Nettleblack, page 12
Keturah St. Clare Ballestas, Director of the Dallyangle Division
Myself once more
More or less still Monday, October 30th, 1893
Sweet elysian pineapples. At least they’re distracted is all I can say.
Judging by the reaction at the Division, this was the first time in everybody’s collective lives (including mine) that such a thing as a severed head had turned up as a sudden and pressing concern. Within twenty seconds of the announcement, the building was a whirlwind. The Director herself strode into the dormitory, silenced the room with a stern stare and a tactical removal of the spectacles, broke the news as if she was snapping a twig. The instant she left, Gertie and Oliver scrabbled about with feral eyes and terrified grins, stockinged feet plummeting into boots, scraps of paper snatched from bedside tables to scrawl the news to their family. I seized the moment of chaos to peer through the crack in the floorboards – to check that Mordred still had his head attached, or perhaps that he didn’t have the severed one clutched in his jaws. Beyond that, I couldn’t do more than cling to my elbows as the candle-flames flickered, far too stunned to register any of it as remotely real.
Dallyangle never had anything like this. In its year of existence, the Division hadn’t encountered a murder – certainly not a dismemberment. It was horrible – it was terribly exciting – it was penny-dreadful stuff – it was the meat of Life and Limbs: A Comic Romance of the Medical School! – it was infinitely more frightening than stolen pigs – it was practically metropolitan!
So Gertie was yelling, at any rate, as she clattered off to run the news to Mr. Adelstein, buttoning her jacket as she sprinted. Out in reception, Cassandra was scribbling a frantic entry in her ledger – no, in a notebook of her own, marbled at the covers, pressed between the ledger’s pages. She didn’t even glance up to snipe at Septimus as the Director gestured us past – for we were to hasten to the theatre, and retrieve all the evidence we could carry.
“Open the morgue, and make it presentable! Gertrude, make sure Mr. Adelstein gets to the scene as quickly as possible – take a bicycle – and put that ridiculous novel away! Septimus, go straight there – bring me everything you can find – hold the fort until Mr. Adelstein arrives! Cassandra, compose a dispatch for the council at once – they will need to hear this from us – ”
This was the last I heard of the Director’s descant – she’d stationed herself in the midst of reception, hurling her ring of keys at Oliver, yelling orders to everything that scrambled past her, the closest to uncontrolled I’d ever seen her reach – before Septimus tugged me away into the night.
The rain had held off, and the cobbles were drying. The market was a skeleton now, stripped of its awnings, a few stark limbs discernible against the leathery black sky. My feet smarted the moment I sped up, and my chemise was quite slick with sweat, but the Division’s mania had crept up on me, and I wouldn’t let a whit of discomfort or a scrape of freezing wind slow me down. Huddled cottages with candlelit windows flashed past like so many cats’ eyes, whilst the shouts and snarls of a crowd ahead got closer and fleshier. Plums, but here I was, dashing behind Septimus, pinched alive and giddily distracted – not away from, but headlong into, the heart of the madness!
And there was the Dallyangle Theatre, throbbing like a jack-o’-lantern. I understood on the instant why my ignorance of the place had provoked such incredulity. It was far larger than I expected, the stucco façade whorled and writhing with architectural furbelows, lit from below by the blazing light of the foyer – for every one of the glassy front doors had been swung wide, hurling people and illumination into the street. The scene was hellishly splendid: the strange garish building with its pillars and frieze, horrendously out of place in the bucolic town, and the heaving heap of greatcoats and carriages jostling for place outside it. Septimus wrestled us through a gap in the gigs, sent a gaslit-eyed horse shying as she clambered under its head. She was yelling Division!, but even she could hardly fling the word high enough to soar over this chaos. It was pure wild scrabble just to get to the doors. I cried out, I fear, quite as much as anyone else in the crowd – there was an elbow sharp in my side, then a heel gouging into my toe, and an open-palmed hand rattled my teeth in my head. By the time we’d cleared the worst of the throng, I was bruised as a peach.
