‘You could have found some other way, you dog.’
‘Watch your mouth,’ he said, though his voice was still mild enough, just rough with pipe-smoke and old beer. ‘Now where are these doors you need to ghost through?’
Harriet could not have said at what moment the atmosphere in the auditorium began to change. The crowd had chattered or applauded its way through some piece or other from the pit and spat out sunflowerseed shells onto the sawdust on the pit floor for a period, till softly the whispering began to change its tone. Harriet looked up, seeing what was around her for the first time in some minutes. The occupants of the boxes looked irritable and a number of the ladies were hiding yawns behind their fans. The musicians were exchanging shrugs and shaking their heads. Those on the upper part of the gallery began to clap, slow and regular, a few at first, then more and more joined till the walls seemed to shake with the regular rhythm of it. One or two ladies began to follow the beat with their closed fans rapping on the velvet lips of their boxes. Harriet was confused; Rachel leaned over to her to explain.
‘The Third Act should have begun some time ago.’
The pace of the handclap began to accelerate. Harriet found herself beginning to stand, a confused wonder and fear crawling up her spine. The thud of the clapping reached a frenzied climax and collapsed. Cat calls, whistles and shouted complaints began to echo around the walls in its place.
‘Rachel, Miss Chase . . .’ Harriet said slowly. ‘I think you should go home at once. Send the carriage back for us when you are safe at Berkeley Square.’
It was Rachel’s turn to look confused. ‘But Harriet—’
Before she could say any more, there was a scream. A woman’s voice, full of rage and grief, poured into the air and scorched it silent. The voice came from somewhere in the wings. For a moment everything was still, then as if the touch of the sound had burned the skin of the audience, everyone began to shout at once. Other feminine cries of distress around the theatre echoed the first. Harriet found herself unable to move. On the stage below them, arranged as for a temple with a sea glittering blue in the back, Mr Harwood staggered out and approached the footlights. His arms raised for quiet.
The flames threw strange shadows up his face and over his arms, and made his shape huge and crowlike on the canvas seascape behind him.
‘Ladies and gentlemen –
please
!’ The noise-level ebbed away and the audience leaned forward. Harriet found her hands were trembling. ‘Tonight’s performance of
Julius Rex
cannot, I am afraid, continue . . . One of our performers is no longer able—’
The scream came again, vicious and angry. Harwood paused, his arms still raised, and looked off stage. He seemed terrified, like a man who finds himself fallen suddenly into hell. From the wings a figure in grey crawled forward.
‘Morgan,’ Harriet whispered through dry lips.
The figure screamed again and lifted her hands; her voice when she spoke was hardly human. ‘Who has murdered my songbird?’ It asked raging and blind. ‘Who has killed my Issy?’ Her hands were caught in the lights. They were red with blood.
Pandemonium. Harwood unfroze and dropped to his knees and put his arms round the stricken woman, trying to help her off stage again. The musicians all stood and craned their necks to look up. The entire theatre was full of cries and weeping, every man and woman on their feet and hurrying to be somewhere but knowing not where or how to flee the horror of it. Harriet spun round to the white faces of her sister and friend.
‘Lock the door behind me. Stay here until the theatre has emptied – the crush could be deadly – then go. Do not wait for me.’ Rachel had started to sob. Harriet hesitated, but met Miss Chase’s cool grey eyes.
Verity took Rachel’s hands firmly in her own, and said in a voice steadier than Harriet’s, ‘Go, Mrs Westerman. I’ll look after Rachel.’ And when Harriet still wavered, Verity stood up and opened the door of the box.
‘For the love of God, Harriet, go!’ Harriet ran out and, gathering her skirts, dashed down the corridor and towards the artists’ apartments as if the devil himself were at her heels.
VI.8
H
ARRIET PUSHED OPEN the doors at the end of the corridor, and escaping the pandemonium of the auditorium, found he
rself in the chaos of the backstage. She fought her way past the Roman women of the chorus weeping and fainting and holding each up in small groups. The God she had watched descend from the clouds at the opening of the scene sat on a plaster boulder in his costume, his Olympian wreath bent out of shape and his heavy make-up running. He rocked from side-to-side. Manzerotti suddenly appeared beside her and took her arm. He still wore gold, though his magnificent plumes he held now in his hand.
