The Plain Old Man (13 page)

That set off the wisecracks again, as Sarah had hoped it would. She didn’t care for the role of skeleton at the feast. Guy had been looking awfully glum there for a moment. Glum and something else. Could he be scared? What sort of joke had these jolly japesters been up to, and on whom had they been playing it?

After they’d got themselves packed into the truck, she asked them in what she hoped was a casual tone, “What time did you get to the auditorium this morning? Mrs. Heatherstone says you left my aunt’s house practically at the crack of dawn.”

“That’s right,” said Skip. “I might add we didn’t see you there.”

“No, I’m afraid I was still asleep. It wasn’t really
—
only seven o’clock, was it?”

“Well, maybe not exactly,” Guy admitted. Ten past, something like that. We spent maybe twenty minutes loading the flats, and got to the auditorium just as the janitor was opening up.”

“So early?”

“Seven forty-five on the dot. He always does. He told us so.”

“If you ever met his wife, you’d know why,” said Chill. “Sheesh!”

“How do you know her?” Skip asked him. “They go to our church. At least she goes, and drags him along with her.”

“Like your mother drags you.” After that, there was no getting any sense out of them. Sarah didn’t try, but concentrated on timing the run back in the hope of finding out how fast the truck could travel. Not very, was the best she could come up with. Assuming these three nice boys had managed to smuggle Ernestina out with the scenery, even though Mrs. Heatherstone swore they couldn’t have, it hardly seemed possible they’d have had time to ditch her somewhere safe and still meet the janitor at a quarter to eight. Surely they wouldn’t be stupid enough to lie about a fact so easily checked.

But if Ernestina was in fact the joke they’d pulled last night, why would they have left her in the house until morning? Because they couldn’t get hold of the truck till then? That hardly seemed likely. To get such an early start, one would assume they must have borrowed it the night before.

Maybe they were pulling some crazy Tom Sawyer stunt, making it more difficult to enhance the artistic effect. Who knew? She tried another question, when she could make herself heard.

“Are you all art students?”

“Perish the thought,” Skip told her. “Our muscle man here is a philosophy major, if you can believe it. I’m in the School of Engineering at UMass.”

“Really? What branch of engineering?”

“Electrical,” Chill answered for him. “Skip’s a real live wire.”

“Shocking, isn’t it?” Guy put in.

“Yes.”

Sarah wasn’t trying to be funny. She had no clear notion of what electrical engineers did, but she was reasonably sure anybody with that much high-voltage erudition should be able to fiddle a home burglar-alarm system. After that, she couldn’t think of much to say until they got back to the auditorium.

“We won’t come in with you, if you don’t mind,” said Guy. “We’ve all got stuff to do. See you tomorrow night?”

“I’ll be here. Thanks for the supper. It was fun.” Some of it.

“Our pleasure.”

They were off. Sarah glanced at her watch and realized she wouldn’t have time for the quick freshening-up she’d hoped she could squeeze in before the dress rehearsal. In fact, she was barely inside the stage door when Heatherstone delivered Aunt Emma.

Mrs. Kelling was not yet in costume, of course, but she did have on her grandest wig and a vast amount of jewelry: yards and yards of jet interspersed with cameos ranging in size from one to four inches across.

“Stand there and let me drink you in,” Sarah cried. “Where in the name of all that’s good and holy did you find that incredible parure?”

“Like it?”

Emma waggled her head to start the blobbed and tasseled eardrops swinging, and revolved slowly so her niece could get the full effect of the many-tiered choker, the bracelets, the high-backed combs, the lavishly draped lavaliere, the rings, the stickpins, and the mammoth cameo brooch depicting Paris with Venus, Juno, and Athene, the golden apple of discord, and the apple tree it presumably came from.

“I picked it up at the antique exchange. It seemed just the thing for Lady Sangazure. When I die, I’m going to will it to Cousin Mabel.”

“What a beautiful thought! Come on, I’ll help you into your bustle.”

They’d done a couple of trial runs earlier in the week. Sarah was able to confront the bulky accouterment with no real sense of panic. Things might have decayed in the bustlemaking trade, as Patrick Barrington* erst so melodiously averred, but the bustle with which Emma Kelling proposed to enhance her role was still going strong. Clearly this particular bustlemaker had built bustles with a will then, he’d built bustles with a wit. For all Sarah knew, he’d built bustles as a Yankee hustles, simply for the love of it.

