The Dress Lodger Read online

  “Darling? Are you all right?” she asks.

  He turns to Audrey, dimly lit and lovely in the candlelight. To what ravages has he exposed this trusting creature? And did his own dirty thoughts not compel her here tonight? Has he not a hundred times in the past two days thought of the girl and remembered the feel of her tiny cat ribs? He draws Audrey’s hand to his mouth and gently bites the pearl engagement ring he gave her three months ago.

  “Yes.” He squints at it like an old pawnbroker. “It’s real all right.”

  Audrey laughs delightedly.

  He shakes Gustine from his mind and joins Audrey in nodding to the other prominent families of Sunderland. Next to the empty box perpetually reserved for the local aristocracy the Marquis and Marchioness of Londonderry sits Sir William Chaytor, showing himself as much as possible around town with the hopes that when the Reform Bill is passed, Sunderland will elect him its first MP. Another box barely contains the Gourley family: shipbuilder John, his enormous wife Mary, and their erupting young son Edward. Cuthbert Sharp, mayor of nearby Hartlepool and renowned antiquarian, has taken up residence in the box belonging to the Vaux family of wealthy brewers, and next to him sits his placid wife Elizabeth, whose beauty twenty years ago, so the story goes, caused young Cuthbert to steal her and elope. Audrey has been helping her mother plan a large wedding with relatives coming from as far away as London, but secretly Henry wishes he could tap upon her window one night and whisk her off to Gretna Green, where they might be married without the family’s knowledge or handshakes from anyone.

  Down in the pit, he sees, the people are growing restless. We are witnessing the end of British Theatre, Henry tells Audrey, when Congreve and Sheridan are sluiced away by the blood-and-guts melodramas written for these people below. When he left London, new auditorium-style theatres were popping up everywhere, designed so that as many as thirty-five hundred might gather to watch mindless equestrian shows or the cataracts of the Nile crash down upon live camels and pachyderms; where a fully commissioned civil war might be waged or love won and lost atop an erupting volcano. How humble and old-fashioned the theatres here in Sunderland are by comparison, so quaintly behind the times they are lit still by candlelight years after others have installed gas. Stagehands spend hours trimming the wicks and wiping the sooted glass chimneys, and still smoke chokes the audience and forces them to mop their brows for the heat. It is safe to say that only the ladies and Henry will regret the passing of candlelit theaters—Henry for nostalgia’s sake, the ladies because candlelight is by far kinder upon the female skin than gas or sunlight; it goes gently over blemishes and pits, serving the same purpose here as it does in the market on Saturday night, by which we mean convincing those who are looking that the goods for sale are sound.

  The old Theatre Royale is constructed of wood: its floor is wood, its pewlike seats wood, the back walls paneled with wood. The raked stage is widely planked and the orchestra pit parqueted; the columns that support the mezzanine and boxes, too, are wood, though painted red and in disguise. When the people below stomp down the aisles the whole building creaks like an ancient galleon, which illusion is further helped along by the salty, fishful smell caught in the net of their clothing. Smoking is strictly prohibited in this wooden tinderbox, so pipes languish until intermission and snuff is passed about. Coster boys hawk the score of tonight’s performance to the musically inclined while entrepreneurial girls walk the pit wearing boxes of oranges like Gothic necklaces around their throats. A girl about Gustine’s age glances up and catches Henry’s eye. She holds up a plump ripe orange and mouths, “Want it?”

  Henry’s uncle Clanny leans behind Audrey and taps him on the shoulder.

  “I was going to send a note around to cancel tonight but you seemed so keen on coming. I think we’ve had our first indisputable case today.”

  “Of what?” asks Henry, tearing his eyes away from the girl.

  Clanny nods to the gruesomely decorated playbill in his lap: an indigo blue devil prodding the words “Cholera Morbus; or Love and Fright.”

  “Haselwood called me in to consult,” he says. “Yesterday, an old keel-man named Sproat collapsed down at the Fish Quay. Thought he ate a bad pork chop, but the symptoms are right: low temperature, rice water stools, cramping and clenching up. Blue eye circles, blue hands and feet.”

  “Audrey, darling,” Henry says at the mention of rice water stools. “Let’s switch places so that I might talk medicine with Uncle Clanny.”