Right back by the stalls entrances, the foyer was at its quietest. There were pinches and scars studding the scarlet plush carpet, the remnants left by walking-sticks and high-heeled boots as the audience rushed for the street. The doors ahead of us had mirrors in them, set between polished coils of wood – and for one startling moment I snagged eyes with myself, flushed and bedraggled with the crowd at my back. Pomegranates – was that truly what my cropped hair looked like?
I quite couldn’t stop to calm it. We were through these doors in three smart steps, and then it was darker even than the empty market. I blinked, and rows of soft empty seats unfolded out of the gloom, down a giddy rake to the orchestra pit and the fussy proscenium of the stage. It was warm in here, close and stifling, the air crammed with sweat and half-melted wax. The footlights were still lit, twinkling faintly out of their shells, speckling weird spasms of light over a painted mansion at the back of the stage. A chest – the chest – sat lone and sinister centre-stage, ringed by plaster gravestones – some of them felled, one of them broken in half. As far off as they could get, a swathe of the company still lurked, lurid at the faces with greasepaint, their garish costumes huddled under shawls and blankets.
Septimus swung up onto the stage, glanced over her shoulder open-mouthed – quite as if there’d been an audience still in those musky stalls, and she was about to do nothing more bizarre than belt a few bars of song. Fortunately, the look brought me into her orbit. Before I could disgrace myself attempting to emulate her easy climb, she’d dropped to one knee and leaned over to grab my waist, dragged me up after her without even a frown for the effort.
I’d not so much as a fruit to stammer in thanks before she sprang upright and whiplashed away to the performers. Had she felt – through the jacket – my consummate lack of corset? Did she disapprove? Medlars, the thought was more than enough to squirm me to my feet.
“It’s in there,” one of the actors cried, swaggering forward to meet Septimus. He was shivering in a thin silk shirt, ruffled at the neckline with a froth of lace, his honey-coloured hair clasped in a creamy ribbon. “In the – wait – you’re not the police! Did no one send to Gulmere for this? Dear Lord, they haven’t summoned the Division, have they?”
“’Course I’m from the Division,” Septimus snapped. “Now – you’re playing Frederic, I assume – where’s Lorrie? Lawrence Tickering?”
The actor blinked at her. With this lacy man in his rumpled silk and enormous boots, and Septimus in her high-buttoned jacket and trousers, they looked alarmingly like they were playing a scene themselves: the villain and the principal boy, blustering through their first confrontation. “Who?”
Septimus flushed. “He’s a pirate! He has the stage business with the life-preserver! You’re in scenes with him – you’d’ve been acting together right when this happened – so where is he?”
“Oh. Him.” A curling sneer from the actor – limes, he recovered quickly from a close encounter with a severed head! – and a lavish wink to go with it, shirt-cuffs flapping like moths as he folded his arms. “The pretty boy with the cockney vowels. He’s outside – flirting with the management, as usual. I’m sure it must be a real perk of your job, fretting over the likes of him – ” (another wretched wink) “ – and if that’s the fun your sort get out of joining the Dallyangle Division, I can’t completely blame you for – ”
“Oi! You two!”
A haggard-looking man in a faded bicorn hat stumbled out of the cluster, a plaid rug slung at his shoulders, the dregs of his false beard sweat-matted and slipping off sideways. “’Case you’ve forgot, Hector, there’s a head in a box over there – time enough to snipe at the chorus later! And you, fellow – planning on doing your job tonight?”
Septimus whirled about, teeth flashing in a snarl – and, from his sudden pallor, it became abruptly apparent he’d only just realised she was a woman.
“I – ah – beg pardon, miss – but – ”
“I ain’t miss,” she spat at him. “I’m a Divisioner, and I know full well what my job is, Pirate King! Right! Cast! File in!”
The remnants of the company were hardly inclined to obey her in any punctual manner, but she was already spurring them onwards – snatching the inimitable notebook from her pocket, lashing the spine back on itself, and seizing the stubby pencil that had been lodged in the folds. “I need names. Everyone in the show, everyone working backstage. Anyone who had access to that chest. Go!”
