Old prices!
No private boxes!
No pigeon holes!
No Kemble!
Grace imagined herself floating high above a battlefield, untouched by the fray. If only Mr. Renfrew stood over her and not Mr. Charles Kemble. The lace from Kemble’s sleeve brushed across her nose, tickling it so she needed every ounce of willpower to hold in a sneeze. Mr. Renfrew would never be so clumsy.
While she waited for Charles Kemble to take the poison and die, she wondered if she’d been too hasty in condemning Mr. Renfrew. He’d been understandably upset at having his watch stolen. People said things in anger; even the best of men swore on occasion. Just look at her father.
The chants rose and fell, the voices sometimes in unison, more often not. In a few moments, Mr. Charles Kemble would kiss her and utter his last line—Thus with a kiss I die. He’d then collapse artfully against her bier. His kiss was her signal to wait a few beats and then wake up. In the interests of economy, Mr. John Kemble had cut out the scene with the Friar that bridged the death of Romeo with the death of Juliet.
Charles Kemble’s lips grazed her cheek. She wrinkled her nose against the stench of stale wine, trusting that his body shielded her face from the audience. The bier shuddered as he slumped against it. She counted to three and opened her eyes.
A mighty roar shook the theater to its rafters.
“Dead! Dead! Kemble is dead!”
Grace shut her eyes and increased the count to ten, twenty, thirty. The ugliness of the crowd paralyzed her. After over two months of almost nightly riots, the counterfeit death of a Kemble—any Kemble—was inflaming the audience to fever pitch.
Charles banged his fist discreetly against the bier. Grace felt as if a lead weight was pressing against her, grinding her into the unpadded slab of wood painted to imitate marble. Through half-closed eyes, she peered up at the ceiling above the stage—a mass of ropes and pulleys that supported the grand spectacles. The New Theatre really was huge. From the galleries, Grace would look like a child in her flowing yellow gown. Her facial expressions as she played out the last minutes of an ill-fated life were invisible to three-quarters of the audience. She might as well be acting to a flock of high-flying birds. A crushing sadness overwhelmed her—for Juliet, for the theater, for Mr. Renfrew, and especially for herself. Tears burned and fell. What did it matter if no one saw them or cared if they did?
With one swift movement, she sat up, gazed around with mock surprise, and then down at Charles’s dead body splayed across the floor. As she’d rehearsed, she flung her arms wide and howled—the sound lost to everyone but herself. She leaned down, plucked the wooden dagger from Charles’s belt, and held it high above her head. She’d not drop it this time.
The noise stopped as if smothered by a giant hand. Thousands of eyes watched Grace, the horns and whistles and rattles still. What was her line? She knew it like she knew how to breathe. But she held the line in, held the dagger steady so it pointed directly at her satin bodice. Her loosely dressed fair hair cascaded over her back in waves that blended with the satin so that from a distance her entire figure appeared dipped in sunshine. She exhaled shallowly into the hush. The gold paint on the dagger glinted in the candlelight as she raised it higher into the air. Finally, she threw her line out across the wide auditorium.
“Oh, happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die!”
With all her strength, she plunged the dagger toward her heart, veering at the last moment to hide the point under her arm. A long, low moan started from her belly and grew to fill the theater. She swung around to face the audience—a blur of faces and black hats, of hands holding aloft noisemakers and rattles for once silent. She let her body go limp and slumped with slow elegance onto the bier. Just as her head touched the painted pillow, she let her right arm drop as if relieved of every muscle and bone. Her motionless fingers grazed the top of Kemble’s head. She let out one long, last sigh, closed her eyes, and waited.
For several more seconds, silence pulsed into the ears of every man and woman in the theater. She began to count. One, two, three . . .
At eight seconds, the theater erupted. After weeks of boos and hisses and rattles, the noise that spread to every corner of the massive theater was the one most welcome to any actor.
Applause.