‘Mrs Westerman. God be praised.’ His black eyes had a glitter to them, and there was sweat on his upper lip. ‘Come with me.’ He took her arm and dragged her through the crowds and across the stage. The auditorium was still king under waves of noise. He dragged her just behind the side panel stage right and released her.
Harwood was on his knees, his head in his hands. In front of him, like a mockery of the
Pièta
, Morgan knelt, Isabella’s body hauled up across her thighs and chest. There was blood everywhere, blackening the blue satin of her bodice and skirts. Only her face and neck were clean of it, though they were heavy with her stage make-up: the skin dead white, her open eyes heavily lined, her mouth wide with red paint. Her natural hair had escaped its pins and fell in black about her temples. Harriet noticed the diamonds in her ears.
Getting down on her knees, Harriet crept towards them, as if approaching a holy and dreadful thing.
‘Morgan?’
The old woman’s head flicked up and stared at her. Harriet crept closer and put her hand round Isabella’s wrist. Still warm. ‘Morgan? It’s Harriet Westerman. What happened?’
Morgan shifted her grip on the girl’s body, holding it still closer to her with a keening whine, and continued to rock her. Her face was flushed and so flooded with tears her skin seemed honey-glazed. She touched Isabella’s cheek with a fingertip, then seeing that she had dirtied the skin with blood, tried to wipe the mark off with her sleeve, smearing Isabella’s rouge.
‘Morgan? Can you tell me what happened?’ Harriet found herself becoming oddly calm. The other clamour of the place dropped away. There was just her in the world and these two women, one dead, one grieving for the dead. She looked swiftly along the length of the body.
Two wounds. One in her belly which had bled hard and fast. The other was a neat straight line above her heart. It had hardly bled at all.
The wood around the lock splintered at the second attempt. Crowther nodded his thanks to Harwood’s man, and stepped into the room. He became still at once. The fire behind them was burning with a fierce light; in front of it, at right angles to the door, was a tin bathtub. Bywater was in it, eyes closed, naked and very white. He had slumped down far enough so that his shoulders were underwater. The firelight swum over it. It was the same colour as Graves’s Madeira. One arm hanging over the lip of the tub had prevented the dead man from slipping entirely under the water. The wrist was an angry red mouth. Crowther had time to note that the cut had been made along the artery rather than across it before he was distracted by the sound of Harwood’s servant vomiting in the corridor behind him.
‘Molloy? How long will you be at this?’
‘Hush, woman. Street door you could open with a fish bone. This one into the family rooms is a little more fancy . . . little bit more sophisticated, you might say. Needs more than a tickle and a slap to get this lady to open up.’
Jocasta folded her arms. He felt her look even in the darkness of the lobby and laughed softly. ‘Patience, Mrs Bligh. I’m nearly there.’
Crowther waited till the sounds of sickness had passed, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and threw it over his shoulder without pausing in his careful scrutiny of the room.
‘Go back to His Majesty’s,’ he told the other man. ‘Tell Harwood and Mrs Westerman that Bywater is dead. Tell them to send to Bow Street and inform them of what has passed, and to Justice Pither on Great Suffolk Street and tell him Mr Crowther would be happy to meet him here tomorrow morning early and inform him of developments. Then send two men here to guard the place. I will pay them. Make sure they have stronger stomachs than you yourself.’
He hardly heard the mumbled thanks and apology. The man’s footsteps retreated down the stairs at a pace. Crowther set his cane in front of him and leaned on it. But made no further move.
‘There, Mrs Bligh! You’re in. Just pull it to sharp as you come out, and no one will know different. I’m away and good luck to you.’
Harwood uncovered his face and looked at Harriet. ‘I must help get the people out.’
Harriet did not take her eyes away from Morgan. ‘Do. I will stay with them.’ She heard him stand and move off. ‘Morgan? What happened?’
Morgan looked at Harriet again, but this time Harriet thought she did so with some understanding.
‘He killed my little bird, Mrs Westerman.’
