Chapter 11
Mr. Culpepper wasn’t in his office at the Piccadilly Playhouse.
I followed the corridor towards the dressing rooms and quickly realized mid-afternoon was a busy time of day in the theater.
Actors and actresses were beginning to arrive, squeezing past me in the narrow corridor to reach their dressing rooms. A man’s voice filled the cramped space as he performed vocal exercises, and a group of women talked loudly to be heard over him—and each other.
Backstage staff hurried past me carrying props, costumes and stage pieces.
None seemed to care that an extra person was in their midst, and I wasn’t stopped.
I knocked on Dotty Clare’s dressing room door. When she didn’t respond, I continued my search and found her in the main women’s dressing room. The door stood open even though one of the actresses wore only her corset and wide-leg bloomers.
“Miss Fox?” came the familiar voice of Mr. Alcott from behind me. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for Mr. Culpepper.”
“I haven’t seen him. Did you try his office?”
Dotty joined us, wearing a silk dressing gown and slippers. She leaned against the doorframe and languidly lifted an arm and pointed towards the door that led to the stage. “He’s out there with my understudy. That girl requires work. Honestly, I think he should get someone else.”
“It’s too late to get another,” Mr. Alcott said. “There’s no time for a new girl to learn the lines. What if you got ill tomorrow? Or you had an accident?”
“Going to push me off a balcony too, Perry?”
He gasped.
Dotty turned to me, a satisfied smile on her lips. “Have you seen my show yet, Miss Fox?”
“Your show?” Mr. Alcott scoffed.
“Find Miss Fox some tickets, will you, Perry?” She patted his cheek. “Good man.” She walked off, her hips swaying seductively and the silk gown fluttering around her ankles.
Mr. Alcott shook his head. “She’s getting more unbearable every day. She’d best be careful or someone might push her off the balcony. Her understudy perhaps.”
I made a small sound of shock and he gave me an arched look.
“You seem disturbed by our little spats, Miss Fox. Clearly you haven’t spent much time around actors.”
“It’s always this nasty?”
“That’s not nasty. Not that Dotty and I are friends, either. I have made great friends in the theater though. Pearl, for example.” He released a shuddery breath and blinked back tears. “It’s beginning to sink in that she’s never going to walk out on that stage again.”
Mr. Culpepper emerged through the stage door then stopped upon seeing me. “I don’t have time for your questions.” He strode past me.
I raced after him. “This won’t take long.”
“Not now, Miss Fox.” He paused outside his office door. “I’m too busy. Good day.”
There was only one thing to do—tell him here and now in the corridor. “Pearl had a child.”
His jaw slackened.
“The child was adopted by her sister and brother-in-law, the Larsens. They’re bringing her up as their own.”
His gaze shifted away and he frowned in thought. After a moment, as if he’d been wound up, he invited me inside. He closed the door behind me, but I remained near it while he rested his hands on the desk.
He lowered his head. “I’ve never seen the girl. I don’t even know her name.”
“It’s Millie. She’ll be four in March.”
He sat heavily on the desk chair and rubbed his chin. The fingers of his other hand lightly tapped the desk. He was calculating Millie’s birth year and perhaps when she must have been conceived. His fingers stopped tapping and he swallowed heavily.
“Pearl stopped working for a few months over the winter of ninety-six. She told me she was ill and went to convalesce at her sister’s home.”
So I’d been right. Millie was Pearl’s child. A niggling doubt had lingered after Mrs. Larsen denied it. “You never saw Pearl during that time?”
“She didn’t want to see me. She wrote saying she was too ill and illness made her look ugly.
” He almost smiled, but it didn’t quite eventuate.
“She was always worried about how she looked, even with me.” He passed both hands over his face.
When they drew away, he glanced up at me.
“My God. You’ve shocked me, Miss Fox. I—I can’t believe she wouldn’t tell me! ”
I couldn’t quite believe it either. But if Mr. Culpepper was lying, he was a very good actor.
“Is the girl mine?” he asked.
“I hoped you could tell me.”
He lifted a shoulder. “The timing fits. We were certainly together then, but…” He squeezed his eyes shut.
“But she was also with Lord Wrexham,” I finished.
He gave a small nod. “She would have told me if the child was mine. Wouldn’t she?
