New Albion (7 page)

Thrilled by this apology, Mrs. Wilton strode across the hall to Mr. Sharpe amidst much applause and gave him her hand. Mr. Sharpe kissed the stubby fingers awkwardly, and there was more applause.

Again, Mr. Wilton spoke up, looking at no one in particular. “Are there any other apologies forthcoming?” he said in a low voice.

As if cued by the word “apologies,” Mr. Farquhar Pratt shifted in his chair and then got himself unsteadily to his feet. “I will apologize too, by gawd, for what I said about Mrs. Wilton yesterday.” He stopped to think for a moment and evidently could not remember what he had said about Mrs. Wilton. He shook his head. “It doesn’t bear repeating.”

Mrs. Wilton sailed across the floor to Mr. Farquhar Pratt, offering her hand, which he kissed with an old-fashioned bow that almost toppled him to the floor.

“Very good,” said Mr. Wilton. His face was ashen, and his broad-backed bearing had momentarily given way to an almost imperceptible slumping of the shoulders. “The meeting is adjourned.”

Friday, 11 October 1850

I had promised Sophie that we would use the morning to inspect Mr. Paxton’s grand conception in Hyde Park. Leaving the younger children in care of Hortense, Sophie and I traveled by means of hansom cab from our apartments in Cloudsey Road through the bustle of Oxford Street, finally turning into the treed splendor of Kensington. The grass in the park had browned considerably since Sophie and I were last there, and many of the trees had begun to shed their leaves, but Hyde Park was still a robust sanctuary for horsemen running their animals through the rigors of daily exercise.

And of course the Crystal Palace, brainchild of the Royal Gardener, which has been so much in the papers of late. When the structure was first proposed last summer, I, like others, dismissed it as a hoax. A palace crafted of glass and steel, covering eighteen acres! Why, the jarring footpads of a hundred people milling about inside would be enough to rattle the panes and send them crashing down in ballistic shards. Now, as the frame of tubular steel begins to take shape, I see that the hoax has become a near reality. Sophie and I, standing south of the structure near the park’s edge, quietly compared Paxton’s startling new conception to an elaborate greenhouse.

By ten o’clock, a crowd had begun to gather, ruining the placidity of our morning’s sojourn in the park. Some heckled the labourers for presuming to build a veritable Tower of Babel. “Who’s s’posed to be cleaning all them winders?” one of them shouted. Others ruminated aloud about the grandeur of the imagination responsible for this edifice. The workmen themselves went about their exertions in indubitable silence, never intimating their thoughts on the utter madness or the sheer sublimity of Joe Paxton’s vision.

Sophie, being seventeen, is in love with Mr. Paxton’s creation. She is the daughter most like Jane, and in many ways she has become Jane, caring for me and the children, preparing meals, worrying over the household finances. I fear that dear Jane’s passing will prove too much for Sophie in the end, that she will develop some nervous complaint owing to the weight of the burden she has chosen to bear. In the last months, I have tried to find opportunities for her to be away from the house and the children so that she might relax and be her seventeen-year-old self again. When asked, her inclination has often been to see the progress of the glass emporium.

On this day, however, Sophie was discomfited by the obvious presence of footpadders and cadgers milling about the crowd, and she suggested that we take our picnic elsewhere in the park. As we were leaving the Palace, I heard a shrill voice call my
name: “Em! Em!” Sophie and I both turned to see Sally, a dol
lymop I know, careening towards us. She had a large tatty shawl covering her dress. She carried her infant, God knows by what father, in one arm and a basket of hand-sewn pincushions in her other hand. She must have been hawking the cushions to onlookers. As she neared us, Sally caught sight of Sophie and stopped dead in her tracks, too late for Sophie not to have seen the surprise in her face. Fortunately, Sally has a nimble mind to match her nimble body. “I’m sorry,” she growled, in a guttural Cockney, “I had you mistaken for someone else.” With a hurt look on her face, Sally turned and dissolved into the multitude.

“Who was she?” Sophie asked, as I whisked her down Rotten Row toward the Serpentine.

