“Back!” yelled a member of the Bow Street horse patrol, clattering his horse’s hind quarters into the crowd. “Back, d’ye hear?”
“The poor little princess: ain’t she a-coming?”
“Yes! Soon enough! Back!”
The other voice wept. There could have been no greater compliment to the pious sedateness of the opera than that nineteen-year-old Princess Charlotte—only child of a hate-marriage between the Prince Regent and good-natured, dirty Caroline of Brunswick—should be permitted to attend it. Princess Charlotte had expressed eagerness to hear this new singer who had been praised so lyrically by the Times, the Morning Post, and the Theatrical Examiner.
“But who’s the damn singer?” growled another voice, as a stocky gentleman with flaming red hair jumped down from a carriage. The crowd recognized him and greeted him with a derisive shout of “Red Herrings!” which he acknowledged with wolfish tolerance.
Full court dress, of course, was de rigueur here. In addition to complete black clothes, with gold or diamond knee buckles, Red Herrings wore small wrist ruffles and a trumpery court sword. He was Lord Yarmouth, whose mother had been another mistress of the Regent; and, many years later, he was to appear as the villain in a novel named Vanity Fair.
“Herrings dear,” said his wife, nearly falling flat on her face as he handed her clumsily out of the carriage, “the singer is called Madame Vestris. She is Italian, but English-born. They say she has the wonderfullest contralto since Catalini retired to Paris.”
“So-and-so to her contralto,” said Lord Yarmouth. “Is she goodlookin’?”
“My poor Herrings, the girl is only eighteen. She is married to that divine Frenchman, M. Armand Vestris, who teaches us how to waltz.”
“Eighteen, eh?” repeated Lord Yarmouth, and licked his lips. Then he stared. “I say! There’s Ned Firebrace, six feet three and lookin’ like thunder, with a horsewhip under his clock. What’s up tonight?”
Others wondered this as well. Yet there seemed no reason for it. Inside, the benches of the pit—divided only by a center aisle called Fops’ Alley—were occupied by as quiet a group as you might find inside a church. At the opera you did not hear, as you heard at Covent Garden or Drury Lane, the vulgar voices of orange girls with their: “Chase an orange, chase a nonpareil!” Or, from the other side, “Buy a bill of the play, buy a bill of the play!”
Perhaps it was only a reflection of the Italian temperament backstage. Lamplighters and sceneshifters screamed at each other, gesticulating under stage moonlight, which looked like real moonlight. Even the new star, slim and beautiful Madame Vestris, with her dark and shining eyes whose soulfulness seemed to express all the mystery of woman, let the tears roll unchecked down her cheeks.
Her husband danced about her in agony.
“Que tu es belle, chérie,” moaned M. Vestris, who would not have to work any longer if his wife scored a success. “M’m, m’m, m’m, m’m, m’m!” repeated M. Vestris, kissing her hand each time he said, “‘m’m.’” “Mais tu es triste, ma petite. Pourquoi? Qu’est-ce que tu dis?”
Elizabetta Vestris raised liquid eyes, and lowered the thrilling voice.
“Je dis goddam,” she whispered. “Mais … ma pauvre petite! Pourquoi goddam?”
“C’est ma gorge,” sadly replied Elizabetta, touching her breast and indicating what size she thought it ought to be. “Je n’ai pas de gorge. I am not enough develop yet. Oh miserable!”
And then, even as she moaned in self-pity, her mood changed in a flash.
“The princess!” she cried. In her dark trailing robes as Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, she flew toward the peephole in the curtain. The orchestra had struck up “God Save the King.”
Outside, beyond the peephole in the curtain, stretched the stage’s immense apron, ringed by a half oval of coal-oil lamps in glass containers. The royal box, of course, reared up inside the apron. Princess Charlotte, bowing and smiling, looked almost handsome against the six frights who had been appointed her maids of honor.
And the occupants of the boxes rose up as one to bow or curtsy.
Of these boxes, set in a horseshoe shape of four high tiers nearly to the roof, sixty-eight out of a hundred were privately owned. They were decorated in white and gilt, with a green laurel pattern in bas-relief on each panel. A small ivory disk, stamped with your name, number, and the season, admitted you to a roomy draped box, which held six plush chairs as well as a stand bearing oranges (usually rotten) and a small couch.
