Secrets of a Lady (16 page)

The smell was instantly recognizable. Not the scented candles, French perfume, and ripe oranges one smelled in the audience, but a sharper scent composed of cheap gilt paint, musty costumes, thick greasy cosmetics, and rehearsal tea brewed over a spirit lamp. Her father’s company had never played in a theater half so grand, but some things were universal, whatever the size of the house.

The slither of booted feet on floorboards and the clang of foils came from the stage.

“‘Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives,’” a voice muttered in desultory tones.

“No, no.” Another voice interrupted from beyond the stage. “You’re supposed to be the best swordsman in Verona, Tony. Try to look confident. Crispin, Mercutio should swagger. You look as though you’re a stripling trying to remember the steps of the waltz.”

Mélanie hesitated for the barest fraction of a second, teetering on the edge of a forgotten world. She’d long since severed this play from the demons of her past, but being behind the scenes was different from watching it comfortably seated in a box or even saying the lines herself in amateur theatricals.

No one noticed their entrance at first. Murky, strong-smelling rehearsal lamps cast giant shadows over the wings, the slotted scene panels, the stage itself. Two men in their shirtsleeves were dueling across the stage. Two women—Juliet and the nurse, from the sound of it—were running lines in the upper stage left corner. A girl in an apron hurried by, holding a brocade robe that rattled as if it were full of pins. Two stagehands staggered out of the wings, carrying an enormous canvas flat that smelled of fresh paint. Mélanie stopped them with a smile and a question. Five minutes later, a tall, thin man in a paint-smeared smock appeared beside them.

“I’m Ned Thurgood, the stage manager.” He wiped his hands on his smock. “Mr. Fraser? Mrs. Fraser? What brings you to the Drury Lane?” His manner was polite, even deferential, but though he looked them in the eye, his attention seemed to dart about the theater, taking in the movements of the duelists, the young man bent over a prop table, the voices running lines, the pounding of nails echoing through an open door at the back of the stage.

Charles shook Thurgood’s hand. “It’s a delicate matter, I’m afraid, Thurgood. We’re looking for a woman named Helen Trevennen who was employed at this theater seven years ago.”

Mélanie was torn between the hope that Thurgood would say Miss Trevennen was even now in the theater and the fear that he would claim never to have heard of her. Instead, his bushy brows shot up. “Helen. Good lord. Yes, she was one of our actresses, though she left the company some time ago. Was she—No, we’d best speak in private. Tim,” he shouted to the young man at the prop table. “Make sure the paint’s dry on the fountain. We need it this afternoon. Balcony scene,” he explained to Charles and Mélanie as he ushered them round coils of rope, a rack of costumes, a thronelike chair with the upholstery stripped off, and a stack of papier-mâché rocks. “Supposed to give the effect of spring and young love. Weighs a ton. We have enough pulleys on this production to rig a ship. Artistic vision’s all very well, but sometimes ideas that sound perfectly good on paper prove dam—devilish hard to execute.”

“‘O! for a Muse of fire,’” Charles murmured. Somehow he made the words friendly and conversational, though Mélanie knew he must be as desperate for information as she was herself.

Thurgood turned his head, as though he was really looking at Charles for the first time. “Quite. Unfortunately, I have to make do with a crew of all-too-human stagehands.” He opened a door onto a small office that seemed to contain a desk and two rickety chairs, though it was difficult to tell, as every surface was stacked with scripts, musical scores, playbills, and odd scraps of paper. Thurgood shifted some papers to the floor, waved them to the two chairs, and perched on the edge of the desk. “Sorry for the chaos. We open in less than a week and it’s a new production. I’ll do what I can to help you, Mr. Fraser, but I haven’t seen Helen Trevennen since she left the company.”

In as few words as possible, Charles outlined the story of his friend Jennings’s death, the trunk of his belongings, and the paper leaving a bequest to Helen Trevennen.

Thurgood scratched his hair, which was of the curly variety that never quite lies straight. “Helen wasn’t a woman one forgets easily.” A reminiscent smile crossed his face, then was quickly erased. “Begging your pardon, Mrs. Fraser. This is an unpleasant business for a lady.”

“Please don’t hesitate out of concern for my sensibilities, Mr. Thurgood.” Mélanie calculated her tone and expression to strike a balance between refined wife and woman of the world. “I wouldn’t have accompanied my husband if I wasn’t prepared for the realities of the situation.”

