1
Treating of Our Heroine's Stage Career, Including Accounts of Her Momentary Madness and Ignominious Dismissal
When Chloe Bathurst was seven years old, living in Wapping with her widowed father and tiresome twin brother, she decided that her future prosperity would be best secured by the arrival, sooner rather than later, of a wicked stepmother. The evidence was beyond dispute. Cinderella the ash-maiden, Snow White the dwarf-keeper, Gretel the hag-killer-in each such case a young woman had found happiness only after her father had wooed and wed a malign second wife.
By her ninth birthday Chloe had come to recognize the naiveté of her wish, and she felt just as glad Papa had neglected to marry a bad person. (Indeed, she felt just as glad he'd not remarried at all.) As it happened, this oversight was not the only accidental boon Phineas Bathurst bestowed upon his daughter, for he also inadvertently guided her towards a glamorous profession. Whereas some men are congenital blacksmiths and others constitutionally sailors, Phineas was a natural-born puppeteer, given to seizing upon whatever inert object might lie to hand-clock, kettle, mallet, lantern, fish head-and blessing it with the gift of mobility and the power of speech. Illusion mongering, Chloe concluded, was in her blood. She must become an actress.
Amongst Papa's many pièces bien faites, she had particularly fond memories of a dialogue between a wine bottle and a flagon of ale, each arguing that its ancestors had done the better job of making human beings the oafish and dullard race they were. She likewise cherished an encounter between a hammer and an apple, the former blaming the latter for the Fall of Man, the latter vilifying the former for its collaboration in the Crucifixion-a dispute neatly resolved when the hammer turned the apple to mash, declaiming, "And so Popish power once again has its way with Jewish lore."
Several years into Chloe's quest for theatrical fame, an irony presented itself. Whatever role she was playing at the moment, her personal circumstances would soon come to reflect the fate of the character in question: not in faithful facsimile-and here was where the irony emerged-but in mirror opposite. If Mr. Charles Kean, manager of the Adelphi Theatre and director of its shamelessly melodramatic offerings, had entrusted to Chloe the blind flower-seller Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii, the tragic Queen Cleopatra in Siren of the Nile, or any other doomed and desperate heroine, she knew that ere long her life beyond the boards would be filled with suitors and champagne. But if she'd been tapped to portray a woman for whom all came right in the end-the brave French castaway Françoise Gauvin in The Raft of the Medusa, the Southern belle Pansy Winslow in Lanterns on the Levee-she could safely assume Dame Fortune was preparing some unpleasant surprises. So compelling did Chloe find this phenomenon that in time she became a connoisseur of irony per se, to a point where no instance of vivid incongruity, from gaunt glutton to tippling vicar, blushing trollop to fastidious tramp, escaped her notice or failed to amuse her.
It was therefore with joyous anticipation that, two days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Chloe contracted to essay the lead in The Beauteous Buccaneer, Mr. Jerrold's violent narrative of the historical female pirate Anne Bonney, who'd fought and plundered side by side with her friend, Mary Read, and her lover, Captain Jack Rackham, prince of freebooters. As staged by Mr. Kean, The Beauteous Buccaneer was a dark divertissement, replete with long shadows, choruses of wailing nereids, and misterioso trills boiling up from the orchestra pit. In one particularly poignant episode Pirate Anne deposited her newborn infant (whom Jack had refused to acknowledge as his own) at the gates of an orphanage, bidding the baby a tearful farewell, then melting into the fog. The final scene found Anne being hauled onto a gallows, outfitted with a noose, and hanged.
Chloe's future, in short, looked rosy. She could practically taste the oysters and the sparkling wine. And yet, strangely enough, in the case of The Beauteous Buccaneer the usual disjuncture between her life and her art did not obtain. No sooner had she finished cleaning her face following her fifteenth Saturday matinee performance (so that her painted brow changed from white to rose, and her cherry lips turned pink) than a visitor entered her dressing-room-her very own wayward father, who at last report had been working as a dustman in St. Albans. His arrival occasioned in Chloe sharp and sudden pangs of remorse, for he wore a pauper's uniform, complete with brown hempen tunic and matching skullcap, and his hands displayed the scars and scabs of one who'd been condemned to relentless toil.
