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Angelica hugged her. ‘There’s another man visiting tonight after the performance, hoping to importune me too. Lord Rackham.’
‘Oh, ’im. He’s a hog-grubber too, only a noble one, and handsome too, so he’s that more dangerous!’ The women managed to lift their spirits with a laugh.
‘I’d better get dressed. With the news of the victory in France, it’s going to be a reckless night.’
* * *
Ivor Asprey had to leave the Houses of Parliament sooner than he would have wished but in order to settle his sister’s mind and gain some peace he needed to at least show willing and see the play, perhaps meet the offending actress and be able to relay some sort of consoling intelligence back. He strode into the brilliant low sun of a late spring evening and joined Parliament Street thronged with revellers, heading north towards Covent Garden. His mind was full of the speech he was due to make and he stopped occasionally to take from his breast pocket a small notebook in which he jotted down new ideas or a particularly resonant phrase that came to him as he walked.
His thoughts were soon wrenched to the present and the world of the senses. Arriving in the foyer of the theatre, he was faced by a brilliant caravanserai of people in high plumage and of every persuasion. The fashionables who had paid for the best boxes were beautifully dressed and mingled for a while with the rougher elements, more foxed than not, heading for the pit or the even more unruly upper terraces. Two strands of beau-monde and demi-monde came together at the entrance, the young dandies and older libertines jostling and soliciting the painted ladies who congregated like butterflies, fluttering and coquettish around them.
Ivor Asprey stood for a moment surveying the merry scene, half expecting to see his lovelorn nephew enlivening the view. His brow darkened, however, as he caught sight of Lord Rackham, even more vulpine than usual, weaving his way through the crowd with a very comely lady of indeterminate age and reputation on his arm. The sight of his lordship on the prowl always incensed him. He could not forgive his predatory interest falling on his own wife all those years ago. Not wanting to be drawn into conversation with his lordship and companion, Ivor Asprey turned away and found himself looking into the upturned face of a lady he knew somewhat better.
He bowed. ‘What a pleasant surprise, Lady Linus.’ The young woman gazing at him in an unnervingly clear-eyed way was smooth-faced and handsome, her fair hair swept off her face in a neat chignon with a modicum of tendrils softening the restrained style.
‘Mr Asprey, I am surprised to see you at the theatre when you have such important work to do.’ She smiled as if they shared a secret. ‘I’m only here because my mother needed accompaniment.’
He was reluctant to reveal anything of his mission and so deflected with a languid comment. ‘Mr Kean is causing a sensation as Hamlet, I hear.’
‘I heard the sensation was more his counterpart, a young upstart girl who reveals rather too much in the dying scene.’ There was a small frown between her brows as she looked across at the milling crowd of men around the birds of paradise, chattering in a flirtatious flock in the foyer.
With a serious voice she took his arm. ‘You and I, Mr Asprey, are engaged on important work in this new century. The licentiousness and tumult of the previous age is now past. You, with your social reforms and I with my concerns for public morals, are at the forefront of change.’ Her eyes were cool and challenging.
Ivor Asprey had been attracted to Portia Linus’s intelligence and conversation when he’d first met her some months before and she had discussed her translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days and compared it to Vergil’s Georgics, but he had not suspected such a zealous, managing nature underneath that cool cerebral manner. As the noise from the foyer had increased he bent his head closer to hers to ask, ‘How so? M’lady.’
With her eyes still on the young unaccompanied women peeling off in pairs with the young men, she said in a low confiding voice, ‘I’ve joined Lady Dartmouth’s committee seeking to rehabilitate the unfortunate young women of the streets. Make them fit for employment. Mostly as maids and kitchen assistants; no responsible employer would want them working in the nursery.’
Ivor Asprey admired her for her lack of priggish sentiment in discussing this pervasive underbelly of city life. He liked her rational, even masculine, turn of mind. Perhaps Edwina was right, she would make an admirable wife for a reforming Whig politician on the rise. Then Lady Linus’s mother appeared at her elbow and claimed her daughter’s attention.
