The Muse of Fire

by Carol M. Cram

  “Your mother? What was her name?”

  “I fail to see what my late wife can have to do with you, sir,” Tobias said. “I’ll concede that she once belonged to this obnoxious profession, but that was many years ago. She has paid for her sin.”

  “What sin, Father?” Grace cried. “My mother was innocent.”

  “She was a whore.” Spittle flew from his mouth. “I was a deluded fool when I married her. I saw her onstage, and to my shame, I thought her the most wonderful creature in the world.” Tears glazed his eyes. “Charlotte bewitched me, and I’ve regretted my weakness ever since.”

  “And me, Father? Am I part of your regret?”

  “You! I can’t even say for sure that you are mine. If your mother strayed once, who is to say she did not stray again?”

  “Stop!” Mr. Harrison waved his cane, narrowly missing Tobias’s shins. He turned to Grace. “Your mother was Charlotte? Charlotte Grant?”

  “Yes. She and my aunt both acted at the Theatre Royal in Bath. It was in the early eighties, I believe.”

  “And you, sir, believe that your wife strayed?”

  “More than strayed. She had a child and then abandoned it before marrying me. Wicked—rotten to the core. I’ve been cursed.”

  “I knew your wife, sir.”

  “What?”

  “I knew her well, and I remember when she left the theater to marry you. I tried to dissuade her. Charlotte had so much to offer the stage. She was a true original—not unlike her daughter.” He smiled at Grace. “I cannot think why I never saw the resemblance, my dear. My eyes are not what they were. You have her voice and I believe will surpass her as an actress.” He turned to glare at Tobias. “As for you, sir, a simple recital of the facts should prove to you that your wife—although she had faults, to be sure—was innocent of what you accuse her of.”

  “Please, Mr. Harrison, tell us what you know,” said Grace.

  “I don’t have time to stay here and listen to lies,” sputtered Tobias.

  Grace walked forward to stand directly in front of her father. He stank of unwashed linen and rotting teeth. She couldn’t imagine that he’d once been capable of captivating a woman like Charlotte Grant. Then she remembered her own folly with Mr. Renfrew and knew she could not judge. “You will stay and hear what Mr. Harrison wishes to tell us, Father,” Grace said calmly. She cocked her head toward the door. Ned took the hint and went to stand in front of it, his arms crossed.

  Mr. Harrison lowered himself back into his chair and smiled approvingly at Grace. “Thank you, my dear. Twenty-seven years ago, I had the great good fortune to be engaged by the Theatre Royal in Bath. You may look as affronted as you wish Mr., ah . . .”

  “Johnson,” Grace supplied. Tobias merely scowled.

  “Mr. Johnson. The theater in those days was perhaps not as respectable as it is becoming in our own more enlightened times, but it was also not altogether the den of iniquity it is so often considered. Mrs. Siddons herself got her start just a few years before the time of my story, and you can hardly consider her as anything less than respectable, for all the faults of her late husband.”

  “Get on with it, man,” growled Tobias.

  “Please, sir, I am an actor—or at least I was. I thrive on the dramatic.” Mr. Harrison turned his head so only Grace could see his face, and winked. She could not help smiling, even as her heart flexed and squeezed with dread. What if her aunt had not lied after all?

  “I fell in love with an angel,” Mr. Harrison said. “And to my very great joy, she returned my love. We intended to marry—and would have if not for the interference of her sister.”

  “Augusta,” Tobias said flatly. “No wonder my wife rarely spoke of her.”

  “No, sir,” Mr. Harrison said. “Charlotte—your late wife—had the great misfortune to believe that I preferred her to Augusta. When I could not return her regard, she was, how you say, a woman scorned. To retaliate, she convinced me that Augusta did not love me. She told me that Augusta had left Bath to marry another man. I don’t know what Charlotte said to Augusta to make her go, but I suspect she convinced her of my indifference.” Mr. Harrison sighed. “I never knew that Augusta was with child. Our great Bard writes of intrigues and jealousies that we believe can only happen on the stage, but he merely takes from life. Charlotte—your mother, Grace—it pains me to say, was as treacherous as an Iago. She shortly after left the theater to marry and several years later bore you. She cannot be cleared of wrongdoing, but she is innocent of the sin you charge her with.”

