Daughter of the House

The stage manager withdrew. Devil heard him tread along the corridor to the door of the main dressing area. He knew every creak of the old floorboards, every scrape of a hinge and click of a switch. The other performers all made ready in one chaotic room, ducking behind screens and crowding at a single mirror. The Palmyra was not noted for its backstage luxury. All resources were lavished on the front of house.

Devil whistled as he stripped off his blazer and soft-collared shirt. He stood in his vest at a broken piece of mirror and rapidly applied a layer of make-up, then worked over the arches of his eyebrows with a dark pencil before finally reddening his lips with a crimson crayon. When he was finished he removed his starched shirt from the hanger and slipped it on, careful to keep the folds away from his painted face. He fixed his collar with an old stud and deftly tied his white butterfly.

Once he was fully costumed he stood in front of the glass again. He rubbed brilliantine through his greying hair, the gloss turning it darker. Then he briskly applied a pair of old wooden-backed hairbrushes to the sides and top.

Devil was fifty-four years old and still a notably handsome man.

By this time Anthony Ellis was coming back to call the ten. Devil walked through the skein of cramped passageways to the wings. Stagehands in shirtsleeves greeted him as he passed. From the pit he could hear the small orchestra tuning up. As he took his place behind the house curtain a stooping elderly woman hurried from a niche to brush the shoulders of his coat. Sylvia Aynscoe was the wardrobe mistress and dresser, and she had been employed at the Palmyra almost since the beginning.

‘Evening, Sylvia.’

She gave him a compressed smile before twitching the points of his collar into place. Sylvia was an old ally of Eliza’s. It was through the unobtrusive conduit of the dresser that news of everything that happened at the Palmyra found its way back to Islington.

At two minutes to the up Devil was poised on the balls of his feet like an athlete ready to sprint. He flexed his white-gloved fingers and patted the props in the concealed pockets in his coat. The rustle and chatter of the audience through the heavy green velvet drapes sounded like the sea.

The first act of the current show was a dance illusion routine. Four girls in laced satin pumps and scanty dresses of sequinned tulle softly padded to their positions behind him. The best-looking of the four, an elfin girl with a dancer’s taut body, knew better than to try to attract his attention at this tense moment. She turned her head instead to catch her reflection in one of the mirrors. A tall plume of white feathers nodded from a tiny tiara, darts of radiance flashing from the paste gems.

The orchestra struck up the national anthem and the audience rose to its feet. As soon as they had resumed their seats Devil stepped out between the tabs. The bright circle of the following spot tightened on him as he smiled into the heart of the expectant house. He was glad to see that it was better than two hundred. All the stalls were occupied and only a score of seats in the gallery were empty. Pale faces gazed down at him from two tiers of gilt-fronted boxes at the sides of the stage. He let his eyes sweep over the rows of seats.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the home of magic and illusion. We have a magnificent and intriguing show for you tonight.’

Devil pivoted. When he turned again a ringmaster’s whip had appeared in his hand. He cracked the whip and a mirrored ball spun on the boards at his feet; he cracked it a second time and the ball rose like a giant soap bubble and floated away.

Laughter and applause spread through his veins, lovely as warmth in winter. Even though he was pinioned in the lights he could see out to the slender pillars that were carved to resemble palm stems, and the fronds of painted plaster leaves. Gilt-framed lozenges of bright paint glimmered at him. His voice rose into the graceful cupola surmounting the auditorium. Devil thought of his theatre as a jewel box that his audience could open, only a few feet removed from the din of the Strand. He offered them opulence in exchange for the mundane world.

He loved every brick and plank of the place.

The giant bubble sank again. Another flick of the whip broke it into real soap bubbles that drifted out over the double fauteuils at the front of the stalls and gently vanished.

Devil swept his bow and backed into the wings.

The curtain rose at once on the dancers. Four girls arched their taut bodies against four triangular columns. Two faces of the columns were mirrored and the third was black.

The orchestra began to play ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’.

