Anne Perry - Half Moon Street

“You have been preparing this!” Cecily said quickly. “You will give me a game for my money after all. So what are you going to censor. . in general and in particular? You have already said you will allow husband murder in Clytemnestra, a child murder in Medea, and a man to marry his mother and beget children upon her in Oedipus. Great heavens, my dear, what can it be you disapprove of?”

Caroline felt her face flush hot.

“These are all tragedies, and depicted as such. One feels a terrible pity for the protagonist, an insight into how such things could have come about, and perhaps an admiration for the courage or the honesty with which in the end they meet their fate-good or bad.”

“So it is all right, so long as the values are kept?” Cecily said with wide eyes.

Caroline saw the trap. “Whose values?” she asked. “Is that not what you are going to say?”

Cecily relaxed in a smile. “Exactly. If you are going to answer me that it is society, civilization, or even God, then I will ask you whose God? Which part of society? Mine? Yours? The beggar’s in the street? The old Queen, God bless her? Or Mr. Wilde. . whose society is certainly different from most people’s!”

“That is your own judgment,” Caroline replied. “But the values we adopt will be the ones the next generation will live by. I am not sure if anyone can decide for you. But no one can relieve you of the responsibility for what you say, in whatever form. And the better you are at it, the more beautiful or powerful your voice, the greater the burden upon you to use it with wisdom and a great deal of care.”

“Oh my God!” Cecily said, a trifle too loudly.

“Bravo!” Orlando gave a little salute of praise.

Caroline turned to look at him. His face startled her, it was so full of emotion, his eyes wide, his lips slightly parted, a kind of rigidity in his body.

Joshua was staring at her.

Bellmaine stood motionless, but his face was filled with amazement and a kind of painful relief it was impossible to interpret. Caroline was startled to see his eyes filled with tears.

“The greatest power sometimes lies in not doing a thing,” she finished; her voice suddenly dropped, but she would not leave the rest unsaid. “It is so easy to use a skill simply because you have it, and not look two. . three steps ahead to see what it will cause. People listen to you, Miss Antrim. You can move our emotions and make us reconsider all kinds of beliefs. That is very clever. It is not always wise. .”

Cecily drew in her breath to say something in rebuttal, then looked at Joshua’s face and changed her mind. She turned to Caroline with a dazzling smile.

“I apologize for having thought too little of you.” She said it with utmost sincerity. There was no doubting that she meant it. “I think I should have listened to you rather better. I promise I shall in future.” She turned to the others filling the room. “Now, shall we send for the champagne and toast Orlando? He has deserved all the praise we can give. . and all the rejoicing. Tomorrow all the world will be congratulating him. Let us be the first, and do it tonight!”

“More than all,” Bellmaine agreed fervently. He raised his hand. “Orlando!”

“Here, here, Orlando!” everyone responded eagerly. Only Orlando himself seemed still bemused. Caroline looked across at him and wondered how exhausted he was. His young face was pale, and his eyes still held the look of Hamlet’s haunted madness. It was not a role one could assume so wholly, live its passions and be destroyed by them, and then cast it off as if it had been a garment and not a skin.

She would have liked to comfort him, but she had no idea how. This was his world, not hers. Perhaps all great actors felt like this? Could one give such a performance merely on technique and skill, rather than by also pouring oneself into it until it became, for a time, one’s own reality?

She looked to Joshua, but he was speaking to one of the other actors and she could not interrupt.

There was a knock on the door, and someone came in with champagne and a tray of glasses.

On the way home through the quiet streets, sitting beside Joshua in the hansom, Caroline was tired, but there was a degree of peace inside her that she had not felt in a long time. She realized now, with surprise, how long it had been. She had spent far too much time looking in the mirror and seeing what she disliked, being frightened of it, and projecting onto Joshua emotions born of that fear.

He had been very patient in enduring her self-centeredness. Or perhaps he had not noticed? That was a far uglier thought. Could she hurt so much, and he be oblivious to it?

Of course! Why not? She had been oblivious to his feelings. Had she for an instant wondered how hard it was for him to be the new-comer in her family, to see her children and grandchildren and know he could never have his own? They might learn to love him, but that was not the same. There was an essence of belonging that. . that what? Mariah Ellison belonged, and she had lived all her adult life imprisoned in an icy hell of loneliness beyond anything Caroline could imagine. She had glimpsed its horror, but she had no concept of what it would do to her over time. Time was a dimension one could not create in the mind; it was change, exhaustion, the slow dying of hope.

She understood so much more of why the old lady had become the person she was, but what had made Edmund Ellison seek his pleasures in cruelty? What devils had crawled into his soul and warped it out of human shape?

She would never know. The answer was buried with him, and best let go now, left to drift into the darkness of the past and become covered over with other memories.

“He was brilliant, wasn’t he?” Joshua’s voice came softly out of the shadows beside her. Through the weight of her cloak and his coat she could feel his body stiffen.

“Oh yes,” she agreed honestly. “But I wonder if it will make him happy.”

He was silent for several minutes before finally asking her, “What do you mean?”

She must word this exactly as she meant it, no carelessness, no fumbling for the right way and missing it.

“He conveyed a dreadful understanding of Hamlet’s pain,” she began. “As if he had looked at a kind of madness and seen its face. I am not sure if I believe one can portray that simply from imagination. Turn one horror into the image of another, probably, but not call it up without a kind of experience, some taste of its reality. It was still there in him long after the curtain had fallen.”

They were moving faster through the darkness, only occasional lights from other vehicles moving past and disappearing.

“Do you think so?”

There was no denial in his voice.

She moved closer to him, so slightly only she was aware of it.

“What my mother-in-law told me made me see many things I had not understood before. One of them is the kind of damage that cruelty can inflict, especially when it is held secret where it cannot heal. To be clever is a great gift, and certainly the world needs its clever people, but to be kind is what matters. To be clever or gifted will make people laugh, and think, and perhaps grow in certain ways; but to be generous of spirit is what will bring happiness. I would not wish anyone I loved to be a success as an artist if it meant that he was a failure as a human being.”

He reached out his hand and slid it over hers, gently, then tightened it.

The hansom swayed around a street corner and straightened again.

He turned in his seat and leaned forward. Very gently he kissed her lips. She felt his breath warm on her cheek, and put up her gloved hand to touch his hair.

He kissed her again, and she clung tighter to him.