"Yes, child, your eyes do not deceive you," said Phineas. "I'm living at Her Majesty's expense in Holborn Workhouse-a place no sane person would enter of his own free will. Thus does our nation hold down the high cost of poverty."
"Papa, you should have told me," Chloe moaned.
"I should have told myself," said Phineas with a shiver of chagrin. "Instead I kept pretending the world was about to provide me with a living."
She slipped behind her fan-folded Chinese screen and began shedding her pirate costume-leather corset, crimson-striped pantaloons, gleaming black boots-in favor of street clothes. "When last we dined together, you had hopes of becoming a hackney coachman," she remarked from her makeshift boudoir.
"A vocation at which I would have succeeded had my passengers not expected me to possess a promiscuous familiarity with London geography," said Phineas. "Shortly thereafter I became a carpenter's assistant, a calling I abandoned upon realizing that my maul bore a grudge against my thumb. Next I apprenticed myself to a locksmith, leaving his service after he told me that burglars would one day drink my health."
Chloe stepped free of the screen, brushing her taffeta skirt into place, her chestnut hair now secured with mother-of-pearl combs, a gift from a former swain. Briefly she contemplated herself in the looking-glass. Her features were inarguably attractive: large eyes, straight nose, high cheekbones-a face for launching, if not a thousand ships, then certainly a fleet of robust fishing smacks.
"You must be famished, Papa."
"Not so much for food, dear child, as for your charming presence. Offer me a bite of cheese, though, and I shan't refuse."
Sensing that her father's hunger was rather greater than he allowed, she suggested they repair to the Cloven Hoof for some supper and a pint of ale. At first he demurred, saying, "Surely my daughter would be ashamed to appear in public with a man dressed in a pauper's uniform."
"No more than her father would be ashamed to appear in public with the most notorious lady buccaneer ever to stain the pages of English history," said Chloe, tying on her green velvet bonnet. "Take my arm, Papa, and I'll procure for you the fattest pie in Covent Garden."
* * *
It was for Chloe a measure of her father's despondency that, as they sat in the noisy and smoke-filled tavern awaiting their respective orders of mutton stew and kidney pie, he declined to bestow life on any inanimate object. In the past he would have introduced the candles to one another, exhorting them to seize the day ere their paraffin flesh melted away. Or he would have transformed the napkins into shrouds worn by spectral rats, encouraging the phantom rodents to haunt the dog who'd murdered them.
The food arrived promptly. Fervently devouring his pie, washing it down with tidal gulps of ale, Phineas explained that he was obliged to eat quickly, for his furlough ended at sundown.
"They've got you doing hard labor like some Hebrew slave in Egypt," said Chloe, indicating her father's ravaged hands.
"Breaking stones, grinding bones, picking oakum."
"Oakum? Is that a crop?"
"Now that I think about it, aye, 'tis a kind of crop, sown with malice and harvested in misery. From dawn to dusk we stoop over masses of discarded rope, untwisting the fibers for shipbuilder's caulk. The overseer's not satisfied unless our fingers bleed."
"We must liberate you from that abhorrent place." A tear exited Chloe's left eye, tickling her cheek as it fell.
"I came not to unload my troubles but to offer my accolades." Phineas removed his pauper's cap and kneaded his brow with the ball of his thumb.
"You saw my performance?"
"From a secret vantage on the catwalk. You make a splendid blackguard, darling. I loved how you stabbed the bosun in the gizzard when he discovered your true sex. The audience got its money's worth in blood."
"In beetroot juice, actually."
Chloe leaned back in her seat, her roving gaze confirming her worst fears. Half the customers were staring at the moist-eyed actress. Her irony bone began to sing. Normally when dining at the Hoof, she hoped that the patrons, having just seen her onstage, would accord her admiring glances-but now that she had their attention she wished them all gone.
"Watching you drink Jack Rackham under the table was equally enthralling," said Papa, daubing her tears with his napkin. "I assume that wasn't rum in your glass."
"Weak tea."