* * *
The ovation lasted for only a few minutes before the yells and jeers resumed, but in those few minutes, Grace’s spirits soared. Finally, she was free to be who she wanted to be. Nothing else mattered—not Percival, nor Mr. Renfrew, nor even the memory of her mother’s body crushed into the cliff-top mud. She was Juliet, and the crowd loved her.
“Wonderful performance!” Mr. Renfrew met her in the corridor outside the women’s dressing room at the end of the evening and walked with her to the stage door. “Magnificent.” He leaned closer and whispered. “Forgive me?”
“You were provoked.”
“That was no excuse to distress you. I would not have you angry with me.” Mr. Renfrew’s eyes were still outlined in black from his turn on the stage in the afterpiece—a musical farce called The Poor Soldier.
“I am not angry.”
He moved closer. “Then perhaps we may go walking again one day?”
The stage door opened to let out several actors on their way to the tavern. Bits of debris swirled in—ticket stubs and crumpled playbills and cigar butts. Grace wrapped her cloak more firmly around herself.
“Grace!”
“Damn the fellow!” Mr. Renfrew said under his breath. Ned crowded into the small room. His collar was unbuttoned and his neck cloth untied, the wound on his forehead glowing pink with new skin. He sagged with exhaustion. The flash of silver at his throat, which Grace had first seen that morning in Ned’s room, again caught her eye.
“If you please, Miss Green, Mr. Kemble’s asked me to see you home.”
“That is not necessary, Ned. My husband always sends a carriage to fetch me.”
“Carriages can’t get through.” Ned was panting slightly. The thin cord circling his neck was threaded through a round disk—the flash of silver. She smiled to herself, remembering how she’d spent three nights sleeping in a bed not three feet from Ned. Except for the one time she saw his naked back, Ned had always been fully dressed in front of her, shirt buttoned and brown neck cloth wrapped neatly around his throat.
“The streets ain’t safe. A crowd’s planning to head toward Mr. Kemble’s house in Bloomsbury.”
“What for?”
“To cause more mischief. Two nights ago, over a hundred of them marched to his house and threw mud, coins, even rubbish. They broke windows and terrified poor Mrs. Kemble half to death.”
“I can see Miss Green home,” Mr. Renfrew said. “She will be safe with me.”
“No, sir. Mr. Kemble’s asked me. Thank you, sir.” Ned took Grace’s arm, blocking Mr. Renfrew with his broad back. “Please, Grace, we got to get going.”
Grace glanced back at Mr. Renfrew and shrugged as she let Ned take her arm. To insist on having Mr. Renfrew see her home would not be wise. She turned to say goodbye to him, but he was already stalking back along the corridor, the red cloak of his soldier’s costume flapping when he rounded the corner to the men’s dressing room.
“It’s uglier than usual tonight,” Ned said as he led Grace out to the street. Several groups of young men pelted past them, laughing and shouting. Ned steered her around a pile of horse droppings. “Mind the dirt.”
“Mr. Kemble must regret hiring the strong arms,” Grace said. “Have they finally been sent off?”
Ned flashed a grin. “Long since, Grace, although Mr. K.’s not one to admit he was wrong to have hired them in the first place.”
“I think we already knew that.” They shared a laugh and then settled into a comfortable silence, their footsteps muffled by the filth of the street. They walked the length of Bow Street and then turned into Long Acre on their way to Bedford Square.
“T
hat object you wear around your neck,” Grace said, “It looks like silver.”
“Ain’t nothing special. Just a bauble.” His large hand closed around the disk as he pulled it from his shirt. The silver flared in the light of a torch fixed to a passing coach.
Grace stopped walking and reached up to gently pry the disk from his fingers. She rubbed the serrated edge, felt the two small holes. It couldn’t be. And yet she felt certain the button was the mate to the one in her mother’s old jewelry box.
