House of Small Shadows (15 page)

The Master of Revels who opened the performance returned for the final scene, and took quick steps on its hind legs to centre stage. Once in place, it directed the audience’s attention to
the collection of ornaments and cases mounted upon little Doric pedestals across the rear of the stage. The receptacles had been painted and designed to resemble ornate jewellery boxes or elaborate
urns. One object resembled a book, opened to reveal a tiny skeletal hand where there should have been pages. A gilded box fitted with a glass screen contained a foot. A small trunk lined with a
silken material stored a jaw bone. She understood this to be a reliquary of the condemned man’s constituent parts.

Catherine’s curiosity about the identity of the condemned, executed, dismembered, and now martyred man was overshadowed by her deep concern for the damaged mind behind this portrayal of
the character’s hideous end in the filthy street. Mason may have changed his medium from rats to marionettes, but the themes appeared to be the same.

The film flickered to an end and Catherine groped her way to the light switch. Behind her, the loose end of the film slapped in a still-turning reel. The screen glared white.

For a while Catherine was left alone. While she waited she studied the little white chairs, and wondered if Mason and his sister arranged screenings for their hideous
creations, or whether children had once been here to watch the actual cruelty plays. Neither option made her feel any better and an urge to flee the house nearly overwhelmed her into actual
flight.

Rats she understood. The war tableau expressed a sensitive man’s trauma at the loss of his young brothers and at what he had experienced in war. But this slide into the grotesque and
primitivism suggested a bloody and inhuman version of justice from the medieval era, within a Tudor and Stuart aesthetic. A regression into even darker times. But quite how he arrived there from
the Great War mystified her.

The narrative of the play had been simple and sensational. A lurid tale for the unsophisticated with a crude and ugly cast, grubby animalistic presentations of the semi-human, the mob as animal.
Mason’s insanity must have been fullblown by the fifties. But the film had been affecting. That she could not deny, even from a bad print without sound projected onto a white cloth.

There was none of the rapid jerking of early films or any sense of a miniaturized world. Onstage the figures had not glided like rod puppets, or bobbed in the telltale style of string puppetry,
and she could not be certain she had seen any silvery threads against the background, even when it was black.

The stage was large enough to host child actors, but the figures could not have been children in costume because of the animal legs of some of the characters
.
All had moved according to
what they had been constructed from. Animal limbs moved naturally, articulated wooden limbs moved as one would have expected them to move. So the play must have either been filmed slowly with
cameras, frame by frame, or Edith’s uncle had employed several masterly puppeteers.

And the cast must have been comprised of the marionettes she had seen in the nursery. The heads were too similar to be anything else. Mason had indeed taken his bizarre and unpleasant art to a
whole new level of artistry. And she’d been the first person to see it in decades.

The cinema screen was made from a rough weave of plain cloth. Multiple layers of fabric backdrops were tucked away in the wings, ready to be drawn by a flyman, when the stage was used for drama.
The back of the theatre was pressed against the wall, but looking up from the front of the stage, Catherine could see no portable bridge, or platform behind the proscenium arches on which Mason or
his sister would have knelt and concealed themselves from the audience without making a sound. If they were the puppeteers, they would have needed to crouch behind the stage, or stand behind the
backcloth.

On closer inspection she found the joinery of the theatre to be masterful. A series of detachable wooden pegs allowed dismantling prior to transit and reassembly piecemeal. And the curtains were
handmade by a highly skilled seamstress; Edith’s mother, Violet.

The ground-floor room must have become the theatre’s final resting place once public performance had been exhausted or found unfit for purpose, and perhaps once Mason was too old to
continue the shows. But who was their intended audience, or what was the purpose of any of this?

Outside the room, the sound of Edith’s wheelchair prompted Catherine to step away from the stage. Being caught conducting an uninvited inspection would not go over well. Or, at least, she
had a feeling that it would not.

By the time the door to the room had clicked open, Catherine had resumed her seat beside the antique projector.

‘Won’t you stop it!’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘It overheats!’