  “Augusta wrote to me,” Tobias said. “Why would she lie?”

  “Augusta is in London?” Mr. Harrison asked. For a few moments, the lines of old age smoothed out, and he was again the handsome leading man, blue eyes flashing. He looked over at Ned, understanding dawning for the first time. Ned stepped forward and clasped the old man’s hands.

  “You are Augusta’s son?” Mr. Harrison asked, his voice choking.

  A shadow of sadness passed across Ned’s face. He stayed very still for a minute and then finally, reluctantly, pulled back his hands. “No, sir,” he said. “I wish I were, if it meant I’d be related to you. Augusta thought I was the child she gave birth to and then abandoned at the Foundling Hospital. I was born there too, but I am not her son.”

  Young Tommy skidded into the room, his eyes wide. “Ma’am? Miz Green? There’s a message just come for you. Real important, like. You got to go home straightaway.”

  Chapter 34

  Look upon thy death.

  Romeo and Juliet (1.1.65)

  “You must prepare yourself, madam,” said the surgeon.

  Percival’s eyes were closed and his breathing rapid. Jagged strokes of crimson marred his fashionably pale cheeks.

  “How?” Grace asked. “He was awake and talking to me when I left this afternoon.”

  The surgeon shook his head. He was a young man with narrow fingers and a tiny red mouth like a blob of sealing wax. Grace did not trust him, but she had no choice. When Percival groaned, Grace took his hand and then almost dropped it.

  “It’s the fever, ma’am. He’s burning up. I suggest cool cloths.”

  Another groan, this time with one word—mumbled over and over. Percival’s head rolled from side to side. “Grace . . . Grace . . . Grace.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. There’s nothing more I can do.”

  “But you must!” It wasn’t right for Percival to die. “Please! Do something.”

  The surgeon rose from the bedside and busied himself with packing his bag. “I don’t even dare bleed him now, ma’am. I’m sorry. The infection is of a putrid sort. I cannot help him.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry!” Grace laid her hand on Percival’s forehead, kept it there despite the terrible heat. “My husband cannot die.”

  “There is one thing you can do, ma’am,” the surgeon said. A wispy black moustache tickled his sealing-wax mouth.

  “What? Tell me!” Grace stumbled forward, knocking the surgeon’s bag from his hand. It landed on the carpet, its contents spilling out. “Tell me!”

  “You can pray, ma’am.” He dropped to his knees and hastily gathered up items from his bag. Then, before Grace could go at him again, he ran from the room.

  She slumped onto the chair next to the bed, all hope drained. This was what the lies had led to. In trying to protect one son from the shame of another, Augusta was soon to lose both.

  Grace had cried many times onstage—wailed even—in an attempt to reach the pigeonholes at the theater.

  But never had she felt as she did now—as if her heart was laid open on a slab of frozen steel.

  * * *

  Grace stayed by her husband’s side for most of the night. When finally Betsy persuaded her to give up her post, a cold dawn was breaking.

  “Go downstairs, ma’am. Tea and food be laid out for you in the breakfast room. I’ll sit with him until you get back. Don’t you worry. He be quieter now.”

  Grace nodd
ed without understanding, but instead of entering the breakfast room, she took her cloak from the peg by the front door and left the house into air pregnant with unshed moisture. She walked with blind purpose toward the river, desperate suddenly to see water, to find solace in its easy, constant movement. She reached a street that ended in black mud beyond which flowed the river at low tide—a wide, brown, swollen mass that bore as much resemblance to her beloved Bristol Channel as Iago to Othello.

  Grace closed her eyes against the pain. The way ahead brimmed with darkness—as frigid as the river sweeping London’s filth to the sea. Why had she turned her back on Percival? Now it was too late.

  If you must marry, Grace, marry for love.