“Never saw her before,” I said. “Case of mistaken identity.”

We settled down in the grass under the shade of a broad chestnut tree far from the gathering crowd. After we had spread a thick woolen blanket on the ground, Sophie carefully emptied the basket of its contents – roast beef and cucumber sandwiches, a bottle of wine, French bread and paté. We had begun to eat and to enjoy this glorious and sunny late autumn day, to enjoy each other’s company, when an elderly beggar materialized out of nearby bushes. His clothes were ragged, his face leathery with constant exposure to the elements. He was wearing threadbare stockings but no shoes. He was not a sane man. He ranted in a high-pitched voice about the evils of cross-racial breeding, all the while feinting to punch or kick some phantasm in the air before him. I fed him some bread and paté, although the wine seemed to be the real object of his desires, and persuaded him to carry on down toward the Palace where there was promise of more people and more food and drink. As the popular song goes, there is no honour given to white hairs when they are buried, buried down in London town.

Sophie and I hurried through the rest of our picnic.

* * *

In the afternoon,
I was back inside the theatre preparing a prompt script for
Crosby Ravensworth
. I continue to have fits of apoplexy about the pantomime. Mr. Farquhar Pratt was not at all convincing at the company meeting yesterday. He is usually quite free with his ideas when he is writing; usually, he will regale me and anybody else who will listen with a hundred and fifty plots which are clattering about inside his addled brain or he will babble on about the creation of a villain, black-moustachioed and hissing freely like the serpent in the proverbial garden, to rival Iago. There is no such expansiveness in the old man now.

The fissure of time between now and Boxing Day began to crumble and to implode at the precise moment when the new apprentice came into view. The opening of the panto, toward
which we are all in this theatre labouring with singleness of pur
pose, now seems two days, and not two months, away. I need remind no one that the Boxing Day opening is the most significant event of the New Albion’s season. Upon its success depends the annual New Year’s bonus which all employees of the theatre have come to expect. There will be much gnashing of teeth if the play script is not worthy.

Saturday, October 12, 1850

A brief and anonymous article appeared in
The Tatler
today, dealing with the daily movements of our own Fanny Hardwick, a young actress with the company. The article is symptomatic of the kind of smutty journalism we have come to expect. I quote the opening paragraphs:

While shopping for trendy clothes in Covent Garden last week, the author happened to see young Fanny Hardwick, celebrated beauty and now actress at the New Albion Theatre. She was dressed in a fashionable skirt and shawl, a hat partially covering her auburn ringlets. Carrying a plethora of packages, no doubt articles of clothing she had purchased on that day, she negotiated her way through the crowded streets. The author remained at a distance but followed her from Covent Garden to Leicester Square, where the morning rain had rendered the cobblestones so slippery as to make it impossible for Miss Hardwick to keep her footing. A stiletto heel caught in the fissure between the stones, and the beautiful young actress slid to the pavement, her skirt and crinolines rising to a point immediately before the knee. Many male admirers, the present author included, were in awe of Miss Hardwick’s pristine beauty, her shapely legs exposed inside satin stockings, her tall red shoes laced past the ankle.

It has long been rumored that Miss Hardwick comes of genteel stock, and if sheer physical perfection is an indication of good breeding, then the present author professes to be a convert to that theory. The young actress has often been seen in the company of an aristocratic-looking young man. If she is indeed a rich man’s daughter, what might have possessed her to take up a life in the theatre, especially in a theatre so scandalous for its panderings to a criminal class of spectators as the New Albion in Whitechapel? It is well known that the New Albion does not even have separate dressing rooms for its actors and its actresses. How can a young lady of
quality maintain her innocence in such an environment? The pres
ent author promises to cogitate upon these questions in the future
and to investigate the probability of Miss Hardwick’s noble lineage. Further installments on the lives of actors and actresses of London will be available in future columns of
The Tatler.