Hector rolled his eyes. “Do you mean to have us recollect the names of every audience member from memory too?”
Septimus met him head-on with a twitch of a glare. “No need to bother, Frederic. Your box office’ll tell me that on the way out. Pirate King! Got an inkling what the names of your crew are?”
“I – well – ” – the man was far too abashed to refuse her this time – “I’ll have a think – ah – well, you have Samuel – no, that’s his character – ”
“Let’s just start with a register, then!”
She jerked her head at me, eyes flicking to the right, where heavy drapes slumped down from the flies. “Henry – Lorrie says the pirates come on stage left in Act Two. Have a look back there. Mind you don’t touch anything.”
“And if you break any of the ladies’ parasols,” Hector added sharply, sneering me towards the wings, “Your silly little detective-club will have to pay for them!”
I doubled my pace after that, blinking like a maniac to accustom my eyes to the gloom of backstage. Within a few frantic steps I’d tripped on something. No one onstage seemed to notice; the grudging roll of names droned on undisturbed. Nectarines – of course, of course it was a parasol underfoot – but Hector would never know it wasn’t just trampled in the panic, if I snuck out quick through that narrow little door ahead –
I gasped when I sprinted through it, and the paltry tallow-light flickered with me. The narrow door led you to an equally narrow corridor, lit only by candles cupped in hollows above head-height – and the temperature was bruisingly cold after the warm stickiness of the auditorium. Darting further in showed me why: whilst half of the corridor cricked towards the back of the stage, presumably leading to the dressing-rooms, a forked alternative took you directly to a door, and this door was flung open to the street outside. There were the rusty remnants of a lock, a gangrenous key still poking out of it, but the structure was more than flimsy enough to have caved with a shove.
Well. Peaches. This quite didn’t help.
Onstage, Septimus was still holding court, having apparently gathered the lists she needed in flat defiance of the company’s reticence. I edged back into the throng, as surreptitiously as I was able – she didn’t look inclined to be interrupted.
“Right! We’ve got a head in a box. So where’s the body?”
Hector and the Pirate King exchanged a stunned glance. “There – there isn’t a body – there’s only ever been a head – ”
“But are you sure?”
A combination of incredulous exasperation and infectious head-mania had apparently seized Septimus tenfold, with the names in her notebook and the whole investigation spieling out before her. The excitement hurled her voice a good three crescendos closer to fortissimo, and – you could see it when she skidded round, snagged in the footlights’ glimmer – struck something rather unearthly into her navy eyes. The resident downward spiral, Cassandra had called her – but you’d quite never think it to look at her now.
“If there’s a head, there’s a body somewhere. I ain’t saying for definite that it’s in this theatre, but it can’t just’ve vanished, and this is the first place there is to look.”
Hector gaped at her. “A corpse running amok in Dallyangle, indeed! Is this ridiculous young woman actually suggesting that we scurry off to hunt her a headless cadaver? Good Lord, she’s another mad cockney!”
Septimus’s answering snarl was almost certainly more charismatic than the motley group’s entire operetta. “I’m asking anyone who thinks they’ve got useful information to come forward with it, and – you! Police! Don’t think I can’t see you sneaking off back there!”
A gaggle of men dislodged themselves from the shadows of the wings, their dull blue-black uniforms striking a passable imitation of the helmeted officers I’d seen trudging about Cambridge. Next to Septimus, they were so many guys and mannequins, limp and quivering in the face of her fervent sharpness.
“Look – we’re not policemen – we’re just bass-baritones, mostly – ”
“That don’t mean you can just run away!” she snapped. “And backstage ain’t to be tampered with ’til Mr. Adelstein’s seen it. He’ll be along with more Divisioners soon, and I need you all to stay here and speak to him.”
