by James Morrow
“No more than her father would be ashamed to appear in public with the most notorious lady buccaneer ever to stain the pages of English history,” said Chloe, tying on her green velvet bonnet. “Take my arm, Papa, and I’ll procure for you the fattest pie in Covent Garden.”
* * *
It was for Chloe a measure of her father’s despondency that, as they sat in the noisy and smoke-filled tavern awaiting their respective orders of mutton stew and kidney pie, he declined to bestow life on any inanimate object. In the past he would have introduced the candles to one another, exhorting them to seize the day ere their paraffin flesh melted away. Or he would have transformed the napkins into shrouds worn by spectral rats, encouraging the phantom rodents to haunt the dog who’d murdered them.
The food arrived promptly. Fervently devouring his pie, washing it down with tidal gulps of ale, Phineas explained that he was obliged to eat quickly, for his furlough ended at sundown.
“They’ve got you doing hard labor like some Hebrew slave in Egypt,” said Chloe, indicating her father’s ravaged hands.
“Breaking stones, grinding bones, picking oakum.”
“Oakum? Is that a crop?”
“Now that I think about it, aye, ’tis a kind of crop, sown with malice and harvested in misery. From dawn to dusk we stoop over masses of discarded rope, untwisting the fibers for shipbuilder’s caulk. The overseer’s not satisfied unless our fingers bleed.”
“We must liberate you from that abhorrent place.” A tear exited Chloe’s left eye, tickling her cheek as it fell.
“I came not to unload my troubles but to offer my accolades.” Phineas removed his pauper’s cap and kneaded his brow with the ball of his thumb.
“You saw my performance?”
“From a secret vantage on the catwalk. You make a splendid blackguard, darling. I loved how you stabbed the bosun in the gizzard when he discovered your true sex. The audience got its money’s worth in blood.”
“In beetroot juice, actually.”
Chloe leaned back in her seat, her roving gaze confirming her worst fears. Half the customers were staring at the moist-eyed actress. Her irony bone began to sing. Normally when dining at the Hoof, she hoped that the patrons, having just seen her onstage, would accord her admiring glances—but now that she had their attention she wished them all gone.
“Watching you drink Jack Rackham under the table was equally enthralling,” said Papa, daubing her tears with his napkin. “I assume that wasn’t rum in your glass.”
“Weak tea.”
If Phineas Bathurst had ever entertained a sensible idea in his life, Chloe was unaware of it. Even his decision to marry the beautiful Florence Willingham had been fundamentally barmy, for she had evidently possessed the disposition of a gorgon conjoined to the ethics of a snake. In the opinion of the neighborhood gossips, Phineas’s wife was determined to put him in an early grave, and it was only her own death (minutes after the respective births of Chloe and her brother) that thwarted this ambition.
“Listen, Father, I am lodged in Tavistock Street with the woman who played Pirate Mary.” Chloe slurped down a spoonful of broth. “You are welcome to sleep on the floor each night till you find employment. We’ll steal a mattress for you from the properties department.”
“Your generosity touches me, but my situation’s more complicated than you imagine,” said Phineas. “For all my fifty years, I still own a stout arm and a strong back, and so the workhouse authorities count me a great asset. Give old Bathurst an extra helping of gruel, and he’ll pick oakum with a frenzy to shame Hercules sweeping the stables. But should I ever leave the place, those same authorities will hunt me down and toss me into debtors’ prison.”
“You’re in arrears, Papa?”
“For the past two years, I’ve availed myself of England’s peerless network of moneylenders. I’m proud to say that, thanks to my continuous expectations of solvency, I donated most of this income to people even needier than I. In time my creditors’ patience ran short, and I saw no choice but to don a pauper’s uniform and flee to a workhouse.”
“What is the total of your debts?”
“Let me tell you about my favorite scene, Pirate Anne leaving her baby at the orphanage. It brought a lump to my throat.”
“Father, please, I must know the sum.”
“If you insist on dragging arithmetic into our conversation, the figure may be obtained by adding four hundred pounds to five hundred pounds.”
“That’s nine hundred pounds!”
“Such a mathematical prodigy you are, Chloe, a regular Isaac Newton. And now, to calculate the absolute and final total, we must reckon with six hundred additional pounds.”
