Free Enter Second Murderer by Alanna Knight

slender thread—that the audience came to applaud Mrs. Aird, and that the success of every evening belonged to his leading lady.
    How Trelawney must hate all that adulation by-passing him each night. Faro tried to picture them as man and wife in a cosy domestic setting, but imagination baulked.
    The Willow Song in Act IV was a triumph of understatement, made all the more moving. The audience was spellbound now and Faro decided that this lovely woman must indeed be bound to the Thespians by ties of loyalty and love, when her talents so obviously belonged in the ranks of the great Shakespearean actors on the stages of London and New York.
    "Kill me tomorrow: let me live tonight." The words, uttered in no more than a whisper, reached every seat in the house, and sent a chill through Faro. For a moment he forgot that this was a play he was watching. Helpless to avert the tragedy, he expected to see Desdemona's lifeless form in Othello's arms.
    And at the last, "Commend me to my kind lord", the silence was broken by an outburst of scuffling as many of the audience began to take their departure before the curtain fell. It also released Faro from his spell. What was coming over him? he wondered. That strange dark moment out-of-time on stage—too many wife-slayers?
    He joined the tumultuous applause as the curtain rose on a smiling Desdemona, risen unscathed from her deathbed. She very obviously supported Othello to his curtain-speech, which was clearly not as reverently received as Mr. Topaz Trelawney thought proper to the occasion. He made a drunken, threatening gesture to the audience, quickly suppressed by an anxious Desdemona, and the curtain mercifully descended.
    The audience surged towards the exits, while Faro and Vince made their way back-stage to the small dressing-room Hugo Rich shared with the other male members of the cast. Topaz Trelawney, Faro noticed, had a room of his own.
    Hugo greeted them anxiously. "How did it look from the front?"
    Walter was full of assurances; Rob and Vince were kind and flattering about his Cassio, putting him at his ease. Mark their words, they would be seeing him treading the boards of the London stage one day very soon. He went away, beaming and happy.
    The party increased in volume of noise and merriment as they were joined by a troupe of girls who were part of the company. Faro, alert, looked in vain for Desdemona among these young actresses, who made costumes, attended to laundry and more mundane domestic matters when there were no suitable parts for them.
    They were polite to him, and attentive, respectful and courteous in a manner that made him conscious of his age, and of the fact that he had lived and experienced a whole lifetime before any of them were born. By the time he was watching Vince with a girl sitting on his knee, he decided that his presence was superfluous and that he should quietly withdraw. Sheridan Place and his bed, only minutes away, seemed a tempting alternative.
    Catching Hugo's eye, he made his apologies about work the next morning, adding, "No, please, don't disturb Vince."
    "I will see you to the door," said Hugo. "Yes, I must. It is a rule that everyone is seen out and the door re-locked. There are often unsavoury characters about and once the box office was robbed."
    As they walked along the dimly lit corridor, the door next to Trelawney's opened and a girl emerged and hurried towards the exit ahead of them. She turned, smiling, to let Hugo open the door for her, and Faro found himself staring into the face of the woman he had last seen in Greyfriars Kirkyard, by the grave of Timothy Ferris.
    "Goodnight, Hugo," she said and stepped out into the darkness.
    "Who was that?" he asked Hugo. "Is she a friend of Trelawney's?"
    Hugo smiled. "I suppose you could call her that." Then he added, with a great roar of laughter, "Don't tell me, sir, that you don't recognise Desdemona."
    "Desdemona? But . . . but . . ."
    "The long blonde hair is a wig." And seeing the