The Wanton Angel (2 page)

Richard Honeydew, the youngest of the apprentices, gave a moving performance as Emilia; brave, honest, devout but hopelessly caught in a web of corruption. His tearful pleas for mercy were heart-rending to all but the cruel Duke, who demanded that Emilia surrender her body to him. The novice took a deep breath before delivering her valedictory speech.

Before Cosimo, Duke of Parma could stop her, Emilia put a tiny flask of poison to her lips and drained it in one gulp. The effect was startling. After convulsing with sudden pain, she fell across the bed and swiftly expired. The Duke suspected a ruse and shook her angrily to revive her but the girl was now beyond his reach. In a fit of pique, he flung her down on the bed only to be disturbed by his steward with the news that, under torture, the Cardinal had admitted that Emilia was the Duke’s own illegitimate child, a secret he had gleaned in the confessional box from the mother who had begged him to keep it from Emilia herself.

Cosimo was distraught. He had, in effect, murdered his own daughter. Remorse finally entered his heart and he knelt beside the corpse in an attitude of grief, weeping real tears as he blamed himself for the tragedy and repented his
wickedness. Lawrence Firethorn was superb. He achieved the impossible. Having outraged the spectators only minutes before with his merciless treatment of Emilia, he now contrived to win their sympathy for his plight. When he announced that he was not fit to live among decent, Christian people, he pulled out his dagger and plunged it deep into his heart before falling at the feet of the daughter whom he had tried to ravish.

The steward summoned servants and both bodies were carried from the stage with great dignity. A stunned silence followed the end of the play and it was only when the actor-manager led his troupe out again to take their bow that the spectators were released from their state of shock. Thunderous applause greeted the company. Lawrence Firethorn beamed, Barnaby Gill glowed, Owen Elias grinned broadly, James Ingram felt his blood pulsing and even George Dart, the tiny assistant stagekeeper, a reluctant actor who was required to play no less than six different supporting roles, all of them beyond his competence, managed a smirk of satisfaction.

Nicholas Bracewell was delighted with the warm reception accorded to
The Insatiate Duke
and he threw a glance up to the gallery where a proud Lucius Kindell, overcome with emotion, was clapping as hard as anyone. The afternoon had been a great personal triumph for him but he was the first to concede that someone else deserved even more praise. Edmund Hoode had been heroic. Not only had he turned a serviceable play into a memorable theatrical experience, he had given a performance that
blazed into the minds of the onlookers. Firethorn, Gill and the others might strut and preen and blow elaborate kisses of gratitude but the man who was enjoying the ovation the most was Cardinal Boccherini.

Poised and impassive, a very monument of Christian virtue, he gave no hint of the laughter which bubbled away inside him. Edmund Hoode’s happiness slipped into delirium.

The Insatiate Duke
was good for business. Spectators who had been alternately excited and harrowed by the play now poured into the taproom of the Queen’s Head to slake their thirst, to discuss the wondrous tragedy they had witnessed or to calm their shattered nerves with strong drink. The inn was packed to capacity and its drawers and servingmen were stretched to meet the needs of the seething mass of customers.

Any other landlord would have been thrilled by the sight of so much ale and wine being sold but not Alexander Marwood. Seasoned in misery, wedded to pessimism and lacking the merest spectre of light in the darkness of his existence, he found even the infrequent moments of good fortune occasions for complaint rather than celebration.

‘Look at them!’ he moaned. ‘They will drink us dry. They will eat us out of house and home. They will
consume
us!’

‘We will make a tidy profit,’ said his wife.

‘But at what cost, Sybil?’

‘None to you, sir. You simply have to look on.’

‘Aye,’ said Marwood with a morose leer. ‘Look on and suffer. With so large and unruly a crowd as this, I fear for my benches, I worry about my tables, I am desperately concerned for the safety of my furniture. Damage will soon come, mark my words. An affray will soon start. I do not simply look on, dear wife. I quail, I pine, I suffer!’

Sybil Marwood inflated her chest, folded her arms beneath her surging bosom and drew herself up to her full height.

‘There will be no trouble while I am here, Alexander.’

The landlord nodded in agreement at the grim boast. Big-boned and brawny, his wife had a basilisk stare which could quell the wildest of revellers and a tongue which could lash with the force of a whip. As one who had suffered both her stare and her stinging rebuke on a regular basis, Marwood could appreciate why she held such sway over their patrons. Even in such a rowdy assembly as the one before them, Sybil loomed large. While she remained, the merriment would always stay good-humoured and never spill over into violence.

‘There is one consolation,’ sighed Marwood.

‘What is that, husband?’

‘Rose is not here to get caught up in all this.’

‘She should be,’ said his wife, irritably. ‘To serve this many mouths, we need every pair of hands we can get. Where is the girl? Rose’s place is here.’

‘Be grateful that she is elsewhere, Sybil.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the relief it yields.’

‘What relief? You talk in riddles.’

‘I would hate any daughter of mine to be pitched into this sea of iniquity,’ he said with a shiver. ‘Drunken men are dangerous. Let a woman pass through a crowd like this and she would be groped and kissed unmercifully. Rose is spared that.’

‘Nonsense!’ snorted the other. ‘I have pushed my way into the heart of this throng and not a single finger was laid upon my person, womanly though it is. There is no danger.’

‘To you, perhaps not. But Rose’s case is different. This taproom would be a place of dire peril to her. The girl is still young and innocent, Sybil. She lacks your experience and strength of mind. You are a mature woman. Our daughter has none of your … of your … of your …’

His voice trailed away as the wifely stare transfixed him to the spot and deprived him of coherent speech. Marwood felt the familiar icicles forming once more on his spine.

‘Go on,’ she urged through gritted teeth. ‘My what?’