“Good Lord! You owe fifteen hundred?”
“Yes. Correct. Plus interest.”
“How much interest?”
“Five hundred, more or less.”
“Sweet Jesus! Two thousand pounds?”
“I know it sounds like a king’s ransom, but I’ve researched the matter, and for two thousand pounds you could barely redeem the bastard son of a pretender to the Scottish throne.”
Chloe stared at the remainder of her stew, for which she presently enjoyed no appetite. “I have but four pounds to my name.”
Not surprisingly, Phineas now inquired after the third member of the family, doubtless hopeful that Algernon had found some profitable occupation, and it became Chloe’s duty to report that, to the best of her knowledge, her twin brother was still the incorrigible gamester and jack-of-no-trades he’d always been.
“The dear boy, so utterly his father’s son,” said Phineas. “The rotten apple never falls far from the crooked tree.” He rose and attempted without success to assume a military bearing. “Thankee for the pie and ale, child, which for several glorious minutes made me forget the frightful workhouse porridge.”
“When shall I see you again?”
“I am promised a second furlough in eighteen months’ time.”
“During which interval I’ll move Heaven and Earth to free you.”
Bending low, Phineas kissed Chloe’s cheek. “No, child. Don’t do it. Keep treading the boards, acting your heart out, making Anne Bonney live and breathe and suffer for her sins.”
“Truth to tell, I find Anne so implausible a character I cannot rise to the occasion of her portrayal. Surely I was born to play better roles than those Mr. Kean gives me—and in better venues than the Adelphi.”
“Including the role of a wife?” said Phineas in a tone of affectionate reproach. “I needn’t tell you, darling, there comes a time in every actress’s life when she’s no longer suited to beauteous buccaneers, beguiling French castaways, or even the Queen of Egypt.”
“’Tis a cruel profession I’ve picked,” Chloe agreed, solemnly pondering the fact that, whereas twenty-five did not sound like a terribly advanced age, the same could not be said of a quarter-century. “You’ll be pleased to hear that not long ago Mr. Throckmorton, who portrayed Jack Rackham this afternoon, proposed to me—and displeased to learn I rejected him.” She squeezed her father’s bristly hand. “Hear my vow, Papa. One morning whilst you’re sitting down to unravel the day’s hemp, I shall appear at your side. In a trice we’ll gather up a barrel of plucked oakum and bear it by hired coach to St. Katherine Docks. On the River Thames lies a pirate sloop, which I’ve fashioned with my own hands, and once we’ve caulked her timbers with the oakum, we’ll climb on board.”
“And sail away,” said Phineas, screwing his skullcap into place.
“On the morning tide. In time we’ll reach an uncharted isle where the bananas taste like roast beef and the coconuts are bursting with ale.”
“And the natives are all lyric poets as handsome as Lord Byron and witty as Mr. Pope.” Phineas made a jaunty pirouette, as if to tell the onlookers that, though bent, he was not yet broken. “If my daughter doesn’t get a lyric poet out of this adventure,” he said, sauntering away, “I want naught to do with it.”
* * *
In a universe rife with ambiguity and riddled with whim, Chloe Bathurst knew one thing for certain. No matter how great her popularity with aficionados of tasteless spectacles, any actress in the employ of the Adelphi Theatre would never accumulate two thousand pounds. Even before learning of her father’s predicament, she’d endeavored to join a more prosperous troupe. Over the years she’d secured auditions with the great patent houses—the Drury Lane, the Haymarket, the Covent Garden—all three still trading on the fact that, prior to the Theatre Regulation Act, they’d been the only venues in London licensed to mount respectable fare. The directors offered her not a word of encouragement. Her voice, they insisted, was ill-suited to substantive plays. She could never do right by Goneril, Ophelia, Rosalind, or even Juliet.
When Mr. Kean assumed management of the company, Chloe had hoped she might enjoy a corresponding increase in salary, for that conceited actor regularly insisted he was not in the business of directing mere melodramas. He preferred the term “tragical romances,” which sounded to Chloe like the sort of challenge a dedicated thespian could meet only with the aid of monetary incentives. She’d first learned of Mr. Kean’s affectation when, eight days before the show was to open, they got around to rehearsing The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mr. Buckstone’s adaptation of a mystery story by the American writer Mr. Poe.
