Cursed in the Act

by Raymond Buckland

  I am not one to move rapidly under normal circumstances, but someone had just tried to kill me. I leapt across to the closest wall and ran along to the ladder rungs set into it. I started climbing, gasping as I went, determined to catch the man. I reached the fly gallery and was halfway across the bridge when I heard a whooshing sound. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a shadowy figure clinging to a rope and descending rapidly to the stage floor below while one of the sandbags went flying upward to counterbalance him. As he reached the ground, he let go of the rope and ran off into the wings. The released rope immediately reversed its direction, and another sandbag hit the stage, this one bursting open and spewing sand in all directions. I started to slowly climb down again.

  Chapter Three

  Mr. Stoker was greatly agitated when he heard of my misadventure.

  “So!” he hissed. “They have the nerve to bring their war into our camp. We can’t let them do that, Harry.”

  “I could have been killed.”

  “Yes, Harry. Yes, of course.” He paused, his brow furrowed. “I’ll tell you what.” I looked at him expectantly. “We’ll forget about you going to Sadler’s in disguise . . . for now, at least. We’ll concentrate our attention here at home. Get up into the fly tower and check all the ropes. Make sure no other ones have been tampered with.”

  “All of them, sir? Couldn’t the flymen . . . ?”

  “Ah yes. Of course, of course. Tell Sam Green to get his men onto it right away. We don’t need any mishaps at this evening’s performance. Oh, and have a word with Bill Thomas. I want to know how a stranger got into the theatre.”

  “Probably happened while we were at the funeral, sir. Bill had to leave his post to go to that.”

  “Yes, well . . . someone should have been there to verify visitors.”

  The evening performance was fast approaching. I hurried off to catch up on my duties as stage manager. There seemed to be a lot that needed my attention. No time to dwell on what may well have been an attempt on my life. How often had I heard the old saw “The show must go on”? It must indeed and would, with or without me.

  In Hamlet a majority of the scenes take place in rooms of the castle or in Polonius’s house. The brief scene that is Act Four, Scene Four is “A Plain in Denmark,” and so, rather than deal with major scene changing, a painted backdrop sheet of said plain is unrolled down in front of the main set and then pulled up again afterward. This sheet rolls down and up like a blind. I had watched while Sam Green unrolled and then re-rolled the sheet, to make sure that it ran smoothly. Little did I realize the part that this backdrop would play in the evening’s performance.

  * * *

  The play was going well. The Guv’nor seemed to have regained most of his stamina and was charming the audience in his customary manner. They were eating out of his hand. Mr. Stoker was, as usual, ensconced in his office juggling paperwork: accounts, schedules, booking requests, front of house matters. While the performance was underway, the stage manager was in charge. I made sure the callboy was not slacking, quieted the chatter of the extras, ensured that props were where they needed to be. Many’s the time I had to institute a frantic search for a dagger or sword that one of the actors had mislaid or I had to locate the wardrobe mistress because one of the ladies had stepped on the hem of her dress and torn it.

  But tonight all seemed to be running smoothly. I stood behind the prompt and watched from the wings. Scene Three finished and I saw Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern gathered opposite me, with Maurice Withers as Fortineras on my side of the stage waiting to go on. The lights were not dimmed for the brief scene change; it was a simple matter for the backdrop to come rolling down and the scene to start. At a cue from me, Sam Green and his men sent the backdrop rolling down. There was a sudden gasp from the audience, followed by a scream from Edwina Price, the prompt. The scream startled me, since Miss Price normally never uttered a word during a performance, unless called upon to prompt.

  “Lights! Douse the lights!” Someone responding faster than me shouted the order, but the lights continued to burn steadily. I saw the reason for the commotion and leapt forward.

  As the scene backdrop unfolded, something that had been rolled up inside it came bouncing out. It was a severed human head!