‘I don’t know how. I didn’t want to touch it.’

Maude bustled behind her chair and brought the whipping tail of the film to a clanking halt. To escape the glare from Edith’s red-rimmed eyes, Catherine went to the window, drew back the
layered curtains and retracted the shutters quickly, as if she was desperate for clean air.

‘Well?’

‘It was . . .’

‘What? Speak, girl.’

‘Very clever. For its time. The movement of the pieces . . . Was it still-frame?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The animation. It must have taken hours.’

‘Nonsense. They were artists. They rehearsed. The performance was second nature. Shows in my uncle’s day were performed in one take. Once my uncle was satisfied with rehearsals he
was never required to interfere with a performance.’

Catherine’s thoughts stumbled in an attempt to follow the conversation. She felt she was being given misleading information before a crowd of strangers who all stared at her. ‘Your
uncle didn’t work alone?’

‘He trusted no one but my mother who was wardrobe and set designer.’

The self-serious tone Edith adopted about her uncle’s work suddenly made Catherine want to laugh madly again. Did the woman believe that what she had just watched was real? Edith was not
going to be much help in understanding her uncle’s marionettes.

‘One can only admire how such small actors could issue such power, don’t you think?’

‘Quite.’

‘It is the greatest testament to my uncle’s art that he can still captivate an audience, even with this poor facsimile of the original, more colourful, work.’

Perhaps it was time to play along with the woman’s enthusiasm and delusions. This was no place for logic. Maybe her visit could only be survived by collusion with fantasy.

‘This is the only film we have left. It was the first of the cruelty plays that my uncle learned. A very old play. I often think it fitting this tribute survived. The other films are
damaged and will no longer play.
The Face at the Window
and
The Dead Witness
were the last to go.’

‘Learned?’

‘Yes! Do you know nothing of our great dramatic history? Barnaby Pettigrew and Wesley Spettyl toured this play for years. At Stourbridge Fair, Worcester Theatre, Coventry. Even Covent
Garden and Bartholomew Fair. It was always a sensation. It was their duty that Henry Strader was not forgotten.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, my uncle even believed the Master of Revels’ head was carved by the great Billy Purvis, head-carver and puppet-maker. And the Master of Revels was ready when my dear uncle
reminded him of his calling!’

‘Sorry, who was Henry Strader?’

Edith sucked in her breath as if scandalized. ‘The greatest of them all. The first known Martyr. Did you learn nothing at school? Were you even now paying attention? You have just watched
the account of his terrible end. The very title of this play is ’
Tis Pity Henry Strader was Broken Upon the Wheel.
Murdered for his art in Smithfield. The Smooth Field, my dear. In
London, in . . . in sixteen-something. I forget. Executed for sedition, for witchcraft. He was then torn apart in the street by a mob. It was the first history lesson my mother taught me in this
very room.’

‘Afraid I’m unaware of him.’

‘What an appalling education you must have received. Are you telling me you know nothing of Strader’s great march on London?’

‘Sorry, I—’

‘The lame flocked to Strader, dear. And followed his troupe from Stourbridge Fair to London. Some even called it the second Children’s Crusade, but it was perceived to be a
rebellion. Strader’s following became so great, so unruly, he was murdered for his vision by the authorities. His killers made his troupe watch. Can you imagine it? He was the first of the
known Martyrs of Rod and String. A local hero no less! Born near here. Parts of his remains were said to be holy, and were even returned to this part of the world after his execution. I was
schooled in this black history right here.’

Again Catherine was confused and mystified by what Edith was referring to, or the timescale involved in what she appeared to be suggesting was a theatrical legacy continued by her uncle. And not
one she had ever heard of.

Edith was wasting her time and Catherine felt another flare of annoyance. The puppets were unsellable. They were an unpleasant curiosity that she could dine out on for years, if she could bear
to remember them, but they were nothing else. Edith’s history lesson was almost certainly pure fantasy. This and the nursery had nothing to do with her valuation and the first day of her
visit was nearly over.