“What a marvelous potboiler we have here,” remarked Chloe’s colleague and rooming-companion, Fanny Mendrick, after the company had read the script aloud. A pocket Venus whose ringing voice seemed transplanted from an actress twice her size, Fanny had been cast as Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye, fated to die at the hands of an Indonesian orang-utang. “But I’m not looking forward to getting rammed up a chimney by an ape.”
“I do not direct potboilers,” Mr. Kean informed Fanny. “I direct tragical romances.”
“Show me a maiden being ravished by an orang-utang, and I’ll show you a potboiler,” said Chloe.
For all his vanity, she admired Charles Kean, who was touchingly devoted to his actress wife, the protean Ellen Tree, cast as the mother of the orang-utang’s victim. Chloe also pitied him. As Dame Fortune had arranged the matter, Charles Kean was born the son of Edmund Kean, England’s most celebrated actor, now fifteen years deceased. Though gifted in his own right, Kean the younger seemed destined to spend the rest of his life boxing with his father’s shadow.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Kean, but I must agree with Miss Bathurst,” said the dashing Mr. Throckmorton, who’d lost Chloe’s hand but secured the role of Inspector Dupin. “Here at the Adelphi we do last-minute rescues, ridiculous coincidences, volcanic eruptions in lieu of plot resolutions, and apes stuffing young women up chimneys. It was ever thus.”
“They do potboilers at the Lyceum,” retorted Mr. Kean. “They do potboilers at the Trochaic and Sadler’s Wells. Perhaps you’d be happier working for those tawdry houses.”
“A question, Mr. Kean,” said Chloe, who’d been assigned the part of Dupin’s mistress, a character not found in the original tale. “Since we’re all tragical romancers these days, might we be paid a tragical romancer’s salary?”
Mr. Kean confined his reply to a sneer.
In subsequent months the Adelphi Company labored to do right by The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the next season found them investing considerable time and energy in Siren of the Nile, a triumph followed by their especially tragical and singularly romantic presentation of The Beauteous Buccaneer. Although the role was abominably written, Chloe had taken substantial pleasure in portraying Anne Bonney—but then came the luncheon with Papa, after which she could barely drag herself on stage, his plight having soured her on the world and all its institutions, not excluding the theatre. And then one Wednesday evening, as she stood beneath the noose prior to her execution, something snapped within her soul.
The scene had begun in normal fashion, with Pirate Anne’s eleven-year-old urchin daughter, named Bronwyn by the orphanage authorities, arriving at the gallows seconds before the hangman would deliver her mother to the Almighty’s mercy. Overwhelmed by this first and final reunion, Anne delivered a mawkish speech imploring her child to rise above whatever proclivity for iniquity she’d inherited from her buccaneer parents.
“Let me be a lesson to thee,” said Anne. “Cleave to the straight and narrow, lest thou, too, be hanged for a pirate.”
Bronwyn stumbled forward and kissed the scaffold, whereupon the hangman dropped the noose over Anne’s head. A priest mounted the platform and, approaching the prisoner, made the incontrovertible point that repentance was superior to roasting in the flames of Hell.
“Ne’er hath God heard the prayers of so remorseful a miscreant!” declared Anne to the imaginary offstage mob. “Ne’er hath Heaven attended the words of a more sorrowful sinner!”
“Dear Lord, receive the shriven soul of this fallen woman,” cried the priest, “who hath seen the error of her ways!”
Now the gas lamps arrayed along the proscenium went dim, leaving the stage lit only by a shimmering shaft of limelight trained on Chloe’s face, at which juncture the fount of her despair (constrained till this moment by decorum and Mr. Jerrold’s script) flowed forth, alien words filling her throat like rising gorge.