  They rearrange themselves and Henry puts his head next to his uncle’s.

  “Did you take him to hospital?” he asks.

  “Wouldn’t go. You know how these people are.”

  Henry looks down into the stalls, where a sea of These People push and shove, shout for the play to begin, and stomp the floorboards. He feels like he does at the Labour in Vain, like the empty space around These People is a net of invisible disease binding them one to the other, pulling where they pull, thrusting up to the surface where they push together. Is he going crazy or is the very invisibility of air infused with danger tonight?

  “When he finally gave up the ghost,” continues Clanny, “we had to threaten the widow with the constables to let us remove him for autopsy. National security, you know, but do these people understand?”

  Henry looks down on These People with a renewed sense of anger. It seems to him sometimes that they exist solely to interpose themselves between a doctor and his understanding of Science.

  “You might sympathize with the widow, Uncle,” says Audrey, having eavesdropped on every word of their conversation. “I cannot imagine what it would mean to part with my Henry’s body, should he die before me.”

  “Men of Science should not be put in a position of begging for bodies,” replies her fiancé more sharply than he means. “Especially when we are trying to understand a deadly disease. Do not make us more dependent on these people than we already are. We tell them we need their dead in the interest of England and still they cling to them. We tell them others will die without their help, and they wail about forgoing a wake! We cannot help them if they will not help themselves.”

  “If the poor are irrational,” suggests Audrey hesitantly, “might we not turn to the wealthy?”

  Clanny laughs long and deep. “Why not? Let’s pop over and ask Lord Londonderry if he wouldn’t let us carve up Lady Londonderry and see how far we get!”

  Henry kisses the hand of his abashed fiancée. It is not her fault he has made himself dependent on one of These People. It is not her fault he has compromised himself—and possibly her—for a better understanding of how her dear heart beats and how her sweet lungs expand and the mechanics of how her tear ducts overflow when men are cruel. If it would help save her precious life, Henry would throw in his lot with a hundred Gustines. Still, looking down over the dirty crowd in the pit, he feels how horrible it is to be beholden to even one.

  “There was a young man in Dublin,” he says gaily, hoping to mollify her, “who began a subscription among the upper classes. He persuaded four hundred rich Dubliners to donate their bodies in the interest of dispelling ignorant superstitions about autopsy. I fear that until we can persuade four hundred Sunderland worthies to part with their carcasses, we’ll never convince the underclasses or anyone else it is a thing worth doing.”

  “Doctor!”

  Both Clanny and Henry rise up in their chairs. From somewhere in the pit, someone is calling for them.

  “Hey, Doctor Sawbones!”

  Jesus, Henry says under his breath. Something always happens when a play’s delayed. Fights break out, children throw up, women get drunk and belligerent on dusty bottles of beer. Let them keep their turbulence to themselves, the miscreants. Audrey looks worriedly at her fiancé, but he whispers disgustedly: Ignore them.

  “I see you up there! Which one of you stole my mate from Mag Scurr’s on Saturday night?”

  A heavyset man in a fustian jacket and tight knee breeches stands on a bench, sha
king his fist at their box. He takes an orange from the orange-girl beside him and hurls it at Henry’s head. The doctor ducks and it hits the door behind him, filling the box with the citrusy smell of Christmas morning

  “Sit down, you!” shouts Dr. Clanny, rising to his full height and leaning over the railing. “I was at Mag Scurr’s on Saturday night and I released a man’s body to his daughter. No one stole anything.”

  The unruly audience has quieted—boys have stopped running in the aisles, daughters and mothers ceased bickering—to watch the altercation; Henry can see them staring at him, some slack-jawed, some hostile and accusing. His thoughts speed to the body in his makeshift operating theatre, the beefy, tattooed cadaver Liss, filleted and labeled on ice, dripping into an empty tin pan beneath the table. Could any of these people put him with Gustine on Saturday night? Would Mag Scurr recognize him and turn him in?

  “Mag says me mate’s wife showed up an’ the body was gone! You gave it to his daughter and her husband took it away! Except the man had no daughter!” shouts the red-faced man in the pit, reaching for another orange. The orange-girl pulls her box away—“Th’ ain’t free, you know.”

