Absolute Honour (12 page)

Some plays might be. This one was not, Jack thought, after a bare few scenes. He had never seen
Henry IV Part I
before but he did not think it the greatest of Shakespeare’s works, alternating uneasily between the blown rhetoric of the
court and the farce of the tavern. The playing, too, was highly variable. Perhaps he was spoiled by Drury Lane and Covent
Garden where his mother had taken him regularly, but the innovations of Garrick in the style of acting, where declamation
had given way to a more intimate, natural manner, seemed not yet to have reached the Provinces. The younger performers were
the worst. They essentially faced front and shouted. It was all noise. Only a couple of the more experienced players engaged.
Falstaff had a generous stomach to suit the knight and a way with his words both amusing and melancholy; while in the small
part of Mistress Quickly, one Miss Scudder gave a fine impersonation of a bustling, drunk and forward landlady. Jack could
almost have sworn that Mrs Hardcastle had followed him from Bristol.

Or perhaps he was too distracted to enjoy any play. Red Hugh’s obvious reluctance to talk of his cousin, and then just to
mock her reading tastes, had intrigued Jack further. He found that if his companion’s eyes were fixed upon the stage, his
own kept shifting to the box she was meant to occupy.

Trumpets blared, Hotspur shouted and Jack squirmed. The bench was damnably uncomfortable! This, no doubt, was another source
of his discontent. He was used to the best view in the house, in the pit, with a hired cushion to soothe his arse. The pain
only grew as the play proceeded, so when the fiddle, fife and French horn that composed the playhouse orchestra signalled
the end of Act Three, he rose quickly.
‘Coming, Hugh?’ A stretch and an ale were what he sought during this middle, long interval. The pantomimes and country dances
that would fill the gap he could do without.

‘Nay, lad, you carry on. I’ll just sit here and linger with the Bard’s words.’ Shaking his head – the man’s eyes were actually
full of tears! – Jack began to squeeze past legs. The stairs led down via the side of the pit and took far longer than it
should have, largely due to the two huge men who stood either side of the staircase, forcing people to pass between them in
single file while they stared rudely into each face. Jack returned glare for glare as he pushed through. By the time he reached
the pit, the crowd was thick before the vendors of nuts, fruit and juices, blocking progress to the street and the adjacent
tavern. Frustrated, Jack waited while a mob cleared before him, glancing up to the stage where some of the players had returned
to give the entr’acte – in this case an episode from mythology with a maiden Cupid in a toga. He was immediately held, less
by the fine legs displayed under Cupid’s miniscule dress, than by her face. For he knew it.

‘Fanny Harper!’ he whispered. ‘By God, Fanny!’

Immediately, and to the disapproval of those behind him, he began to push the other way. The usher was distracted by a drunk
and Jack managed to slip unnoticed beneath the rope that was meant to keep the gallery’s peasants from the pit. Beyond it,
the crowd was thinner. Jack made for the stairs that led up beside the forestage. By the time he reached them, Cupid had shot
love’s arrow and was already exiting.

‘Fanny! Fanny!’

Her kohl-lined eyes looked blankly at him then suddenly widened in shock.

‘Jack? I don’t believe … Jack Absolute?’

She’d halted and another actor bumped into her. ‘Jesus, Fanny, move yer fat arse.’ He darted round her, as she tapped the
usher on the shoulder, pointed at Jack and said, ‘Let him
up.’ Then, with a quick and still amazed glance back, she disappeared stage right.

Jack found her in a canvas-enclosed space in the wings. Two other actresses shared the cramped area, each engaged, as Fanny
was, in changing costume.

‘Eh, Lobster Back,’ snapped one of them, ‘you’re not allowed in ’ere.’

‘Leave ’im be,’ the younger one cooed. ‘ ’E’s my admirer, aintcha, love?’

‘Mine, actually,’ said Fanny. ‘And aren’t you ladies on?’

Sticks were being thumped on stage, whistles blown. The two pushed past him, the older one grumpily, the younger with a wink
and blown kiss. Through a gap in the curtains, he glimpsed them joining the others on stage. A wild chase began.

He turned back. ‘Fanny, what … what are you doing here?’

‘Playing, obviously. I returned to my trade. No, was forced to return to my trade. You may remember why.’

