“I’ll take any sort of work to get started,” she said. “If you’ll only give me a chance.”
Sir Alan smiled at Dickens and pondered aloud, “I wonder if we haven’t miraculously found the girl to play Lady Jennifer.”
Dickens smiled in return, “I’m pressed for time. But if you’ll give her a reading I’ll go back to the theatre for it.”
“She shall read the part directly after lunch,” Sir Alan said. “I owe poor Ernest a debt or two. He gave fine performances in my company and when he was down I’m ashamed to say I turned my back on him.”
“You were not alone,” Dickens said. “So did Macready. I lectured him for it.”
Sir Alan gave Fanny one of his charming smiles. “When we go back to the theatre you will read a scene with me.”
“Is it an important role?” she asked.
Dickens laughed. “It’s the lead, no less! Alan hasn’t been able to cast it! I say, why not start at the top, young lady!”
Sir Alan then ordered lunch and Fanny sat silently, only able to pick at her food. She was too nervous to join in their conversation. But they did not seem to mind this as they had much to talk about. Charles Dickens spoke of a new novel he was doing which he called
David Copperfield
, while Sir Alan went on at length about the trouble and expense of staging one of his huge costume dramas.
At last the luncheon ended and the two men accompanied a thoroughly tense Fanny back to the theatre. She worried that in her nervous state she might not be able to read opposite Sir Alan at all. Her throat would constrict and the words wouldn’t come out.
In the theatre Sir Alan went up on stage to get the scripts for the scene and to explain to the stage manager what he was about to do. Charles Dickens smiled at her as he prepared to take a front aisle seat.
He said warmly, “The best of luck, my dear.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dickens,” she managed.
Sir Alan called out, “On stage please, Miss Hastings. We are waiting for you.”
“Yes, sir,” she murmured and hurried up to join him.
“Take off your bonnet and cloak,” he told her. She did so and the stage manager took them. Then Sir Alan gave her the Script and explained the scene to her. “I play the knight and you are the young lady. I am leaving for the Crusades and this is our parting moment. Before I go, I reveal that I know you have been in love with a younger man who is joining me on the Crusade. You admit you had some friendly interest in him but deny you loved him. You ask me to watch out for him and not hold the business against him. I tell you that I was perhaps too old to make you my wife and so am partly to blame. You swear that you love me and tell me that if I do not return you will place a dagger in your heart. I hold you in my arms and caution you to do no such thing, and I thank you for removing the dagger of suspicion from my own heart which has until now been torturing me without cause! You understand?”
“I think so,” she said, studying the script.
“You must first suggest to the audience my accusations against your faithfulness are true. Then in a few minutes you must convince both them and me, that I was wrong. The big emotional moment is when I accept your words as truth and thank you for sending me to the Crusade with a whole heart. That is the crux of the scene.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“Very well,” Sir Alan said firmly and spoke the first line.
In that moment Fanny’s training came back to save her. All her nervousness ended as she concentrated on the lines she was reading. She gave them the touches of emotion she felt were right, the slight pauses and the proper emphasis, and she lost herself in the character she was playing. Suddenly the scene was at an end. There was a long silence on the stage and in the theatre.
Then from his seat down front Charles Dickens applauded. “A magnificent first reading!” he told her.
Sir Alan was smiling as he said, “Wherever he may be, your father must be proud at this moment. You have the part!”
The opening night of “The Knight and the Lady” began a new phase of Fanny’s life. She was given a thunderous ovation by the fashionable audience and in the newspapers the next day the various critics gave praise to her remarkable talents. Nor were Sir Alan Tredale and the play ignored by those gentlemen of the press. It was agreed that the play was one of Sir Alan’s best productions and that in Fanny he had offered London a new star.
Fanny’s success opened to her a different kind of London, the London of the wealthy and privileged! She moved into a smart flat not far from the theatre and hired a maid and housekeeper-cook. Her new companions were people like Charles Dickens, Lucy Vestris, Charles Matthews and Sir Alan Tredale. It was a gay, romantic world which she had often dreamed about but which she’d hardly dared hope to attain.
