day, if it hadn’t been for an easy-going temperament that made him love company and good fellowship better than his art. He must have been in his fifties but wore his age as lightly as everything else; a bear of a man with a shock of curly grey hair and a wind-tanned face from riding on the outside of coaches on his way to far-flung concert engagements.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Better not tell him. Not until afterwards, anyway.’
He nodded towards Daniel.
‘No. He’s … he is very fond of Jenny Jarvis, isn’t he?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen him like this a few times before. Usually it’s the soprano in whatever opera he’s directing. He’ll recover in time.’
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’
The violins were cued so he couldn’t answer.
Hardcastle and his friends sat through the burletta, then left noisily as the arithmetical horse began its act. They returned an hour later, even more noisily and some of them unsteady on their feet, during the instrumental prologue to the second ballet.
As far as there was a plot, it concerned the goddess Diana, out hunting with her maidens. Anything less like the chaste moon goddess than Columbine in gold-spangled muslin and a coronet sprouting blue ostrich feathers in her hair it would be hard to imagine. The high point of the dance was Columbine turning a series of pirouettes. The girls kneeled down and stretched out imploring palms to their goddess, so that if she became unsteady she could take support from the one nearest. With luck, it would look like a graceful acceptance of homage rather than desperation. One pirouette safely executed, second pirouette, a hasty clutch at a nymph’s hand, similarly with three. She came down flat-footed at four and a half, turned and dropped her usual curtsey to acknowledge the applause. Jenny was at the end of the line and there was no need for Columbine to touch her at all. I couldn’t believe it when she straightened from the curtsey, put her hand on Jenny’s outstretched palm and forced it backwards with all her weight. Jenny made no sound that I could hear, but her face contorted.
Daniel positively yelled a protest that must have been audible on stage if not to the audience and, for once in his life, missed a note. Kennedy rallied the strings and the dance went on. Jenny was smiling again, the automatic smile of all the nymphs. Daniel looked at me. I signed to him to go on playing and he did, his eyes fixed on the stage.
The yellow-haired girl, Pauline, presented Diana with a wooden hunting spear. Some animal was notionally attacking them from a canvas-painted thicket. The nymphs formed a protective circle round their goddess. Columbine flourished her spear and drove the point of it straight into Jenny’s shin. Jenny yelped and jumped. This time the audience couldn’t have missed it. There was a hole in Jenny’s stocking and blood flowing. The dancers nearest her looked horrified, while the others held their attitudes and their smiles.
For a moment it looked as if Jenny was going to take it as passively as the previous attacks; but only for a moment. Still moving with delicate grace, she kicked Columbine hard and accurately on the kneecap. Columbine’s shriek was probably heard in the street outside. The gallery were ecstatic, whooping and cheering. They were too far from the stage to see the brutal reality of the thing and thought this was all part of the entertainment, much more to their taste than ballet. Most of the musicians had stopped playing by now, though Kennedy – on the principle that in theatre you must keep going whatever happens – fiddled out an Irish jig that formed an oddly appropriate accompaniment.
Jenny, seeing the look on Columbine’s face, tried to move for shelter behind the other dancers, but Columbine went after her, limping heavily but with more energy than she’d put into the dance. She caught Jenny by the back of the bodice, spun her round, and raked her nails deeply down her cheek. By that point, Daniel was climbing on to the stage. I caught his coat tails.
‘No – you’ll only make it worse.’
Jenny, with fierce stripes of red on her cheek, clutched at Columbine’s hair and yanked hard. By then, the rest of the audience had taken their cue from the gallery and were laughing out loud, even Hardcastle’s party, who were surely in a position to see it was all too real. The laughter grew to hysteria as Jenny fell over backwards on the stage, with Columbine’s wig and its coronet of ostrich feathers spread across her body like the tendrils of an exotic octopus.
Columbine screeched again and clapped her hands to her head. She wasn’t bald, nothing as bad as that, but her own hair was thinner than the wig, pinned close to her scalp and wet from perspiration. The combination of her small, wet head, smudged rouge and spreading circles of eye make-up above her billowing gauze was oddly clownish.
Through it all I’d been aware of the voice of Barnaby Blake shouting from the wings. He’d probably been ordering the stagehands to bring the curtain down, because it descended so suddenly that some of the dancers who’d been watching open-mouthed had to leap backwards to save themselves from being knocked off their feet. Behind it, Columbine was still yelling.
Daniel ran up the steps to the stage and round the edge of the curtain. I followed. On the way he almost collided with Rodney Hardcastle, who was trying to scramble over the edge of the box, possibly with the belated idea of helping Columbine. Daniel simply pushed him aside. As I went past I glimpsed Hardcastle’s round face, mouth open, expression caught between hilarity and alarm.
On stage, the dancers and the maid Marie had clustered round Columbine and were trying to soothe her. Barnaby Blake was taking no notice of them, shouting to the stagehands to change the set.
‘Suter, what are you doing here? Get back into the pit, stop that infernal jig and play the music I’m paying you for.’
‘Where’s Jenny?’ Daniel said.
‘Gone to throw herself in the Thames, I hope.’ Blake turned to yell at a stagehand, ‘Just get the bed on quickly, never mind the battlements.’ Then, ‘Suter, where do you think you’re going?’
Daniel went at a run past Diana’s glade, into the wings and out to the dimly lit backstage corridor. He hesitated at the door to the dancers’ room and noticed for the first time that I was following him.
‘I’d better go in first,’ I said. ‘She may be changing.’
The room was empty, the dancers still on stage.
‘She couldn’t have just run out in the street in her dancing clothes, could she?’ Daniel said.
‘I don’t know. She might have been desperate to get away. She knows she’s the one who’ll get the blame.’
We went out of the room and along the corridor to the side door. The fat man, Billy, was in the doorkeeper’s room, feeding his cat by the light of a feeble gas-lamp.
‘Has a girl just gone out?’ Daniel said.
‘Someone just went rushing past. Didn’t see who it was.’
I followed Daniel out of the door. Late-evening crowds were pushing along Long Acre. An endless procession of carriages went by, their lamps illuminating a dense mass of pedestrians, hawkers, chestnut braziers, beggars and patrolling policemen. There was no sign of Jenny.
‘I’ll go to her lodgings,’ Daniel said.
‘I’m