Chapter 25
’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
Hamlet (5.2.60–62)
Olympia sparkled as Constance in the farce Animal Magnetism by the indomitable Elizabeth Inchbald. Ned noticed a sharp drop in the noise level from the rioters every time Olympia Adams stepped onstage—and who could blame them? She played her part with such spirit. Her small, neat body appeared to float above the polished boards. He had no illusions about his chances with Olympia. She might not have gotten married, like she said she was going to, but that didn’t mean she’d look twice at him. He wasn’t a toff—not the kind of man she deserved.
It was Saturday night—the busiest night of the week for the rioters. The pit and boxes overflowed with noisy young men, many jingling pockets full of the new medals struck in honor of the riots. The chiseled shape of a head meant to represent Kemble appeared on one side of the medal, with the letters OP on the other. Above the head were etched the words OH MY HEAD AITCHES. Ned couldn’t believe the lengths the rioters were going to make their point. Someone had paid good money to have the medal struck and copies made—a criminal waste in Ned’s opinion.
Grace came to stand next to him in the wings. She’d finished her turn in the chorus of the comic opera Love in a Village, which opened the evening.
“She’s wonderful,” Grace said, nodding toward the stage where Olympia was delivering her lines.
“Aye, that she is.”
“You know that she’s left the general’s house? I hear she’s trying to support her mother on what she makes at the theater.”
“I’m glad to hear it. He’s a right old bugger.” He grinned. “Beggin’ your pardon and all, Grace.
Grace laughed. “I’m not so innocent anymore,” she said. “That button—the one you wear around your neck? How did you come by it?”
“Why do you want to know?” Ned turned from watching Olympia and motioned for Grace to follow him away from the stage.
“I have the same kind of button. It belonged to my mother.”
He fished the button out of his shirt and held it in his palm. The memory of how he got it was never far from his mind, although it wouldn’t ever do to tell Grace. Or anyone. “I don’t think it can be, Grace.”
“May I borrow it? Just for a few days?”
“Why?” He couldn’t imagine what harm it would do, but the request was strange, even coming from Grace.
“I want to see if it’s the same as my mother’s.”
“Your mother? What do you mean?” Surely Grace didn’t think . . .
“I, well.” Grace blushed.
“Take it if you like, Grace,” he said, pulled the cord over his head and thrusting the button at her before he could change his mind. “But it won’t make no difference.”
He remembered a night many years before—hot and sticky it had been, not like the November chill that honed the air outside the theater tonight. He’d left his bed to wander the halls of the Foundling Hospital, drawn by the sound of a woman’s cries in the darkness. He smelled the blood before he saw it—a black pool that coated the scrubbed floor like liquid coal.
The woman left a few days later, but the child—a girl so small that six-year-old Ned could have cupped it in his hands—only lived long enough to be christened.
“I got to get on, Grace,” Ned said. “The scene’s about to change.”
He escaped back into the wings in time to see Olympia skip off the stage, her cheeks flushed.
* * *
Grace wasn’t sure if she was relieved or dismayed to find Percival waiting in the vestibule for her when she arrived home. He was still wearing his cloak.
“I did not hear a carriage,” he said.
“The carriages could not get through the crowds. Ned walked me home again.”
“Good of him. Is he still out there? I’ll give him a shilling.”
“No, Percival. He’d be insulted.” Ned’s silver button felt as heavy as a piece of lead shot in her hand. She should wait for the morning to talk to Percival, but that would be the coward’s way out.
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
“Would you come into the sitting room with me, Percival? I have something I wish to tell you.”
“Of course, my dear.” He helped her out of her cloak, then paused a moment to hold her shoulders. His warm breath on her neck was soothing. She bit back a sigh and broke away from him, just glimpsing a flicker of hurt on his face as he took a lit candle from its wall holder. A blast of damp air swirled around her legs. She and Percival so rarely used the sitting room now that she spent six evenings out of seven at the theater.
“I can wake Betsy to see to the fire if you’re cold.”