  * * *

  Detective Sergeant Bellamy examined the point of his pencil to make certain it was sharp. I’m sure he had a lot to write. The pencil was poised over his official notebook. He looked up again for the umpteenth time, his eyes only half open, and he seemed close to falling asleep. His mournful gaze rose to the vast darkness above the stage.

  When Mr. Irving, onstage as Hamlet, had seen the head and realized what it was, he had run forward, kicked it into the orchestra pit, and then carried on as though nothing had happened. Miss Price’s scream went unnoticed and the play had gone on to its conclusion with the usual number of curtain calls. It was not until the audience had cleared the theatre that Mr. Stoker notified the police.

  “Rum do,” observed the sergeant. “Rum do.”

  “Yes.” I had to agree.

  “So this wasn’t a part of the play, we take it?”

  “No,” said Mr. Stoker. “The play is Hamlet. There are no severed heads in it.”

  My mind did go, fleetingly, to the churchyard scene and Hamlet musing over the skull of Yorick. It might, perhaps, have been more appropriate if the severed head had leapt out at that time, I thought.

  “Whose head is it, sir?”

  “Whose head is it?” Stoker echoed, incredulously.

  “Yes. It must belong to someone.”

  “Well, of course it belongs to someone!” I exploded. “How would we know whose it is? I thought that was your job?”

  He made a note in his book then looked at me through rheumy eyes. “No need to get testy, sir,” he said.

  “Testy?” It had been a long day and I was about to show him just how testy I could get when pushed . . . but I sighed and let it go. I was too tired to get into an argument. “You are going to take it with you, are you not?” I asked almost pleadingly.

  “Oh yes. Yes. We’ll remove the object, sir. Have no fear.” Another note in his book. “Tell me, how did it end up in the orchestra pit . . . beside the bass drum, as we understand it?”

  “The Guv . . . Mr. Irving kicked it there.”

  His eyebrows rose a half inch. “Kicked it there? Did he now? Now why would he do a thing like that?”

  “So that the audience wouldn’t get upset!” I said, exasperated.

  “Look, Sergeant, can we not go over all these questions in the morning?” interjected Mr. Stoker. “It is getting late and we have all had a really long day . . .”

  “Oh yes. Yes, sir, of course we can.” More scribbling in his book, which he finally snapped closed. His eyes examined me for a moment, as though he thought I might be holding back some important information. Then he nodded in agreement with himself and turned to look down into the pit, where the head still lay. “Just come around to St. James’s Division before nine of the clock, if you would be so kind, sir, and we’ll finish our report then. Do you have a bag, or something?”

  * * *

  The theatre was closed on Sunday. Not so the police station, so I made my appearance there and filed my report to Sergeant Bellamy’s satisfaction. I was surprised to see him there on the Sabbath, but one of the constables suggested that the good sergeant had no other life.

  “’E’s married to the force,” he said with a grin. “Ain’t never ’ad no wife as I know, and not likely to get one, to my way o’ thinkin’.”

  The good detective sergeant was about fifty years of age, and I surmised from his somewhat ruddy countenance that he was also married to the local tavern. I pondered whether or not that could be classed as bigamy.

  It was a sunny day for February, though with no warmth from the sun. The bone-chilling wind that had blown throug
h London for the past several days had died down to a whisper, and I felt almost exhilarated. I eschewed a cab or an omnibus, turned down Northumberland Avenue, and headed for the Embankment: Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s vision of reclaimed river land. Up until twenty years ago this whole section had been twenty-two acres of mud and filth, with various sewer lines emptying into the river. Now it was a fine promenade fashioned from granite blocks brought by barge from as far away as Cornwall. It had rapidly become a popular venue for all Londoners.

  A number of young couples strolled there beside the river, pausing now and again to stand close to each other and gaze out at the murky waters of the Thames. One or two nursemaids pushed their perambulators, clutching the hand of an older child dressed in his or her Sunday best. A young boy bowled a hoop along the Embankment while another boy enthusiastically whipped at a top to set it spinning. Most, I assumed, were fresh out of church. I was not a churchgoer myself, though I did duck into Christ Church in Marylebone once in a while, to keep on good terms with whoever might be in control “up there.”