“A famous writer insists that nothing so wonderfully concentrates a person’s mind as knowing he’s to be hanged at dawn,” she told the offstage mob, a departure from the text so radical that it shocked her as much as it doubtless bewildered those playing daughter, priest, and executioner. “But he neglected to mention that such mental clarity persists until the moment of death. Aye, my friends, ’twould seem I’ve been vouchsafed a vision of the future. Mine eyes behold a great English Queen presiding o’er an empire more mighty than ancient Rome. But all is not well in Victoria’s realm. Whilst merchants get rich and nobles grow fat, the people suffer.”
Chloe slipped out of the noose and, like a little girl playing hopscotch, jumped over the trapdoor.
“I see workhouses built to imprison the destitute, as if poverty were a crime and not a tragedy. I see broken men, sickly women, and, aye, helpless orphans forced to live on green meat and rancid gruel. I see these wretches spending day after day breaking stones and untwisting rope till their fingers bleed and blisters bloom on their palms. And so I implore ye, tell your children to tell their children to tell their children that such conditions must never come to pass on Albion’s shores. I know that in the name of Christian charity our descendants will petition Her Majesty, appeal to Parliament, shame the aristocracy, remind the Church of its duties—whatever it takes to close the workhouses and give our lowborn brethren their due in love and bread!”
Suddenly an Adelphi patron shot from his seat and began screaming like a lunatic. “Hear! Hear! Listen to the pirate!” Half-blinded by the limelight, Chloe could barely see her votary, but he appeared to be a wild-eyed youth with a feral beard. “She speaks the truth!” he persisted, waving a stack of papers about as an arsonist might wield a firebrand. “Last month a brilliant pamphlet rolled off the presses—Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which I’ve just translated into English! It tells how the bourgeoisie will cease exploiting the proletariat only when workers control the instruments of production!”
Hisses, boos, jeers, and catcalls greeted the agitator’s outburst.
“Shut up, you anarchist snake!”
“One more word, and I’ll ram your nihilist teeth down your atheist throat!”
“Give us that lady Barabbas, and send the Jacobin to the gallows!”
“Tar his Chartist hide!”
“Feather his Socialist skin!”
No sooner had the agitator’s antagonists stopped shouting than a smattering of stentorian voices came to his defense.
“Property is theft!”
“All power to the proletariat!”
“Crush the bourgeoisie!”
“Redistribution now!”
“Votes for workers!”
“God bless Tiny Tim!”
“God bless us, every one!”
Fearful that a riot was in the offing, Chloe stepped onto the trapdoor, placed the noose about her neck, and spoke the last lines of Mr. Jerrold’s script: “Merciful Jesus, I pray that thou wilt lead my dear sweet Bronwyn along the path of righteousness! Send me to Perdition if such be thy will”—as always, the executioner now wrapped his gloved hands about the lever—“for I’ve just glimpsed Paradise in my daughter’s smile!”
“‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa’!” cried the agitator, reading from his manuscript. “‘A ghost is haunting Europe’! ‘The ghost of Communism’!”
And then, as always, the limelight faded to black, an interval sufficient for Chloe to sneak away whilst the property master climbed the scaffold stairs and suspended an effigy from the gallows crossbeam.
“‘The poor have but their chains to lose’!” the agitator continued. “‘They have a world to gain’!”
The limelight flared to life, illuminating the dangling corpse of Pirate Anne.
“‘Laborers of all nations, come together’!”
The dazzling ray died, the curtain descended, and the playgoers charged pell-mell towards the exits, eager to distance themselves from this foul and heady thing called Communism.
* * *
Beyond her impatience with Mr. Jerrold’s simpleminded conception of Anne Bonney, Chloe would admit that the lady pirate’s life and her own were not entirely discontinuous. Just as Anne and Jack had indulged in activities almost certain of procreative consequences, so had Chloe allowed her first great love—Adam Parminter, the dapper son of a Brighton family grown rich by trade—to thrice seduce her at age seventeen without benefit of linen condom or other prophylactic measure, the ensuing catastrophe sparking in Mr. Parminter the same degree of callousness with which Jack had greeted the prospect of fatherhood. Whereas the prince of freebooters had persuaded Anne to leave their baby at an orphanage, the Brighton bounder had recommended that, in lieu of a marriage between Chloe and himself, she take hold of the infant when it arrived, carry the creature down to the Thames, and set it adrift, “rather like the newborn Moses, though without the seaworthy bassinett.”