“Ah—quite.” Thurgood coughed.

“Where did Miss Trevennen go when she left the theater?” Charles asked, impatience breaking through in his voice.

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Mr. Fraser.” Thurgood fidgeted with the papers on the desk beside him. “It’s odd. I haven’t thought of Helen—Miss Trevennen—in years. But another gentleman was asking about her only a few days ago.”

Mélanie could almost hear Charles’s silent curse. “Oh?” he said. “Another acquaintance from the past?”

“So he claimed. Foreign gentleman. Spanish. Said he met Helen on a visit here during the war.”

“Do you remember his name? It might help us in tracing Miss Trevennen.”

Thurgood smiled. “Iago. Can’t expect anyone who works in a theater to forget that. Iago—was it Morano? No, Lorano, that was it. Iago Lorano.”

“Midthirties?” Charles asked. “Black hair? Tallish?”

“Yes, that sounds right. More a Cassio than an Iago. A bit too stiff for Romeo. Might have made a good Harry Five, he had the right military bearing. Do you know him, Mr. Fraser?”

“I think I may have met him once in Spain.” Charles leaned back against the sagging slats of the chair, as though willing the tension from his body. “What were you able to tell him about Miss Trevennen?”

“Not a great deal. I—”

The door was jerked open. “Mr. Thurgood—” A young man with carrot-red hair poked his head through the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we can’t find either of the poison flasks.”

“I think Rosemary took them to make sure they fit in the costume pockets.”

“I’ll ask her. Oh, and Dobson wants to know if the musicians are stage left or right at the ball?”

“Left, last I heard.”

“Thanks.” The carrot-haired man ducked out.

“Sorry,” Thurgood said. “You’d think they could keep track of things themselves. Oh, thunder.” He jumped to his feet and pulled open the door. “Tim! Make sure Friar Laurence’s prayer book is on the prop table.” He closed the door. “Damn fool can’t ever remember to put it back himself. We spent an hour hunting for it yesterday. Sorry, Mr. Fraser, where were we?”

“You were telling us about Iago Lorano.”

“Oh, yes.” Thurgood returned to the desk. “I wasn’t able to tell him much, but I introduced him to Violet Goddard, our current Juliet, who was friendly with Helen—Miss Trevennen.” He pulled a pencil from behind his ear and jotted a note on a nearby script. “Must remember to make sure the tombs are anchored properly. Yesterday they went slithering and nearly toppled Romeo and Juliet into the pit.” He looked up at them. “I can ask Miss Goddard to have a word with you.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “in a moment. I’d like to ask you one or two questions first.”

Thurgood, who had started to get up, leaned back against the desk.

“When did Miss Trevennen leave the Drury Lane?” Charles asked.

Thurgood folded the paper he’d written on and tucked it in his sleeve. “Must be five or six years ago. No, more than that. We were doing the new
As You Like It,
with the Forest of Arden after the style of Turner. So that would make it…early 1813. Nearly seven years.”

Just about the time she would have received Jennings’s letter. Charles shot Mélanie a glance. “Why did she leave?” he asked Thurgood.

“I wish I knew. She simply didn’t show up one night. Very unprofessional. Phebe had to play Celia, and Audrey had to play Phebe, and one of the seamstresses actually went on as Audrey.” He shuddered at the memory. “Miss Trevennen was no saint, but she’d always been punctual before.”

“What about her friend Miss Goddard or others in the company?” Charles asked. “Did she contact them?”

Thurgood thumbed his finger through a loose sheaf of music on the desk beside him. “I never heard that anyone had had news of her. I didn’t ask questions, if that’s what you mean. We engaged another actress and that was the end of it.”

Mélanie disentangled her skirt from a bit of rough wood on the chair. “Did she have other particular friends in the company? Besides Miss Goddard?”

Thurgood scratched the side of his face. “Helen Trevennen was the sort of woman more likely to be in the company of men than women. And no,” he added, in response to the unspoken question in Mélanie’s eyes, “she wasn’t—ah—entangled with any of the men in the company. She set her sights higher than actors and stagehands.” He got to his feet. “Miss Goddard may be able to tell you more. If you wait a moment or two, I’ll bring her in.”

“Hell and damnation,” Mélanie said, when the door had closed behind Thurgood. “How the devil did Iago Lorano or whatever his name is find his way here? Baxter didn’t even tell him Helen Trevennen’s name.”