Harriet came forward till she could slip her arm around the old lady’s shoulders. The woman leaned into her and wept. Harriet almost slipped under the weight of her.
‘Who killed her, Morgan?’
‘Bywater! That fool, Bywater! She’d asked to meet him in the scene room after the Second Act when it would be a little quieter. He’s been strange, the last day or two.’
Harriet put her other arm across them, holding Morgan and the dead Isabella in a loose embrace. ‘Did she see he was not in the pit?’
‘Of course, of course. Though it didn’t seem to surprise her, and she still swore he’d be there to meet her. Said he’d
have
to be there.’
‘Do you know why she was to meet him, Morgan?’
She felt rather than saw the old woman shake her head. ‘No, no. I thought perhaps he was angry with her. Her all followed and courted, and invited places he ain’t. She smiles at the rich men, but it’s her work. She means nothing by it. Do you, little bird?’
Harriet became aware that she was not alone in listening to Morgan. A couple of the
corps de ballet
were standing behind them, their heads hanging. Two or three of torus singers, the leader of the opera band sitting on the bare stage, his violin dead in his hands. There was a stir in the crowd. One of the servants of the place approached, pale, shaking, out of breath, with Crowther’s soiled handkerchief still in his hand. He knelt beside her, whispering in her ear.
Harriet nodded and said to him, ‘Let Crowther know what has happened here and say that I shall wait for him.’
Jocasta slid into the room like a cat sneaking into a dairy, and pulled the door to just behind her. Then she made for the grey shadow of the side-table. The lip was certainly thicker than it needed to be. She slipped her fingers below it, began to feel along the length hoping her heart would calm enough not to leap out of her chest where she stood. It was not as easy as in the dream. There seemed to be no magic spot to make a secret jump free like a jack-in-the-box. For a second Jocasta thought of turning and running and calling the dreams traitor. But there was something wrong in the make of this. She began to feel along the way a little lower down. Fingering for weakness, for an unhappy joint.
The servant retreated and earnest whispers began to rustle among the groups around them.
Morgan looked drunk, bemused with grief. ‘What has happened?’ she said.
‘Bywater is dead,’ Harriet said simply.
‘Good. By his own hand?’
‘It seems that way.’
Morgan held Isabella up in her arms again and kissed her forehead. Harriet looked around them. There was a face that looked familiar, young and tear-streaked in the corner. She recognised the assistant from the scene room.
‘Boyle! We are in need of your help. Fetch something to use as a stretcher and two men to carry it.’ He nodded and turned to go. Harriet said more softly to Morgan: ‘Let us take her back to her room, Morgan, where she may be more private.’
Morgan gave no sign of having heard, but kissing Issy’s forehead again said softly to the cooling corpse, ‘We shall make you comfortable now, my sweetheart. Did you hear all the shouting and Bravos? Did you hear them calling for you even when the ballet was begun? While you hurried off to see that silly man. But we must rest now, my love. Come to your room and we will make you cosy.’
Crowther waited till he was sure that he could draw the plan of the room from memory, then stepped into it. He walked the edges of the space. The arrangement of the place was not unlike Fitzraven’s, though the house had none of the pretensions to civility of Mrs Girdle’s establishment. A clavichord and desk. The latter was covered in manuscript paper. There were many beginnings, many scratched out or torn. On top of them all lay a sheet which Crowther carefully picked up, read and folded into his pocket.
Jocasta’s fingers almost missed it. Then she paused and set her hands eiide of the circular top. She breathed deep, then gave it a sharp twist. With a little judder of protest the top turned, making the bowl sat in its centre rattle in its place. The sides of the table opened up like a flower, revealing four neat drawers, shaped like petals. Two were empty. Two had rolls of paper in them, done up with string. She pulled one out and unrolled it. Writing, and plenty of it. For a moment she was still, then taking two sheets and laying them on top of the table, she curled up the others again and laid them back in the drawer. With a start she noticed the little brooch that Kate had been so pleased with. She was just reaching for it as if she was in a dream again when she went very still. Footsteps. A woman’s and the front door creaking open. She looked about her. The room seemed suddenly bare and small. Her eyes caught on the door. There was a rattle of a key, a pause. The handle began to turn.