If Phineas Bathurst had ever entertained a sensible idea in his life, Chloe was unaware of it. Even his decision to marry the beautiful Florence Willingham had been fundamentally barmy, for she had evidently possessed the disposition of a gorgon conjoined to the ethics of a snake. In the opinion of the neighborhood gossips, Phineas's wife was determined to put him in an early grave, and it was only her own death (minutes after the respective births of Chloe and her brother) that thwarted this ambition.
"Listen, Father, I am lodged in Tavistock Street with the woman who played Pirate Mary." Chloe slurped down a spoonful of broth. "You are welcome to sleep on the floor each night till you find employment. We'll steal a mattress for you from the properties department."
"Your generosity touches me, but my situation's more complicated than you imagine," said Phineas. "For all my fifty years, I still own a stout arm and a strong back, and so the workhouse authorities count me a great asset. Give old Bathurst an extra helping of gruel, and he'll pick oakum with a frenzy to shame Hercules sweeping the stables. But should I ever leave the place, those same authorities will hunt me down and toss me into debtors' prison."
"You're in arrears, Papa?"
"For the past two years, I've availed myself of England's peerless network of moneylenders. I'm proud to say that, thanks to my continuous expectations of solvency, I donated most of this income to people even needier than I. In time my creditors' patience ran short, and I saw no choice but to don a pauper's uniform and flee to a workhouse."
"What is the total of your debts?"
"Let me tell you about my favorite scene, Pirate Anne leaving her baby at the orphanage. It brought a lump to my throat."
"Father, please, I must know the sum."
"If you insist on dragging arithmetic into our conversation, the figure may be obtained by adding four hundred pounds to five hundred pounds."
"That's nine hundred pounds!"
"Such a mathematical prodigy you are, Chloe, a regular Isaac Newton. And now, to calculate the absolute and final total, we must reckon with six hundred additional pounds."
"Good Lord! You owe fifteen hundred?"
"Yes. Correct. Plus interest."
"How much interest?"
"Five hundred, more or less."
"Sweet Jesus! Two thousand pounds?"
"I know it sounds like a king's ransom, but I've researched the matter, and for two thousand pounds you could barely redeem the bastard son of a pretender to the Scottish throne."
Chloe stared at the remainder of her stew, for which she presently enjoyed no appetite. "I have but four pounds to my name."
Not surprisingly, Phineas now inquired after the third member of the family, doubtless hopeful that Algernon had found some profitable occupation, and it became Chloe's duty to report that, to the best of her knowledge, her twin brother was still the incorrigible gamester and jack-of-no-trades he'd always been.
"The dear boy, so utterly his father's son," said Phineas. "The rotten apple never falls far from the crooked tree." He rose and attempted without success to assume a military bearing. "Thankee for the pie and ale, child, which for several glorious minutes made me forget the frightful workhouse porridge."
"When shall I see you again?"
"I am promised a second furlough in eighteen months' time."
"During which interval I'll move Heaven and Earth to free you."
Bending low, Phineas kissed Chloe's cheek. "No, child. Don't do it. Keep treading the boards, acting your heart out, making Anne Bonney live and breathe and suffer for her sins."
"Truth to tell, I find Anne so implausible a character I cannot rise to the occasion of her portrayal. Surely I was born to play better roles than those Mr. Kean gives me-and in better venues than the Adelphi."
"Including the role of a wife?" said Phineas in a tone of affectionate reproach. "I needn't tell you, darling, there comes a time in every actress's life when she's no longer suited to beauteous buccaneers, beguiling French castaways, or even the Queen of Egypt."
"'Tis a cruel profession I've picked," Chloe agreed, solemnly pondering the fact that, whereas twenty-five did not sound like a terribly advanced age, the same could not be said of a quarter-century. "You'll be pleased to hear that not long ago Mr. Throckmorton, who portrayed Jack Rackham this afternoon, proposed to me-and displeased to learn I rejected him." She squeezed her father's bristly hand. "Hear my vow, Papa. One morning whilst you're sitting down to unravel the day's hemp, I shall appear at your side. In a trice we'll gather up a barrel of plucked oakum and bear it by hired coach to St. Katherine Docks. On the River Thames lies a pirate sloop, which I've fashioned with my own hands, and once we've caulked her timbers with the oakum, we'll climb on board."
"And sail away," said Phineas, screwing his skullcap into place.
