Once they were outside in the Clerkenwell alley Eliza realised how late it was. She was thoroughly relieved to be out of Heinrich Bayer’s domain, but the eeriness seemed to extend even to here. There was no sound, and few lights showed in the nearby tenements and warehouses. Damp clouded the air and muffled their footsteps as they hurried to the corner. Devil asked where she was going and she told him.
He said, ‘I have to go only to Holborn, but Bayswater is too far to walk. What shall we do?’
Another two turns brought them closer to Smithfield where there was still torchlight and a sullen clatter of activity around the market. A dejected hansom stood at a corner, the horse’s head hanging low and the driver dozing under his greatcoat. There was nothing for it, Eliza realised. Two cab rides in one night, and no money left over. At least she had gained a square meal, although the eeriness of Herr Bayer’s workshop had depressed her appetite.
Devil followed her thoughts. He was embarrassed that he could not even pay for the girl to ride home in safety, when he would have wished to drive her to Bayswater in his own brougham.
‘It is all very well for Bayer to say, Vat is money? as if he were royalty. It is always people who have plenty who profess their lack of interest in it. I will get some very soon, and then I will allow myself the luxury of dismissing its importance.’
Eliza thought of the afternoon’s walk through South Kensington. It seemed a long time ago.
‘Jasper was saying earlier that he intends to buy one of those fine white stucco houses with eight steps up to the front door. He will have a man in livery to open the door for him too, no doubt.’
‘My house will have ten steps. And my man will have a finer set of whiskers than Jasper’s man.’
They burst into laughter.
As they reached the hansom and Devil was holding open the door for her he asked, ‘How long have you been walking out with Jasper Button, Eliza?’
‘I am not walking out with him.’
‘I think you are.’
He handed her up the step. The sad vehicle reeked of tobacco.
‘Will you consider my idea?’ she persisted. ‘About the role?’
‘When I own the Palmyra theatre, I promise I will do so.’
‘When you own it?’
He stood back from the door, his black face hard under the brim of his bowler.
‘Yes. What else did you imagine?’
He touched his hand to his hat and the driver whipped up the old horse.
Eliza recalled the backstage realm at the Palmyra theatre as a chaos of casually naked limbs barely concealed by dressing screens, where discarded or not yet assumed costumes gaudy with feathers and sequins hung in wait for the strutting performers. It was a swarming, hectic and self-absorbed space stinking of perspiration and gas fumes, stale beer and face paint, where a half-consumed dinner of bread and cold beef lay on a table under which a bucket of piss stood in plain view. In her waking hours she mulled over the thrillingly disreputable vigour of all this, and the trapped din of the unseen audience reverberated in her head along with the jingle of tiny bells.
But when she slept, it was different. When she slept she became one of the performers. Amongst these creatures, who like a series of violently coloured butterflies had managed the transition from humdrum world to stage glamour, she grew wings and flew, she spiralled in dances, she sank in an exaggerated curtsey to acknowledge the roar of applause.
When she woke up from her dreams, she felt dull.
To be an artists’ model had in her own estimation seemed daring, and she had certainly shocked her father and stepmother – this Eliza always found pleasant to contemplate – but now she realised that her own notions of what it was to reject proper behaviour were in themselves staid enough. Up until now she had felt fairly satisfied with the precariousness of her existence, but her spirits sank when she contemplated the stale routines of the day that actually lay ahead. A languid class in watercolour painting at the Rawlinson School did not compare with the seamy adulation she was offered in her dreams.
At this point, with an inevitability that was becoming familiar, her thoughts would turn to Devil Wix. If she wished for closer acquaintance with the theatre, surely it was Devil who could lead her to it? It was true that he had dismissed her barely thought-out suggestion about a female role, but – characteristically – she would not allow that to deter her. Eliza considered matters. The first strategy was to earn Devil’s approval, and his gratitude if that were possible. She must find a way to direct paying customers to the box office in the Strand.
To this end, after the next life class, instead of leaving immediately once she was dressed and Mr Coope was out of the room, she lingered for a few minutes to talk to the students. Charles Egan and the others were delighted with this opportunity and they were soon established in a semicircle, with the young men’s coats slung aside and their feet hooked up on chair rungs. Ralph Vine laced his fingers behind his head and tipped his seat at a reckless angle. Even Miss Frazier hovered within earshot. For her own part Eliza was enjoying the stimulating contrast between her nakedness of half an hour ago and the polite cadences of the present conversation.
She began by asking them, ‘I wonder if any of you have seen the new variety show at the Palmyra theatre?’
‘That old place?’ Leonard Woolley shook his head. ‘My father used to go to concerts there. It has been closed for years.’
‘Indeed it was closed, but it has recently reopened as a variety hall. It is not much better than derelict even now, but you should go and see the magic act. The illusion is called the Execution of the Philosopher. I promise you, Mr Woolley, you will not believe your eyes.’
‘Whatever you command, Miss Dunlop. May I persuade you to come with me?’
‘Thank you. I have already seen the performance,’ Eliza smiled at him. Some of the young men were languid and others were bumptious. None of them had interested her, even before her visits to the Palmyra and Herr Bayer’s studio.
When she arrived for the next class Leonard Woolley and two others were quick to announce that they had followed her instructions and enjoyed a visit to the theatre.
‘It’s a rough sort of place, though. Who took you along there, Miss Dunlop, may I ask?’
‘My sister and her husband.’
‘Not your young man?’ Ralph Vine slyly murmured.
‘I don’t have such a thing.’
‘I saw you walking in the park with a chap who looked as if he’d like to be.’
Charles Egan mocked him. ‘You might like it too, Viney, but that doesn’t necessarily make it happen.’
‘What did you think of the Philosophers illusion?’ Eliza persisted.
Mr Woolley whistled. ‘Top-notch, I have to say. I was astounded. Cutting off his head, you know. A strange person in the row in front of us nearly screamed her own head off. The trick is a waxwork of course. But how is it done?’
‘I couldn’t reveal any details.’
‘But you do know? How come? Do tell us. I love theatrical illusions. They have such a primitive appeal.’
Everyone