to myself, ‘This is good—this is in fact sublime—it is a mirror held to the Human Condition. But I forget about the audience. Anyone who can spell Condition—or Human—or The—is at the opera. The ones we’ve got are mutinous before we’re fifteen minutes in. ‘I liked them witches—they was all right—and it was prime that bit where they stabbed the feller. But why do they have to talk about it, rest of the bloody night?’ It’s the same with Hamlet. Give them the Ghost, and the Gravedigger and the five minutes of slaughter at the end, and they’d go off happy as clams. It’s the other four hours that bores ’em rigid.”
Cubitt’s limitations as Chief Tragedian had something to do with this failure as well. The last time he had essayed Hamlet, vocal elements had begun urging him on to self-slaughter by the middle of Act II. But there was a straw here, and I reached for it, albeit morosely.
“Are you saying that my play is beyond the grasp of the Kemp Theatre audience as presently constituted?”
“No, I’m saying your play’s no damned good. Same as your other ones. Sorry to say it, dear boy, but spade a spade. I’d put the quill away, if I were you, and look about for something I had a talent for. Ah, finally?”
An apparition had uncannily manifested down below, poking its head out through a little door in the stage apron and waving one bony hand to Cubitt. It looked for all the world like something the faeries had left behind, on one of their nighttime depredations into some ill-starred nursery. Remarkably this was not a performer in the evening’s extravaganza, but the boy who operated the trap. He was not above twelve or thirteen, with lank white hair and great unblinking eyes in a pale and sharp-chinned goblin’s face. We called him Tommy—short for Tommyknocker.
“We’re ready? My stars, can it be true?” Cubitt demanded, in the register he reserved for moments of tragic irony.
Tommyknocker disappeared beneath the stage without a word. He never did say a word—never a syllable, for apparently he was mute. He had been discovered at the stage door one morning, huddled and shivering, one of those waifs that the metropolis vomits up upon the cobbles. But one of the actresses took him in, and one of the carpenters found him a corner to sleep in, and eventually someone else discovered that he was no fool, and in fact ingenious with pulleys and mechanisms—amazingly so, in a child so clearly defective.
“Then let us screw our courage to the sticking point.” Stepping forward, Cubitt assumed the attitude of Lord Ruthven, Highland fiend, and declaimed: “Demon as I am to walk the earth to slaughter and something-or-other! Something else about a black heart sustained by human blood—oh, deuce take it, they’re not coming for the bloody dialogue.” With that, Cubitt precipitated himself headlong and disappeared, with a suddenness that would elicit great gasps and cries from the three-penny seats, for in tonight’s performance it would be accompanied by a hiss of smoke and a belch of hellfire. I gave a little jump myself, despite knowing how the illusion was produced. It was a simple stage trap, consisting of two India-rubber flaps underlain by a wooden slide fitting close beneath. This was slid back at the appropriate instant, letting the actor plunge through to be caught by a blanket affixed below.
As Cubitt disappeared I had a glimpse of Tommyknocker, staring up at me through the opening with those great uncanny eyes. For a disconcerting instant he might have been an imp squatting upon the infernal coals, contemplating the inevitability of my eventual arrival. Then the flaps snapped back into place and I stood alone, clutching my poor rejected manuscript while the muffled voice of Cubitt wafted up through the boards.
“Give it up, dear boy. I’m sorry, but give it up. Off you go then— I’ll want my supper at six o’clock—and don’t flounce.”
I HAD BEEN in London for nearly two years by this point, having fled there from Cornwall when my old life collapsed in ruin. For of course you have already made the requisite connection. The Revd Mr Beresford, pursued by Furies—this actor Jack Hartright, with his murky past and distinctive horseshoe-shaped scar—by God (you’ve exclaimed) they’re one and the same man! And so they are—or rather, so they were, for as I set this down four decades later I find I have transformed once again, and call myself by a third name. It is a dark one, this third name, but that need not concern us at present, for just now I am telling you of the bygone events of 1851, by which so much was set in motion—some that was great, and some alas that was terrible.
I won’t describe in detail my flight from Cornwall. Suffice it to say that there was a chance outcropping of rock along the cliffs below Scantlebury Hall. It broke my fall, although it broke my ankle as well, so badly that it never really healed. There was a friend who found me and took me in—Young Ned Moyle, bless his true heart—keeping me hidden and nursing my injuries until I could walk again, and then arranging secret midnight passage over the waves. Picture in your mind a cutter setting out from Sawle, and a young man shrouded in a cowl. Imagine an unseasonable storm arising, with such ferocity that the sailors began to mutter with white rolling eyes that there was surely a Jonah on board, carrying God’s curse. But picture safe harbour at last, and a post-carriage rattling through the night, and then finally there I am: stepping out into London under cover of darkness, with neither friends nor resources beyond a last few shillings and my own frail certainty that a new day must eventually dawn.
Going home to my family in the north was clearly no option. My father had intimated prior to my departure to Cornwall that arranging for my curacy was pretty much the last effort he could be expected to make on my behalf, although I should certainly write if I ever became a bishop. Besides, that was the first place the Scantleburys would look for me. No, it had to be London, where a man could dwell unnoticed amongst the teeming masses, and create himself anew. And on that first morning, as I gnawed a sticky bun from a coffee stall in the Strand, I felt that there was hope. London was vast and surging and bellowing—half the world, it seemed, was upon this thoroughfare alone. Carriages jostling, and pedestrians streaming, and costermongers with their barrows and their bullhorn Cockney voices, rising above the cacophony: Ni-ew mackerel, six a shilling . . . Wi-ild Hampshire rabbits . . . Fine ripe plums! No one pausing, and no one caring, and most of all no one noticing—not noticing the marks of deformity upon the poor, or the mute despair upon the faces of many, or indeed the fugitive priest who was sidling away from the coffee stall without having paid his penny.
“Oi!”
This from the stall-keeper, a burly oaf in an apron, who turned with a gentleman’s change just in time to see our hero disappearing into the throng like a river otter into bulrushes. The rushes closed behind me, and I was gone.
I confess to my shame that there were various such episodes in those first days and weeks in the metropolis, for after all a man must survive. But a chance meeting with some players in a public house led to a few pennies for passing out handbills advertising the Kemp Theatre’s new season, which led in turn to the discovery that the theatre manager, Mr Edmund Cubitt, required a secretary. This invaluable person would handle the great man’s correspondence and keep the books in order, and might in addition be required to appear on stage from time to time when an actor was indisposed—“indisposed” being a theatre term meaning “even drunker than the rest of them.” Naturally I clutched at the opportunity, although soon enough I discovered that the position involved other duties as well, such as washing the great man’s linen and mending his hose, not to mention putting up with his moods and indulging his maunderings, for it turned out the great man was in fact a mediocre man at best—indeed in many ways an utterly paltry and inadequate man—not least when it came to appreciating dramatic literature.
I had written several plays. I had done so in a joyful creative fever, having discovered that dramatic poetry was my true and genuine gift. I had scribbled them by guttering candlelight, often working clear through the night until dawn. My writing made the rest of it bearable—the moods and the linen, and the orange peels flung at my forays onto the