  An old woman played a hurdy-gurdy at the corner of Northumberland, and not a dozen paces away a young boy fingered a pennywhistle at a furious speed, its notes clashing with those of the hurdy-gurdy. It was as I was turning away from admiring a slow-moving Thames sailing barge that I saw Ralph Bateman.

  Ralph Bateman was the younger brother of Mrs. Crowe. Mr. Stoker believed that Mrs. Crowe (the Bateman daughter Kate) could be behind the poisoning of the Guv’nor. Her brother, Ralph, was a pasty-faced, overweight young man who had—so I had been led to believe—dropped out of Cambridge and, the last I had heard, journeyed off to the West Indies on the other side of the Atlantic. It seemed he had now returned, and it was indeed a surprise for me to see him here on so fine a morning. However, Ralph had always fancied himself something of a fashionmonger and before his travels used to hang about his mother’s theatre passing his time by criticizing and complaining. His mother, and now his sister, fully indulged him. It was perhaps understandable that he would promenade along the Embankment, as did so many young bucks.

  Right now Ralph Bateman was in deep conversation with a pair of unsavory-looking characters. One of them, a short man, kept his eyes firmly on Bateman’s face, while the other, a tall and well-built dark-skinned man, constantly looked about as if to ensure that they were not being overheard. I didn’t think that Ralph Bateman knew me, at least not by sight, so I casually strolled in their direction, idly wondering what they might be up to.

  “You’ll get your guinea when you’ve completed the job,” Ralph was saying to the shorter of his two companions. “That’s what the boss said; that was the agreement.”

  “That was afore I see’d the ’eight of that stuff! An ’undred feet above the stage, if’n you ask me.”

  “Nonsense. No higher than at Sadler’s, and you know it. I hadn’t realized that you were afraid of heights or I would have hired someone else.”

  “’Ere! I ain’t afeared of nothin’ and no one. I want me money.”

  “When you have completed the job.” Ralph Bateman turned away as though the conversation was at an end. I stood there dumbfounded at what I was hearing and wondered who “the boss” he had mentioned might be. The short man took an impulsive step forward and Ralph swung back to stare at him, raising his cane and prodding him in the chest. “Don’t even think it, Charlie Vickers. Don’t even think it, especially if you want to get any part of your money.”

  The dark-skinned man stepped forward and nodded in my direction. Bateman glanced over his shoulder and then set off at a brisk pace away from the riverside and toward Whitehall Place. The two others hurried after him.

  * * *

  “Charlie Vickers, you say?”

  Stoker peered at me over the gold rims of his reading spectacles. He was working on the accounts, and I felt guilty interrupting him so early on a Monday morning, but I wanted to report on my stroll along the Embankment the previous afternoon.

  “That’s what Ralph Bateman called him, I believe. I wasn’t able to get too close before they took off, but I did hear that much. I don’t know who the third man was, nor ‘the boss’ that Ralph referred to. The third man was a dark-skinned gentleman. Very well dressed. From across the ocean, I presume. I haven’t seen him before.”

  Stoker’s ponderous head nodded slowly up and down, as it was wont to do while he digested my reports. “Could he have been a native of the Caribbean, joined up with Ralph when on his travels? And you think that they are concocting further mischief?” he asked.

  It was my turn to nod. “Bateman said something about not paying Vickers until the job was completed. That’s when he mentioned this ‘boss.’”

  Stoker laid down his pen and sat back in his office chair. “Charlie Vickers is a nasty piece of work, Harry,” he said. “If the price is right, he’ll do anything short of murdering his grandmother . . . and he probably has a price for that.”

  “You know of him, then?”

