The Corpse Played Dead Read online

  ‘Shocked?’

  ‘Poor girl, she’s all anxious now Joe,’ said Molly. ‘She’s only a little thing.’

  If only she knew.

  Sugden gave me a hard look, and for a moment I was worried that he had read my thoughts.

  ‘I wonder now,’ he said, setting his pot down on the floor and wiping his mouth with the palm of his hand. ‘Where did you blow in from, did you say?’

  I hadn’t said. Davenport and I had decided on a story to explain my presence, though. It seemed an ideal opportunity to rehearse it. It was my turn to play the actress.

  ‘I’m not from London,’ I said. ‘You can probably tell that, sir, but my mother was a mantua-maker, so I’ve been holding a needle for as long as I can remember. She’s dead now; my pa too. I thought I’d come to London because there are more people needing clothes made and mended down here.’

  ‘Why did you come to a theatre? There’s plenty of women making gowns in London,’ he asked. I took a deep breath, as if I was about to tell them something that troubled me, something I was ashamed of. I stared at the hands in my lap as I spoke.

  ‘I got into trouble, see?’

  ‘Oh aye, here it comes. What sort of trouble?’

  I spoke quietly, keeping my head down. ‘I was hungry, and I had nowhere to live. None of the mantua-makers wanted me, a girl from the country with no references. I…’ I decided that adding a sob might sound too contrived, so merely hesitated. ‘I took some bread, and a little cake, without paying for them. Only because I was hungry. I wasn’t brought up to steal.’

  They waited. I paused again, remembering my lines perfectly.

  ‘I’d already eaten the cake when I got caught. The baker took me to the magistrate. I was so afraid of him I thought I would faint. He can’t see – he’s blind, you know – but he listened to my story and he took pity on me. Then he said that he had heard Mr Garrick wanted an extra needlewoman in his theatre. He even paid the baker for what I’d taken. I could hardly believe it, and I’ve barely stopped thanking God for my good luck since yesterday.’

  Joe Sugden stiffened. ‘You arrived with the magistrate’s man earlier.’ He said this as a statement. ‘He didn’t look too pleased about it.’

  ‘He wasn’t, sir. He said he had business with Mr Garrick, he didn’t have time to bother with the likes of me.’

  Sugden, who had encountered Davenport at his most high-handed and dismissive, was satisfied with my story. Perhaps I was a decent actress after all.

  Even so, he stared down at me with a look that was not at all friendly.

  ‘I’ll be watching you, girl. I don’t like thieves, and if anything goes missing, it’ll be you I come to first.’

  I swallowed hard, feeling a little less confident.

  ‘There’s enough going on in this place at the moment without us harbouring someone who takes things that don’t belong to her. You’ll do as you’re told, ask permission to leave the theatre, and go where you’re bidden, you hear me?’

  Davenport had intimated that there had been thefts from the theatre as well as damage.

  ‘I said, do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Molly leaned across the table and cut me a slice of bread, giving Sugden a frown. ‘Here you go, Lizzie. You’ll be happy here with us. The wages are rubbish, but you won’t go hungry.’

  Chapter Seven

  Sugden gave a derisive laugh. ‘Wages? What wages would those be, Molly Bray? I haven’t been paid for weeks.’

  ‘We don’t get paid?’ I asked.

  ‘We do get paid,’ said Molly, giving Sugden another stern look. ‘It’s just that Mr Garrick is not so good at paying us regularly.

  ‘Or fairly,’ muttered Sugden.

  ‘How do you survive?’ I asked. ‘How do I survive?’

  Molly shrugged. ‘We manage. Some weeks are harder than others. It’s easier for us, in the dressing rooms, we get the cast-offs from the actresses. Some of them will drop you a coin if you treat them right, or they’ll let you have an old ribbon. I got a hat once that was nearly new. It’s harder for Joe and the stage hands – they’ve no one to look out for them.’

  ‘The players get paid?’ I said.