"On the morning tide. In time we'll reach an uncharted isle where the bananas taste like roast beef and the coconuts are bursting with ale."
"And the natives are all lyric poets as handsome as Lord Byron and witty as Mr. Pope." Phineas made a jaunty pirouette, as if to tell the onlookers that, though bent, he was not yet broken. "If my daughter doesn't get a lyric poet out of this adventure," he said, sauntering away, "I want naught to do with it."
* * *
In a universe rife with ambiguity and riddled with whim, Chloe Bathurst knew one thing for certain. No matter how great her popularity with aficionados of tasteless spectacles, any actress in the employ of the Adelphi Theatre would never accumulate two thousand pounds. Even before learning of her father's predicament, she'd endeavored to join a more prosperous troupe. Over the years she'd secured auditions with the great patent houses-the Drury Lane, the Haymarket, the Covent Garden-all three still trading on the fact that, prior to the Theatre Regulation Act, they'd been the only venues in London licensed to mount respectable fare. The directors offered her not a word of encouragement. Her voice, they insisted, was ill-suited to substantive plays. She could never do right by Goneril, Ophelia, Rosalind, or even Juliet.
When Mr. Kean assumed management of the company, Chloe had hoped she might enjoy a corresponding increase in salary, for that conceited actor regularly insisted he was not in the business of directing mere melodramas. He preferred the term "tragical romances," which sounded to Chloe like the sort of challenge a dedicated thespian could meet only with the aid of monetary incentives. She'd first learned of Mr. Kean's affectation when, eight days before the show was to open, they got around to rehearsing The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mr. Buckstone's adaptation of a mystery story by the American writer Mr. Poe.
"What a marvelous potboiler we have here," remarked Chloe's colleague and rooming-companion, Fanny Mendrick, after the company had read the script aloud. A pocket Venus whose ringing voice seemed transplanted from an actress twice her size, Fanny had been cast as Mademoiselle Camille L'Espanaye, fated to die at the hands of an Indonesian orang-utang. "But I'm not looking forward to getting rammed up a chimney by an ape."
"I do not direct potboilers," Mr. Kean informed Fanny. "I direct tragical romances."
"Show me a maiden being ravished by an orang-utang, and I'll show you a potboiler," said Chloe.
For all his vanity, she admired Charles Kean, who was touchingly devoted to his actress wife, the protean Ellen Tree, cast as the mother of the orang-utang's victim. Chloe also pitied him. As Dame Fortune had arranged the matter, Charles Kean was born the son of Edmund Kean, England's most celebrated actor, now fifteen years deceased. Though gifted in his own right, Kean the younger seemed destined to spend the rest of his life boxing with his father's shadow.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Kean, but I must agree with Miss Bathurst," said the dashing Mr. Throckmorton, who'd lost Chloe's hand but secured the role of Inspector Dupin. "Here at the Adelphi we do last-minute rescues, ridiculous coincidences, volcanic eruptions in lieu of plot resolutions, and apes stuffing young women up chimneys. It was ever thus."
"They do potboilers at the Lyceum," retorted Mr. Kean. "They do potboilers at the Trochaic and Sadler's Wells. Perhaps you'd be happier working for those tawdry houses."
"A question, Mr. Kean," said Chloe, who'd been assigned the part of Dupin's mistress, a character not found in the original tale. "Since we're all tragical romancers these days, might we be paid a tragical romancer's salary?"
Mr. Kean confined his reply to a sneer.
In subsequent months the Adelphi Company labored to do right by The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the next season found them investing considerable time and energy in Siren of the Nile, a triumph followed by their especially tragical and singularly romantic presentation of The Beauteous Buccaneer. Although the role was abominably written, Chloe had taken substantial pleasure in portraying Anne Bonney-but then came the luncheon with Papa, after which she could barely drag herself on stage, his plight having soured her on the world and all its institutions, not excluding the theatre. And then one Wednesday evening, as she stood beneath the noose prior to her execution, something snapped within her soul.
