Don Gutteridge - Vital Secrets

The various bits and pieces usually taken by Armstrong or Thea Clarkson were merely read by one of the other players, and Mrs. Thedford agreed with the director’s suggestion that the scenes from The Tempest be dropped from the bill due to the comatose condition of Prospero. Rick groaned at the patent unfairness of a decision that would deprive him of seeing Tessa play Miranda, the quintessential ingenue. Miranda herself seemed blithely unconcerned.

Just as they were finishing, Thea Clarkson made a dramatic entrance, pale and fevered, and insisted on taking her part as Juliet, even though this set had already been run through twice with clear success.

“How nice of you to make an appearance, love,” Merriwether said acidly. “You look more like Lady Capulet or the Nurse than a fifteen-year-old virgin.”

Thea seemed about to burst into tears. Illness or not, she no longer gave the illusion of a woman in first bloom, for though she had a pretty, moon-pale face and striking almond eyes, she had put on weight that did not sit on her bones attractively. Moreover, her expression was that of one whose confidence has been shaken by the discovery of some knowledge still too daunting to admit.

“There’s no need for gratuitous cruelty,” Mrs. Thedford said to Merriwether. “Thea, dear, you and Clarence can rehearse the Romeo and Juliet scenes tomorrow afternoon. You need to rest now so you’ll be fresh for the farce tonight. After all, it is you who must carry the piece.”

Thea beamed her a bright smile, then began to weep quietly.

At this point in the proceedings, Dawson Armstrong woke up. “Where in hell did my Cordelia go?”

“Don’t you just love theatre people?” Rick exclaimed.

“Tessa has offered to give us a tour of the facility,” Rick called down to Marc and Jenkin, who were standing by the potbellied stove warming their hands. “And Mrs. Thedford has invited us to stay for the supper the Franks are laying on for the company in the hotel dining-room.”

“We’ll take the tour,” Marc said, “but this is my night to have supper with Aunt Catherine at the shop.”

“Speak for yourself, young fellow.” Jenkin laughed. He winked at Marc: “That Thedford woman’s a fine specimen of her sex.”

Rick hopped down, and they followed him through a curtained doorway to the left of the stage and into the gloomy space beside it, where the actors could rest between entrances. Tessa was waiting for them, her blond hair shimmering in the near-dark. She led them down a long, narrow hallway, on either side of which were several cubicles that Tessa, still leading the parade, referred to as dressing-chambers. Rick insisted on exploring the one assigned to Tessa and Thea Clarkson, professing his amazement at the drawerful of makeup paints and glues, the wig-stand, and the bedraggled mannequin with the evening’s costume in place upon it. Marc peered into Merriwether’s carrel, where several playbills caught his attention. One of them, an advertisement for Hamlet at the Park Theatre in New York, featured a sketch of a younger Merriwether as Claudius, with a wig of curly black hair, bushy brows, and a trim Vandyke of similar hue-looking very much the smiling villain of the piece. Having exhausted the wonders of the airless, windowless dressing-rooms, they retreated as they had come in, and Tessa pointed up the steps to the stage itself, indicating that they were to cross to the other side.

“Where does that door go?” Rick asked, glancing to his left.

“Oh, that takes you into Mr. Frank’s quarters,” Tessa burbled, reaching down for Rick’s hand. “The Franks’ve got the most beautiful furniture you’ve ever seen. It’s just like a doll’s house!”

They crossed the stage-the chandelier was now extinguished-and, through the wings on the right, down into another unlit space. There was a door to their left and a set of steep stairs straight ahead. The door appeared to be the only link between theatre and tavern. Tessa eased it open. They could see the bar just ahead and beyond it a room full of boisterous patrons, not of the drama but the bottle. Tessa eased it closed again.

“Show us your rooms,” Rick suggested slyly.

“Oh, wait till you see them! We had nothin’ like this in Buffalo!” Tessa testified, and skipped up the stairs with Rick on her heels. The party paused on a landing, and then continued up again to the second floor directly above the theatre.

“Is this the only way in here?” Marc asked anxiously. The upper storey of Frank’s addition appeared to be self-contained and separate from the original building.

“That’s right,” Tessa said. “Unless you want to go through that window at the far end of this hall and jump off the balcony onto the street.”

“I could call for you like Romeo from underneath the balcony out there,” Rick teased.

“What if there’s a fire?” Marc asked.

“My, would you look at this!” Rick cried, ignoring Marc’s question. He pointed through the partly opened door to the first room on their right.

Tessa blushed, giving the effect of a white carnation magically transformed into a red one. “That’s our bathroom. You ain’t supposed to peek in there!”

But peek they must.

An elephantine copper tub squatted ostentatiously in the centre of the room, around which, on clothes-horses, were arrayed a dozen bath towels of varying pastel tints. In a far corner a Chinese folding-screen offered privacy to the diffident bather. On top of a pot-bellied stove, spitting and aglow, sat a kettle big enough to swim in.

“The Franks have a maid who readies the bath whenever we wish,” Tessa said.

“Looks like that tub could hold more than one person,” Rick said, and was rewarded with another full-petalled blush.

A guttural cry directly across the hall from the bathroom interrupted this bit of by-play, as if someone had muttered a curse while stumbling over a coal-scuttle or bag of nails.

“What on earth was that?” Jenkin asked.

“Oh, that’s just Jeremiah’s babble-talk,” Tessa said. “Don’t pay him no mind.”

At this, the three men turned to the open doorway of a storeroom, where a huge black man was staring at them with white-eyed, menacing curiosity.

Tessa made what appeared at first to be several flirtatious gestures with her hands and fingers across the top of her bosom. Jeremiah, if that’s who he was, relaxed immediately, and greeted the newcomers with a gleaming smile that consumed most of his large, round face and bald head.

“He doesn’t speak English?” Rick wondered.

Tessa laughed, a bubbling little-girl laugh. “He don’t speak at all.”

“He’s mute, then?” Jenkin said.

“Aaargh,” Jeremiah said forcefully, with a painful contortion of both lips.

“He’s deaf and dumb,” Tessa said matter-of-factly. “But he can read and write and read lips a little-can’t ya, Jeremiah?” Here she flashed him a sign, and he nodded vigorously.

“He does the haulin’ and settin’ up of the flats. Annie-Mrs. Thedford-picked him up off the street and gave him a place to sleep. I told her he was probably a runaway slave but she don’t bother listenin’ to anyone, especially when it comes to pickin’ up strays.”

Like you, Marc thought, and raised his opinion of the imperial Mrs. Thedford another notch.

“What’s that?” Jenkin asked, indicating a slate that hung by a rope from the man’s neck.

Jeremiah smiled, and Marc could discern the intelligence in that face, whose age might have been twenty-five or forty. He realized that the overly demonstrative facial gestures and hand movements were an attempt to communicate almost physically, but might easily lead people to assume he was a simpleton. Marc thought of Beth’s brother Aaron and winced inwardly.