  “Well, how was I to know he had no daughter?” demands Dr. Clanny in a booming voice. “What reason did I have to doubt her?”

  “No reason if you were in league with them!” yells the man. “Blood-sucker!”

  “Burker!” screams a woman from another part of the audience. “You’d murder the lot of us for your experiments!”

  Henry feels all the blood leave his face. It is like Edinburgh all over again, the crowd and the shouting. Should he speak up and put an end to all of this?

  “Why won’t you let us die in peace?” screams the woman.

  “You may, with pleasure, madam, die in peace, if you will but allow us to watch this play in peace.” Clanny makes a prepossessing bow. He is used to commanding respect and as he stares down the crowd, his war medals gleaming, the weight of his education and Bishopwearmouth address pressing down upon them, one by one they slowly retake their seats. The orchestra, having sat nervously through the spat, strike up an air, effectively putting an end to it. The pit buzzes among itself but no one dares shout out again, and even the red-faced man on the bench thrusts his fist in his pocket and sits back down. Henry and Clanny had both stiffened at his mention of the pawnshop morgue; now Clanny lets out his breath and wipes his forehead.

  “Damn Haselwood,” he says. “Sounds like something he would do.”

  Clanny has been a physician so long, he has heard everything the masses can hurl at him and then some. Henry, sick at the idea of how close he came to ruin, marvels at how steady his uncle’s hands are as he pulls out his watch chain and sighs over the time.

  “Will this wretched play never start?” he asks.

  Those who read the paper this morning know that a gouty letter was written to the Herald complaining of the bad taste displayed in mounting this new production when the cholera morbus might, for all we know, be rapping upon our very gates. “Is it to be endured that a visitation of the most alarming and afflicting character should thus become the subject of merriment and ridicule when the voice of public authority calls upon the nation at large to put up prayers in all our churches against the progress of the new plague throughout the land?” The letter seems to have succeeded only in filling the auditorium to twice what it would normally be on a Monday night, and what with tempers inflamed by the preceding shouting match, and anger running high toward doctors, is it any wonder that when the curtains are at last drawn back, the pit erupts with shouts of “Cholera humbug! Cholera humbug!”

  Cholera humbug. Could any two words be more musical to the ears of Mr. Eliot, the play’s auteur? He looks about him on the stage—at a grim Mr. Mortimer, the troupe’s leader, at a crimson Miss Watson, dutifully stepping forward to curtsy to her audience. When Mr. Eliot had presented the script of what was to become “Cholera Morbus; or Love and Fright,” venerable Mr. Mortimer had hung his head for shame. Miss Watson, who read the script at her dressmaker’s and thus ruined the hem of tonight’s green bombazine frock by repeatedly stamping her tidy foot in disgust, swore she would never lend her name to this offensive bit of drivel. It was bad enough when Mr. Eliot wrote a blood-and-guts about the Beamish Coal Mine explosion; she’d suffered through his witticisms on the Lyme Regis Ferryboat tragedy—but to make fun of a fatal disease, one that hubris might very well bring down upon her own pretty brunette head, well, she would be no part of it.

  And yet here she is, dressed up as the gentle Laura, ward of the hypochondriac Gripeall. Mr. Eliot himself is playing Gripeall’s servant Jeremiah—a smaller part, to be sure, but one which affords the lion’s share of laughs. As the troupe’s resident playwright, Mr. Eliot might compose for himself any part he wished. King of England? A flourish of the pen and it is done. Patriarch, Pharaoh, Caesar Augustus? Scribble, scribble, scribble. Done! Yet Mr. Eliot is no hog of glory: the princely parts he bestows on Mr. Mortimer, and keeps the servant roles for himself. All the better to hang back and study his work’s effect.

  But who could have anticipated tonight’s wild response? Saturday’s opening crowd sat so listlessly still that Mr. Eliot had begun to fear that in fact he had gone too far. Overnight, though, a change has come over Sunderland. “Cholera humbug! Cholera humbug!” Listen to them. They shriek the words, angry and agitated, boxing the air and stomping their feet. From the wings, he’d heard these same furious people shout down the doctors, calling them body snatchers and other foul names. He’d nudged Mr. Webster, who in the second act would portray Timothy Tug, quack physician. Look there, he’d said, nodding up to the boxes. Think you can pull off Dr. Cross of India Medal? You may, with pleasure, madam, die in peace, smiled oily Mr. Webster in perfect imitation of William Reid Clanny’s faint Ulster brogue, if you will but allow us to perform our play in peace.

