Page 86 of Regency in Color

“Let’s not scare her away just yet.” At Andie’s questioning look, he explained, “There’s a hidden walkway just below the top floor, between the stage and the orchestra’s gallery.” He lowered his voice and whispered, “It’s terrifying. Obviously, it’s Lu’s favorite spot.”

“Obviously,” Lulu emphasized.

“The box,” Frank repeated. With a wink and a bow, he took his leave. “Enjoy the show.”

Frank disappeared in a flurry of activity, the sound of dropped instruments and indistinct shouts echoing in his wake. The hall immediately felt emptier without him in it.

Andie let out a sigh. She had briefly forgotten Lulu was there. Frank was all presence, but Lulu was almost the absence of it—quiet and calm, even her breathing was silent as she studied Andie with an artist’s eye. Suddenly wishing she’d worn something less dowdy, Andie smiled awkwardly, only just noticing that the girl appeared to be wearing a sort of Greek dress of violet paisley. It had a fraying ribbon belt and a raw hem, but it was more beautiful than half the things Andie’s modiste came up with. “Your dress is remarkable. Do you really design the costumes?”

Lulu nodded. “And the sets, although everybody helps. Sometimes I feed the crows, but that’s mostly my dad. He is rather prone to exaggeration. He doesn’t need me or anyone to keep him alive. He’s less scatter-brained than he seems.”

“Does your mother help?”

“My mother?” Lulu wrinkled her nose as if Andie had just enquired about her tobacconist. Her voice dropped as she deadpanned, “She’s no longer with us.”

Her expression was so straight that Andie couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Oh…erm, I’m sorry to hear that.”

Lulu shrugged and headed down the hall toward the center of the building. “It’s quite all right. This way, Miss Archer.”

As fast as Frank was, Lulu was quicker. Over the next twenty minutes, Andie was shown every back corridor, seating area, dressing room, and secret passage. Although the theater itself was indeed Elizabethan, it had been modified by three hundred years of eccentric owners who’d thought to use it for every kind of trade and entertainment under the sun. It had housed a potters’ guild during the Civil War—the furnaces of which were still used in the kitchen, now at lower temperatures for daily cooking—then became a temporary shelter for those displaced by the Great Fire. Though the Restoration had brought the return of the theater, the top floor was still fitted with Jacobean apartments. Thinking of her mother’s interest in art and architecture, Andie wanted to ask more about those, but Lulu was already halfway up the final set of stairs to the roof.

Six floors up, Andie could see for miles.

She could have stood there for ages, just looking at the city lights, but the sound of a piano playing to roaring applause drew them back inside.

In “the box”—one of many, but the lowest central balcony—Andie finally caught her breath. Sitting beside Lulu on a plush velvet settee, she felt more like royalty than she ever had at the opera. Worn as it was, the sofa was preferable to the hard benches and stools of other theaters. The atmosphere was lively and cheerful, no one was spying on her with opera glasses, and best of all, the stage was so close, she could hear and see everything clearly.

The lamps were lower than they were for most performances, the audience in darkness. The brightest thing in the whole theater was the glittering plaster moon affixed to the trapeze ring, now suspended a little higher over the stage. To the left, a comically large top hat bobbed back and forth behind the piano. There was no light back there—Frank was playing the music by memory, or he was improvising it. A galloping rhythm, it was almost a reel, gathering in speed and intensity with stormy minor chords inserted jarringly into random offbeats. The crowd began to clap along, faster and faster until a curtain dropped, light spilled in, and Frank took the stage.

Andie couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of him. In the coat and cravat of a funeral director, he’d powdered his face stark white and lined his eyes in kohl until he was the very image of a gothic villain. Affecting a stagger, he hobbled to the center of the stage and took in the crowd, his every expression sinister and every gesture exaggerated. With a lift of an eyebrow, he had the crowd rolling with laughter.

The audience fell into an uncomfortable silence. Frank let it sit, looking out over their expectant faces. “You again?”

The cheers were thunderous.

Frank let them make all the noise they wanted for a moment, then calmed them with a disgusted shake of his head. “Can’t a body enjoy the hereafter in peace?”

All at once, the crowd shouted, “No rest for the wicked!”

Andie jumped. Were they supposed to do that?

Frank nodded, humoring them. “And no one would know better than you lot, hey? When’s the last time you slept, Billy boy?” he asked a man to the right of the stage.

“May 1803,” came the answer.

The crowd laughed, and though Frank didn’t join them, he looked delighted by the clever response. “Could say the same for Old Boney and all.” When the cheers died down, he continued, “Speaking of bones…”

As the curtains behind the stage parted, Andie gasped. Above the stage was another balcony directly opposite. Sitting or standing in two rows, a dozen musicians burst into feverish song. They all wore black, and like Frank, their faces were powdered into ghastly shades of gray. They wore various amounts of kohl around their eyes, some having extended it to their noses and the hollows of their cheeks to appear like skeletons or cadavers in various stages of decay. The music was not like anything Andie had heard before—a lively cacophony of unusual instruments, it was more akin to Frank’s first reel combined with Bohemian folk music. As an eerie fiddle rent the air, the hair on Andie’s neck stood on end. “What am I watching?” she whispered to herself.

Lulu shot her a glance and giggled.

Frank spread his arms and shouted, “Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between,”—he wiggled his eyebrows at a group of unusually tall ladies to the left of the stage, who whistled and applauded in appreciation—“I’m Frank Creighton, and this is my Phantasmagoria of Horror and Mystery.”

* * *

Between introducing the various acts,Frank sat behind his piano and dabbed at his face with a towel. At this rate, he’d sweat all his makeup off before the closing bit. He told himself he wasn’t nervous, only that the year had been unseasonably warm and—

He pinched the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t lie to himself, even in his own head. The year had been miserable, only marginally better than the previous, and Britain hadn’t seen a real summer since 1815. Oh no—he had no one to blame for his stage fright but himself.