The Secret Hen House Theatre (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Finishing Touches

By four o’clock they had been through the whole play twice and Hannah called an end to rehearsals.

“Right,” she said to Lottie as the others left, “shall we finish this panelling?”

Using bits of old doors, planks and crates that they had found around the yard, Hannah and Lottie had built a wooden wall for the back of the stage. On the reverse side there were nails and strips of wood all over the place, but from the stage it looked quite solid and smooth. Now they had to nail a grid of thin strips of wood on to it to create a panelling effect. And finally, they were going to paint it with a can of brown paint Lottie had found in her dad’s garage.

“Then the only thing that isn’t right will be the floor,” said Hannah. “We really need a rug.”

“And we need some ornaments for the dressing table,” said Lottie. “And we should hang a picture on the panelling. There’s always old oil paintings on the panelling.” Lottie visited a lot of stately homes with her mum.

Hannah looked at her and raised her eyebrows.
“I know where we could get one of those.”

Lottie read her face. “Oh, no. No way. Don’t even think about it.”

Hannah was already pulling back the front-of-house door. “Come on! It’ll take two of us to carry it.”

“Hannah! Don’t be ridiculous! Come back!”

But Hannah was halfway down the secret path. “Come on. It’ll be perfect!”

Hannah stretched up to the grimy picture rail in the sitting room. “Imagine how great this will look in the queen’s bedroom.” She gripped the sides of the frame.

“Hannah!” said Lottie, out of breath from the chase. “We can’t take this to the theatre. Your dad’ll go crazy!”

“He’ll never notice it’s gone,” said Hannah. “We’ll put it back straight after the competition.”

She lifted the horse and dog painting off its hook. The string had been hanging there so long that it stayed as stiff as wire in its upside-down v-shape.

“Come on, take the other end.”

Lottie groaned, but she picked up the other end of the frame.

“Tell you what,” said Hannah as they carried the painting through to the hall. “I’ll bring those silver candlesticks out later too. They’ll look amazing on the queen’s dressing table. I’ll put new candles in them.”

“Hannah, you nutter, you cannot—”

The back door rattled open. Both girls froze.

“Tess! Stay outside, you bad dog.”

Lottie’s eyes gleamed in terror. “Your dad!” she whispered. “Oh, my goodness, you’re going to get us killed.”

“Hannah!” called Dad.

Hannah propped the picture against a chair. She grabbed a moth-eaten picnic rug from the hall cupboard and thrust it at Lottie, who looked like she had been turned to stone. “Cover it up,” she hissed.

Hannah walked innocently into the kitchen. “Yes?”

Dad was standing in the doorway in his wellies.

“Get some antibiotics from the fridge, would you, Hannah?”

“What’s up?”

“Calf with pneumonia in the barn.”

Hannah went back through the hall.

“What’s going on?” mouthed Lottie.

“Ssshh,” said Hannah. She found the box of antibiotics and took it to her father. As casually as she could, she walked back into the hall. “Through the garden,” she whispered to Lottie. “He’s going out the other way.”

“I was nearly sick waiting for you,” said Lottie, sidestepping a cowpat as they scurried across the yard. “Don’t you
ever
do that to me again.”

“It was worth it, though,” said Hannah. “Won’t it look great?”

Hannah made Dad’s cocoa at nine o’clock as usual,
but he still hadn’t come in. She pulled her coat and boots on and stepped out into the farmyard.

The farm was cloaked in velvet darkness and the sky was dotted all over with tiny stars. The only sound was the occasional muffled grunt of a well-fed pig. As Hannah breathed in the silence, a barn owl swooped, feather-light, across the yard.

A dim glow came from the back barn. As Hannah approached, she heard the low murmur of her father’s voice. She tiptoed round behind the machinery to the far end of the barn, where a pen of calves was housed. One calf, bolder than the others, wandered over to the bars and sniffed at Hannah’s hand. She stroked its velvet back and let it lick her fingers with its sandpaper tongue.

The light came from an old-fashioned lantern strung over a beam with baler twine. It hung above a small enclosure made of straw bales. “There you are then,” Dad was saying to the sick calf. He heaved a bale from the stack at the side of the barn and added it to the straw wall. “Soon have you warm as toast. Don’t want any draughts, do we? We’ll put a few more bales around you here, get you nice and comfortable. Good girl, well done. I’m just going to see to the cows.”

He picked up a bucket in each hand, straightened up and saw Hannah. A look of fear crossed his face.

“What’s up? Something wrong?”

“No, no,” said Hannah quickly. “Everyone’s fine. Your cocoa’s ready.”

“Righty-ho. I’m just finishing here.” He moved
towards the cows’ winter barn.

All of a sudden Hannah felt she had to talk to him.

She forced the words out through the tightness in her throat. “Lottie says the landlord wants to demolish the farm to build houses on. He can’t do that, can he?”

Her father gave a short laugh, like a bark.

“Don’t you worry about that. Cashmore’s a greedy money-grabbing snake, but as long as we pay the rent every quarter, he can’t lay a finger on this place.”