The words were spoken with a degree of frost that made Jack flush. He also looked away, for Fanny had pulled Cupid’s short
toga over her head. She had nothing on beneath, recalling for Jack the last time he’d seen her, before he left for Canada.
She’d been similarly unclad, shamed in the middle of the Pleasure Gardens’ Rotunda by Lord Melbury.

‘Why turn away, Jack? You have seen my charms before.’

The anger was still there. Justified, Jack knew. Her disgrace had been largely his fault. ‘Fanny, I am so sorry. I—’

‘Too late for that.’ He looked again, as she dropped a shift over her head.

‘Is it so bad? All this?’

‘It is not my house in Golden Square, my servants, my little luxuries. It is the life of a player and I thought I’d left
that behind.’ Reaching behind him for a brush, she began to stroke it through her long, brown hair.

He watched her, embarrassed. ‘Look, you are busy. Can we meet later, tomorrow perhaps?’

She flicked her hair to the other side, ran the brush through it vigorously. ‘I don’t think so. Harper wouldn’t like it.’

‘Harper?’

‘My former husband. He took me back, got me into this company. But he won’t marry me again. So I play under my maiden name
of Scudder.’ The brush was thrown down, pins picked up, the hair gathered. With her hand folding it on top of her head, she
looked at him properly for the first time. ‘My,’ she said softly after a long moment, ‘but haven’t you changed?’

‘I’ve had a fever.’

‘It’s not that. You’re thinner, yes, but there’s more.’ She stepped closer. ‘Yes,’ she said softly, ‘I see what it is. You’ve
become a man, Jack Absolute.’

He turned away, uncomfortable under that appraising gaze. ‘I’ve … I’ve had some experiences.’

She stepped away. ‘Haven’t we all, dear?’ She began to put up her hair. With pins in the mouth she mumbled, ‘Though I am most
surprised by the clothes, Jack. You were always such a peacock. And I’d heard you’d enlisted in the Queen’s, not some troop
of the Cumberland yeomanry.’

‘This?’ Jack tried to smooth down a crease. Embarrassment made him seek an excuse. ‘This is more in the nature of,’ he looked
about him for inspiration, ‘a costume.’

‘Well, then, you will certainly be at home in Bath.’ Hair up, she took his arm, pulled aside a curtain to reveal the crowd
milling in the pit. ‘The town is a giant theatre, Jack, and everyone here is a player. We are merely the professional ones,
and not necessarily the best, either. For all here is
artifice, a glittering façade. And beneath that glitter, Bath hides every human frailty, all its vices.’

Jack glanced up, to the gallery. Red Hugh, dressed in purple, should have stood clear among all the brown and grey up there.
But strangely, all Jack saw were the two huge men who’d blocked his progress down the stairs, and who now seemed to be searching
for something.

Fanny’s words drew him back. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘and here one of our newest players makes her entrance. In Bath but two days
and regard the legion of her admirers.’

Jack looked where Fanny did. Indeed, it was hard to look anywhere else. For a body of men were pushing down the pit’s side
aisle, moving forward while simultaneously looking back. Many stumbled but the progress was not halted. What was driving it
was clear. Or rather whom.

She moved slowly, steadily, not so much walking as gliding, so that her hooped dress appeared to float before her, rolling
her admirers on like jetsam before a tide. The theatre was not large and Jack’s eyes were good. Yet he felt like rubbing them,
because they had to be deceiving him. He could not believe that anyone – anything – on the whole planet could be so beautiful.

Of what did beauty consist? A fortunate combination of eye, nose and lip? These could be altered, with colour and shading,
yet he knew the face he beheld betrayed the merest breath of paint. Was beauty in that sweep of an eyebrow, the fall of curl
upon the forehead, the magenta-redness of both a contrast to the churned cream of the skin? Or did beauty rest finally in
the eyes themselves that, even at a distance, fast diminishing due to her approach and the intensity of his regard, seemed
to be all the greens of the world? Her beauty was all these things and more that he could not comprehend, swept into a whole
that had him actually gasping as he looked. In that instant, all thoughts of McClune and his
bookish cousin were swept away. For he had seen the lady he would pursue in Bath.

‘What … what is her name?’

‘Laetitia Fitzpatrick.’

Jack gasped again. He had dismissed her the moment before and now he had to take her up again. How easy that was!