The scene had begun in normal fashion, with Pirate Anne's eleven-year-old urchin daughter, named Bronwyn by the orphanage authorities, arriving at the gallows seconds before the hangman would deliver her mother to the Almighty's mercy. Overwhelmed by this first and final reunion, Anne delivered a mawkish speech imploring her child to rise above whatever proclivity for iniquity she'd inherited from her buccaneer parents.
"Let me be a lesson to thee," said Anne. "Cleave to the straight and narrow, lest thou, too, be hanged for a pirate."
Bronwyn stumbled forward and kissed the scaffold, whereupon the hangman dropped the noose over Anne's head. A priest mounted the platform and, approaching the prisoner, made the incontrovertible point that repentance was superior to roasting in the flames of Hell.
"Ne'er hath God heard the prayers of so remorseful a miscreant!" declared Anne to the imaginary offstage mob. "Ne'er hath Heaven attended the words of a more sorrowful sinner!"
"Dear Lord, receive the shriven soul of this fallen woman," cried the priest, "who hath seen the error of her ways!"
Now the gas lamps arrayed along the proscenium went dim, leaving the stage lit only by a shimmering shaft of limelight trained on Chloe's face, at which juncture the fount of her despair (constrained till this moment by decorum and Mr. Jerrold's script) flowed forth, alien words filling her throat like rising gorge.
"A famous writer insists that nothing so wonderfully concentrates a person's mind as knowing he's to be hanged at dawn," she told the offstage mob, a departure from the text so radical that it shocked her as much as it doubtless bewildered those playing daughter, priest, and executioner. "But he neglected to mention that such mental clarity persists until the moment of death. Aye, my friends, 'twould seem I've been vouchsafed a vision of the future. Mine eyes behold a great English Queen presiding o'er an empire more mighty than ancient Rome. But all is not well in Victoria's realm. Whilst merchants get rich and nobles grow fat, the people suffer."
Chloe slipped out of the noose and, like a little girl playing hopscotch, jumped over the trapdoor.
"I see workhouses built to imprison the destitute, as if poverty were a crime and not a tragedy. I see broken men, sickly women, and, aye, helpless orphans forced to live on green meat and rancid gruel. I see these wretches spending day after day breaking stones and untwisting rope till their fingers bleed and blisters bloom on their palms. And so I implore ye, tell your children to tell their children to tell their children that such conditions must never come to pass on Albion's shores. I know that in the name of Christian charity our descendants will petition Her Majesty, appeal to Parliament, shame the aristocracy, remind the Church of its duties-whatever it takes to close the workhouses and give our lowborn brethren their due in love and bread!"
Suddenly an Adelphi patron shot from his seat and began screaming like a lunatic. "Hear! Hear! Listen to the pirate!" Half-blinded by the limelight, Chloe could barely see her votary, but he appeared to be a wild-eyed youth with a feral beard. "She speaks the truth!" he persisted, waving a stack of papers about as an arsonist might wield a firebrand. "Last month a brilliant pamphlet rolled off the presses-Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which I've just translated into English! It tells how the bourgeoisie will cease exploiting the proletariat only when workers control the instruments of production!"
Hisses, boos, jeers, and catcalls greeted the agitator's outburst.
"Shut up, you anarchist snake!"
"One more word, and I'll ram your nihilist teeth down your atheist throat!"
"Give us that lady Barabbas, and send the Jacobin to the gallows!"
"Tar his Chartist hide!"
"Feather his Socialist skin!"
No sooner had the agitator's antagonists stopped shouting than a smattering of stentorian voices came to his defense.
"Property is theft!"
"All power to the proletariat!"
"Crush the bourgeoisie!"
"Redistribution now!"
"Votes for workers!"
"God bless Tiny Tim!"
"God bless us, every one!"
Fearful that a riot was in the offing, Chloe stepped onto the trapdoor, placed the noose about her neck, and spoke the last lines of Mr. Jerrold's script: "Merciful Jesus, I pray that thou wilt lead my dear sweet Bronwyn along the path of righteousness! Send me to Perdition if such be thy will"-as always, the executioner now wrapped his gloved hands about the lever-"for I've just glimpsed Paradise in my daughter's smile!"
"'Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa'!" cried the agitator, reading from his manuscript. "'A ghost is haunting Europe'! 'The ghost of Communism'!"