This was no modified sofa pillow with a mere tape to tie around the waist, but a complicated structure of wire and whalebone, shaped generally on the principle of the Appalachian egg basket and scaled to fit a lady of already generous proportions. Sarah knew in her heart of hearts that she’d never have what it took to wear that bustle, steatopygia not being a Kelling characteristic, but she yearned over it all the same. It was something merely to adjust the appurtenance over Aunt Emma’s nethermost petticoat and snug in the waistband.

“There,” she said, “does that feel comfortable?”

“Oddly enough, yes,” Mrs. Kelling replied. “Have you got it fastened securely?”

“Not yet. Turn your back to the light, will you? I have to do these pesky hooks and eyes.”

As she was bending over the bustle, trying to cope with the awkward fastenings, Sarah noticed something she could swear hadn’t been there before. The tapes that held the wire to the whalebone now had printing on them: clumsy letters done with a smudgy felt-tipped pen. Reading from tape to tape, she made out the message, “Tomorrow is the day.”

What was that supposed to mean? That tonight was just the dress rehearsal and tomorrow the real performance? Sarah thought not. Well, much as Aunt Emma hated having her feelings spared, Sarah was not going to tell her she was about to play Lady Sangazure with what was almost certainly another missive from Ernestina’s kidnappers appended to her rear elevation. She picked up the voluminously befrilled awning affair that draped over the bustle before the top petticoat went on and lashed it in place before Emma could get a look at herself in the mirror.

Then came the rustling petticoat, then the purple taffeta gown, and more hooks and eyes and tiny cloth-covered buttons with fragile miniature loops they had to be coaxed through; then the panoply of cameos and jet, then the mauve satin bonnet bedecked with ostrich tips, artificial violets, and broad mauve satin ribbons that would be tied in a bow halfway up her left cheek after Emma had got her makeup on, for even Lady Sangazure had a touch of the flirt in her.

“Thank you, Sarah. I’ll do my own face. You’d better run along and see what’s doing out there.”

It was high time she did. Sarah found three or four members of the chorus already clustered around the makeup table. She picked up a stick of bright-orange greasepaint, sent up a silent orison to whatever deity might be in charge of painting actors’ faces, and got to work. Her first attempt was passable, her second a little better. By the time she’d done three or four, she was feeling confident enough to start throwing in a few flourishes. She gave Dr. Daly rosy cheeks and a nose to match. She exaggerated Cousin Frederick’s bushy eyebrows and Kelling nose to make him appear an even plainer old man than nature had intended.

Ridpath Wale was next in line, wearing a plain black suit with a high wing collar and a severe dark cravat. While Sarah was meditating her line of approach, wondering whether to emphasize the wizard or the businessman, he noticed a paperclip lying on the table and picked it up. A bit sheepishly, he then pulled a whole chain of them from his pocket and looped his latest find on the end.

“Can’t help it,” he confessed. “These are my worry beads. Something to fiddle with, you know. I tell myself you never know when a paper clip will come in handy.”

“No,” Sarah replied. “You don’t, do you?”

She was thinking about those two paper clips she’d found pinning that other ransom note to the library screen, and about how the Sorcerer hadn’t been needed at the rehearsal until well after she’d managed to get loose from the potting shed.

“Are you going to give me a sinister black mustache?” Ridpath asked as she began smearing greasepaint on his chin.

“I hardly think that’s necessary,” she told him. “I find you quite sinister enough, just as you are.”

* I Was a Bustlemaker Once, Girls; Patrick Barrington: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., Ltd., London (also
Punch
).

D
AME PARTLETT WAS SARAH’S
next customer, neat and far from gaudy in her ankle-length brown dress set off by a plain white apron, kerchief, and ruffled cap. Martha was looking downcast and sober as befitted her role of pew opener. It was a trifle early for her to start acting, Sarah thought.

Cousin Frederick, who was still hanging around the makeup table either for moral support or for want of anything better to do, noticed also.

“Why so glum, Martha?”

“Hello, Fred. Don’t ask me to talk just now. I’m getting bedizened.”

“You look a damn sight better without that glop on your face. Watch it, Sarah. You’re making her look old.”

“I am old,” said Martha, keeping her lips stiff so as not to discommode Sarah.

That didn’t go down with Frederick. “You old? Balderdash! You’re a damn sight younger than I am.”