Ivor Asprey saluted them as they bade farewell then turned on his heel to discover which box was his. He was no longer single-mindedly focussed on his forthcoming speech and sat down in the luxurious red plush seat feeling unsettled and pensive. He entertained the alien thought that perhaps his sister was not always wrong. He glanced across at the opposite box and glimpsed a familiar profile and an unexpected stab of longing further undermined his equanimity. Arabella, Countess of Hilperton, had just taken her seat alongside her husband and mother-in-law. He looked on her disconsolate beauty, that exquisite tip-tilted nose, the curve of her cheek, and was reminded why, against reason, he continued his unsatisfactory affair with her. She must have sensed his piercing gaze for she turned and, as the light dimmed, their eyes met, gleaming in the semi-darkness.
He sat back in his seat thoroughly discomposed. How much he disliked to be in the sway of his emotions. Since the death of his wife he had sought to minimise his emotional vulnerability by burying himself in work and choosing to express any romantic needs with the beautiful Countess, herself dissatisfied with marriage to a sporting earl who preferred his horses to her. Ivor Asprey thought it fortunate that each desired nothing much from the other beyond a pleasurable few hours in the afternoon. But his heart, so long cauterised, was stirring back to life, he knew not why, and was disturbed by these unruly feelings that surprised him at unexpected moments.
The play had started but his mind was elsewhere. In the low light he was aware of the Countess who was aware of him, stealing the occasional glance his way. And somewhere in another box, Lady Linus and her mother were sitting, perhaps as distracted as he was. Even the arrival of the ghost, clanking onstage, and the excitement of the pit did not hold his attention. A great cheer at the sight of Hamlet made Ivor look up to see Edmund Kean, already hailed as the new great tragedian of the age, dressed in his embroidered frock coat, satin breeches and a towering powdered wig. Ivor Asprey thought the production had made a mistake in choosing eighteenth-century dress but despite this sartorial disadvantage, Hamlet’s presence was mesmerising. Regardless of his diminutive stature, Mr Kean compelled all eyes as he stalked about the stage, his voice thrilling with emotion.
When Angelica, as Ophelia, eventually arrived on stage with her brother, Laertes, Ivor wondered what all the fuss was about. This slip of a girl was undistinguished, overborne by her heavy costume and the white powder on her face and labouring under an elaborate wig. But when she spoke her voice was lyrical and full of feeling. He leaned forward to catch her words better. The drunken crowd had begun their bawdy catcalls from the moment she appeared and the excitement reached a crescendo when she spoke the verse:
‘Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.’
A slew of shouts almost drowned out Laertes’ farewell to his sister and father. Ivor Asprey winced in sympathy for the actress as one stentorian voice bellowed, ‘Ee lass! That’s telling the whore’s-bird, that is.’
He heard a woman’s voice cry, ‘They’re all scabs and varlets, miss. Keep away from ’em!’ to much laughter. And then another rough voice from the opposite side of the pit shouted, ‘Eh, miss! Don’t believe Mister ’Amlet else it end in a bath of tears.’
Watching from the safety and privacy of his box, he admired how this young woman through force of character managed to act with such dignity and pathos that the audience grew subdued, despite reeling as they did with cheap ale.
Ivor Asprey was intrigued. Such skill and her exercise in subtle authority would be a lesson for politicians dealing with the rowdy floor of the House of Commons he thought, and wondered whether it was in technique or character that her power resided. As Ophelia left the stage his thoughts returned to his speech and the sudden realisation that it would be given extra force if he used first-hand accounts of the children in their own words, telling of their daily lives and suffering. He was busy making notes when a great roar from the pit startled him.
His pencil mark jagged across the page as he looked to the stage and beheld a vision that completely took him unawares and stopped his heart. It was as if one of Botticelli’s Graces had wandered out of mythology and into their mundane lives. The crowd too fell uneasily silent, rapt in their attention on the divine figure before them.
For a moment it seemed that Ophelia had appeared entirely unclothed, so frail and vulnerable was she now in a simple white chemise having cast aside the brocaded armour of her previous costume. No longer hidden by her powdered wig, Angelica’s hair was like liquid gold as it tumbled to her waist from a coronet of columbine and daisies; her face, free of white powder and paint, revealed the beauty of her translucent skin and her large, heavy-lidded eyes. Carrying her lyre and an armful of wild flowers which she strewed across the stage, she sang fragments of an unearthly song. All eyes were upon her. Her movements were a dance, her presence mesmerising; there was a sense of the audience holding its breath. With a chilling thought, Ivor Asprey realised that Ophelia was not about to die off-stage, her death to be described later by the Queen, but to drown in front of them.