And then, as always, the limelight faded to black, an interval sufficient for Chloe to sneak away whilst the property master climbed the scaffold stairs and suspended an effigy from the gallows crossbeam.
"'The poor have but their chains to lose'!" the agitator continued. "'They have a world to gain'!"
The limelight flared to life, illuminating the dangling corpse of Pirate Anne.
"'Laborers of all nations, come together'!"
The dazzling ray died, the curtain descended, and the playgoers charged pell-mell towards the exits, eager to distance themselves from this foul and heady thing called Communism.
* * *
Beyond her impatience with Mr. Jerrold's simpleminded conception of Anne Bonney, Chloe would admit that the lady pirate's life and her own were not entirely discontinuous. Just as Anne and Jack had indulged in activities almost certain of procreative consequences, so had Chloe allowed her first great love-Adam Parminter, the dapper son of a Brighton family grown rich by trade-to thrice seduce her at age seventeen without benefit of linen condom or other prophylactic measure, the ensuing catastrophe sparking in Mr. Parminter the same degree of callousness with which Jack had greeted the prospect of fatherhood. Whereas the prince of freebooters had persuaded Anne to leave their baby at an orphanage, the Brighton bounder had recommended that, in lieu of a marriage between Chloe and himself, she take hold of the infant when it arrived, carry the creature down to the Thames, and set it adrift, "rather like the newborn Moses, though without the seaworthy bassinett."
"I shall do no such thing," Chloe informed him.
"It's a more common practice than you imagine," Mr. Parminter insisted.
"And I'm a less ordinary person than you suppose," said Chloe, gasping from the hideousness of her paramour's scheme and the nausea of her sixth week. "You may have stolen my innocence, but my conscience is yet my own, and it requires me to nurture this child, even as I banish you from my life."
In the dreadful days that followed, Chloe repeatedly asked herself whether she believed the noble words with which she'd greeted Mr. Parminter's idea, never arriving at a fixed answer. Fortunately, she had in Fanny Mendrick not only a shoulder on which to cry but also a friend in whom to confide. The two stage-struck young women were on the point of making their first appearances before a London audience, having been cast as novice nuns in the Olympic Theatre's production of The Haunted Priory. Set in medieval England, this supernatural melodrama, newly penned by Mr. Buckstone, gave Chloe, as Sister Margaret, ten whole lines to speak and Fanny, as Sister Angelica, eight. Were Chloe not so miserable, the situation would have appealed to her sense of irony-for what incongruity could be greater than a ruined ingénue portraying a chaste fiancée of Christ?
"Oh, Fanny, am I mad to imagine I might bring up a child whilst pursuing a career on the stage?"
"As long as your ne'er-do-well father and prodigal brother remain ne'er-do-well and prodigal, then 'mad' is the proper word," replied Fanny. "For all its contempt of convention, I fear the theatrical world will not accommodate your indiscretion."
"By my calculation the creature arrives in seven months' time," said Chloe. "I have but two hundred days to find employment more consonant with motherhood." She endured yet another twinge of procreative nausea. "You're a churchgoer, Fanny. Will I burn in perpetual flames for conceiving a bastard child?"
"Though not a theologian, I am given to understand that the whole idea of Christ is to keep Hell's population to a minimum." Fanny rested a soothing hand on Chloe's cheek. "No, friend, you will not burn, and-if I can help it-neither will you starve."
Two nights later, both actresses stepped on stage in the premiere performance of The Haunted Priory. Their one and only scene had taken Sister Margaret and Sister Angelica to the subterranean crypt wherein lay the remains of former abbesses, for the novices wished to investigate the legend that the ghost of Abbess Hildegard stalked the place-a ghost with a secret: the location of a buried treasure. Hugging each other to quell their fears, the novices waited in the musty darkness, and then, at the stroke of midnight, the revenant appeared, covered in a moldering shroud and speaking in a voice like a corroded penny whistle-the estimable Ellen Tree in an artfully restrained performance.
"Yea, verily, a chest of doubloons is hidden on these grounds," said the ghost of Abbess Hildegard in response to Sister Margaret's query.
"Being poised to take the vow of poverty, Sister Angelica and I shan't spend the gold on ourselves," Chloe assured the ghost. "Rather, we would use it to renovate the priory."