“Ah,” breathed M. Armand Vestris, “quelle vue magnifique!”
In the boxes of the first tier might be seen the daughters of the Duchess of Argyle, said to be the most beautiful girls in London. In the next box sat the equally lovely Marchioness of Stafford, with her daughter, Lady Elizabeth Gore. That belle enfant whom everyone loved, Lady Cowper, was regrettably afflicted with a fit of hiccups.
There was “Monk” Lewis, the moneyed author who had written a novel which pure taste condemned as “lewd and lascivious,” and whose crablike eyes now stared at Lady Caroline Lamb. In the box of the Princess Esterhazy sat another man named Lewis, Tillotson Lewis, looking steadily up at the box in which the Marchioness of Darwent would presently appear.
So did the Hon. Edward Firebrace, his wide-set teeth fixed at a grin, in the box otherwise occupied only by his new flame, Harriette Wilson, and his old friend, Jemmy Fletcher.
There was Scrope Davies, who had once spread the story (untrue, by the way) that Lord Byron wore his hair in curlpapers at night. There (positively) was the great Beau Brummell, thin as a thief, brown hair brushed up to a peak: edging toward ruin, forced to skip over into France the following year. George Brummell had played the fool so long that he had become one now.
And so they rose up, in a sort of feathered silken thunder, as the orchestra played “God Save the King.” Faces were mere white blurs, set amid gilt and white and green box frames, against a darkness tempered only by the semicircle of footlights. Gentlemen’s white-gloved hands with quizzing glasses lifted, ladies’ hands waggling plume-feathered fans, diffused gently over the theater an air like the breath out of a wine vault.
The “God Save the King” faded away. The orchestra swept into the overture from Proserpina. Amid much rustling on carpetless board the audience sat down.
Caroline and Darwent, who had been waiting in the dim-lit little passage at the back of the third tier, hastened into box number forty-five. In the box adjoining it, separated only by a very thick curtain, sat the three leading patronesses of Almack’s: Lady Jersey, Lady Castlereagh, and Lady Sefton.
“My dear Sarah! My dear Emily!” appealed little Lady Sefton. “Acknowledge, now, that your first attitude towards Lord Darwent, when we sent him a card for Almack’s, was the correct one!”
Lady Jersey, cost what it might, would never lower her air of a theatrical tragedy queen.
“You are very young, my dear,” she smiled.
“Own, now,” pleaded Lady Sefton, “that your subsequent suspicions have been baseless, and unworthy.”
“Baseless, now!” exclaimed Lady Jersey. “When the wretched man keeps two of them under one roof? Oh, filthy!”
“Oh, disgustful!” murmured Lady Castlereagh, who was wearing all the diamonds which had caused such envy. “Nevertheless, Sarah, it shows an initiative which is much to be desired.”
“My dear Emily,” declared Lady Jersey, peeling an orange and throwing the peel over the edge into the darkened pit, “I do not hold Lord Darwent guilty or even partially guilty. In fact, the blame was entirely Caroline’s.”
“Caroline’s?” Lady Sefton repeated incredulously.
Then came the interruption.
Out of the darkened pit a man’s voice, almost lunatic in fury, exploded with an effect as shattering as the explosion of a guardsman’s grenade.
“’Oo the ’ell,” it shouted, “throwed orange peel on the top of, me fornicatin’ ’ead?”
Dead silence, except for noises
as though some person or persons had tried to throttle the speaker. It might have been funny, but it was not. No rowdy catcall was hurled back. To box holders, the members of the pit—that buttress of middle-class sedulous apes—seemed momentarily to have lost their senses.
The orchestra, thrown off beat in dim light, slipped again into the smooth iridescent stream of Mozart-and-water. Behind the scenes, old and experienced sceneshifters remembered how few precautions had even been taken here against riot or fire.
“Really,” drawled Lady Jersey in a louder voice, and threw more orange peel over the plush box ledge, “they should be more careful to whom they issue tickets. What was I saying?”
“Caroline!” whispered Lady Castlereagh.