  ‘Depends,’ said Sugden. ‘The likes of Mrs Cibber can demand whatever wages she chooses. Garrick has to pay her, or she kicks up the most enormous fuss. The spare horses – that’s the lot that makes up the crowds or takes the smaller speaking parts – they make extra in the best way they can. So the stage hands and the actors over the rich gentlemen at the gaming tables and the women screw them in the usual way.’

  It was why theatres were as notorious as brothels. In the audience, women like me laid plans with gentlemen who would take us home in a carriage and then spend the night. Backstage, or out in the alleyways near the theatre, the lower orders of players were making their own arrangements. Garrick, I knew, was trying to raise the reputation of theatres, hoping to present them as temples to high art; he had a long way to go to achieve his aim. I wondered whether Molly made ends meet like that or whether she really did survive on hand-me-downs from Mrs Cibber and stale bread from the green room.

  The door was flung open. A man entered, older than Joseph Sugden, greying at the temples, but similarly covered in dust. He was tall and thick-set, making him seem almost as square as he was high. He was a man used to lifting heavy objects, shifting furniture and stage equipment. A deep line had formed between his eyebrows, the result of years spent frowning with physical effort. His nose looked as though it had been broken long ago. The whole effect made his face look like a squashed pie. He spoke in a curt and self-important tone; like a man who had only recently been put in charge, keen to impose his authority over the underlings.

  ‘I thought you might be down here,’ he said to Sugden. ‘I need a hand shifting the flats. Tom’s still out, on account of his leg, and the others are all down in the hell.’

  ‘My apologies, Mr Dinsdale,’ said Sugden, not moving, and not looking especially apologetic, ‘I wanted to make sure that the new girl had found her way to the dressing rooms.’

  Mr Dinsdale turned the frown towards me. I scrambled up from the cushion and gave a polite curtesy. This was the stage manager – second only to Mr Garrick – after all.

  ‘Lizzie Blunt, sir. New seamstress.’

  I was unimportant, compared with the scenery that needed to be moved. Everything in his face told me that. He barely even glanced at me.

  ‘Molly Bray, the stage area needs to be tidied, as does the green room. I’m also down a maid, so you’ll have to do it. You can take…’ he paused, having forgotten who I was already ‘… this girl with you. Save your mending until the afternoon.’

  ‘The light is better now—’ Molly began, but Mr Dinsdale shook his head.

  ‘No. The light will be fine when you’ve cleared the stage and green room. You’ll go now.’

  He favoured us with a final scowl before striding from the room. Sugden rolled his eyes and pushed himself up from his seat to follow.

  ‘Better get moving, Moll. He’s not in a good mood at the moment.’

  ‘Is he ever?’

  ‘Watch your step with Mr Dinsdale, girly,’ this was addressed to me as he sloped through the door. ‘If you get the wrong side of him, you’ll be out on your ear.’

  Molly licked her fingers and dabbed up the last crumbs of bread from the plate, as if to make a point of dawdling. ‘Don’t worry, Lizzie,’ she said as she tucked her arm through mine and pulled me towards the dismal corridor and the equally dismal task ahead, ‘Dinsdale won’t bother us, he’s too busy running his little kingdom upstairs to make our lives difficult. Come to think of it, no one takes much notice of the likes of us at all, unless a coat sleeve comes loose.’

  I was happy to hear that. Davenport had told me to remain out of sight as best I could, to be quiet and unnoticed, the better to observe what was going on. I thought that I was ready for the task.

  But what, I wondered
with a slight shiver, was ‘the hell’?

  Chapter Eight

  Molly and I worked solidly for over an hour in the green room, clearing the floor of food, discarded pipes and spills, wine bottles and glasses. We wiped tables, reset chairs to their upright positions and put fresh wax candles in the wall sconces. There was vomit in the fireplace. It lay crusted on the hearth, dry but by now only mildly pungent. Molly dealt with it, while I scrubbed the puddle of piss that was next to the hearth – still sticky when I trod in it – where someone had aimed poorly and missed his target.

  I was becoming too used to the ways of London’s gentlemen to be bothered by their habits. No one was ever sick in Mrs Farley’s fireplaces, of course – not those who wanted to leave the house with their limbs intact, anyway – but I’d spent enough time in taverns to know what even the most charming of men will do when they’ve had too much to drink.