  That’s what her mother had told her to do that last morning of her life, and Grace had ignored her. She’d put her longing for fame above the demands of her heart. Counterfeiting emotion was so much easier than feeling it.

  She picked her way across the mud toward the water, her boots sinking and squelching. The river did not smell fresh and wild like the sea. Even on a day so cold that curls of ice crested the black mud, the river stank of rancid flesh.

  What if she kept walking? Was the current fast enough to carry her away? Would it pull her under before she had a chance to cry out, the cold killing her as swiftly as the choking water? Grace stepped forward, welcoming the numbness of frozen toes inside her thin leather boots. Black water lapped over her toes. It would be quick. Why play Ophelia when she could be Ophelia? With hair unpinned and eyes fixed on phantoms, Grace could join Percival. Perhaps in the next life, they’d have another chance. And even if that was not possible, she’d go to a place where nothing was required of her, where through death she’d become an object of pity for a few weeks and then forgotten. She’d have no need to forgive herself or anyone else then, no need to feel anything. And who would blame her? Into the wind, Grace recited lines drawn out from Macbeth when he was at the limit of his endurance and his sin:

  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.”

  Another step and the bottom of her skirt grew heavy. It would drag her under quickly, that and her thick woolen cloak. In the middle of the river, a dozen men, faces raw with wind and effort, rowed a large boat upstream. Her hand strayed to her belly. Could she love a child born of humiliation? Evil ran like dirty water in her father’s veins. Was Grace also evil? Had the sins of her father, her mother, her aunt, stolen all chance of love?

  She wanted out.

  A wave splashed toward her. She stood very still and waited for another wave. Soon she’d no longer feel anything. Soon, she’d welcome darkness.

  “To take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.”

  What arms could she bear against her own sea of troubles? She could not save Percival or erase the memory of Renfrew’s hands on her body or ignore her own mother’s treachery and her father’s hate. Nothing. No one. She had nothing to offer and no desire left to give.

  A freezing patter of drops—sharp as cut glass—blew into her face. Without thinking, she gasped and jumped back. Foul water stung her eyes. She blinked rapidly. The water swirled over her boots as her heels sunk deeper into the mud, sticking there. Panic gripped her. With a cry, she tried turning around, but the mud held her fast. She pulled first one leg and then the other, heard finally the suck of mud releasing her. She staggered away from the river’s edge, slipping across stone and debris, terrified by what she’d almost done.

  “Oy! Miss! You best take care. The wind’s come up and the tide’s turning. It ain’t safe here.”

  A boy smeared head to toe in black mud ran toward her. A bag slung over one skeletal shoulder bumped against his hip. His eyes—green as spring buds—were the only wholesome thing about him. Grace had heard of his kind. Called mudlarks, they were the lowest of the low. The whimsy of the name contrasted sharply with the reality of a young life coated in river slime, with little to eat and no future.

  “Follow me, miss. I’ll get you to the bank. You shouldn’t be out here. The river’s no place for a lady.”

  Her heart still pounding, Grace followed the boy across the mud to a set of wooden steps leading back up to the road.

  He turned and held out his palm to show her a disk, a medal or a coin of some sort. In the fast-fading light, the profile of a man was just visible.

  “See here, miss! I just found it. It’s yours for a penny.”

  “May I look?”

  The boy edged toward her, ready at a moment to run if she tried to take his treasure from him without paying. He held it up between two filthy fingers, flashing first the side showing the head of a man wearing a jester’s cap. Grace leaned forward to peer at the words stamped in an arc above the head.

  The boy drew back, alarmed.

  “I won’t take it from you,” she said, “but please, let me look. I promise I’ll pay for it.”

  The boy clearly didn’t know whether to believe her, but he held the coin steady. In the dim light, Grace read the inscription.

  OH MY HEAD AITCHES.

  Grace stared at the medal for several seconds and then began to laugh, the sound harsh in the cold air. The head was a caricature of Mr. Kemble, and the inscription referred to his affected way of saying aches. The boy closed his fist over the coin and backed away.