Marwood mouthed words that refused to be translated into sound. Sweat moistened his brow. He essayed an appeasing smile but it looked more like a bold sneer. A violent twitch broke out on his lower lip, another on his right ear and a third on his left eyebrow. He slapped at his face wildly as if trying to swat a series of troublesome flies but he only succeeded in dispersing the twitches to new locations. Additional activity was soon set off until his whole visage was in a state of frenzied animation. Unprepossessing at the best of times, Marwood was now positively grotesque.

Sybil did not let him off the hook of her displeasure.

‘Rose does not have my
what
?’ she demanded.

He wanted to say ‘authority’ but the word was stillborn on the sawdust of his tongue. After experimenting with a dozen other words which might have assuaged her, he finally found one which consented to be spoken aloud.

‘Beauty,’ he croaked.

It was the most ridiculous and inappropriate word to use of the gargoyle which confronted him and Marwood realised it at once, letting out a death rattle of a laugh at the sheer absurdity of such a description. What he had once ruinously mistaken for beauty in his wife had, on closer acquaintance, revealed itself to be no more than a deceptive willingness to please masking a hard-edged and unlovely countenance.

‘Do you mock me, sir?’ she snarled.

‘No, my love. Of course not, my angel.’

‘My beauty?’

‘Yes,’ he gabbled. ‘Your beauty, your beauty.’

‘Rose does not have my beauty?’

‘True, Sybil. So true, so true!’

‘So false, you wretch! she scolded. ‘Are you blind? Are you insane? Beauty is the one thing that Rose
has
inherited from me. Everyone has remarked upon it. Everyone but you, that is. Rose may lack my grace but she is as beautiful as her mother.’

‘Yes, yes!’ He was ready to agree to any illusion.

‘A moment ago, you denied it.’

‘I was wrong, Sybil.’

‘As always.’

‘As always,’ he echoed gloomily.

Marwood had learnt to take the line of least resistance against his wife. It was the only way to make life under the same roof as her at all tolerable. Since he could never hope for any pleasure in bed with her, he devoted his energies to reducing the pain which she routinely afflicted on him. How was it, he often asked himself, that motherhood seemed to soften most women yet had had the opposite effect on Sybil, turning her instead into a flinty harridan? It was unjust.

‘Have you spoken with Master Firethorn yet?’ she asked.

‘I am on my way to do so even now.’

‘Keep him to the terms of the contract.’

‘Left to me, there would
be
no contract,’ he grumbled. ‘We do not need that band of lecherous actors, prancing about on a stage in our yard, performing lewd, ungodly plays and bringing all the dregs of London into our premises.’

‘No,’ she said with heavy sarcasm, ‘and we do not need money to buy food, drink and shelter for ourselves and our daughter. Westfield’s Men make the Queen’s Head one the most popular inns in the city – as you can well see, Alexander. Look around you, man! These people are not here for the dubious thrill of meeting you. The players brought them in, which is why we must renew the contract with Westfield’s Men.’

‘On the terms we stipulate.’

‘That goes without saying.’

‘I will certainly say it to Master Firethorn,’ vowed her husband. ‘And to Nicholas Bracewell. He will be party to the discussion.’

‘Dear Nicholas!’ cooed his wife with an almost girlish giggle. ‘Such a gentleman in every way! How can you rail at the company when they have someone like Nicholas Bracewell in their ranks. I tell you this, sir. If I could have the choosing of a husband for Rose, I would look no further than him. It would be a joy to have him in the family.’

‘Joy?’ he repeated dully. ‘What is that?’

At that moment, Sybil caught a glimpse of her missing daughter through the window and the frost returned at once to her face and voice. She brushed her husband roughly aside.

‘Out of my way, sir. I want to speak to Rose.’

‘Keep her out of this bear pit,’ he said, gazing in dismay around the taproom. ‘Her virtue would be in danger.’

After congratulating the company on its success, and after heaping especial praise upon Edmund Hoode and Lucius Kindell, the joint authors of
The Insatiate Duke,
Lawrence Firethorn fortified himself with a glass of Canary wine in the tiring-house before leading a small deputation to the private room where they had agreed to meet the landlord. Barnaby Gill and Edmund Hoode went off with the actor-manager because they were principal sharers in the company and had a major stake in its future. At Firethorn’s insistence, Nicholas Bracewell was also part of the group because his counsel was always wise and because he was
the only member of Westfield’s Men who could mollify and deal effectively with Marwood. There was the inevitable complaint from Gill that the book holder was merely a hired man and not a sharer but his petulant objections were quashed by Hoode and overridden by Firethorn.

When they reached the room, it was Ezekiel Stonnard who let them in. A big, round, corpulent, unctuous man in his fifties with a permanent smirk, Stonnard was Alexander Marwood’s lawyer and an old adversary of Westfield’s Men. He became proprietary and waved a flabby hand of welcome.

‘Come in, come in, sirs,’ he said. ‘My client will be here in a moment. Pray, do take a seat.’

‘We will stand,’ replied Firethorn. ‘This business will not take long and we have a triumph to celebrate.’

‘What triumph might that be?’ asked the lawyer.

‘My performance,’ said Gill, involuntarily.

‘Were you in the play, Barnaby?’ teased Firethorn. ‘You made such little impression, I quite forgot you were there.’

‘My jigs earned an ovation, Lawrence.’

‘The audience was so pleased when they ended.’

‘Both of you gave superb performances,’ said the ever-generous Hoode, intervening in the ritual bickering between the two outstanding talents in the troupe. ‘Lucius and I were thrilled that our play provided you both with such ideal roles in which to strut and dazzle.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Firethorn. ‘Barnaby strutted, I dazzled.’