The Wanton Angel Read online

  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.’

  ‘Did you not see the play, Master Stonnard?’ said Nicholas, politely. ‘Since you came here to discuss our continued lease on the Queen’s Head, I wonder that you did not take the opportunity to watch Westfield’s Men at work.’

  ‘I am not fond of such entertainment,’ said the lawyer, superciliously. ‘Theatre is an unnecessary diversion in my view but my view is irrelevant here. All that concerns me is your agreement to the terms of the new contract.’ The door opened. ‘Ah, here is our genial host! Good day, sir.’

  Anyone less genial than Alexander Marwood was difficult to imagine. He came through the door with a frown which changed into a scowl when he saw the four visitors ranged against him.

  ‘Why did you not bring the whole company?’ he taunted.

  ‘We are the company,’ said Firethorn. ‘In essence.’

  ‘And excluding our hired man,’ said Gill with a dismissive flick of the hand in the direction of Nicholas.

  Hoode leapt to his friend’s defence. ‘Nick is a vital member of this troupe,’ he said, ‘and he has proved it time and again. We could well survive without Barnaby Gill but without Nicholas Bracewell, we would be utterly lost.’

  ‘I share those sentiments!’ affirmed Firethorn.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to share some interest in this,’ said Stonnard, producing some documents from inside a leather satchel he was holding. ‘I take it that you have now had time to study the contract in detail?’

  ‘We have,’ said Firethorne. ‘So has our lawyer.’

  ‘What is his opinion?’

  ‘He found little to cavil at, Master Stonnard.’

  ‘Then let us get it signed and over with,’ urged Marwood. ‘You know my view of this unfortunate arrangement. I wish I had never encountered Westfield’s Men. But other imperatives are involved here,’ he continued, thinking of his wife. ‘If the contract must be signed, let us do it with all due speed then I can get back to the taproom before it is torn asunder by that rabble.’

  ‘But there has been no negotiation,’ argued Firethorn.

  ‘Negotiation?’ said Marwood.

  ‘Yes. There are several clauses I wish to amend.’

  ‘Take care, sir,’ said Stonnard, stepping smartly forward and sending his double chin into a wobble. ‘I will not permit any legal quibbles. My client and I spent many hours drafting this contract. It may not be rewritten to satisfy your whims.’

  Firethorn bristled. ‘They are demands not whims.’

  ‘And complaints,’ added Gill. ‘The tiring-house stinks.’

  ‘Only when your players are in there,’ said Marwood.

  Gill struck a pose. ‘The place is never swept from one year’s end to another. Cleanliness is next to godliness. If I did not have my pomander beside me, I would die of the stench. Let it be entered in the contract that the landlord undertakes to make his premises more wholesome.’

  ‘They are wholesome!’ wailed Marwood.

  ‘Barnaby spoke only in jest,’ soothed Hoode.

  ‘No, I did not!’ said Gill.

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said the lawyer, waving the contract in the air. ‘We are here to examine an important document, not to worry about some phantom smell.’

  ‘Stink,’ said Gill. ‘A positive reek of decay.’

  ‘You merely caught a whiff of your own performance,’ said Firethorn with a chuckle.

  Gill flared up, Firethorn baited him afresh and Hoode did his best to calm them down. It was left to Nicholas Bracewell to introduce a serious note into the proceedings.

  ‘If I may be allowed to say a word,’ he began, ‘then I would ask you to first to consider the limitation of time in the new contract. Six months is not acceptable to us. It gives us no security of tenure. A year is the least that Westfield’s Men deserve, bearing in mind that we do not play at all for some months and are therefore paying rent for premises we are unable to use. But if we know that we have a home for at least one year, it enables Master Firethorn and the other sharers to make decisions about the company in the longer term.’

  ‘Well spoken, Nick!’ said Firethorn.

  ‘Why stop at one year when we might nominate two?’ said Nicholas, ‘Or even three? It would save the expense on a lawyer if the contract no longer comes up for such regular renewal and it would show good faith on both sides. Would you at least consider two years?’

  ‘Three!’ boomed Firethorn.

  ‘Never!’ said Marwood. ‘It is like a life sentence.’

  ‘We could never agree to three years,’ said Stonnard. ‘Nor could I condone any action impelled by the base motive of avoiding a lawyer’s legitimate fees.’

  ‘Yet they are exorbitant,’ said his client.

  ‘Ezekiel Stonnard always gives value for money, sir.’

  ‘We believe that West
field’s Men do likewise,’ said Nicholas, persuasively, ‘and the Queen’s Head has proved an excellent venue for our work. Permit me to explain why.’

  Lawyer and landlord were treated to a long but cogent description of the company’s achievements and the benefits which they brought to all parties. Firethorn and Hoode were happy to let their book holder act as their advocate and even Gill, a brilliant clown on stage but a carping critic of everyone and everything when off it, came to admire the skill with which Nicholas was marshalling his arguments. Marwood writhed in discomfort throughout and Ezekiel Stonnard made several failed attempts to interrupt but Nicholas had hit his stride and the words flowed in a continuous stream.

  Concessions were slowly wrung from Stonnard who, in turn, advised Marwood to accept them. To the agonised landlord, each concession was a tooth being drawn from his mouth by red-hot pincers and he groaned accordingly but the contract was finally agreed upon, signed and witnessed. Marwood fled in terror, Ezekiel Stonnard went after him in pursuit of his fee and the others were left to celebrate. Firethorn threw his arms around Nicholas and hugged him gratefully.

  ‘Well done, dear heart! You are our salvation.’

  ‘I simply reasoned with them,’ said Nicholas, modestly.

  ‘But with such skill and passion, Nick,’ said Hoode. ‘You should have been a lawyer. You could haggle with the best.’

  ‘I was trained as a merchant, remember. Haggling is in my blood. The contract has been amended to suit your demands. I just wish I could have brought them around to the notion of extending it for longer than a year.’

  ‘A year is double what they first offered, Nick,’ said Firethorn, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. ‘It is such a relief to know that Westfield’s Men have a home for another twelve months. The Queen’s Head is a verminous inn with an even more verminous landlord but I love the place!’