  I found my small bundle under the chair and took it back to the mending room; by now familiar with the direction. I laid out my needle box and hairbrush, hid the ribbons in my pocket and put the apple pie, wrapped neatly in its cloth, on the table with the ale, deciding to share it with Molly later.

  When I returned to the green room, it had transformed again.

  It was full of people. Now, at last, I could begin my real work. I hid in the corner by the door and watched them. After a while, I recognised one of the women: a lean, pointy-faced person with a black spot pressed high on her cheek. She had been in the performance of King Lear, I was sure. I recognised the nose. This would be one of the ‘spare horses’, as Sugden had called them: lesser players who made up the company, or who drifted in and out of it as they built their career by seeking out wealthy patrons. Here they were, off stage and preparing for the evening, greeting one another loudly, brightly painted women and men, not all completely dressed, who seemed excessively diverted by one another’s company. I knew well what they were beneath the paint. I had been brought up to regard such people as loose in morals, and nothing I had seen in London had given me cause to doubt their tawdry reputation. They were all whores, pimps or gamblers, who were gifted in the art of reciting lines, and who looked tolerably attractive in dim lighting. They were as notorious for their immorality as they were for their lust for life. Any one of them could be thieving from Garrick.

  The sharp-featured one was playing cards with another woman, while a third was pouring wine and stealing a cheeky glace at her friend’s hand. Cheats and liars, all of them, I thought – from my lofty moral position.

  A small crowd had gathered around a man who was reading something from a newspaper, but they were too far away, and the room was too noisy for me to hear what it was. From time to time they erupted with raucous laughter. Mr Dinsdale and another man were tucked in a corner, deep in conversation over pots of beer. Dinsdale was sitting forward and scowling while his companion talked, making small stabbing motions with his forefinger, as if pressing his point.

  Across the room, two men were playing with pistols, examining the silverwork on the handles, turning them this way and that, cocking and uncocking them and pretending to aim them at the fireplace that we had recently cleaned and lit, surveying themselves in the vast gold-edged mirror that hung above it as they did so. Fresh baskets of food and jugs of wine and beer had been brought in and laid along a wide table at the edge of the room. Everyone helped themselves and already it was a merry company.

  Molly was sitting with Joe Sugden and another man, who looked familiar. Her hands were moving quickly, rolling about in the air, but it was a moment before I realised that she was juggling. She was taking slices of apple from a small monkey and throwing them up, several pieces at a time, before pausing to feed them back to him as she drank from a glass of wine. Their companion was the monkey man who had offered such a dismal interval performance two nights ago. His forehead was large and bald, but his cheeks were thin, making him look like his pet. The small amount of hair that he had fell in long grey strands to his shoulders.

  I felt a hand on the small of my back, then an arm snaked around my waist, as a ginger-haired man tugged me into his body. I was treated to an ugly leer, and the stink of his beery breath.

  ‘Not seen you here before,’ he slurred into my face. ‘You’re a pretty little bird; want to come and get to know me?’

  I gave him the heartiest shove that I could and wrenched myself free, nearly falling over in the process, telling him to leave me alone. He staggered back and laughed, as if I’d paid him a compliment. If he’d groped me like that on the street, I’d have told him to go and screw his sister. But I wasn’t on the street with an armoury of insults, curses and comebacks to suit every occasion. Men like him were going to be an occupational hazard for poor Lizzie Blunt. I sighed at this dispiriting thought and made my way to the safety of Molly’s table.

  The monkey jumped on his owner’s head, apple piece in one paw, and sat there, chewing. It was an ugly thing.

  ‘How did you learn to juggle like that?’ I asked Molly as I sat next to her. ‘You’re very good at it.’

  She grinned at me and winked at the monkey man. ‘I’ve had years of practice, haven’t I, Ketch?’

  I picked up a glass and began to help myself to the jug of wine on the table. A frown crossed Sugden’s brow, and in a heartbeat, I knew that I’d done something wrong.