‘My uncle saved an entire English tradition, my dear. Outlawed for being in league with one devil or another, by fools. Ha! Did you know that Tiberius suppressed them, and that Claudius
banished them too? This troupe have known dangerous times. Their entire history has been one of persecution. I mean,’ she lowered her voice as if in fear, ‘you saw what happened to poor
Henry Strader at the Smooth Field for resurrecting the tradition. For daring to contradict the Church and government. He was the first martyr my uncle could even find a name for, my dear. But there
were others. After him, for certain. And before him, too, you can be sure of that, though he never traced them.’

Edith sat back in her chair, smiled, and showed her yellow teeth, as if delighted at the opportunity to correct her guest’s woeful ignorance. ‘You know, in the summer when I was a
girl, we had theatre on the lawn. My uncle staged those plays of Henry Strader that were remembered. The Martyr wrote nothing down. It was too dangerous. And much was lost. But in his own time he
was more popular than Shakespeare. I saw
The Magician’s Fate
and
The Beauteous Sacrifice
before I was ten. Now, how many little girls do you know who can say
that?’

Unhindered by a voice from behind her back, or the peal of Edith’s little bell, Catherine passed through the garden gate. She tried to walk casually, though an attempt to
move soundlessly made her movements furtive. She experienced a deep discomfort at leaving the building without asking, but then was aghast at herself for assuming that she needed permission to
leave to make a phone call.

After the screening of the film, Edith had been wheeled to her room to sleep before dinner, and Maude had retreated to her fiefdom on the ground floor to prepare the evening meal. Both rooms
were situated at the rear of the property, and she realized this was her best chance to leave the building unobserved. Her request to begin work on the inventory had been treated to an embarrassing
silence before Maude escorted her to her bedroom without a word. Was she then to wait there all afternoon until dinner?

She needed a phone signal and urgently wanted to share her experiences with Leonard, and get his advice on what to make of it all, and what to do. But she now worried that as soon as she got
behind the wheel of her car, leaving the Red House even for half an hour would make a return to the building difficult.
Unbearable
would be an exaggeration, but not a great one.

As she walked away, she desperately tried not to look back at the house. If someone was watching from a window, her glance might be an admission of wrongdoing, of not keeping her hosts abreast
of her movements.

The nape of her neck cooled as if a cloud had passed across the sun, or the shadow of the house had lengthened to keep pace with her scurrying down the lane. The house’s scrutiny began to
feel like a tangible pressure, as if there was now a disapproving face at every window behind her. She was struck with an instinct to cringe, and could not prevent a surreptitious peek at the house
just to make sure that no one was, in fact, observing her. But the peek became a double-take, in which she was forced to stop and face the building.

In a solitary glance, she had been shocked by a mistaken impression of a sudden change in the Red House’s character. For a moment, in her moving vision, the overgrown garden had climbed
even higher up the dark walls of the house’s front. The bricks of the building had appeared unkempt, blackened with age or even dereliction.

The illusion was caused by the way the nearby trees cast their shadows over the first storey, abetted by her sight briefly dimming under the canopy of a small fir tree crowding the garden wall.
The house was now restored to its former hideous magnificence.

Catherine reached her car and got inside quickly. Turned the engine over and put the car into first gear. As she drove away as slowly and as stealthily as she could manage she hoped the
occupants of the Red House wouldn’t hear the sound of the engine.

She slipped her car through the tunnel of hawthorn, but struggled to see the lane as shadows rolled over the bonnet and across the windscreen in a strobe effect. Emerging from the natural
tunnel, strong sunlight blinded her and she was forced to brake. She fumbled with sunglasses and the sun visor.

In the rear-view mirror the black claws of the roof finials were skeletal against the sky.

Once she was moving again, the idea of escaping Edith’s unpredictable moods, at least for a while, allowed the tension of the day to seep from her shoulders and neck. There would be no
friendship or even familiarity between them. Hoping for such was tiring and destined for repeat disappointments. Just an evening meal to get through and then she could sleep. If she could
photograph every item for sale the following day, she wondered if she might even complete the valuation offsite, at home.