The Black Charade. John Burke
of Mystery in Leicester Square. He had virtually retired from the theatre save for an occasional guest performance, preferring to devote himself to the exposure of fraudulent mediums and magicians rather than the display of his own avowedly, professionally fraudulent magic. Still she cherished the memory of him in his role of Count Caspar, in exuberant command of his skills and his audience.
Even in this room, at ease in his chair, he exuded the same power. He closed his eyes, but thereby became more widely awake. From memory and intuition he sought to call up whatever was relevant to that flash of insight they had experienced.
At last he said: ‘No, it’s an advertisement we’ve neither of us seen before. But we recognize certain aspects of it. So I feel it must be in a column adjacent to one of our theatre announcements. Logan will be able to trace it. I’ll go round and set him to work first thing in the morning.’
‘You can’t visualize the exact wording?’
Together they tried to bring the snippet of newspaper into focus from the remembered imprint of Laura Hinde’s consciousness. But only a few scattered words survived:
...TRUTH...death and its banishment... Scientific truth open to all who qualify as mature students... Thursday 12th January.
‘At least that date should simplify our quest. We’ll most likely find the item during the fortnight or so before the 12th of January.’
* * * *
The full version, when the Cavern of Mystery’s advertising manager had tracked it down, sat amid a whole batch of invitations to lectures and meetings: on two successive evenings the enquiring mind in search of self-improvement had a choice between the activities of the Empirical Society, the Paternoster Botanic Club, the Western Hermetic Society, and the Malthusian League, or a free discourse by Madame Helena Blavatsky on The Secret Doctrine. The one that Caspian had been seeking read, in full:
A DISCUSSION GROUP on
OUR INDESTRUCTIBLE LIFE
for discriminating seekers after TRUTH.— Lecture for serious Ladies and Gentlemen worthy of advanced tuition. The illusion of death and its banishment. ETERNITY IN THIS WORLD. Scientific truth open to all who qualify as mature students. Selection meeting Thursday 12th January at The Camden Lecture Rooms N.W.
Bronwen could see and hear it so clearly and depressingly: an hour or more of earnest disquisition in a dank and ill-lit hall, followed by equally earnest argument about Life and Death and the Hereafter and Scientific Proofs of something or other. Every night of the week there were such meetings and such jumbling together of hopes and frustrations all over London. ‘But why,’ she wondered aloud, ‘should Miss Hinde be so disturbed by her memories of that meeting—if in fact she did attend it?’
‘I fancy she attended it,’ said Caspian, ‘but yes, that’s our question: what did they teach her that proved so frightening...yet so irresistible?’
‘She won’t have been the only one to answer that announcement. There must have been others like her, hoping to get something from it.’
‘And perhaps, like her, now fearing what they’ve got.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘Death for you,’ said the woman sprawled on the sofa. ‘And a sterile life for that creature you leave behind. Unless I take care of her, too.’
‘You wouldn’t dare touch her.’
‘You touched her. You dared. And never came near me again. That’s why you’ll die, and I’ll still be here, watching over her for you. Waiting for her to die too, in her own way, at her own pace.’
First her laugh, then his.
And he said: ‘I think you’d better look more carefully at the table, and see where you went wrong.’
Then her scream. Not, thought Elaine Mancroft seven or eight yards away, a particularly convincing scream.
‘What have you done to me?’
‘It’s what you’ve done to yourself,’ said the man by the sofa. ‘The poison’s in you, Madeleine, not in me.’
Another scream: really, the poor dear would have to do better than that on opening night. Elaine stood in the wings and tried to subdue her own agitation by deriding the performance of the two on stage. In a few minutes’ time she would show them what power and passion really meant. All their inept fumblings would be overshadowed by her final entrance and the long, vibrant closing speech.
She shivered. She could not stop shivering.
The play had a compelling theme, and a leading part that would have been coveted by any actress. But it had not been fashioned for any actress: it was Elaine Mancroft’s, hers and hers alone.
She could not afford to bungle it. Not again; not now, at dress rehearsal.
As she stood in the wings, she murmured the closing lines over and over again to herself, a thing she had not had to do for years. The wrong words kept swimming up in her mind. Worse, they kept swimming up in her throat. She tried to swallow, and gagged on them.
Somewhere Adelaide was laughing at her.
She tried to blot out the sound with the sound of those crucial last lines.
‘You must make your last entrance very steady,’ Daniel had exhorted her. ‘It should be doom-laden, implacable. But when you speak, you’re very quiet. Make them wait for you—and don’t say one word until you’re at a standstill. Then make it final, despairing...beautiful. You can do it, Elaine. If only you’ll do it as I’ve written it.’
He must by now be as scared as she was that she would do it quite another way.
Down there in the stalls he was sitting and waiting for her to make a mistake. Her head echoed not only with his advice but with his barely concealed scorn.
What possessed her?
And what possessed Daniel? Did he, in his heart, want her to ruin everything so that he would have an excuse to be done with her? He wanted her to leave, she was sure of it. To go as Adelaide had gone. Or, if not as violently as Adelaide, still to go.
The air whispered with Adelaide’s thin, vengeful laugh.
Nonsense. Adelaide was dead. She would never hear Adelaide again.
She heard her cue. ‘The lies will have to stop.’
It was impossible to set one foot in front of the other. Out there on stage she would meet Adelaide again: face to face this time, perhaps.
Roderick Grenville glanced over his shoulder. Ten more seconds, and the pause would be too noticeable.
She forced herself forward. But she was moving too quickly. She slowed, and made her way deliberately to the sofa on which the wife of the drama was now crumpled in death.
Grenville turned with a melodramatic start. He had always been one for the grand manner and the violent gesture. Today in the Green Room he had been overpoweringly histrionic even before starting rehearsal: flexing his muscles for the grandiloquence, which his little claque of faithful followers would expect on opening night.
Elaine spoke; and saw the shock in his face.
What had she said wrong?
She tried to grasp the lines and hold them steady. But they were coming out of their own accord, and they were not the lines Daniel Clegg had written. Adelaide was taking over. Adelaide was forcing her to say things unrehearsed and unuttered before. She found herself leaning across the sofa, haranguing Grenville and the unresponsive corpse beside him. Her voice was soured by the whining accent she knew to be Adelaide’s.
‘It’s the wrong ending, it wasn’t like this, you know it wasn’t. The wrong ending....’
‘We will not say goodbye.’ Grenville struggled gamely, absurdly.
‘The wrong ending,’ she shouted. ‘Why are