Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Graham dragged in a deep breath of the familiar scents of the theater—greasepaint, sweat, and sawdust—and held it. Waiting.
The noise was terrific. Even Fanshawe, who had come up through the music halls and penny shows, struggled to make himself heard over the crowd. Graham considered whether to signal for the curtain to be dropped, to put the play out of its misery at last.
Then Julia stood, paper in one hand, quill in the other, and an unexpected hush fell over the audience.
Less out of respect than morbid curiosity, he feared. Theatergoers found entertainment in spectacle, even in failure. He should never have agreed to this, should never have let Julia go on.
By Christ, she was brave, though. Her posture revealed no hint of nervousness. She looked every inch the clever, confident reviewer whose judgment deserved to be heeded.
Oh, but she was foolish, too—foolish in her determination to rescue this play. After tonight, she would be the subject of whispers wherever she went, and for longer than he cared to imagine.
And he loved her for all of it, for her spirit and her heart and her strength. She would meet society’s scorn with a twinkle in her eye—and pray God, he added, pressing the ring box in his pocket against his ribs, with me at her side.
The hope and love that had flickered to life last week during Sterling’s visit were now burning brightly in his chest. For Julia hadn’t just stepped onstage intending to save The Poison Pen, or even the Magazine for Misses.
He understood that she was doing everything in her power to save him, as well—not Blackadder, but him. The man he had once been. The man he could be again.
Fingers plucked at his sleeve, and he glanced down to see Sawyer urging him to move. “You can’t stand there, my lord.” He pointed above their heads.
Graham followed his gesture to a network of ropes and pulleys, connecting the poles from which hung the heavy painted backdrops, anchored by pendulous sandbags. Being struck by any one of the objects dangling above them would at the very least render a man unconscious. Stagehands crouched high above on rough-hewn boards, waiting to drop the scenery on cue and trusting that anyone backstage would know better than to be in the way.
“Else you’ll be leaving your brains on the boards, as well as your heart,” Sawyer finished, with a sideways glance toward Julia, who was at present struggling to disguise a laugh as Fanshawe plodded his way through another verse.
“That obvious, am I?”
“I daresay, since Blackadder trusts you, you must know something about the theater,” Sawyer conceded. Even behind the painted-on brows of the sardonic Reginald Briggs, his expression was teasing. “But an actor you’ll never be.”
Sawyer was a cleverer fellow than many, but Graham wondered whether he was the only member of the cast who had worked out Lord Dunstane’s feelings for the young woman he had introduced to them as “Miss Hayes.”
“Now then, my lord,” Sawyer continued, tugging at his arm. “Haven’t you got a box to watch from?”
He did, of course. And by his calculation, that box now held one empty seat, if not more. He had visions of ushers in the vestibule struggling to keep an outraged Lord Sterling—or perhaps Mrs. Hayes, brandishing her ebony walking stick—from storming the stage.
Even aside from the cold reception he anticipated, though, tonight his box wasn’t the proper place for him. He did not want to hold himself aloof and apart. He could not bear to be so far away from Julia.
So, he made do with withdrawing farther into the wings, into the shadows, watching as she moved with striking confidence through the scene and breathed life into his words.
To his utter amazement, the audience laughed—right where he’d hoped they would, and with less bitterness than a Blackadder script usually inspired. Fanshawe even managed to play up his own death for comic effect, done in in the end not by Perpetua’s review but by his own terrible verse.
The curtain swept down at the end of the scene. Fanshawe sat up, gathered the various papers strewn across both desks, and used them to prod Julia to exit the far side of the stage. While the dresser fussed over the pins in her costume, Julia pored over the script pages, her lips moving in silence as she tried to familiarize herself with the changes that had been made. Graham took a single step toward her, wanting to offer both praise and encouragement.
Once more, Sawyer grabbed his arm as a new backdrop came whizzing down from the rafters to replace the first. With a shake of his head, Sawyer stepped to his mark as the curtain rose again on a new scene. Half of the stage was now Reginald Briggs’s quarters, less dreary than his brother’s, and the other half had become the sitting room where Perpetua Philpot would receive the editor of her magazine.