“After all, my dear! When she attempts to cuckold her husband on the very first night they are to be together …”
“When?” asked Lady Castlereagh, amid a rattle of shoulder diamonds. “Where? By whom?”
“Here,” replied Lady Jersey calmly. “And—” she pointed down to a pit box on the ground floor at the left-hand tier, “—and there. Caroline was almost indiscreet. The man was Lord Alvanley.”
“Lord Alvanley!” almost screamed Lady Castlereagh. All three heads had twitched round toward the door at the back of the darkened box. A narrow vertical line of light opened there, and Alvanley’s round good-humored face appeared!
“Your servant,” he said. “Your sole wag-dog keeps guard.”
For none of the three ladies, tonight, was squired by her own husband.
“I have a small difficulty,” smiled Lord Alvanley, intimating it was a very small difficulty. “I shall return at once.”
And the box door closed.
It was less warm and stuffy in this passage behind the boxes. Alvanley could hear above his head the stamp and shuffle of late-comers pressing into their boxes on the fourth tier; above that, there was a small gallery for servants and those Italians who had come to live in the Haymarket to be near their beloved opera.
Alvanley’s smile faded, leaving his face in its usual comic expression, because of a button nose into which he could get hardly any snuff.
“Can’t be done,” Alvanley muttered. And then: “Got to be done.”
Stripping off his white gloves, he slapped them into the palm of his left hand and then stuck them between waistcoat and shirt frill. Almost idly he drew the court sword from its gold scabbard. It was fashioned after the smallsword of the last century: hardly more than an inch wide: no edges but sharp tipped for play with the point: showy, brittle, useless in any hand but that of a master swordsman.
There was a little snick of disgust as Alvanley dropped it back into the sheath. At the same time a booming voice carried along the passage.
“Will?”
Since the curve of the back boxes was a half oval, and the front wall of the King’s Theatre was a straight line, you could hear a person before you could see him. The windows, beside each of which they had fastened a “safety” lamp, threw a dim white light on the dirty floor.
“Will?” the voice called again.
“Ned?” inquired Alvanley, assuming a dapper air and taking out his snuffbox.
The Hon. Edward Firebrace, nephew of Major Sharpe and formerly a cornet in the 10th Hussars, approached with a leisurely step. He wore a purple cloak, ankle-length, with a high black colter fastened at the neck. Though his two brushes of side whiskers were of a lighter sandy color than his uncle’s, his hair at the head-parting was brushed up into a kind of large pomaded spring, coiled along the parting. He was six feet three inches tall, with a reach like the African ape exhibited by M. Saumarez at the Pantheon.
And so he came forward, showing his wide-set teeth in a smile.
“You must have been disguised,” he remarked. “Couldn’t find you at all, until you looked in at Lady Jersey’s box.”
“Oh?” inquired Alvanley, tapping his forefinger on the lid of the snuffbox. “Is there any reason why you should wish to see me?”
“Reason?”
“Yes; reason.”
Though Firebrace tried to keep his suavity, his wide-set teeth showed through.
“This morning, or this afternoon, you carried my uncle’s challenge to Lord Darwent. You agreed to act as my uncle’s second ….”
“Under the code, I had no choice. But I wished it all to the devil.”
“Well? What happened?”
“Lord Darwent very courteously refused, and stated his reasons: one of them being that he must first settle accounts with his greatest enemy. I thought them good reasons, and carried them back to your uncle, who agreed. The challenge has been withdrawn.”
“With …”
From underneath his purple cloak fell several lengths of horsewhip, together with its lash end. The horsewhip handle Firebrace still clutched in his fist under the cloak. They could hear, through thin partitions, the overture rising to its close.
“My uncle grows old,” Firebrace said dryly. “Old men tend to cowardice. So I shall go into the box, Will. I mean to give Darwent a touch of this.” He rattled the whip coils on the floor. “If he suffers it meekly, before the whole opera—well! If he calls me out—well! You have seen my saber-play.”
Suddenly, as the shadows towered behind him, you became aware of Firebrace’s height and his immense length of arm. His saber-play was all slash and viciousness, to beat down an opponent as Firebrace might have beaten him down with a quarterstaff.