  “Oh yes.” Again he nodded his head. “A thrasonical scoundrel. One time, just before you came here, I believe it was, he sold counterfeit tickets to all of our best seats for the Guv’nor’s production of Richard III. Caused no end of a problem. Then he was involved in the theft of the leading lady’s jewelry at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre on Charlotte Street. That leading lady, by the way, was our own Miss Ellen Terry, before she came to join Mr. Irving. Charlie Vickers is a small-time sneaksman with no inhibitions.”

  “Well, then there was that puzzling thing,” I added. “Bateman said—and I think I heard him aright—that ‘you’ll get your guinea when you’ve completed the job. That’s what the boss said.’ In other words, it sounds as though someone else is actually in charge, giving the orders, and yet Ralph doesn’t usually pay attention to anyone other than his mother. And she’s no longer with us. He pays no heed to his sister.”

  There was a long silence while Stoker digested that.

  “I must admit, I thought this a little ambitious for Mrs. Crowe’s brother, Ralph. Yes, Harry, it would make sense that there be a smarter mind behind these attacks on the Lyceum. The question is, who could it be?”

  “I’ve alerted Bill Thomas to be especially vigilant,” I said, “and I’ve also paid a crossing sweeper and an itinerant musician to keep an eye open outside and report anything that strikes them as being out of the ordinary.”

  “Good. Good.” He looked back down at the accounts book as though anxious to get back to it. “What news from your Sergeant Bellamy and the head?”

  “Oh! Here’s a surprise. I looked in on St. James’s Division on my way here this morning. That head . . . according to their morgue records, it belongs to our deceased understudy, Peter Richland. The very man we buried a couple of days ago!”

  Stoker did not seem surprised. When Sergeant Bellamy had told me, I had been astounded, but not so my boss. “I rather suspected as much,” he said.

  I gaped at him and then, when nothing else was forthcoming, closed my mouth. Perhaps this wasn’t the time to pursue the matter. I could see that our theatre manager wanted to get back to his work. “What would you like me to do, sir? I’ve got plenty of Lyceum work to get on with but . . .”

  “What plans do you have for after tonight’s performance, Harry?”

  The question took me by surprise.

  “Why, none, really. Back to my rooms and a hot supper, if Mrs. Bell can fulfill her obligations. Why do you ask?”

  He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, then replaced the glasses and again studied me over the rims.

  “Fancy a bit of grave robbing, Harry?”

  Chapter Four

  The moon was full that night. I would rather it had been a new moon or something less than its complete self, so that our actions might not be obvious to anyone who would be passing the cemetery. This was also Saint Valentine’s Day—not that the celebration of love
rs had anything to do with me, a confirmed bachelor. I did, however, wonder what excuse—if any were needed—Bram Stoker had given his wife to explain his absence on such a night.

  Stoker led the way between the tombstones as though he was familiar with the path, his great figure casting a huge shadow on the ground behind him. I had myself forgotten exactly which grave we had stood about, two days earlier, but he seemed not to hesitate as we rounded the rear of the church and he struck off at an angle along the tall brick wall separating the church property from the street. This was all the more surprising since he had not been at the funeral.

  Stoker stopped close to an ancient yew tree, whose branches brushed the wall. “I think it’s here, Harry,” he said, pointing to the far side of the tree.

  He was right. The grave had not yet been sodded down, and loose earth confirmed the recent excavation. There was as yet no memorial stone, but only a wooden marker. In the bright light of the moon I could make out the painted notation: B34R8 PETER RICHLAND 12Feb1881.

  “What is the plan?” I asked.

  “I arranged to have a pair of shovels left here,” said the big man. “Ah! There they are—behind the tree. Now then . . . As you observe, Harry, there is a moon too bright for our enterprise. However . . .” He looked up and scanned the sky. I followed his gaze. “There are plenty of large clouds. We wait until the moon goes behind one of those and then we dig until it comes out again . . . Dig when it is dark and conceal ourselves behind the tree when it is brightest. It is almost midnight, so I doubt there will be many passersby, but it will be best if we are not observed.”