  ‘M – may I? Am I able to have some wine, Mr Sugden?’ I stammered out the words, replacing the jug on the table. I had been too free in assuming that what was on the table was as much for me as for the others. It would have been, at home. I was not at home, though, and Lizzie Blunt shouldn’t take such liberties.

  ‘Or, may I pour you some more, sir?’ I asked, lifting the jug to his own glass, which was nearly empty.

  He held out his glass, not saying a word, but watching me, eyes narrowed. I refreshed the monkey-man’s glass as well, while the monkey climbed onto his head.

  ‘What a funny little creature, Mr Ketch,’ I said, trying to shift my unease with mindless chatter. ‘Wherever did you find him?’

  ‘Southwark,’ he said.

  I was disappointed. I had imagined somewhere a little more exotic.

  ‘At the fair,’ he said in a ponderous voice, cupping the glass of wine as the monkey curled its tail over his brow. ‘And it’s Ketch. Everyone just calls me Ketch.’ He reached out and shook my hand.

  ‘It was love at first sight for your friend, I think,’ I said, sharing my own name and nodding at the monkey.

  Ketch didn’t smile. The monkey had not been a clever investment – if the performance on stage had been anything to go by.

  Neither of the men wanted to talk. I turned back to Molly.

  ‘Do you know the fair, miss?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever been?’

  ‘Been?’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘I grew up with the fairs. Southwark was one of the best.’ She laid a hand over Sugden’s arm, but as she spoke, she was looking at Ketch.

  ‘My family were travelling people. My father and mother both danced on the high ropes. My brother used to do the juggling. I wasn’t so good, despite what you think of the tricks with apple slices. I wanted to walk the ropes too, I was better at that, but…’ her voice dwindled a little and she turned her eyes to me ‘…but my father died, and then my brother and mother died, and I decided to come to London. A bit like you, really.’

  I was silent. My real story was quite different from hers. My mother was, indeed, long dead, but that was the only similarity. My father had thrown me out of his house for behaving like a strumpet and told me never to return.

  I didn’t need to respond; the brightest of London’s stars were entering the green room and all of us, including the unsmiling men at our table, turned to gawp.

  Chapter Nine

  Even when surrounded by such lively and attractive people, David Garrick commanded the attention of every person in the room. He was not especially tall, nor handsome. His features were large, too big for his face, but – as I knew from watchi
ng him on stage – so very expressive. His velvet coat was a rich shade of blue, the colour of sapphires, and his waistcoat was heavily trimmed with gold, giving him a flamboyant and glittering air, and yet he moved with small steps and quiet gestures, as though containing his energy for the evening’s performance. He did not need to be expansive here; everyone who greeted him fawned, fluttered and twittered in front of the great man, so that the drama seemed to happen around him. And yet, his dark eyes flickered with light as he listened, or spoke.

  A glass of wine was brought to him. He took a sip and moved towards the men who had been playing with the pistols. They were now nursing pots of beer, but Garrick was keen to examine the weapons. They were for the stage, I saw. Handing his wine to a man at his side, he aimed one at the large mirror and pretended to fire it, his arm flicking back at the imagined recoil. A dark-haired woman in a vibrant yellow gown gave a small scream and a mock swoon as he did so, causing the group to laugh. Garrick put the pistol down and began to fan the woman with his hand, as if rousing her from the faint, until she, like the others, gave way to laughter. He kissed her full on the lips before reclaiming his wine and moving away.

  ‘Kitty Suckley,’ said Molly in my ear. ‘She’s playing Goneril in Lear from tonight. Fanny Barton’s just married and gone away with her new husband. Kitty’s been called up from the spare-horses. God knows, but she’s nothing more than a whore.’

  I turned and raised my eyebrows. ‘Really?’ If she truly were, I had never met her or heard of her. She was the sort of woman I would have remembered: one who would always be the centre of attention because that is where she would, rowdily, place herself. Fanny Barton, I thought, had made a splendid Goneril.

  ‘Look at her,’ Molly hissed. ‘Prancing and preening in the brightest gown she could find. Always showing off in front of Mr Garrick. It’s no secret that she’d love to be the toast of Drury Lane.’