Charles stood and took a turn about the small room. “If Baxter hadn’t been able to remember her name, what would you have suggested we do next?”

Mélanie forced her mind to focus on the question. “Probably that we travel to Surrey and visit Mrs. Jennings. Wives often know more than their husbands realize.” It occurred to her that this last phrase had unfortunate reverberations, but she plunged on without waiting for Charles’s reaction. “Mrs. Jennings may have known her husband had a mistress and she may even have known the woman had been an actress at the Drury Lane. Do you think that’s how Lorano tracked Helen Trevennen here?”

“It seems the likeliest explanation.” Charles realigned the edges of a stack of scripts on the desk. “His questioning technique doesn’t sound particularly subtle. It’s a good bet we can learn something he overlooked.”

“Violet Goddard is a very good actress,” Mélanie said, thinking back to various performances they had seen Miss Goddard give at the Drury Lane.

“Yes.” Charles prowled the narrow length of the room again, a tall, lean, impatient figure, like Raoul a few hours ago at Mivart’s. “It won’t be easy to get her to say anything she doesn’t want to say.”

Thurgood returned a few moments later accompanied by a slender young woman with pale gold hair that flowed loose about her shoulders and gave her something of the look of a Renaissance Madonna. She wore a gold silk shawl and a heavy wool rehearsal skirt over a stylish gown of chestnut lustring. Violet Goddard was slighter in person than she appeared onstage, but she carried herself with the same graceful bearing. She paused just beyond the doorway and gave a full, deliberate smile, brighter than a dozen wax tapers. Her fine-boned face went from passably pretty to incandescent.

“Violet Goddard.” Thurgood pulled the door closed behind them. “Mr. and Mrs. Fraser, Violet. We’d like to help them in any way we can.”

Charles held out his chair to Miss Goddard. The gesture earned him a faint look of surprise. She sank into the chair in one elegant, economical movement, so that the bulky overskirt fell about her in graceful folds. Thurgood excused himself to return to the stage.

“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Goddard,” Charles said, as though she might have had a choice about it. “We know you are in the last days of rehearsal.”

Miss Goddard smiled, this time with an ironic tilt to her mouth, as though to say the interview had been a command and she knew it. “It’s of no moment, Mr. Fraser. They’ll be rehearsing the fight for at least another hour. For some reason, duels are much more difficult to choreograph than love scenes.”

Sensations teased at the edges of Mélanie’s memory. Clashing swords. The swish of a velvet cape. The rustle of a brocade gown. The feel of standing in the wings, waiting to step onstage, more heady than champagne, more nerve-racking than her first presentation at court. “I’ve always thought it unfair that Juliet is excluded from such an exciting part of the play,” she said. “It gives the actress entirely too much time to think.”

“Yes.” Miss Goddard’s eyes brightened with fellow feeling. Then she caught herself up short. How much fellow feeling could there be between an actress and a political hostess? Little did she know.

Charles gave an easy smile that was a tribute to his own acting ability. “We saw you as Lady Teazle last year. The scene with the screen was the funniest I’ve ever seen it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fraser. It’s one of my favorite roles.” Miss Goddard folded her hands in her lap with the delicacy of a woman who has learned to infuse her every gesture with grace. The dazzling charm, her professional armor, was in place once again. Her eyes sparkled, part Juliet, part Cleopatra. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Charles repeated his story about Jennings and the bequest to Helen Trevennen.

Miss Goddard listened in silence. She had shrewd eyes, set in an elegant, well-groomed face. The face could have belonged to any lady in Mayfair, but the eyes had seen things no gently bred girl was meant to witness. Mélanie wondered if her own gaze could betray her past as easily. Perhaps it took one who shared the experience to recognize the signs.

“I wish I could be of more help,” Miss Goddard said when Charles finished. The words sounded just the slightest bit too rehearsed. Her voice was cultured, with an underlay of Spitalfields. “But I fear I can tell you no more than I told the Spanish gentleman who was here last week. I haven’t seen Helen in nearly seven years.”

Charles was leaning against the desk, arms folded across his chest. “But you weren’t as surprised as everyone else by her disappearance?”

Her eyes widened. “How did you know?” she said, and then bit her lip at the easy trap she had fallen into.

Charles hitched himself up on the edge of the desk. “She talked to you before she left?”