“In any case, Will,” he added, “my family honor has its due.”
“Your family honor,” repeated Alvanley, with a curious inflection.
“At cards, Ned,” Alvanley went on, trying to put snuff into his microscopic nose and spilling most of it in spots over his face, “we expect to find only one ace of trumps in the pack …”
The whip colls rattled slightly.
“But when the Colonel of your regiment found two aces of trumps, one on the table and one in your sleeve, he was very easy with you in allowing you to resign your commission. Now if you were to kill Darwent, or even humiliate him badly, High Authority would get you back your commission. Eh?”
Firebrace’s hand made a short, sharp movement.
The little peer, coolly dusting snuff from his cherubic face with a lace handkerchief, did not even appear to notice.
“Be advised by me, Ned,” he suggested. “Don’t touch Darwent. If you won’t agree for a good reason, you may agree for a bad.” Then Alvanley’s tone changed. “Did you look in at the pit tonight?”
Firebrace took a step forward, and stopped.
“The pit? No. Why?”
“It’s full of prize fighters,” said Alvanley, dusting his cravat. “Damme, you talk of disguise. I’ve counted two dozen cropped skulls under more disguises than would fill a shop. Have you forgotten the O.P. riots at Covent Garden?”
“But men like Cribb or Belcher, or even Randall …”
“No; they wouldn’t touch it. Any more than they’d take the managers’ bribes at Covent Garden. But d’ye think I don’t know Broad Henchman, when I backed him for two thou in a mill with the Game Chicken: and he fought a cross at that? Or Dan Sparkler? Or the Nottingham Peach?”
Alvanley’s voice went up a little.
“They’re the scum of the prize ring,” he said. “In about five minutes, if not less, this theater will explode as though they’d dug mines under a fort.”
The warm passage was silent, for an instant, except for the rustling of gowns and the rush of music.
“But what’s the game?” demanded Firebrace. “Nobody’s against the Italians. Stop, though! At the O.P. riots somebody did set up a yell against foreign singers. But that was a pre text.”
“So is this a pretext,” said Alvanley. “To kill Darwent.”
Firebrace’s eyes widened. “To kill …”
“In my opinion, which is only an opinion,” said Alvanley, coolly replacing handkerchief and snuffbox, “he’ll be found dead of a broken neck or spine at the end of the
mill. There was a dead man at Covent Garden, you remember. Who saw what happened? Who could set the blame, in all that confusion? This trick would be worthy of Old Q., if Old Q. weren’t dead and damned. It was arranged—”
“By the person you call his greatest enemy?”
“Yes. A man dressed like a coachman out of the graveyard.” For a moment Alvanley was silent. “Ned, he’s in a trap and he can’t get out. For God’s sake, don’t make it worse!”
Firebrace threw back his purple cloak, so that the wings were behind his shoulders. Slowly he coiled up the horsewhip.
“And does my lord,”—there was a grit of hatred behind Firebrace’s wide-set teeth— “does my lord know he’s in a trap?”
“Yes. I warned him on the staircase tonight. But he merely said …”
“Said what?”
“It was his only opportunity to meet the coachman face to face.”
Firebrace strolled over to a position beside Alvanley, so that they were both facing in the same direction.
“Oh, he may meet the coachman,” smiled Firebrace. “He may meet me as well. Let’s see what happens.”
His arm snapped back and lashed forward, sending the whip full-length down the passage to crack like a small arm as it curled round an iron joist.
“I wonder,” he said, “what Darwent and his dear wife are chattering about now?”
Clang went the last cymbal clash as the overture ended. There was a spattering of applause, which ran through the old wooden shell like rain on a roof.
In box forty-five, Caroline and Darwent were speaking much as they had been speaking five minutes before, when they entered the box. Even at that time their feelings had become dangerously intense.
“Will you look at me?” asked Caroline.
Darwent turned his head.
Caroline wore—deliberately?—the same white satin gown, cut very high at the waist and very low horizontally across the bodice, with the flaming ruby at her breast and the red sash round her waist, which she had worn on the night of the Newgate wedding.
And, now that Darwent turned to look at her, they could not meet each other’s eyes.
The Bride of Newgate Page 19