“No young giddy, thoughtless maiden full of graces, airs, and jeers; but a sober widow laden with the weight of fifty years.”

It was Martha’s number, but Sarah was the singer. She’d meant to lighten the mood of the moment. She’d have done better to keep her mouth shut. Why remind Martha Tippleton that she’d soon be having to sing those lyrics to her own husband while the cast stood around trying to put a brave face on so obvious a misalliance as Sir Marmaduke’s getting himself plighted to a member of the servant class? Whatever had possessed Aunt Emma to permit so tasteless a piece of casting?

The situation might be merely amusing if Jack Tippleton could have refrained from making an ass of himself over a younger woman, but Aunt Emma ought to have known he couldn’t. There he came now, out of the men’s dressing room. He’d done his own makeup, getting himself up to look at least twenty years younger than his part called for.

And there was Gillian Bruges darting up to drop him a curtsy, winsome as all get-out in a costume like Martha’s but with perky white ruffles on the kerchief and apron, and saucy white polka dots on the demure brown dress. She had chestnut-colored ribbons on her cap, and chestnut brown false ringlets peeping out from under its ruffle. If Uncle Jem were here, he’d be calling her a fetching minx.

Sarah could think of a few other things to call her. Didn’t Gillian know better than to carry on her flirtation, even if it was nothing more than that, directly under Martha Tippleton’s nose? Or was that part of the fun? It was a matter of deep personal satisfaction to Sarah when Aunt Emma sailed out with her bustle a-rustle and put the superannuated swain in his place.

“For the love of heaven, Jack, what have you done to your face? You’re supposed to be a respectable English country squire, not a gone-to-seed Riviera gigolo. Sarah, fix him up quickly. Ready, Martha? They’re starting the overture. Come along, Gillian. I’ve never held a curtain for anybody yet, and I don’t intend to start with you.”

“Break a leg, Mummy.” That was the lovely Aline, running to give Martha a going-onstage hug. “You look sweet enough to eat in that cap. Doesn’t she, Daddy?”

Jack made some kind of noise. That might have been the best he could do. Sarah had slathered him with cold cream and was scrubbing away the Don Juan makeup without regard to his finer feelings. Jenicot put on a gallant grin and tried again.

“Isn’t it fun that we’re all three doing a show together? The family that sings together clings together. How about that, Daddy?”

Emma Kelling gave the struggling girl a quick pat. “Yes, Jenny dear, it’s lovely. Go call Parker and Sebastian. I want them ready and waiting in the wings before Gillian finishes her number. Honestly, Jack, at your age, one might have thought you’d know better.”

It was not an auspicious beginning. Sarah hoped the senior citizens weren’t in for too big a letdown. She reckoned without Aunt Emma.

Precisely what Emma Kelling said or did backstage to make Jack Tippleton quit making a fool of himself, to turn Gillian Bruges into a model of propriety, to sort out Cousin Frederick’s two left feet and put some starch into Martha Tippleton’s wilting backbone, Sarah never knew. Her aunt had ordered her out front, to monitor the performance from the audience’s point of view.

Whatever it was, it worked. There were rough spots, naturally, since this was the first opportunity the performers had had to run through the entire show from the auditorium stage. On the whole, though, the dress rehearsal went as well as any amateur group could expect, and no doubt a good deal smoother than most.

The star of the evening, to everyone else’s astonishment and his own dismay, was Frederick Kelling. The instant he set foot onstage, the children from his school began applauding. Those whose infirmities didn’t allow them to clap managed to cheer, scream, pound the floor with their crutches, or beep the horns on their wheelchairs.

Sarah didn’t mind their noise a bit. At least it was keeping her awake. Last night had caught up with her, even the coffee she’d had with the boys wasn’t helping. She kept dropping off and waking up with a jerk. It was a good thing she’d picked a seat well toward the rear so the cast and the rest of the small audience couldn’t see her disgracing herself.

Her makeups weren’t bad, Sarah decided. She’d done a better job than some of the cast who’d put on their own, Jenicot Tippleton in particular. Jenny’s voice might not be up to Gillian’s, but she was far and away the prettier of the two. Onstage tonight, though, she wasn’t coming off anywhere near so well. Gillian must have had more stage experience than she’d admitted to, or else she was an awfully quick learner. As a further else, Jenicot’s makeup might have been all right to start with, and she’d messed it up.