  Two stagehands turn a crank to raise the house chandelier, and as the auditorium grows darker, the cries gradually subside. Opera glasses flash in the boxes, throats are cleared in the stalls; there’s rustling and bustling and a general doffing of caps all around. Mr. Eliot cannot resist shooting one glance of triumph at the mortified Miss Watson. He’ll write himself up as her husband next time and make her shower him with kisses for the lack of faith she’s shown this play.

  The opening backdrop of “Cholera Morbus; or Love and Fright” is that of a colonial plantation, lush with painted bamboo and twined with wide-blown tissue flowers in scarlet, violet, and gold. India is the country; the time, one year previous to this very evening. Upon a shady verandah are arranged Gripeall (Mr. Mortimer), his lovely ward Laura (downcast Miss Watson), and Gripeall’s manservant, Jeremiah (the wiry and wily Mr. Eliot). Like a disgruntled Egyptian slave, Jeremiah, dressed in full English livery, fans his master with oversized peacock feathers, while with his free hand he shoos a native green parrot (played with avian aplomb by one “Patches”). Gripeall, a mean-tempered, miserly hypochondriac, sits wrapped head to foot in blankets, moaning under the gentle circulation of Jeremiah’s fan. Cue music, thinks Mr. Eliot, and the orchestra strikes up an Easterny-sounding waltz, full of strings and Shiva-evoking clarinets. Exchange your snowy Sunderland evening, they seem to say, for a sun-drenched afternoon in Madras. Cue actors—Mr. Eliot looks down at Mr. Mortimer, who dramatically sneezes and blows his nose. Let the play begin!

  GRIPEALL:

  O why did I ever travel to darkest India? Tell me, Jeremiah! Why suffer the tortures of Climate? The stings of Insecta? The outrageous effronteries of Flora and Fauna? (Here swoops Parrot at his bald head.) Good God! Why have I, who am used to good English beef and puddings (in Moderation as per orders of my doctor, Sir Timothy Tug), been made to subsist on Rice, seasoned with the popular curries of this country: Typhus, Plague, Malaria, Putrid Fevers, Gangrene—

  JEREMIAH:

  Don’t forget the Bombay Runs!

  Mr. Eliot is gratified to hear thunderous laughter and applause from t
he audience.

  GRIPEALL:

  Let us speak not of these Dread Sauces, Jeremiah! You know how I fear them falling upon my food. They fright me nearly to death.

  LAURA:

  Come, come, dear Uncle. You are in excellent health. As for venturing to India, have you forgotten it was to fetch home poor me, whose beloved mother and father both perished in this beautiful yet unpredictable country? (Here, a Cobra—played by a Tame Garden Snake in a hood—is let loose to slither across stage.)

  Mr. Eliot is cheered by Screams from the ladies in the Audience.

  GRIPEALL:

  Had your foolish mother, my sister, not run off with a soldier, Laura, lo those eighteen years ago, I would not be suffering in this condition.

  LAURA:

  Forgive her, dear Uncle. My parents were so very much in love. Would that I would ever find one to love me so.

  GRIPEALL:

  Would that you would not, wicked child. You are to nurse me for the few remaining years of my life, as was our bargain when I agreed to come for you.

  LAURA:

  (looking longingly away) Yes, Uncle.

  While the others continue talking, Mr. Eliot sets down his peacock fan and crosses downstage to retrieve Gripeall’s silver platter of pills. How he detests these old-fashioned tallow theatres with their dirty flickering candles. Critics complain that actors fall over each other to play at the edge of the stage, where, lit from below, even the sweetest ingenue appears hellish and infernal. But what are they to do? In tallow theatres center stage is a shadowy void that neither foot, overhead, nor shuttered sidelights can seem to penetrate. They must play in a straight line downstage, like prating hieroglyphics, just to be seen!