A Christmas Homecoming (12 page)

he crypt scene and Lucy’s final scene, as a vampire, went quite smoothly. They moved into the last act: the hunt for Dracula. Vincent was slightly overplaying Van Helsing’s mimicry of Renfield, but he added some details that were very vivid, and truly tragic, evoking Renfield as a man once decent, now a helpless victim of the terrible vampire. Joshua told him very firmly to keep all that he had added in; if the play ran five minutes longer because of it, then so be it.

“It’s not necessary,” James protested. “We’re ten minutes over time already. We’ll lose the audience.”

“No, we won’t,” Joshua told him. “It’s a superb piece of acting.”

“We’re here to entertain, not show off,” Mercy said
defensively. “Vincent’s just trying to impress Mr. Netheridge. He’s looking for another lead in the London West End.”

“On that performance, he deserves it,” Joshua said. “And it’s important to the play. He makes Renfield matter to us.”

“Renfield’s trivial, a plot device,” James said with disgust.

“He’s a plot device that works extremely well,” Joshua said gravely. “His degradation from decent man to fly- and rat-eating lunatic shows us more clearly than any words what the power of the vampire is. Through Van Helsing we watch him die, but for an instant return to the man he once was. This is the only time we get to see that, to understand how far he fell. If we’re not frightened of Dracula after that, then we are truly stupid.”

James drew in his breath to argue, then let it out again. He was actor and dreamer enough to know the truth of what Joshua said.

They followed the script through to the end. They even tried the effect of the lights to create the illusion of a snowstorm, and cut down the words used to describe
the last chase of the coffin carried through the mountain pass as the lights dimmed in imitation of the sun sinking in the west. They killed Dracula in its last rays, and the unearthly scream that rang out as the light faded and the curtain came down drew a moment’s total silence, and then a roar of applause.

“It will work,” Joshua said simply. “Thank you for your ideas, Mr. Ballin. You have helped us enormously. Without you we might never have succeeded.”

Ballin bowed, smiling. “It was a great pleasure,” he said. “A very great pleasure. Miss Alice, I think you have a happy future ahead of you.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes shining.

inner was quiet. Everyone was tired and ready to retire early. There were no more problems to solve; all that was left was for the script, much amended, to be learned by heart so there were no mistakes, no hesitations. In fact, several of them would write out a new copy of the script, clean, without the scratchings-out
and scribbled margin notes. Many actors found writing out the script was an excellent way to commit the words to memory.

Caroline wrote out the script as well, not every word, but the key phrases that cued the light changes. The prompting script would be with Alice, though Caroline had often taken on that task. Alice’s parts onstage were only a few words here and there: a servant or a messenger. It would not be difficult to fill all the roles and still act as prompter. The lights were crucial, and Caroline wanted to focus entirely on them.

Joshua was sitting at the small desk in the bedroom and Caroline was on the bed, reading her cues over again, when she remembered a note she had written hastily about the lighting of Lucy’s death scene. She had left it on the stage.

“I’ll just go and get it,” she said, slipping her feet off the bed and standing up. “I won’t be long.”

“Shall I get it for you?” Joshua offered.

“No, thank you.” She walked over to him and touched his cheek lightly. “You’re busy.” She looked down at his half-written page. “There’s another hour’s
work you have to do still. I’m not afraid of vampires in the dark. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so.”

Joshua smiled and turned back to the desk. She was right; it would take at least another hour or so to complete.

Caroline went out onto the landing and down the stairs to the main hall. The lights were always left burning low—but quite sufficient for her to move swiftly toward the passage to the theater. The hall seemed even more magnificent in the shadows: the ceilings higher, the checkered marble floor bigger, the stairs sweeping up on either side disappearing dramatically into the dark corners where they turned and curled back to the gallery above.

The long passage to the theater was even darker, leaving the distance between the niched candles heavily shadowed, the outlines of pictures barely visible. She walked briskly. Luckily there were no chairs or jutting tables to bump into. Not even the vase of bamboo was there now, she remembered, with a small smile.

She turned the first corner, then the second, her eyes on the wall ahead, searching for the next candle along
the corridor. Then she tripped over something and pitched forward, landing hard on the floor on her hands and knees. She got up slowly, shaken and bruised. How could she have been so clumsy? She turned to see what she had fallen over, and at first did not understand what it was. She was in the shadow between the lights, and the object looked like a pile of curtains dropped on the ground.

