in exchange for a tot of brandy?
But no such place came immediately to mind so his steps tended southwards, towards the Palmyra.
In the distance in an angle of two walls, splashed over sooty brickwork, he saw a painted palm tree. The size of it – three feet tall, if it was an inch – and the insolent brightness of whitewash against the dingy background were what caught his attention in the first place. But then it came to him that its outline was entirely familiar because it was a crisp stencil-cut version of the palm that crowned the theatre pillars. The same palm motif had been taken as an ornament for the head of Jacko Grady’s playbills and posters and it also adorned the theatre’s programmes.
Devil splashed through the mud to examine it more closely.
The whitewash had been applied haphazardly through the outlines of a stencil held up against the wall. Trickles ran down from the curved leaves and dribbled from the base. It was clearly fresh. Devil ran his thumb over a section of the trunk and scraped the brick beneath. The whitewash was only just turning grey with wind-blown dust. He walked on and passed a dozen more palms. As he drew near to the Strand he noticed arrows in the same whitewash, painted over walls and lintels, on steps and on the stones underfoot, all of them pointing in the direction of the Palmyra. People hurried by, but Devil estimated that most of them bestowed at least a wondering glance on trees and arrows.
He reached the Strand. Here another much bigger arrow pointed from the street towards the theatre entrance. A ragged street sweeper prodded his broom at it.
When Carlo arrived for the matinée Devil asked him what he thought of this proliferation of palms. The dwarf shrugged.
‘Grady’s doing?’
Devil thought this was highly unlikely. ‘Grady? You mean, he’s had a selling notion and then paid to have this done? Or is there some third person involved? Someone we know nothing about?’
The dwarf shrugged again. He and Devil were constantly at odds, chafed by too much proximity and downcast after a run of poor houses.
‘Ask him, if you’re so interested.’ He swung away and took the philosopher’s wig out of its box. The horsehair was matted with grime from its excursions beneath the stage.
Devil never spoke to Jacko Grady unless it was impossible to avoid him. He undid his buttons and took off his shirt, ready to put on his costume. Next to him the soprano was preparing for the stage by gargling and spitting linctus into a tin bowl. From her other side Bascia darted Devil a thin, complicit smile of disgust.
The next day there were more palm trees, a white forest of them waving all across Covent Garden as far as Trafalgar Square. Devil saw a man stop walking, turn in his path and follow with his eyes the direction of an arrow. That night there was a somewhat bigger audience, and the atmosphere of expectation amongst the crowd raised the quality of the performance. There were some Rawlinson students present, and the Philosophers received by far the longest and loudest applause. Grady intercepted Devil and Carlo as they came offstage. His thumbs were tucked into the pockets of his grease-blotched waistcoat.
‘What is this, Wix?’
‘What is what?’
‘The trees.’
The bustle of the wings might not have existed. Prickling with antagonism the two men appraised each other. From the belligerence of his question Devil understood that Grady was concealing suspicious alarm, and so most probably was not behind the strange multiplying of whitewashed palms. This did not reassure him. It could only mean that some other individual threatened to intrude, one who might be more devious and therefore a more formidable rival than greedy Grady.
‘I have no idea,’ Devil blandly countered, hoping to convey that he did. ‘The question is – is it criticism or applause?’
Grady’s mind was working, but the labour did not bring forth any explanation or a reason to blame Boldoni and Wix. He contented himself with a generalised thrust. ‘You need to get up some new material. Use the rigmaroles from your audition. Cards, memory, vanishing. Your box trick will be stale by next month.’
‘I don’t believe it will, but to offer you some of our astonishing new tricks will be a great pleasure.’
The cabinet was carried offstage and they followed it, leaving Grady at his vantage point. As soon as the stagehands deposited the piece Carlo pressed his ear to the mechanism that controlled the hidden doors.
‘The hinge is catching. It takes a full second longer for the door to spring. You might pay more attention to the act, Wix, and less to your personal ambitions,’ he grumbled.
‘You heard the audience tonight. My ambition will pay off, and then perhaps you will appreciate what I have been trying to do.’
‘No one will ever appreciate you as sincerely as you do yourself.’
Devil ignored him. The dwarf’s carping pessimism and sense of his own importance were irksome, but whenever he thought of reclaiming for himself his lodgings and his act – the two halves of his life, because he had nothing else – he was forced back to the bare truth that he needed Carlo more than the dwarf needed him.
‘Ten per cent of every house more than eighty per cent full,’ he murmured. ‘Tonight we were three-quarters sold.’ The ribbon of gold that had shone so enticingly in Devil’s dreams at the beginning of the enterprise had drooped and grown tarnished, but in recent days it had started to glitter all over again.
‘New hinges,’ Carlo bared his wolf’s teeth. ‘Tomorrow.’
Heinrich Bayer passed with Lucie in his arms, her unmarked satin slippers skimming an inch from the floor. She had a new costume, a narrow skirt of heavy oyster-coloured silk worn over a high bustle in the latest style. But it was the other automaton, the manikin glimpsed in Bayer’s studio, which occupied Devil’s thoughts.
He was going to need Carlo’s cooperation for a trick much more difficult to execute than the Philosophers illusion. The dwarf would have to be kept sweet.
‘Tomorrow, my friend, of course,’ he agreed in a voice as silken as Lucie’s gown.
If the fine art students were piqued by the apprentices’ appropriation of their theatre, they did not retaliate by withdrawing their support for it. Stark black cloaks became the preferred costume for a certain section of the house, and each night the swoop of the executioner’s blade and the crash of the head into the basket were greeted with a louder roar. The severed head’s words from the black depths of the cabinet carried a whispering echo as twenty others mouthed them from the stalls. With the warm swell of approval buoying him up, Devil’s snapping of the sword blade and plea for forgiveness found a real pathos that even Carlo could not fault. The smoke coiled with devilish effect in the flashes of blue and silver gaslight that were now, with long practice, perfectly synchronised. The bitter cascade of gold coins at the end drew a storm of applause.
The Execution of the Philosopher illusion had reached its point of perfection. Word of mouth spread from the students to their friends, their families, and their friends’ friends and families. The palm trees had caused their own stir, and there had even been a picture and a teasing paragraph about it in the London Illustrated News. For an entire week the number of seats sold was greater with each successive night. Devil quickly concluded that the rumbustious youths who had taken to attending performances in costume were also in some way responsible for the street decorations. So long as the business was