Graham retreated once more into the shadows, leaning against a battered wardrobe where costumes were stored for quick changes between scenes. Briggs launched into a speech about his poor brother and the dastardly critic.
“ ‘She killed him,’ ” Sawyer-as-Briggs explained to his manservant, “ ‘with her poison pen. I daresay she stirs up some witches’ brew of poets’ tears and novelists’ sighs, speaks some dreadful incantation to harden her heart, then dips in her quill and the words begin to flow, an evil spell that blinds her readers to everything good.’ ”
When the audience laughed, Graham eased a sigh of relief. The changes were working. Everyone in the theater had heard for themselves how terrible the brother’s poetry was. Then, to cement their perception that Briggs was in the wrong, Sawyer picked up the slim volume of his brother’s poetry as he finished his speech and began to read it, obviously for the first time. The mischievous contortions of his face, his inability even to sit still as he paged through the poems, only increased the audience’s amusement.
The lines also served to create a sharp contrast between the Perpetua of Briggs’s imagination and the Perpetua the audience had come to know for themselves. As Briggs accused her of witchcraft, she arranged flowers in her sitting room and paused to listen to birdsong. In Mrs. Cole’s experienced hands, the revised character had begun to show the requisite softness and gentleness; Julia’s genuine innocence and sincerity—the lack of makeup had turned out to be a stroke of brilliance—only amplified those traits. Just as Graham had planned from the beginning, everyone was falling in love with her.
Or . . . well, something like that.
By the end of the next scene, Briggs would be among them, and the play’s transformation from satiric tragedy to romantic comedy would be complete.
A muffled thump distracted him from the action on the stage. He sent a chiding glance to a nearby stagehand, who shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands to indicate that he had done nothing to make the noise. Graham tried to ignore it, in favor of the debate between Perpetua and her editor, who was demanding more cutting critiques to encourage circulation of his magazine.
“ ‘The public’s taste cannot be trusted. You must teach them what to think.’ ”
“ ‘But if what I tell them isn’t true, they will no longer trust me.’ ” Julia gestured with what might have been a draft of Perpetua’s next column. She was doing a masterful job of disguising the fact that she was reading most of her lines.
Fanshawe, who had crossed underneath the stage and come up to stand near Graham, nodded. “Yes, that’s it,” he whispered in a tone of astonishing encouragement.
Thump-thump! Thump!
This time, Graham felt the commotion as well as heard it. Beneath his shoulder, the sturdy piece of furniture rattled. What on earth? Next, they would be beset by rumors of a malevolent ghost.
He tried to open the wardrobe door and found it locked. “Have you a key?” he demanded of Fanshawe in a whisper.
“No, sir. The property manager—I’ll fetch him.” Fanshawe walked away as Graham dropped onto one knee, trying to peer through the keyhole.
It would be as well if he didn’t watch the scene between Briggs and Perpetua, when they spoke directly to one another through their work, coming ever closer though still meant to be in separate rooms in different parts of the city. It was the scene he had acted out with Julia not so very long ago, the scene that had made him realize that it was useless to deny his feelings for her. He’d made few changes to it, since it had obviously worked so well to communicate the forbidden spark between writer and critic.
He glanced over one shoulder to judge the progress of both the scene and Fanshawe. Onstage, the actors grew ever more intimate. He felt a familiar surge of jealousy as Sawyer’s hand rose, almost touching Julia’s upturned face. Beyond them, the audience seemed to hold its breath.
He both couldn’t bear to watch and didn’t want to tear his eyes away. Damn it! Fanshawe was taking his own sweet time. What had got trapped inside the wardrobe? An animal, perhaps? He had seen cats hanging around the alley behind the theater, looking for mice. One might have sneaked its way inside the building, he supposed, and fancied that the open wardrobe looked like an inviting spot for a nap.
