Don Gutteridge - Vital Secrets

The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes-The life still there, upon her hair-the death upon her eyes.

Marc felt the surge of his own emotion catch in his throat, and realized he had been thinking of Uncle Jabez and the sister lost to him forever. Just as Mrs. Thedford recited the final phrase, she sank to her knees with the grace of a swan settling over her eggs while Tessa simultaneously rose through the gauze of her garment till she was almost sitting up. Freeze. Tableau. Music fades. Finis.

No one moved. For a full minute all thoughts drifted inward. The ghost of Jason Merriwether was palpable.

“Well, it’s time to liven things up a little,” Armstrong said in a voice clear, strong, and uncontaminated by drink. He signed something towards Jeremiah, and the black man grinned and went over to the far wings. In the shadows there was a pile of what Marc had taken to be scenery-flats covered by a piece of sailcloth. Jeremiah whipped this cover away to reveal, not a stack of flats, but a gleaming pianoforte, which he began to push out onto the stage. Well, Marc thought, no wonder Ogden Frank had scratched himself bald worrying about the future of his investment. But who would play the instrument?

It was Dawson Armstrong who sat down before it on a stool and struck a thundering introductory chord. “Ready, ladies?”

The three women came down to the footlights. With Tessa between Mrs. Thedford and Thea Clarkson, they linked arms. Then, to Armstrong’s zestful accompaniment, they entertained Marc, enthralled him really, for the next twenty minutes with a series of trios, duets, and naughty ditties from The Beggar’s Opera, mixing male and female roles willy-nilly. Mrs. Thedford sang in the rich alto range, throaty and vibrant; Tessa’s note was descant, tremulously sweet. Thea’s voice was contralto, haunted and rippled with the shadow of longing and regret. The latter concluded this set with a solo, an aria in Italian about the heroine’s sorrow at the loss of her lover. That was all that Marc could decipher, but there was little need for lyrics here: Thea’s voice, her posture, and the sonority of the song itself were sufficient. How she contrived to complete it in such circumstance Marc did not know, but he hoped that somehow the effort was cathartic. When she finished, the women curtseyed and the four men applauded.

Without warning or ado, Armstrong now banged out a single cacophonous chord. Beasley and the women retreated to a bench upstage. Then Jeremiah Jefferson, barefoot and stripped to the waist, leapt into stage-centre. From the pianoforte there now came a steady, rhythmic beat from the lowest keys only, a cadence somewhat like the panic of a heartbeat but not quite, for there was the thump of bravery and bravado in it and an intimation of the erotic.

Under the chandelier’s flickering cast, Jeremiah’s skin glistened as the muscles beneath tightened and released in response to the primal obbligato of the music. His eyes were closed and his whole face upturned as if anticipating a benediction of rain. But it was the legs and bare feet that fascinated. Their dance was so intricate, so alien, so intrinsically staccato that it was impossible to tell whether it was animated by the piano’s beat or was simply a coincidental and parallel harmony. As the rhythm-thrums progressed in intensity and dissonance, Jeremiah’s feet became a gray blur, sweat shimmered and shook free, both eyes were wide open and gazed sightless before the music stopped in mid-beat and his body froze as if it were abruptly bronzed.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Mrs. Thedford said to him as all the tension in him was instantly relaxed and he became Jeremiah Jefferson, escaped slave, once again. She signed her pleasure as well, and he smiled his acceptance of her approval.

“But how can he hear the music?” Marc said to Beasley, who was nearest him. “He’s deaf.”

“Oh,” Beasley said, “he can feel the vibrations, especially if the notes are low.”

“I’ve never seen or heard anything like that.”

“Then you’ve never spent any time in the United States,” Beasley said.

Mrs. Thedford came over to Marc and handed him a sheaf of papers. “We’re all through here now, Mr. Edwards. We’re going up to rest before supper and the show at eighty-thirty. I’ve put together, in sequence, the scripts for tomorrow with your parts marked.”

“With all this ahead of me, I won’t have time to attend the performance this evening, so I am glad I was able to sit in on your rehearsal.”

“We look forward to your being part of it tomorrow.” Again, she kept her gaze steadily upon him. He could feel in it an intense curiosity and something much more ambivalent and inaccessible. It unnerved him.

“Cobb will look after you when I leave shortly,” he stammered.

“I find that immensely comforting,” she said with an enigmatic smile.

When the actors had withdrawn, Marc sat on the vacant stage waiting for Cobb and staring out at the vast space where a hundred or more spectators would be scrutinizing his every twitch and stutter when he made his debut as Jason Merriwether. But his overriding concern at this moment was not the distinct possibility of stage-fright or being prematurely unmasked but, rather, a simple question: How could any one of the people he had just observed in the fullness of their generous talent have committed a brutal murder? And if not one of them, then who?

Cobb arrived half an hour later.

“Did you get to Michaels?” Marc asked at once.

“Good day to you, too,” Cobb said, staring at the piano-forte. “We gonna have some song an’ dance?”

“Yes. And since I will be at Mrs. Standish’s boarding-house memorizing a dozen pages of script tonight, you’ll have the pleasure of humming along with it here this evening. You might want to bring Mrs. Cobb-I’m sure I can arrange for a box seat.”

“I’ll have her get the family gems outta storage.”

“What did you find out at the chemist’s?”

“Several vials of laudanum were bought there last Saturd’y afternoon by people Michaels didn’t know.”

“Did you show Ezra the sketch of Merriwether?”

“Yup. But Merriwether wasn’t one of ’em.”

“Damn. Did you get a look at any of the buyers’ names?”

“I did. An’ one of them was very familiar. Hang on to yer hat, Major: it was Thea Clarkson.”

“My God.” Marc had not been prepared for that information.

“Want me to haul her down here? Yer idea that she might’ve been teamed up with somebody to do the cheater in seems applause-able now, don’t it?”

“Yes. But I’m going to wait until morning before confronting her. I can’t take any chance on disturbing the equanimity of the troupe before the performance tonight. And I’m even reluctant to do so in the morning: this ruse we’re attempting must not be compromised.”

Cobb sighed. “I think you’re more afraid of a rebellion in this province than Sir Francis Swell-Head himself.”

“Well, at least it looks now as if we’ll be able to demonstrate that Rick didn’t drug Tessa in order to have his way with her. What possible connection could there be between Rick and Thea Clarkson?”

“I’m sure that knowin’ the world don’t consider him a despoiler of virgins will give the lad a lot of comfort as the noose tightens ’round his gullet.”

Marc ignored the remark. “It’s still possible that Merriwether bought his own laudanum.”

“Possible. Michaels ain’t the only chemist in town, just the richest.”

“It would be so helpful if I could make a direct link between the drugged sherry and Merriwether. Keep looking, will you?”

“In my spare time, ya mean?”

“Whenever you can. Please.”