” He seemed to be asking himself, or perhaps the ghost of Pearl.
His gaze grew distant. “When she returned to work, she was as happy as she’d ever been.
She and Wrexham went to a lot of parties then.
She was always careful not to mention them around me, but I heard.
It was almost as if she decided to make the most of what was on offer, and there was a banquet spread out before her. ”
That didn’t sound like someone who’d just given up her baby. Unless she hadn’t wanted that baby.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” he muttered.
I bit the inside of my lip. The only reason she wouldn’t have told him was because she knew, or suspected, the child wasn’t his.
I went to open the door at my back, but thought of one more question. “Did Pearl ever ask you for money?”
He’d been rubbing his hand through his hair and when he stopped, his hair stuck out at odd angles from his head. “No.”
“Not even quite recently?”
He shook his head. “She knows I couldn’t give her anything. Besides, Rumford gave her everything she could have wanted. What did she need more for?”
I thanked him and slipped out, leaving him staring vacantly after me.
I was glad I’d spoken to him. His answers were a revelation.
And yet some things didn’t ring true. How could he have not known that his lover had a baby?
Surely he would have noticed the swell of her belly when they were together before her self-imposed confinement.
And surely he wouldn’t simply have accepted her excuse that she was ill.
If he loved her, he would have tried to see her during her illness.
I also didn’t believe that he had no money. He was the manager of one of London’s premier theaters. Even if he didn’t have enough on hand for whatever Pearl needed, he could get a loan. If nothing else, Pearl would have gone to the man she loved first before going to Lord Wrexham.
If she had asked Mr. Culpepper for money so she could take back her child, he must have become angry that she’d never told him about Millie.
Perhaps they argued and he killed her during a confrontation.
Perhaps the entire conversation I’d just had with him was a fabrication, an act.
He might not be an actor himself, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t perform when necessary.
The more I thought about it, the more I warmed to the idea. Ever since realizing Millie was Pearl’s daughter, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What other reason could there be for Pearl to want money? She was going to pay off her sister and raise Millie herself.
Which pointed to Mrs. Larsen as the murderer. She could have killed Pearl out of fear that she was going to lose the girl she’d raised as a daughter for almost four years.
“Miss Fox! Wait!”
Mr. Alcott hurried along the corridor behind me, waving some strips of paper in the air. As he drew closer, I realized they were tickets. He handed them to me. “They’re for tonight’s performance. Best seats in the house.”
“Thank you. I look forward to it.”
He leaned forward and whispered, “Dotty’s performance won’t be as good as Pearl’s.”
The mention of Pearl reminded me just how close they’d been. “May I ask you a very personal question about Miss Westwood?”
“This sounds serious. What is it?”
“Did she ever mention that she’d had a child?”
“Bloody hell,” he murmured. “No, never. When was this?”
I didn’t like spreading gossip, but I needed answers and this man might be able to give them to me. “The child will be four in March. Pearl’s sister and brother-in-law have been raising her as their own.”
He shook his head. “I’m flabbergasted. Not only did Pearl never mention her, but…” He shook his head.
“Go on.”
“But as I said, I never had an inkling. Even now that you’ve told me, I can’t think of a single time Pearl even hinted at that child being hers. There were no photographs of her in her dressing room, no children’s drawings. I don’t even know the girl’s name.”
“Millie.”
“She bought her a gift at Christmas, of that I’m sure. It was a teddy bear. She asked me if I thought it was a good gift for a toddler, but you’re saying the girl is almost four.” He shook his head over and over. “How could she not have told me?”
The more he spoke, the more he threw cold water over my theory. “So there were no times you thought she seemed sad? As if she regretted giving the child away?”
“Pearl was never sad. She was always happy. She had everything she could ever want, as far as I knew—men who adored her, a generous benefactor who lavished her with gifts. If she regretted anything, she never showed that side to me, and I was her best friend.”
A best friend who hadn’t known about Pearl’s relationship with Mr. Culpepper. So perhaps he hadn’t known Pearl’s true feelings about the baby, either.
But everything in the picture he painted of her was the same that others painted. Pearl was happy. She enjoyed her life. She didn’t act like a woman who missed her child and wanted her back. Surely if she had, her lover and friend would have known, or at least seen some small sign.