Not only are the facts wrong in this blasphemous piece of journalism – the New Albion does now have partitioned dressing rooms for actresses and actors, in part owing to the agitation of Miss Hardwick herself – the article also constitutes an invasion of the young lady’s privacy. Some would argue that an actress, by being an
actress, subjects herself to the unrelenting scrutiny of the public, but I would argue that every human being deserves a modicum of privacy whatever their station or occupation in life.

Of course, the article was passed from hand to hand inside the theatre. I could not help but think that many of the ladies in the company had taken a secret delight in Fanny’s misfortune as the ladies’ dressing room seemed particularly filled with jollity this morning. When I encountered Fanny at my desk at the stage left arch, her face was drawn and she appeared to be on the verge of tears.

“There was an article in
The Tatler
this morning,” she murmured. She was readying herself to begin rehearsing.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“Have you read it, Mr. Phillips?” She offered this as a probe and as a challenge; it was an attempt to ascertain whether I agreed with the tone or purpose of the article.

“I have read it,” I admitted, “and I think the article singularly distasteful. It is an injustice to you.” By gawd, she is a beautiful woman, and her vulnerability only serves to enhance her physical charms.

Tears filled her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Phillips. I have spent a good part of the morning wondering what I have done to bring on such a holocaust.”

I would have liked to grasp the young lady in my arms, to kiss her moist eyelids, but that action would have negated the fatherly advice she is accustomed to from me. I did not touch her. “You have done nothing, my dear,” I said. “Only pursued your calling.”

Fanny seemed heartened by this. She took a handkerchief from the pocket of her rehearsal skirt and daubed her eyes. “Some days, Mr. Phillips, I feel that I have made a bad choice in my profession. Why can’t a lady pursue a career in the world of theatre? In a world she loves?”

“There is no reason,” I said, but I knew that there were many reasons. Would I want any of my daughters, Sophie or Davina or Hortense or dear young Susan, to pursue a career as an actress? The answer is, categorically, no.

Called to the stage, Fanny smiled at me and touched my arm and then strode into the playing area toward young Master West. “You are my brother,” she declaimed, “and dearer than life to me.”

I confess to being half in love with Fanny Hardwick. It is a doomed love and an exquisite love and a foolish love and a sublime love. I am forty-two, she is probably twenty. I am a respectable widower, and she thinks of me as a daughter might think of a father. I have watched her leave the theatre, late in the evening, escorted by a handsome-looking young man in evening attire, a young man she has never bothered to introduce to me or to any of the denizens of the New Albion. She lives on the edge of a mystery for me and for others. Who is she, and where does she come from?

Monday, 14 October 1850

Mr. Hicks was
ivre
again, tonight, during
David Hunt
.

In the dress rehearsal, this afternoon, Mr. Watts had reacted with composure to Mr. Hicks’ habitual drunkenness. He seemed to be thinking, “You may offend God and Providence,
my dear man, but you will never move me to behave as a ruf
fian.” Tall and slender and of noble bearing, with a thin high forehead and a long aquiline nose, Mr. Watts seems to me the antithesis of the burly, sanguine Mr. Hicks. When he is not on the boards, Mr. Watts wears a spartan suit of grey, cut thin in the modern style, as if economy were the watchword of his life off the stage as well as on. Whether performing his beloved Shakespeare or in the lesser works of Ned Farquhar Pratt, he acts with a restraint hitherto uncharacteristic of East London theatres. He neither splits the ears of the groundlings nor tears a passion to tatters.

During tonight’s performance of
David Hunt
, however, Mr. Watts was in a passion, hissing sotto voce at the other actors to stand up straight and complaining to them about Mr. Hicks’ drinking habits. For his part, the inebriated Mr. Hicks was particularly vehement in declaiming his revelatory line. He wrang the last bit of articulatory tincture out of “I am he who has seduced your daughter, brought about her ruin, and cursed your dotage,” hitting the consonants with such force that I also feared the ruin of his vocal chords. Mr. Watts repaid this herculean vocal effort by shoving Mr. Hicks backward. It was a limp two-handed shove against Mr. Hicks’ shoulders, but it managed to send him sprawling to the boards. The denizens of Whitechapel, themselves brawling in the gallery, were delighted.