“But how will you—”

“See that old thresher over there?” He pointed to an ancient, ramshackle machine at the side of the barn. It was so old that it was built entirely from wood, even the wheels. It had once been salmon-pink but its peeling paint had faded to a pale pastel.

“What about it?”

“Bloke who bought the Field Marshall wants the thresher as well. They’re fetching it in a couple of weeks. Saves insuring it too. Costs a fortune to insure these old machines. So next quarter’s rent’s all covered. Don’t you worry for a second, all right?”

“All right,” said Hannah. “Night, Dad.”

“Goodnight.”

Hannah walked back across the yard with a spring in her step. So Dad
did
have it all sorted.

She could hear him talking to the cows. “Hello, Clover. There you go, old girl. Plenty there to keep you going. All right, Bluebell? Good girl, here you are.”

He gave each of his cows a name on the day they were born. All the names were chalked up on a board in the milking parlour, and he knew every one of them.

She should just have trusted him. There was no way Dad would ever let anything happen to the farm.

Chapter Sixteen

The Dress Rehearsal

Hannah and Lottie spent every spare minute of the next week working on scenery and costumes. On Monday after school they made the queen’s four-poster bed. They tied fence posts to the corners of the chicken crates and cut up a big purple bedspread. Draped in purple damask, with matching curtains at each corner tied with gold ribbon, the bed really did look fit for a queen.

On Tuesday they painted a woodwormy old blanket box. Hannah had found it on the log pile and thought it would make a perfect window seat. Above it they fixed an old sash window they had found in a shed.

“That looks fantastic,” said Lottie. “And I’ve got a piece of blue fabric at home – we’ll hang that behind the window for the sky.”

On Wednesday Hannah led Lottie backstage and unveiled a surprise. “See,” she said, gesturing with a sweep of her arm to a sawn-off broom handle, suspended horizontally from the ceiling with baler twine. “Our costume rail. And the genius of it is, it doesn’t take up any floor space. When we don’t need
to use it, we won’t even know it’s there.”

As she had promised, Hannah cycled to Lottie’s house every evening after she had put Sam to bed, and as the week went on the rail started filling up with costumes, each labelled, as Mum’s theatre books advised, with the character’s name and the scenes in which they were to be worn.

Hannah loved every second of the preparation. Each day at school dragged more than the one before, as she watched the clock until the time when she would be released to work on the theatre. And on Sunday afternoon, the day of the dress rehearsal, when she stood backstage and looked around at all they had achieved, she thought: Mum would be proud of us. This really is a theatre now.

It was fifteen minutes until curtain up. Hannah was dressed in her Scene One costume: a long frilled pink nightdress with pastel-blue bows. It was made of a satiny material, which made her feel very regal and changed her walk into a kind of glide. The hair helped too. Martha had put it up in a bun. The hairgrips had been shoved in slightly harder than necessary and her hair scraped back a little forcibly, and the hairspray need not perhaps have gone into her eyes quite so much, but the result was effective. And the make-up – orange lipstick, puce blusher and purple eyeshadow – was certainly striking.

“Jo, have you checked off all the props?” she asked. “Are they on the table in scene order?”

“Yes, I’ve just done a last check,” said Jo, shrugging Prince Rallentando’s flowery silk jacket on to her
shoulders. “And I’ve ticked them all off on my list.”

“Where’s the letter from Prince Rallentando?”

Lottie, who was sitting by the window having her make-up done, patted the pocket of her maid’s apron. “In here, ready to bring on. Hannah, take your watch off! Martha, you’re going to have to hurry – you haven’t done Jo yet.”

Martha grabbed Lottie by the chin. “Stop talking, stupid, or I’ll smudge your make-up.”

Hannah put her watch on the dressing table and slipped through the wings to give the stage a final check. The wooden panelling looked totally authentic now it was painted, and the horse picture, in its gilt frame, gave the room real grandeur. The silver candlesticks looked amazing on the dressing table in front of the painting. Hannah gave a deep sigh of satisfaction.

She peeped through the curtains into the auditorium. The only members of the audience so far were Jasper and Lucy, sitting in prime position in the very centre. Jasper was chewing the cud thoughtfully. Lucy was nestled into his back.

Oh, well. At least Jo hadn’t sat them on chairs.

Where was the rest of the audience, though? What if they hadn’t managed to find the hidden path?

Suddenly she heard a murmur of voices from somewhere in the thicket. Her heart leapt into her throat.

What if it was Jack?

But it wouldn’t be, would it?

Of course it wouldn’t. He hadn’t made the slightest
mention of the dress rehearsal. He had probably forgotten she’d ever invited him. It was only one stupid remark, after all – the whole hideous dead duck incident would have swept it clean from his mind.

And he hadn’t gone to Miranda’s rehearsal either. Miranda had been really annoyed with him about that.

Somebody laughed.

A woman. Phew. Hannah ran backstage. “People are coming!”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. “That’s Auntie Cath,” said Lottie.

Leaves rustled and twigs snapped. A child wailed, “Ow, it stung me!”

“Ugh,” said Lottie. “My cousin Jeremy. He’ll probably cry for an hour now.”

The front-of-house door slid open. Hannah crept onstage and peeped through the gaps at the sides of the curtains. Lottie’s auntie Cath stepped cautiously over the threshold. A little girl held her hand.