The bass-baritones flung a volley of glances to me, woebegone and beseeching. What a giddy delight it was just to shrug! I looked – and was – a far softer touch than Septimus, but her spare zeal seemed to have leapt into my veins, and it made me firmer than I’d ever yet been.
“More Divisioners!” Hector spluttered. “God help us! If there are more Divisioners, what are you two supposed to be doing?”
Septimus set her teeth. “We’re here for the evidence. I’ve got the names, we’ll get the ticket register – Henry, bring me the head.”
Wait.
Figs.
I was perfectly content being an awestruck observer – not – why was I the one to have to go pearl-fishing for the thing?
“But – don’t you – erm – think – ”
“The head,” she growled, skewering me on a javelin of a glare. “Now.”
It was there in her eyes, even half-feral and glittering as they were. This was a test. You really don’t know a thing, and now here was a chance to start remedying that. Her glower twitched; she was realising, too late, that I might turn tail and sprint away, never mind the attendant humiliation it would hurl back at her. For one shaky moment, right in the midst of her virtuosic performance, she looked every inch as awkward as she’d been that morning, inadvertently proffering me a bunch of flowers, steeling herself for me to laugh them out of her hand.
I settled my shoulders. Staggered towards the chest, with its slammed lid and splintered wood, every eye on the stage grazing my bruises. She swallowed – with the cast watching me, she had a few seconds to steady herself – and tipped forward on her boot-toes, quite as morbidly curious as the rest of them.
For my part, I felt nightmarishly light-headed. Oh – no! – not the best phrase, truly not the best phrase –
“Pomegranates!”
The company screamed for my scream. Even Septimus flinched. I reached into the chest, grabbed a bristly crop of cold greying hair – lifted – failed – shifted to a two-handed grip – tried again – it was heavy, I’d not expected that –
And there it was. A man’s head, mutton-chopped and silver at the temples. Eyes shut, skin grey as the hair, face stiff but otherwise unconcerned. Not a whit of blood.
Which – wasn’t that – ?
I gaped at it, quite the little public-executioner, fear fast curdling to sheer bewilderment. Granted, my experience with severed heads was about as extensive as the rest of Dallyangle’s, but – surely – surely the expression ought to look more pained? Surely it ought to smell of something that wasn’t quite so – so sickly, so cloying, so clinical in one’s mouth? Surely there ought to be blood – or even bloodstains? Surely the decapitated remnants of a recent murder victim were supposed to look less – well – one would have to check with Nick Fitzdegu and his family of undertakers, but – less pristine?
Septimus had it out of my hands before I could stammer as much, tipping it up to the gleam of the footlights. A universal whimper sent the whole cast scuttling backwards. “Right! Either he ain’t been beheaded here, or someone’s done a job and a half of cleaning him up. Does anyone recognise him?”
Hector – and I could have hurled the head at him for it, had I still held the head, and been of a considerably braver disposition – actually rolled his dark-lashed eyes, one hand cupping his billowing shirt close to his corseted waist. “Almost a sensible question! None of us recognise it, and none of the audience did either.”
Septimus scowled. “None? Are you sure? No reactions stood out? Dallyangle ain’t a large town – surely someone must know – ”
“Apparently not,” Hector retorted briskly. “Well, you’ve got the head, and you’ve got your little list, and absolutely none of you will be missed when you finally see fit to make your exit – so is there anything else, Divisioner, or are you going to leave us be?”
Figs, I wanted to yell, but you shan’t sneer at Septimus! Not tonight – not when she gets far too much of that from her own colleagues! Not when you’ve barely aided her enquiries beyond scoffing and denying things! Not when – surely – you ought to be glad of her protection until the reinforcements arrive!
Septimus blinked at him, panic spasming across her eyes. “Wait. What – where are the police chorus?”
Hector smiled nastily. “They ran into the wings when you pulled out the head with such feminine tact. They’ve probably gone home, costumes and all.”
“What? But – they can’t go out backstage – I told ’em – ”
“Yes. Well, you see – if you want to order fake policemen around, you have to be a real policeman. That’s the trick of it, sweetheart.”