But no matter how alarmed such a creature might have been to awake and find itself locked in, Graham doubted that three or four those scrawny strays together would be capable of making the heavy wardrobe shudder. Perhaps one of the urchins who hung about had thought to play a prank and found himself stuck instead?
At last, Fanshawe returned bearing a ring of keys that would have done the chatelaine of the castle proud. It would take an eternity to sort through them. “Sorry, sir.”
Graham snatched them from the man’s grasp and began to search for one that looked like it might fit the wardrobe lock. Too big. Too small. Fanshawe was no help; his attention was, at long last, all on the play. Finally, Graham fitted the proper key into the keyhole.
“Oh, brava, Miss Addison,” murmured Fanshawe as the scene drew toward its conclusion and the doors to the wardrobe sprang open.
Mrs. Cole rolled out and onto the floor.
She was bound at wrist and ankle with rope, her mouth stuffed with a dirty rag. Terror flared in her eyes as she stared up at Graham.
“My God! Who did this?” he exclaimed as he pulled free the gag.
She tried to speak, but no sound came from her parched tongue. Fanshawe, who now crouched beside Graham though his gaze was still locked on the stage, shrugged helplessly. A stagehand reached into his pocket and handed over a flask. Though its contents smelled strong enough to peel paint, Graham tipped it to Mrs. Cole’s lips, and she drank greedily and gratefully.
“I don’t—ahh!” she gasped as Graham fumbled with the knots at her wrists, revealing angry abrasions. “I don’t know. I never saw. I was in my dressing room, looking over those new lines for the final act, when someone came in. The screen hid my view of the door. He must’ve . . . ooh.” As soon as her hands were free, she reached up to prod a tender spot on the back of her head.
“He struck you,” Graham said. “And then tied you up. But who—?”
Applause broke, drowning out his words as the scene playing out behind them ended. The curtain swept down again, and for a moment, all was dim. Sawyer hurried over to them.
“What’s happened?” he said, shrugging out of his coat and accepting another from the dresser, this one more flamboyant, suited to the style of a successful poet—a success he owed in no small measure to Perpetua’s reviews.
“Mrs. Cole was attacked in her dressing room, then bound and gagged and locked in here,” Graham explained. “Clearly, someone didn’t want her to take the stage tonight.”
“But it makes no sense,” she insisted, sitting up and rubbing her rope-burned ankles. “I’d just got the pages you sent, that dramatic confrontation scene, and I—”
“Pages I sent?” Graham echoed, absently winding the rope into a coil as he crouched beside her.
“Well, I assumed they came from you, my lord. You’ve delivered all his other changes, and these had a note pinned to them signed R.B.”
“R.B.?” Sawyer pulled a face. “I say, that’s strange. I didn’t get any—”
Graham leaped to his feet without hearing him. “Fanshawe!” he shouted, heedless of the fact that his voice would carry beyond the curtain. He realized now why the paper on which the threatening letter had been written felt so familiar. And the words the actor had spoken moments earlier had finally penetrated his brain. “Did I hear you call her Miss Addison?” He spun, searching for him.
His realization had come a moment too late.
Fanshawe stood with his back to the curtain, a knife in one hand, the other elbow wrapped around Julia’s throat. She clawed fruitlessly at his forearm as he dragged her away from the others, toward the center of the stage. Just as Graham lunged toward them, the curtain rose.
The audience gasped in unison, then nervous giggles and uncertain whispers began to erupt around the theater.
“Isn’t that fellow meant to be dead?”
“Perhaps it’s a ghost story.”
“But that’s Lord Dunstane! Is he taking on a role too?”
And from above, the tremulous voice of Mrs. Hayes. “J-Julia?”
Fanshawe laughed. “This is working out even better than I planned, my lord. I thought that if I got rid of Mrs. Cole, then the show would be canceled.” He continued to retreat from Graham, dragging Julia with him across the stage, until Perpetua’s writing desk was at his back. A gleeful, mad smile stretched across his face. “It was beyond my wildest dreams to think that Miss Addison here might step into the part and make things even worse.”
