Anne Perry - A Christmas Homecoming

Joshua gave a sigh of relief.

Douglas snorted with what seemed to be contempt, although Caroline was certain that it was actually frustration.

“The master of delusion and deceit, aren’t you!” Douglas spat the words.

It was Alice who sprang to Ballin’s defense. “Stagecraft, Douglas. I’m sorry you don’t know the difference. It is causing you to be unnecessarily rude to our guest.”

“He is not our guest,” Douglas insisted. “He is a stranger who landed on the doorstep out of the storm, melodramatically, asking for help, and he has been aping Dracula ever since.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice said angrily. “He told us what happened. His carriage overturned and broke a wheel in the snow. He won’t be the only person stranded in this weather. What on earth would anyone do except invite him in, especially at Christmas? What would you have done? Tell him there is no room?”

“Invite the vampire into your house,” Douglas answered, his own voice louder and more strident. “He told you himself: Evil can come in only if you invite it.”

Alice paled a little. “No one can come in unless they are invited,” she said, glaring at him. “Don’t tell me we’ve done this so well you actually believe in this vampire stuff?” She tried to laugh, and failed. It came out as a gasp of breath, with no humor and no conviction.

“I believe in evil. And in stupidity,” he said bitterly.

Her eyes raked him up and down. Her lip curled a little. “Don’t we all?”

“Of course we do.” Lydia moved closer to Douglas’s side. “If we didn’t before, we should now.” She faced Alice. “You are fortunate to have the love of so fine a man, Miss Netheridge. I think he is something like Jonathan Harker, brave and modest, not knowing how to fight evil because he has none within himself, to be able to understand it.”

Alice went even paler. She started to say something, then changed her mind and walked away.

“Perhaps you’d like to attack the children again after we’ve finished lunch?” Joshua suggested to Lydia with an edge of sarcasm that was breathtaking. “Just pretend you have the dummy in your arms. Leave it in the shadows. Drop it, if it seems right to you, and then come forward to Harker and Van Helsing.”

Caroline put her hands over her face and pretended she was somewhere else, just to give herself time to re-gather her strength.

he crypt scene and Lucy’s final scene, as a vampire, went quite smoothly. They moved into the last act: the hunt for Dracula. Vincent was slightly overplaying Van Helsing’s mimicry of Renfield, but he added some details that were very vivid, and truly tragic, evoking Renfield as a man once decent, now a helpless victim of the terrible vampire. Joshua told him very firmly to keep all that he had added in; if the play ran five minutes longer because of it, then so be it.

“It’s not necessary,” James protested. “We’re ten minutes over time already. We’ll lose the audience.”

“No, we won’t,” Joshua told him. “It’s a superb piece of acting.”

“We’re here to entertain, not show off,” Mercy said defensively. “Vincent’s just trying to impress Mr. Netheridge. He’s looking for another lead in the London West End.”

“On that performance, he deserves it,” Joshua said. “And it’s important to the play. He makes Renfield matter to us.”

“Renfield’s trivial, a plot device,” James said with disgust.

“He’s a plot device that works extremely well,” Joshua said gravely. “His degradation from decent man to fly- and rat-eating lunatic shows us more clearly than any words what the power of the vampire is. Through Van Helsing we watch him die, but for an instant return to the man he once was. This is the only time we get to see that, to understand how far he fell. If we’re not frightened of Dracula after that, then we are truly stupid.”

James drew in his breath to argue, then let it out again. He was actor and dreamer enough to know the truth of what Joshua said.

They followed the script through to the end. They even tried the effect of the lights to create the illusion of a snowstorm, and cut down the words used to describe the last chase of the coffin carried through the mountain pass as the lights dimmed in imitation of the sun sinking in the west. They killed Dracula in its last rays, and the unearthly scream that rang out as the light faded and the curtain came down drew a moment’s total silence, and then a roar of applause.

“It will work,” Joshua said simply. “Thank you for your ideas, Mr. Ballin. You have helped us enormously. Without you we might never have succeeded.”

Ballin bowed, smiling. “It was a great pleasure,” he said. “A very great pleasure. Miss Alice, I think you have a happy future ahead of you.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes shining.

inner was quiet. Everyone was tired and ready to retire early. There were no more problems to solve; all that was left was for the script, much amended, to be learned by heart so there were no mistakes, no hesitations. In fact, several of them would write out a new copy of the script, clean, without the scratchings-out and scribbled margin notes. Many actors found writing out the script was an excellent way to commit the words to memory.

Caroline wrote out the script as well, not every word, but the key phrases that cued the light changes. The prompting script would be with Alice, though Caroline had often taken on that task. Alice’s parts onstage were only a few words here and there: a servant or a messenger. It would not be difficult to fill all the roles and still act as prompter. The lights were crucial, and Caroline wanted to focus entirely on them.

Joshua was sitting at the small desk in the bedroom and Caroline was on the bed, reading her cues over again, when she remembered a note she had written hastily about the lighting of Lucy’s death scene. She had left it on the stage.

“I’ll just go and get it,” she said, slipping her feet off the bed and standing up. “I won’t be long.”

“Shall I get it for you?” Joshua offered.

“No, thank you.” She walked over to him and touched his cheek lightly. “You’re busy.” She looked down at his half-written page. “There’s another hour’s work you have to do still. I’m not afraid of vampires in the dark. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so.”

Joshua smiled and turned back to the desk. She was right; it would take at least another hour or so to complete.

Caroline went out onto the landing and down the stairs to the main hall. The lights were always left burning low—but quite sufficient for her to move swiftly toward the passage to the theater. The hall seemed even more magnificent in the shadows: the ceilings higher, the checkered marble floor bigger, the stairs sweeping up on either side disappearing dramatically into the dark corners where they turned and curled back to the gallery above.

The long passage to the theater was even darker, leaving the distance between the niched candles heavily shadowed, the outlines of pictures barely visible. She walked briskly. Luckily there were no chairs or jutting tables to bump into. Not even the vase of bamboo was there now, she remembered, with a small smile.

She turned the first corner, then the second, her eyes on the wall ahead, searching for the next candle along the corridor. Then she tripped over something and pitched forward, landing hard on the floor on her hands and knees. She got up slowly, shaken and bruised. How could she have been so clumsy? She turned to see what she had fallen over, and at first did not understand what it was. She was in the shadow between the lights, and the object looked like a pile of curtains dropped on the ground.