“Isn’t this fun!” said Auntie Cath. “Look at those lovely curtains, Evie!”

A very grumpy-looking man stepped into the auditorium. He had two folding chairs under each arm and a whimpering boy behind him.

“Great fun,” he said, “when you have to carry your own flipping chairs through a blasted forest to get here. What is this, boot camp?”

“Sshh, Andrew,” said his wife. “They’ll hear you. Stop moaning and enjoy it.”

A pale girl of about ten, holding a paperback book in front of her face, appeared at the door. She glanced up from the book for long enough to pinpoint the spare seat, sat down in it and started reading again.

“Where’s everybody else?” asked Uncle Andrew. “We’re not the only ones who’ve got to suffer this, are we?”

Charming.

But where
was
everybody else? Surely it must be three o’clock by now? What if Granny and Lottie’s mum were wandering lost around the thicket?

The others were fussing with costumes and make-up. Hannah slipped out of the stage door and down the path, where bright-green leaves were uncurling all over the blackthorn bushes and wood anemones were opening up on the ground like little earthbound stars.

And then she heard a sound that stopped her blood in her veins.

“A theatre? In these bushes? You having a laugh, Adamson?”

Jack and Danny! Hannah felt her leg bones dissolve like tablets in a glass of water. She clutched at a hazel branch. No, no, no!

Deep inside her, so deep that she couldn’t really admit it even to herself, Hannah had had a secret fantasy that Jack
would
come to the play, and that, once there, he would be so wowed by her acting that he would see her in a whole new light and fall madly in love with her.

What a ridiculous idea. He
had
come, but he’d
brought Danny with him. Of course he had. They’d come to point and laugh, to gloat and make fun, and then to spread it all round the school on Monday morning that Hannah Roberts spends her weekends playing at theatres in an old chicken shed.

And what would Lottie say?

Lottie would never speak to her again after this.

As Hannah stood there clutching the hazel branch, she heard Danny’s voice again.

“There’s nothing in there, mate. She must’ve been having you on.”

And then Jack. “Who cares, anyway? Let’s get out of here.”

Hannah clung to the branch, not moving, not even breathing, as their voices faded away. Even when the only sound left was the rustle of the grass in the breeze, her legs still trembled and she couldn’t move. She hardly dared believe they had gone.

But they didn’t come back. There wasn’t another sound.

She was saved. And she would never, ever be so stupid again.

“Here we are, Dora. This must be the path.”

Lottie’s mum. And Hannah’s granny with her. Weak with relief, Hannah scurried back to the theatre before they saw her.

Jo and Lottie took up their positions in the wings, each holding the string of a curtain. Lottie caught Hannah’s eye. “Ready?” she whispered.

Hannah laid her head on the queen’s pillow and closed her eyes. Lottie and Jo pulled the curtains open.

Hannah, snoring loudly, heard surprised and appreciative noises from the audience. She heard her granny say, “Goodness, haven’t they got it looking nice!”

Hannah stretched elegantly and gave a huge yawn. Slowly she sat upright, opened her eyes, raised her chin and called: “
Maid! MAID! Come here at once! I command you!”

Halfway through the play everything was going pretty well. Lottie’s Prince John moustache had dropped off a couple of times and Jo had fluffed one of her speeches (though, to be fair, it hadn’t helped that her breeches had fallen down halfway through). But there had been no real disasters. Martha was charm itself as Princess Esmeralda and, best of all, the audience really seemed to like it. They were laughing in all the right places.

Lottie entered now in her maid’s costume, with a letter on a tray. Hannah was lounging on the bed, admiring herself in a hand mirror.

“
A letter for you, Your Majesty,
” said Lottie with a curtsy.

Hannah extended a hand and took the paper between her thumb and forefinger. “
Oh, marvellous. It is from my nephew, Prince Laurence
.” She scanned the letter. “
Oh, how utterly vexing. His malingering wife is indisposed and he will be unable to grace my birthday celebrations.
” She looked at the letter again. “
I wonder who his hosts are in Shropshire. He speaks of them most highly. You are from 
Shropshire, maid. Which are the families of consequence in the county?”

Lottie, who was dusting the window frame, looked up thoughtfully. “
Well, Your Majesty, there are Lord and Lady Dingly-Wilson, or
—”

“
Imbecile
!
” screeched Hannah. “
Do you not know that Lord and Lady Dingly-Wilson only own nine castles? How can you insult my dear nephew so by implying that he would stay with people who only own nine castles? You should be executed for treason
.”

“
Of course, Your Majesty
,” said Lottie, bowing her head. “
I beg your pardon, Your Majesty
.”

And then Sam burst through the wings on to the stage.

What was he doing? His entrance wasn’t for ages.

He tugged at Hannah’s skirts. “There’s a fire!” he gasped.

Hannah stared at him. His face was white and his eyes were huge with panic.

“What?” she said.

Lottie turned away from the audience and put her hands on his shoulders. “Sam, you’re not on yet,” she whispered.

Sam shook her hands off. “No!” he shouted. “In real life, the farm’s on fire!”