Then as she stood dazed, her heart pounding, her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and the form came into focus. It was a man lying crumpled on his side, his legs half-folded under him. Was it a drunken footman? What on earth was the stupid man doing here?

She bent to shake him, and only then did she see the long handle of the broom slanting upward. Except it was only half of the handle. The brush was missing, and the shaft ended abruptly in the man’s back. She felt the shadows blur and swim as if she were going to faint. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. It was not a footman, it was Ballin. His eyes were open and his mouth was open, as if he had screamed when the makeshift spear had struck him. She had no doubt whatsoever that he was dead.

Should she yell for help? It seemed ridiculous to scream now, deliberately. Added to that, her mouth was as dry as if she had been eating cotton. She should stand up, control herself, make her legs walk back up the stairs to Joshua. Please heaven no one come along this corridor in the meantime.

Her legs were wobbling. It was all she could do not to fall again. What had happened? Was there any imaginable way it could have been an accident?

Don’t be absurd, she told herself, crossing the hall as silently as she had the first time, a world and an age ago. Nobody takes the head off a broom and spears themselves with the handle by accident. In fact, it must have been sharpened into a purposeful weapon, or it wouldn’t have even penetrated the skin anyway.

She reached the stairs and clung to the newel post, climbing up hand over hand, pulling and balancing. She had seen murder before. One of her sons-in-law was a policeman.

She was at the top of the stairs. She reached her own bedroom door and opened it. She saw the light on Joshua’s brown hair, the fair streaks in it shining.

“Joshua …”

He turned around slowly, smiling, the pen still in his hand. Then he saw her face.

“What is it?” he asked huskily, starting up from the desk. “Caroline!”

“Someone has killed Mr. Ballin.” She gulped, struggling now not to sob, not to let her knees buckle. He was beside her, arms holding her.

“I tripped over his body in a dark stretch of the corridor to the theater,” she went on. “Before you ask, yes, I am sure he was killed … murdered. He has been stabbed through the chest with the broken-off handle of a broom. You could say …” She gulped again and the room swam and blurred in the corners. “You could say down through the heart with a stake.” She wanted to laugh but it ended in a sob.

He was guiding her to the bed, still holding her.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

“No. I … I thought of screaming, but it seemed so stupid. We must tell Mr. Netheridge. Do you know which is their bedroom?”

“No. I shall call one of the servants to wake him.” He glanced at the window, then back at Caroline. She was sitting on the bed now, and he still held both her hands. “We will have to deal with it ourselves … without the police.”

“Joshua, it’s murder!” she protested. “We can’t just … just deal with it, as if it were some kind of domestic accident!”

“Caroline. Who’s going to walk through that snow to fetch the police?” he asked very gently.

“Oh … oh.” She took a deep breath. “Yes … I see. How stupid of me. We’ll have to … Oh, heaven!” Now she leaned against him as her body began to shake. “That means one of us must have done it.”

He touched her hair gently, pushing the long strands away from her face.

“I’m afraid it does. There won’t be any more strangers out in the night coming here, or anywhere else.” He let out a long, shaky breath. “I’ll go and get one of the servants. Butler, I suppose. He’ll call Mr. Netheridge. At least we must provide a little decency for the body, for the time being.” He took a step.

“Joshua!”

He turned. “You stay here,” he told her. “Perhaps you had better not let anyone else in.”

“Put a blanket over the body, if you like,” she told him. “But you’d better not move it until someone has looked at it. We have to find out who killed him.” She smiled bleakly and it felt like a grimace. “I’ve been around rather a lot of crime scenes, one way and another. Thomas is a policeman, if you remember.”

“We can’t leave it there until the thaw,” he protested. “We’ll have to find a better place for it, somewhere cold. But yes, perhaps we should take a very careful look at it first. I don’t know who, Netheridge himself, I suppose. It’s his house. You know, I have the odd feeling that Ballin would have been the best person to take charge in a situation like this.”

He looked very pale. For a ridiculous moment she thought, what a disappointment it was that they would hardly be able to put on the play now. It really had become very good.

“Yes,” she agreed. “He was very able. I’m … sorry he’s gone.” It sounded so inadequate, and yet it was all she could think to say.

“Stay here,” he repeated, then he went out the door.