"Giving the surplus to the poor," added Fanny.
"The treasure has lain in the earth these past two hundred years," said the ghost, "and there it will remain till the end of time."
"I am sore perplexed," said Fanny. "With the hoard in question, we could found an orphanage."
"And save the soul of many a harlot," added Chloe, suddenly aware of a viscous fluid migrating down her leg, warming her skin as it sought the floor. My baby weeps, she thought. The wretched thing sheds tears.
"Our Lord preached that wealth is the worst of Lucifer's many venoms," said the ghost, "poisoning the souls of all who seek it."
The sticky dribble became a flood. Chloe's bowels constricted. Panic clogged her windpipe. Glancing at the boards, she saw the blood pooling beneath the hem of her habit. The last line of the scene-Of all the women of my acquaintance, living or dead, you are quite the wisest, Abbess Hildegard, for you've given me to understand that this treasure, unearthed, would prove a bane worse than the Black Death-belonged to Sister Margaret, but Chloe could not speak it, being about to faint.
Having noticed the rushing red gobbets, Fanny straightaway swooped to the rescue, saying, "You are quite the wisest woman I know, Abbess Hildegard, dead or alive, for you have taught me how this treasure would prove a burden as dire as death-and now we must away, for Sister Margaret is enduring an onslaught of the vapors."
Fanny curled an arm about Chloe's shoulder, and together they staggered out of the crypt, at which juncture the set, the theatre, and the world went black.
Upon returning to consciousness Chloe found herself backstage, sprawled across the four-poster that had served as Abbess Hildegard's deathbed in act one. Fanny knelt beside her, cooling her brow with a damp kerchief, whilst Ellen Tree sponged away the sanguine remnants of the frightening event. Props from Olympic Theatre productions gone by loomed out of the shadows-a ball gown, a suit of armor, a siege cannon, Macbeth's head on a pike.
"Am I dying?" asked Chloe.
"Not in the least," said Fanny. "Be still. Tomorrow we feed you beef for breakfast-"
"At my expense," said Ellen Tree.
"By way of restoring the blood you've lost," Fanny explained.
"Blood-and everything," said Chloe as relief and exultation washed through her, borne on a tide of qualified remorse.
"Don't worry about tomorrow night's performance," said Fanny. "I shall collapse Margaret and Angelica into a single character."
"I myself once endured the very trial that befell you tonight," added Ellen Tree. "You are likely to recover in full."
"For reasons known but to Himself, God decrees that certain creatures must not come into the world," said Fanny, an observation on which Chloe was willing to let the whole cataclysmic matter rest.
* * *
But for the fact that the audience who'd witnessed Chloe's improvisation during the Wednesday evening performance of The Beauteous Buccaneer included a journalist in the employ of the Times, the affair might never have come to the public's attention. Owing to the efforts of that anonymous scribbler, however, half the city spent the following Friday gossiping about Miss Bathurst's gallows speech. DISTURBANCE AT ADELPHI THEATRE, shouted the page-two headline for the 17th of March, 1848. ACTRESS HARANGUES AUDIENCE WITH POLITICAL RANT, ran the first subheading. MOB VIOLENCE NARROWLY AVERTED. Amongst the consumers of this narrative was Chloe herself, who, upon reading of her recklessness, felt as if she were back on the gallows, the trapdoor opening beneath her feet. Seeking to distract herself, she fixed on an adjacent article summarizing the arguments of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, including their colorful conclusion that "the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers," the victory of the proletariat over the propertied classes having been ordained by a Wheel of History impossible to roll back-an idea she found genuinely diverting, though not sufficiently so to alleviate the misery caused by her emergent notoriety.
Later that afternoon, upon arriving at the theatre, Chloe discovered a note from Mr. Kean attached with sealing wax to her dressing-room mirror. Report to me immediately, it read.
Nervous and fretful, she approached the manager's office, her palms so damp she could barely turn the doorknob. Mr. Kean stood behind his desk, mallet in hand, tapping a nail into the plaster. Upon completing the task, he decorated the wall with a framed certificate indicating that Her Majesty had appointed him Master of Revels.