The man did not seem to have been watching the same performance as Graham.
“Why?” he asked in a softer voice, slowly approaching the pair. “Why would you want the play to be ruined?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Blackadder’s lost his touch. His plays used to cut like a steel blade.” He twisted his weapon, making it gleam in the light. “But this one’s got less tooth than an old whore.”
“You pleaded for a part in it,” Graham pointed out, taking another step.
“That’s close enough,” Fanshawe said, turning the knifepoint toward Julia. “I didn’t used to have to go begging for parts, you know. Not until the reviewers got their teeth in me. But what do they know? What gives ’em the right? Muckin’ about with a man’s livelihood, and some of ’em no more than girls.” He spat. “When I heard Blackadder had it in for Miss on Scene, I wanted in. Knew I could count on him to do what had to be done, teach the critics a lesson once and for all. Then this girl showed up, wanted to turn things all soft, like. Didn’t seem to understand that Perpetua Philpot was the villain of the piece. And you—” Here the knife flicked toward Graham. “The high and mighty patron didn’t put a stop to it—you went all dewy-eyed and let her have her way with you, the play, all of us! I decided I’d have to take care of Miss on Scene and her ilk myself.”
Graham didn’t dare risk a glance over his shoulder to see whether Sawyer or anyone else was prepared to back him up if he made a move to rescue Julia. The audience sat, stunned into silence, listening to her panting, rasping breaths, as she struggled ineffectually against Fanshawe’s choke hold. To think, Graham had promised to look after her happiness.
He should have vowed to keep her from harm.
“Stroke of luck,” Fanshawe continued, giving Julia a silencing shake, “that I happened to be in the same pub as the clerk from Porter’s, overheard him crying into his ale about M-M-Mrs. Goode’s m-m-magazine.” He pulled a face and made his jaw wobble in mocking imitation of the man. The story jibed with what Keynes had been able to learn from the clerk, who had tried to drown his sorrows at his loss of employment and couldn’t recall to whom he might have spoken. “Now I know who’s behind it all.” He sent a leering glance toward the theatergoers around him. “And soon you will too. I mean to end it, if you won’t.” Those last words were directly squarely at Graham.
“But the notes you sent were signed ‘R.B.’ ”
“That’s right. For Robert Briggs,” he said, naming his character. “Though I knew those silly girls at the magazine would think it was Blackadder who’d done it. Even you must have wondered—must have feared he’d found out at last that you were destroying his play and with it, his name.”
“Actually, no.”
Graham calculated frantically. Would it work? Could he catch Fanshawe off guard, open him to an attack?
“You see . . .” Graham raised his voice to make certain that every one of the thousands present could hear him. “I’m Blackadder.”
At that, the audience gasped as one, just as he had hoped. The sound of their surprise, or perhaps the revelation itself, startled Fanshawe just enough that he relaxed his hold, and Julia was able to slip free of his grasp.
Fanshawe snarled. “Damn me. I might’ve known it.” He kicked at her, but she had already scrambled out of his reach, behind the writing desk. Deciding to ignore her, Fanshawe instead stepped toward Graham, blade first. “Just another nob, toying with the lives of honest working men like we,” he said, with a sweep of his other arm that took in everyone on the stage and behind the scenes. “Well, no more.”
He started to lunge at Graham, then seemed to catch a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and twisted his body at the last minute. Julia stood behind him, the brass candlestick from the desk in her upraised hands, prepared to bash his skull. The arm holding the blade curved toward her instead, toward the defenseless expanse of her rib cage—and beneath that, her liver, her lungs, and her precious, precious heart.
Graham leaped for the knife, pulling the man’s eyes toward him as she brought the candlestick down on Fanshawe’s head. The actor collapsed to the stage like a dummy filled with sand.
But not before his knife connected with flesh, piercing the center of Graham’s palm, its tip reemerging through the back of his right hand.