lounging, and he leapt up with a shout of alarm which released the audience from its trance.
With squeals of fright, the men and women at the back of the barn scrambled to their feet.
Fighting to get away, they pushed each other aside. Those on the benches caught the infection and jostled their way across to the doors. Shrieks of terror mingled with cries of pain as people were trampled in the panic to escape.
Edmund leapt up and shouted for them to be calm but his words were lost in the hubbub.
The epidemic of fear had taken too strong a hold for his words to penetrate the minds of the frightened mob. If he had caught their attention before the rush started he might have prevented it, but it was too late now. Nothing could halt the wild scramble to get clear.
Wide-eyed with terror, Julia clutched at him, overturning her chair as she screamed, ‘Save me, Edmund, save me!’
The rickety platform on which they stood swayed as the pressure of the milling throng rocked its precarious foundations. The doors were flung open by the first to reach them, producing a gust of air that fanned the flames, sweeping them close to where Anne waited her chance to clamber down from the shaky platform as soon as the crush in front of her thinned.
From the corner of her eye she saw Edmund clasp Julia. Instinctively she turned to shield Kit, but as the press before them shifted at last he jumped down. With an anxious shout of, ‘My whip! Ferdie’s left my whip on the stage!’ he ran to retrieve it from the burning stage, empty now of actors.
‘Come back, Kit!’ Anne ran desperately after him. She heard Edmund call for her to stop, but with a pang of desolation she saw that he was too occupied with Julia to help. She was foolish, Anne chided herself, to have expected anything else. The moment of oneness with Edmund that had so thrilled her had meant nothing to him. His first thought when danger loomed had, as ever, been of Julia.
She must follow Kit. There was no one else to help the child. James was too busily hovering beside Julia to bother about anyone else. In a few strides she had caught up with the boy. While he hesitated, unsure of how to negotiate the blazing boards she grabbed at him.
‘Leave it, Kit,’ she exclaimed, shielding her face from the heat with her other hand. ‘It’s too dangerous. You can’t risk your life for that. We can buy another whip any time, but not a new Kit!’
He was forced to agree and turned obediently back. The smoke was too dense now for them to see the others. Coughing as it filled her lungs, Anne tried to push Kit across the scattered benches to the doorway, but he tugged her in the opposite, direction.
‘No! This way is quicker, Anne. There’s a gap just here that I climb through when I come to see the ratting.’
Sure enough, close behind them was a small hole in the wall boarding, and Kit scrambled through with ease. Anne bent quickly to follow. It was a tight squeeze, but with a loud rending sound as her hem tore on a protruding nail, she managed to drag herself through.
‘Let us hurry round to the front now, Kit. We must find your Mamma and the rest. They’ll be imagining we’ve been roasted!’
They hurried back round the outside of the ba
rn and through the crowd to where Julia drooped sobbing on James’s broad chest. One arm around her waist, he was patting her shoulder with the other, his face a mixture of alarm and delight. ‘There, there, Julia! Don’t distress yourself so. He’ll find them. Don’t you fret!’
As Anne drew closer Julia looked up and saw them. ‘Anne, Kit! Wherever have you been?
I’ve been half out of my mind with worry!’ she exclaimed peevishly, then searching anxiously past them, she demanded, ‘And where is Edmund?’
‘I thought he was here with you.’
‘No, he left James to look after me. I thought he must be going back for you and Kit. Surely you saw him?’
They all stared aghast at the blazing building. There was an ominous creak, then a thunderous crash as a large roof timber fell into the flames. Julia screamed, and hid her face in James’s jacket.
Pale with apprehension, Anne thrust her way through the excited crowd to the barn doorway. A chain of men was passing buckets of water hand to hand to throw on the fire.
Sweat running down their faces showed how great the effort was, but their hard toil made little effect on the fire. It burned fiercely on, lighting up the men’s tired forms with a hellish glare.
She tried to push past them, calling ‘Edmund!’, but one of the farm labourers grabbed at her, pulling her back.
‘It’s no good, miss! You can’t go in. It’s not safe!’
‘But you don’t understand,’ she cried frantically. ‘Lord Ashorne is inside there, looking for me! I must find him.’
‘It’s no use, miss,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘You’d only be killed too if you tried to go m now. The roof’ll cave in any minute now.’
As if to prove his words there was another hideous rumble and creaking above them.
Anne’s heart leapt as two smoke-grimed figures staggered through from the murky interior.
She started eagerly forward, only to sink back disappointed as she recognised Weston and Rosy. Between them they dragged a huge trunk.
Change of Heart Page 12