  “Please, miss, I don’t want no trouble. I ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong bein’ here. Why are you laughin’?”

  The wind gusted across the stinking mud as Grace’s laughter faded to a shiver. “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

  “I ain’t frightened. I’ll take a ha’penny if you got it.”

  Grace pulled a small gold watch from a pocket sewn into her cloak. Her stiff fingers brushed across the inscription.

  MY DEAR CHARLOTTE

  GOD’S WILL BE DONE

  TOBIAS

  Grace’s mother had always disliked the watch—had refused to wear it when her husband was away from home. She said it was too heavy for a lady, but Grace suspected that the inscription distressed her. Grace held the golden disk in her outstretched palm. The child’s eyes widened. He’d probably never seen such a treasure in his short, brutal life.

  “Will this be enough for you to give me the medal?” Grace asked.

  “They’ll think I stole it.”

  “But you didn’t. Take it. I’m sure you’ll find someone to give you money for it. Or keep it to remember the strange woman you met by the river.”

  The child snatched the watch, dropped the OP medal into the mud, and dashed back along the embankment. Grace hoped he’d eat a hot meal that night, although she doubted he’d see any benefit from his sudden windfall.

  She stooped to pick up the medal and wiped it against her skirt to clean it. Straightening her spine against the biting cold, she picked up her sodden skirts and mounted the steps to the road.

  Grace would face the worst and find her own way forward. She’d not be the first woman to do so.

  Chapter 35

  How long a time lies in one little word!

  Richard II (1.3.213)

  A hundred times on his walk from Covent Garden to Grosvenor Square, Ned resolved to turn back. What did he hope to gain by meeting her? Nothing good could come of it. He found the house and walked along the side to the kitchen, half hoping that she was out. He rapped at the back door with the bare knuckles of one hand.

  “We’re not havin’ any!” a young woman said as she opened the door. “Get on with you.”

  Just in time, Ned got his foot in the door. “I want to speak with your mistress.”

  “What for? She ain’t going to talk with someone like you.”

  “Tell your mistress that Ned’s here,” he said. “She’ll know.”

  “I won’t. Mistress will have me skinned alive if I let y
ou in.”

  “Aw, come now. Do I look like I’d hurt a fly?”

  “You’re a lot bigger than me, so yes. And how do I know you’re not a thief?”

  “Do I look like a thief?” Ned flashed his widest smile, what Alec called his charming smile, the one that made him look like a cat that just ate cream.

  “Guess not. You look a bit too prosperous. I take it you’re employed.”

  “I work at the theater. Covent Garden.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “You’re not an actor, are you? I ain’t never met one of them.”

  Ned laughed. “They wouldn’t be letting me onto the stage. No, I take care of things behind the scenes. But I’ve been known to talk to the actors. And the actresses too.” He winked at her.

  “Are they wonderful?”

  “Some of ’em. Have you ever been to the theater? I don’t mean the circus or a revue. I mean the real theater.”

  “’Course I never been to no Covent Garden, nor Drury Lane neither. Do I look like a lady?”

  “You’re as good-looking as any of the ladies I see going into the theater.”

  “Go on with you.”

  “How about I arrange for you to watch a play from backstage, meet the actors and actresses?”

  “You can do that?”

  “Name the day. I’ll even come fetch you and take you home.”

  “And how would your wife like that?”

  “I don’t got a wife.” Ned grinned. “But if I did, I’m sure she’d trust me—even with a pretty girl such as yourself.”

  “You’ve got a tongue on you, and that’s no mistake.” She stepped aside and opened the door wide. “I think you’d best go in unannounced.”

  “That might be better,” Ned agreed. “And what’s your name?”

  “Hannah.” She flashed him a smile. “Mistress is in the sitting room.”

  Ned followed Hannah along a dark corridor to a narrow vestibule at the front of the house. To his right, an open door led to a brightly lit room, the warmth of it spilling into the drafty hall. He wondered at the stinginess of a woman who kept a fire blazing for her own comfort and kept her maid shivering.