The columns were mounted on spindles, and in the recess beneath their feet a stagehand turned a drum and the columns silently revolved. The girls moved into their dance. Four were multiplied to eight, and the mirrors reflected their reflections until sixty-four splintered images danced into the light, were swallowed up by the turning darkness, and then pirouetted into view again. Dozens of white plumes swayed and the jewels shot points of fire.

The audience drew a collective breath and the applause for this vision almost drowned out the music.

Devil watched from the wings. The elfin dancer spun en pointe and her blank gaze passed over his face. But on the next turn their eyes locked for a fraction of a second. No one else saw it, but the ghost of her smile for him was multiplied into infinity.

Devil lifted his gloved hand in a small salute. He turned away through the wings, and returned to his office where the bills were still piled on his desk.

CHAPTER THREE (#u5a0bdf10-c9ce-5c6f-8746-374fa71736ca)

The housemaid brought in the tray and placed it on the table.

‘Anything else, Mrs Wix?’

Eliza ran her eye over the tea service with the pattern of forget-me-nots, the silver pot and sugar tongs, and the two varieties of cake on a tiered plate.

‘Thank you, Peggy, that will be all.’ When the girl had left the room Eliza said to her guest, ‘Now, Mr Feather, how do you take your tea?’

The man had called on her twice before. On the first occasion she had been out at Faith’s and on the second she had told Peggy to say she was not at home. When he turned up for the third time she realised that he would go on knocking at her front door day after day until she did agree to see him, so she had let him in. Lawrence Feather was not a welcome guest, but now he was here she would at least show him that she ran a proper household.

Feather was not the man to be deflected from his purpose by tea or sponge cake. As soon as he could he put his cup aside and leaned forward.

‘I need your help,’ he said.

She inclined her head. ‘Really? In what way?’

‘I think you don’t believe in psychism, Mrs Wix?’

She frowned. ‘I have seen plenty of stage cheats and music-hall fakery. Clutching icy hands, floating mists, bells clanging when there is no one to ring them, that sort of thing. There is no real harm in it, as entertainment for those who are so inclined. But there has never been a so-called manifestation that couldn’t be explained away by hidden wires, a yard or two of fine muslin, a human arm in a black sleeve. All in a darkened room, naturally. Possibly I am too coarse to be susceptible to the real thing, Mr Feather.’

He did not flinch. He just looked at her, his eyes glowing like coals in their hollow sockets.

‘I don’t believe you are in the least coarse, Mrs Wix. Let me put it to you in a different way. Are you quite certain that there are no senses on the fringe of human consciousness, nothing whatsoever beyond the range of what is accepted as normal or physical?’

Eliza hesitated.

‘I think none of us can be quite certain of that. I was talking about those cheap stage performances I have seen with my own eyes and know to be fraudulent. You are speaking of different matters, perhaps.’

‘I am.’

The man probably conveyed all sorts of damaging nonsense to the lost and bereaved who made up his audiences. She was suspicious of him and his motives.

He lifted his hand. ‘You know, of course, that I lost my sister Helena, and my dear brother-in-law, when the steamer sank. We spoke of it when we met at Lord’s.’

‘Yes. You have my sympathy.’

‘Thank you. You and your family suffered your own loss. However, Mrs Wix, I am not married. Helena was all I had. I loved her dearly. Perhaps even too dearly.’

There was a shiver of a pause. Feather’s tongue moistened his lips before he smoothly continued, ‘Our parents passed years ago and we have no other siblings. She was my lieutenant in my work, and she knew everything about my efforts to open a conduit from this world to the regions beyond.’

He anticipated the obvious question.

‘You are wondering, since this is my claimed expertise, if I am able to speak to her now, or if she has in any way reached out to me?’

‘Yes.’

His voice sank to a whisper. He seemed on the brink of tears.

‘I have tried. I have tried with all my heart, and every fibre of my capacity. There is a tumult of voices out there, crying and calling, clamouring for me to open their channels, but there is no Helena.’

Eliza could not help feeling sympathy, even for a charlatan.

‘Only once, on the night she passed, did I hear anything. I stood on the beach in front of the hotel and I wanted to die from grief. I hoped I would die, God forgive me. Then Helena spoke suddenly to me out of the silence. She said, “I am here.”’