Don Gutteridge - Vital Secrets

Marc checked his Hamlet image in the watery mirror, then joined the others in the wings.

“No need to be nervous, Marc,” Mrs. Thedford said, touching him on the forearm. “I can’t imagine you requiring a prompt, but if you do, watch my lips.” She leaned across and gave him a phantom peck on the cheek, exposing, as she did so, the upper-halves of her unmotherly breasts. Then she was sweeping onto the stage as the first scene from the play got under way to welcoming applause.

From his position in the wings, Marc could see the boxes on the far wall of the theatre. Dora and Horatio Cobb, along with Owen Jenkin, were in the one most distant, which afforded the constable a wide view of the pit, the gallery, and the other boxes. On the opposite side, Marc knew, Lieutenant Spooner and his guests occupied a middle box. There was nothing any of them could do now but allow the drama to unfold.

Dawson Armstrong delivered Claudius’s soliloquy at prayer with such spit and verve that the audience brought him back for two bows. Marc cooled his heels and trembled in the wings. Mrs. Thedford, as Gertrude, stood beside him again, but she was fully in role now and said nothing. He could hear her taking deep, rhythmic breaths. Then it was their turn and Marc, feeling as if he were stepping into the cauldron of battle for the first time, walked with knees aquiver into a blaze of light. When he turned to the audience to deliver his opening lines, the words, mercifully, came out. The hundred pairs of eyes appraising him in his nakedness-for so he felt-were, with equal mercy, invisible, drowned in the sea of black set up by the footlights.

HAM: How now, what’s the matter?

GERT: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

HAM: Mother, you have my father much offended.

The quality and pitch of their long rehearsal yesterday was instantly rekindled, and Marc soon forgot the audience, himself, and why he was doing this. He was the Prince of Denmark excoriating his faithless mother. The applause, as their scene ended, came more as a shock than an expectation, so engrossed was he in Hamlet’s angst. On the other hand, Gertrude dissolved immediately and Mrs. Thedford took her formal, practised curtsies as a matter of right, while tugging him into his hesitant bows. Then, as they were leaving the stage, the adrenaline of praise struck: he felt as if he might float down the steps to his dressing-room.

“Well done,” Mrs. Thedford said. “You were to the manner born.”

“I’ve still got Antony and Macbeth to negotiate,” Marc said with a modesty he didn’t actually feel. “Oh, here’s your looking-glass: I know what it means to you.”

During the Hamlet scene, when Hamlet holds the hand-mirror up to his mother and her sins, Mrs. Thedford had insisted that they use the one she kept in her room upstairs, “for good luck,” she had said. He was happy now to return the treasure intact.

“Solid work, young man,” Armstrong said, and meant it.

Apparently Marc had passed more than one test out there on the boards.

Marc had no more scenes until after the interval, but he did return to his dressing-room to change into Antony’s toga and sandals. Although unbearded, Antony sported a close-cropped black wig and charcoal eyebrows with artfully darkened skin, effectively camouflaging Marc’s fair complexion and light brown hair. As he waited anxiously for the interval to begin, he could hear laughter and spontaneous applause as the scenes from Twelfth Night completed the first half of the evening. Wilkie came over to report that no one had tried to enter the premises under his watch. Minutes later, the other actors hurried past to their individual cubicles to rest and prepare for the second half.

Meanwhile, Ogden Frank and his assistants made sure no spectator got backstage from the pit through the doors to the left or right, but they did not discourage the relaying of messages and bonbons under the auspices of Madge Frank. Tessa, whose performance of Ophelia had brought audible sobs from the viewers, received a box of sweets and a proposal of marriage. Thea Clarkson as Cordelia was rewarded with a bouquet of chrysanthemums, and Mrs. Thedford with an array of cards and billets-doux. There were no messages for either Hamlet. At one point before they resumed, Cobb managed to catch Marc’s eye from his position near the refreshment stall, and shook his head slowly. Perhaps no contact would be made, either because the rebels had simply got cold feet or they had begun to suspect subterfuge and betrayal.

While Marc flubbed a line or two as Antony, as he had predicted, Mrs. Thedford’s Cleopatra was so sensual, sardonic, and touching, with quicksilver shifts in mood and tempo, that few in the audience cared what kind of Antony provoked such a complex woman into being, so long as he had. Mother and whore, wanton lover and calculating bitch, goddess and little lost girl-she played them all within a single body with a singular voice. When she rose from her death-scene to accept the approbation raining down upon her, Antony, long dead and forgotten nearby, remained where he was.

Marc returned to his dressing-room to change into his Macbeth costume, but sensed something amiss as soon as he stepped inside. It took him several seconds to realize that there was an extra costume on the rack beside the other two. He reached into one of the pockets of the tunic and, unsurprised, drew out a plain envelope. Inside was the note he had been expecting, printed by hand in block capitals:

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE PERFORMANCE, GO TO EAST MARKET STREET, NORTH END. MOUNT THE HORSE THERE. RIDE EAST ALONG KING TO SCADDINGS BRIDGE. TWO MILES UP THE KINGSTON ROAD YOU WILL BE MET. BRING SAMPLE. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE FOLLOWED. YOU WILL BE WATCHED ALL THE WAY. DESTROY THIS NOTE.

So, this was it. His ruse had worked. Now if he could only remember his lines as Macbeth, all might yet be well. Then, with a guilty start, he remembered that he had not thought of Rick Hilliard once in the past two hours. But there was just too much to do here and now. He went down to find Wilkie. Someone had delivered this costume and was, most likely, part of the conspiracy.

“I found an extra costume in my cubicle,” Marc said to Wilkie.

“No mystery there, sir. I put it there myself,” Wilkie offered cheerfully.

“And who delivered it to you?”

“Oh … I see. It was the same fella that’s been here a coupla times before, bringin’ costumes from some repair shop in town.”

Marc froze.

“They usually let him come in through the tavern, but seein’ as the play was goin’ on and all, the barkeep took him through Frank’s place and in this here door. But I didn’t let him get more’n a foot inside here. I told him to halt, an’ said I’d be the one to deliver anythin’ that needed deliverin’.”

“Medium height and build?” Marc said, dreading the response. “Sort of baby-faced and fair-skinned? Big smile?”

“That’s the fella all right,” Wilkie said, nodding his large head. “You seen him too, have ya?”

Unfortunately he had: it was George Revere, bringing another mended costume from Aunt Catherine’s shop, except that this one contained a message which could send all who had handled it to the gallows. Marc sat back on the bottom step below the wings. He could hardly breathe. Incurious as ever, Wilkie drifted back to his post. Surely it was Revere, recent arrival from the United States and boisterous republican, and not Aunt Catherine, who was involved. Even so, Beth’s aunt was herself a recent immigrant from New England and, Marc grimly concluded, might well be tarred with the kind of broad brush he had seen wielded by members of the establishment here. Was there no end to the entanglement of politics and his personal life? Perhaps Revere himself was innocent, a dupe of treasonous types around him.