Fanny continued, ‘Niece of the Earl of Clare, it is reported, which seems unfair for it makes her rich as well as … well,
as you see.’ She snorted. ‘Perhaps not so unfair. For even this beauty will fade while her gold will ever glister. They say
she’s come to Bath to marry and is destined for nothing less than a duke.’ She had finished dressing; now she reached forward
and turned to Jack. ‘God spare me, not another recruit!’

He could not reply. Could not talk about new love before an old, even if he’d been able to find words. Instead he looked at
her, at her transformation, for her legs were now swathed in a bulky skirt, her bosom lost within the folds of a dull grey
blouse. There was an Abigail’s cap on her head. ‘You are Mistress Quickly,’ he said.

‘I am. And I am soon on again. The play begins anew. So … shoo!’ She took his arm, began leading him towards the stage, where
the interval pantomime was just concluding.

‘You are the best thing in the piece.’

‘I know.’ she said. ‘Me and Harper.’ She gestured to the wings opposite where Falstaff was mustering his girth. Halting, she
then pursed her lips and whistled. A boy occupying the end of one of the onstage benches looked up. She beckoned him over
and reluctantly he ceded his perch. ‘There, you goose,’ she shoved Jack toward the vacant seat. ‘Now you can sit and gaze
upon your love.’

‘Fanny, I—’

‘Tut! ’Tis all done, Jack. In the past. And yet,’ a little smile came, ‘perhaps you can look at this as my revenge upon you.’

‘How so?’ He paused, looked back, just as the orchestra struck up and the audience scrambled for their seats.

‘Remember what I told you of Bath. Of what lies beneath. For I have met the fair Lady of Clare. Only for a moment, but I could
see that she too has her secret. And it is something dark.’

On that word she was gone. Jack forced his way onto the bench. He looked into the box. Her face was in profile, for she had
turned to talk to the older woman – her aunt, no doubt – who had accompanied her progress through the theatre.

A dark secret, Jack thought as the actors returned to the stage. How much would I give to find it out?

After the play had ended it was hard to note anyone in the frenzy of Orchard Street. The majority of the audience showed no
desire to be swiftly away on this warm, still bright June evening. Indeed, Fanny’s words on the nature of Bath as its own
theatre were proven as its occupants strutted and fretted before the playhouse doors. All conversations were carried on in
tones designed to carry to the Upper Town, and all had to shout to be heard above the braying of French horns. Bath seemed
full of them, both day or night, and they were usually sported by Negro musicians whose skills varied enormously. Chairs stood
everywhere, their chairmen either in fine livery, awaiting their masters, or in drabber clothes, seeking fares. When one was
filled, the men, clutching the poles, would bellow for their way to be cleared, words generally having slight effect unless
accompanied by a pole end up the arse. Jack gained a slight elevation on a doorstep opposite the theatre entrance to wait
for Red Hugh – and his cousin – to appear.

The door behind him creaked open. He was about to vacate his vantage point when there was a hiss. ‘Don’t move, Jack. And don’t
turn around.’

He obeyed, froze. ‘Hugh?’ he whispered.

‘Aye.’

‘What do you—’

‘Shh!’ The caution was harsh and brought a pause. ‘Do you see two men? Large brutes, looking for something? Someone?’

Jack had again met the two he’d encountered on the stairs when he’d left the theatre, once more slowing progress with their
bulk. ‘Yes, they’re inside. Who are they?’

A sigh came. ‘Creditors; or their lackeys anyway. That business deal I was telling you of in Bristol? To effect it I had to
raise certain sums and gave a guarantor who was ficticious. I did not think they would find out but it appears to the contrary.
These men have been sent to take back what I no longer possess.’

‘Oh, Hugh!’

‘Yes, lad, it is unfortunate; especially as it seems we will not be sharing that fine house after all. I’ll have to find meaner
lodgings and lie low.’

Jack felt something prod him in the spine. He reached back and grasped a large key. ‘It’s number twenty-two, the Circus. A
servant comes with the place. He’ll see to your needs. And I’ll be by, if my dealings allow.’

Jack’s attention was suddenly drawn by a bulge of men forcing their way out of the theatre’s main doors, revealing the sight
he most wanted to see – Laetitia Fitzpatrick. She did not walk with eyes demurely downcast now but boldly and face up, with
a smile to mock the compliments undoubtedly being poured upon her. As she had been a tide driving men into the playhouse,
here she was pushing them out. She was aided by her guardian Mrs O’Farrell, a lady of some girth, who used that to keep the
young men moving, flapping at them with her fan as if they were bothersome insects.