However, she did not forget her old friends. She still occasionally paid a visit to the eccentric Gilbert Tingley at his Museum of Freaks and he considerea her his greatest success.
He never missed a chance to take her around the museum and introduce her to his current freaks and tell them, “What this young lady accomplished under my training, any one of you can do!”
The gaunt Silas Hodder was quite disgusted by this. One day as Fanny left the museum in his company, the skull-faced man said with scorn, “To hear him tell it you’d think you’d received all your training playing a mermaid for him! It is your acting in the provinces and especially the coaching by your late father which brought you success!”
“That is true, Silas,” she said sadly, thinking of those good days and wondering what had become of David Cornish from whom she’d heard nothing since she ran away from his company. Then brightening, she squeezed the arm of the odd, old man and told him, “Still, if it makes Gilbert Tingley happy to think of me as a protegée, I confess I don’t mind!”
“Aye,” the thin man lamented. “Trust you to be too tender-hearted. You have conquered London, my lass. But you must be made of stern stuff to keep your footing in this city!”
She gave him an amused glance as they walked along the narrow sidewalk of the grubby street. “
You
have managed very well, it seems!”
He snorted with derision. “I’m what you might well call a confounded failure! A beggar who torments gentlemen to give him alms! Not much to be proud of there! Meeting you is the best thing that ever happened to me!”
“And my meeting you was a turning point in my life,” Fanny insisted. “Had you not handled things so well that first day at the theatre I should never have got in to see Sir Alan.”
The gaunt face showed modest pleasure. “It was a small business, but I did manage it with a certain flair!”
“I’ve mentioned it because I have an offer for you,” she said as they walked along, she in an enchanting brown taffeta and matching bonnet and he in his somber black suit and tophat.
“What sort of offer?” he wanted to know.
“Sir Alan Tredale needs a new stage door manager for the People’s,” she told him. “And he favors you. He admires your way of handling people. He asked me to broach the matter to you.”
The tall, gaunt man halted and stared at her, his deep-set eyes moist with tears. “You are actually offering to restore me to a place in society?”
“I’m not sure it’s what you want,” she said. “You have so long made your way by your wits.”
Silas Hodder said bitterly, “A way which will certainly see me in paupers’ prison if I continue to pursue it.” He squeezed her hand. “You are a dear girl! I’m certain you have spoken to Sir Alan on my behalf!”
Fanny smiled. “I
did
bring up your name when he mentioned the position would soon be vacant.”
“I shall take it, my girl,” the gaunt man said excitedly. “It is my one hope of not losing touch with you!”
“That will never happen! You are too good a friend!”
“It will! It must!” the old man insisted. “You are now part of a London society which tolerates me only on occasion to enjoy me as a freak! I’m as odd to them as any of the displays in Tingley’s museum! Gradually they will drop me and I will no longer be part of your circle. But this solves everything! I shall guard your stage door every night!”
“I’m so happy you’ve accepted,” Fanny said. And then she added, “There is just one thing more.”
“And what, pray is that?”
“Your … appearance,” she said, warily. “I know it is helpful to look weird as a professional beggar. But Sir Alan will demand that you properly shorten your hair, dress a bit less somberly, and present a more normal facade. Do you mind?”
Silas Hodder hesitated for a moment, causing her to think she had offended him. Then he burst into laughter and said, “I declare, child, Sir Alan asked you to approach me because he feared to say such things himself.”
“True,” Fanny admitted.
“I don’t mind sprucing up in the least!” the gaunt old man said happily. “And I shall lose none of my dignity in the doing of it. I shall still make a first class guardian of the backstage area!”
“That is why Sir Alan wants you for the post,” Fanny assured him.
He patted her hand and they resumed their walk. “Consider that I have accepted!”