Seated on plush chairs, Fanny, Mrs. Kean, and Mr. Throckmorton greeted Chloe with tepid smiles. The presence of her disappointed swain prompted Chloe briefly to consider-and reaffirm-her commitment to chastity, the best available approximation of the virginity she'd surrendered long ago. Not only was Adam Parminter the first man to seduce her, he'd also been the last. Although a slap on the cheek normally sufficed to deter a suitor's untoward advances, occasionally she'd been obliged to introduce her favorite family heirloom, Grandpapa's bayonet, into the relationship.
Mr. Kean offered Chloe a chair, but she declined, explaining that she prided herself on receiving bad news without swooning.
"Naturally I should like to overlook Wednesday night's rabble-rousing," the manager began, gesturing towards a copy of the Times splayed open on his desk. Even at this distance Chloe could read DISTURBANCE AT ADELPHI THEATRE. "But I fear we have a crisis on our hands. Either playgoers will boycott us to protest your tirade, or a Chartist mob will show up one night hoping to witness a repetition of your outburst. Ergo, I took the liberty of printing up an addendum to be pasted onto each patron's playbill. 'For this evening's performance'"-he flashed his wife a smile-"'Anne Bonney will be played by Ellen Tree.'"
Mrs. Kean née Ellen Tree shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
A queasiness spread through Chloe. "Am I banished for tonight only, or have you permanently cast me as woebegone Abigail in The Streetwalker and the Scalawag?"
"Spare us your self-pity," said Mr. Kean. "Mrs. Kean and I intend to award you three pounds in severance pay, a sum sufficient to cover your needs till some other company employs you."
"If I choose to remain a woman of the theatre, it will be as a dramatist, not an actress," said Chloe. "Amongst the plays I intend to write is the saga of a second-rate highwayman doomed to compete with the reputation of his late uncle, the greatest thief of his day-rather the way the son of a famous actor might end up living in his father's shadow."
A frown contracted Mr. Kean's brow. Saying nothing, he used his handkerchief to polish the glass protecting his Master of Revels certificate.
"Mightn't we give Chloe another chance?" asked Fanny.
"She doesn't know what came over her on Wednesday," added Mr. Throckmorton.
"I know precisely what came over me," said Chloe. "My father has been condemned to die of hard labor through no fault of his own-or, rather, through several faults of his own, none grave enough to merit such a fate." Extending her index finger, she tapped the article concerning The Communist Manifesto. "I've already got a plot. Our second-rate highwayman takes his troubles out on his fellow robbers, dismissing them from the gang one by one. Desperate, the thieves hire a sorcerer to conjure up an avenging phantom. And so it happens that, just as Ebenezer Scrooge was visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, so is our hero haunted by the spectre of Communism. Frightened out of his wits, he re-employs his former colleagues, and they straightaway stage a series of benefit robberies, using the proceeds to feed the residents of the nearest workhouse."
"Lurid, but I like it," said Mr. Throckmorton.
"Overwrought, but oddly gripping," said Fanny.
"What you've described sounds like a melodrama," said Ellen Tree, gazing at her husband, "but with some effort it might become a tragical romance-am I right, dear?"
"I think not," said Mr. Kean.
"I'm going to call it The Bourgeois Bandito versus the Wheel of History," said Chloe.
"It's time you cleaned out your dressing-room," said Mr. Kean.
"You'll have to find another dagger for Pirate Anne," said Chloe. "The one I use each night is no prop but a bayonet bequeathed to me by my paternal grandfather, who fought at Waterloo."
"On which side?" said Mr. Kean.
"That's enough, dear," said Ellen Tree.
"Whether the dagger is a prop or not, I don't doubt you'll take it with you," said Mr. Kean, "along with everything else that isn't screwed to the floor."
"With all due respect, madam, I don't write tragical romances," Chloe told Ellen Tree. "I write chillers about escaped lunatics," she added, fixing on her former employer as she swirled out of his office, "melodramas about gentlemen infected with lycanthropy, and sweeping sagas of intrepid lady explorers who take jungle gorillas for their lovers. If ever you need a potboiler, Mr. Kean, don't hesitate to look me up."
Copyright © 2014 by James Morrow