“Thank you, Percival, but it’s not necessary to disturb her. I am quite warm.” Grace sat on the edge of the sofa, her back ramrod straight to stave off shivering from the cold—and nerves. Perhaps she shouldn’t tell him. Percival would hardly rejoice at even the possibility he may be related to someone of Ned’s class.
Percival used the candle to light several more around the room and then lowered himself into a hard chair opposite her. Black leather shoes gleamed in the soft light. He crossed one leg over the other and then clasped both hands to the side of one knee where the white stocking met the cuff of his silk breeches.
“What is so pressing that you must keep us from our beds?” he asked.
Grace held out the button still threaded on a cord burnished black with dirt.
“This button belongs to Ned,” she began. And then, with halting words and many pauses, she described her suspicion. When she finished, Percival sat in silence for several minutes, his expression impassive as he stared at the fire. She knew that what she’d told him was shocking, unbelievable perhaps. But she needed him to want the truth as much as she did.
“So you are telling me that, because of a button, you think this Ned fellow is your brother?” Percival made the word sound obscene.
“Half brother. And I said I wasn’t sure.”
“We must talk to my mother.”
“Your mother?”
He sighed with exaggerated patience. “Your own mother is dead, and Ned can’t be expected to know about his origins. Your assertion that a silver button leads to a relationship with your mother and by extension you is no more than surmise.” He held up his hand to forestall Grace. “Hear me out, my dear. I understand that you are feeling somewhat emotional at this suspicion about Ned’s parentage, but believe me when I assure you that it cannot be true.”
“I don’t know why you think that. I was never told about my mother’s life before she married my father. You remember how surprised I was to find her stage jewelry. If she was indeed an actress, then she may well have gotten herself in trouble.”
“Are you suggesting that because your poor mother was once associated with the theater that she had loose morals?”
“No, Percival. But I am not so innocent that I don’t know what can happen to a young woman who strays.”
“Your father would not have married her if she’d borne an illegitimate child.” Percival sat back, his expression smug.
“My father likely knew nothing about it.” Grace stopped as she remembered her father’s voice raised in anger the night before her mother’s death. Was that the reason—so many years later? “I brought my mother’s jewelry box with me to London. It
contains a button that is identical to the one Ned wears around his neck. Mrs. Gale told me it was one of a pair that came from my mother’s Juliet costume and that my mother had always prized its uniqueness.”
“Coincidence.”
“Normally I would agree with you, Percival, but please hear me out as to why I believe the two buttons are related.” Grace took a deep breath. “A few weeks ago, Ned and I got to talking backstage while I waited for my cue. He told me that he’d been born at the Foundling Hospital. I know that the wretched mothers who gave their babies away after giving birth at the hospital often affixed a token of some sort to their child’s blanket—brooches, thimbles, charms, that sort of thing. The button must be the token that Ned’s mother—my mother—left for him.”
“How can you know this?”
“One of the actresses at the theater told me about the tokens.”
“Thereby proving my point about the moral quality of the people you work with.”
“Let us not quarrel. We have an agreement.”
Percival rose to his feet and nodded down at Grace. “I will inform my mother that we wish to speak with her. If your mother bore a child, my mother must have known about it. Ned is likely hoping that fabricating a connection with you will help him get on in the world. He is sadly mistaken.”
“Ned is a good man, Percival. I doubt he has any idea of the connection. How could he?”
“Alleged connection, my dear. His kind’s always looking to take advantage of their betters. We must sort this out as soon as possible. I presume next Sunday will be convenient?”
“Yes, of course.”
He stood and indicated the door. “Goodnight, my dear.” He extinguished the candles and stood aside to let her pass. She did not look at him as together they mounted the stairs to their separate beds.
* * *
Augusta received Percival’s description of Ned with perfect composure, the slight sneer on her lips barely fading, even when she regarded the two identical buttons he set before her.
The Muse of Fire Page 23