And so it came about that a new-born Silas Hodder arrived to serve at the backstage entrance of the famous old theatre. The transformation in him was satisfyingly complete. He donned a fresh brown frockcoat with yellow checkered trousers and a fawn vest. His battered, black tophat was replaced by one of dark glossy brown. A golden watch-chain graced the fawn vest and he stood at his post with a dignified air. His short gray hair gave his face a less macabre appearance and he soon became a favorite of all the company.
Fanny would have considered this new life on which she’d embarked the happiest time of her existence, had it not been for some memories which haunted her. She had never truly been able to forget her first love Viscount George Palmer. And she felt pain whenever she thought of David Cornish. She knew her running away had caused him unhappiness and she had cared for him greatly and believed in his talent.
But her promise to her father to strive for success on the London stage had been more important to her than anything else. She had deserted David because he’d wanted to tie her to acting in the small towns and cities of the provinces. Her father had warned her that this could easily be a dead end for her, and had urged that she try London. He would have shared the adventure with her had it not been for his untimely death.
As for Viscount George, the old Marquis had soon made her realize that this perfect love was one which could never be. So she had come to think of this early romance in that way, even though she knew she would never forget the handsome young man. For his sake, and her own, it was a dream to be forgotten.
There was no reason why this should be difficult since she had been caught up in the theatrical excitement of the London Stage. Discounting Lucy Vestris and her husband, Charles Matthews, there were no more gifted actor-managers on the London boards than Sir Alan Tredale. She was sure she might have fallen in love with the aristocratic, older actor if he had not been a happily married man with a family of three girls not much younger than herself.
As it was, he became a sort of foster-father to her in addition to being her co-star. There was no question that she would continue to be his leading lady and that her popularity would grow with each new play in which they appeared. Meanwhile she was making many important friends in the world of London’s upper classes. The fantastic events of her first descent on the city seemed to belong to a dark world which no longer existed. Though one of her new friends, Charles Dickens, told her in his solemn way, “Do not be deceived by your good fortune, Fanny! Behind the facade of this world of fashion we know there exists a sewer of dangerous slums!”
“I had some experience of them when I first came to the city,” she assured him. “But I have hoped that things are better now.”
The famous novelist’s handsome face was bitter. “Not so!” he said. “The other evening I toured some of these slums with Inspector Field of Scotland Yard. I confess I was sickened. We opened the door of a dilapidated house and were stricken back by the pestilent odor issuing from it! Field held held up a lantern to show ten, twenty, thirty—it was hard to tell—men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese! Poor souls evicted from their homes so that we might build New Oxford Street and other fine streets without regard to where these unfortunates whom we clear out are to find shelter!”
“Must it always be like this?” she lamented.
“That is a question I often ask myself,” Dickens said with a sigh. “I have used my pen to fight such conditions but I begin to fear it has been too feeble a weapon!”
“That is untrue! Your writings are not only popular but they have shown up many social evils.”
“To what avail?” the famed novelist asked. “I begin to wonder about my purpose in life. What has it all meant and how much is it worth? My domestic life is no longer happy. I find escape only in my friends in the theatre like Sir Alan, Forester and Macready!”
Fanny was all sympathy for her friend. “You must not feel so! You are a success and doing much good!”
This discussion ended when Sir Alan and some friends came to join them. They went on to supper at a favorite restaurant in the Strand. Fanny sat a distance away from the novelist at the long table heaped with fine food and wines, but she watched him during the lively conversation and revelry and saw him to be more restrained and sober than the others.
• • •
Months went by and it seemed that this new life on which Fanny had embarked would continue forever. Sir Alan scheduled new plays and they all were successful. Offstage, Fanny led a quiet life in her small flat near the theatre. And it was there one day in February of the following year that she had an unexpected visitor, none other than the elderly character woman with whom she’d worked in the provinces, Hilda Asquith!
The aristocratic old actress wore a shawl over her thin coat and her lined face under a black bonnet looked more gaunt than when Fanny had last seen her. The two embraced on this gray, winter afternoon and then sat together over tea and cakes provided by Fanny’s housekeeper.