Free Tell Me, Pretty Maiden by Rhys Bowen Page A

scream.
    “It’s up here. I can see it now,” another one whimpered.
    “It’s all right, ladies, I’m quite human, I can assure you,” I said loudly.
    “What are you doing up here? You’ll get in awful trouble.” A tall blonde pushed past the others. “Miss Lovejoy don’t allow no public before opening night.”
    “She sent for me,” I said. “She knows I’m coming. I was told to wait in her dressing room.”
    “She won’t be in no state to talk to anybody,” the lanky girl said. “She’ll need a sedative after what happened.”
    “What did happen?” I asked. “I heard the scream.”
    “She saw a face at the window,” one of the girls whimpered.
    “Window?”
    “In the scene she was doing, she is supposed to open the window and look out,” the tall blonde said. “She went to the window and saw a face outside, staring at her.”
    “Did any of you see it?”
    “We weren’t onstage,” another girl said. “But Clara said she was waiting in the wings and she felt something brush past her—something cold and clammy, she said.”
    “Trust Clara,” the blonde said with a sniff. “She’s a bundle of nerves all the time.” She glanced back down the stairs. “We’d better beat it. We’ll be in big trouble if we’re not in our dressing room when Blanche comes up.”
    As one they ran on together like a gaggle of slim white geese, all jockeying for position. I found Blanche Lovejoy’s dressing room. It had her name and a star on the door. I wasn’t sure what to do next—wait in the dark hallway and risk scaring Blanche to death or go ahead into her dressing room and risk scaring her equally when she entered. But she wouldn’t want me down in the theater either. I decided to go into the room. At least I’d look less threatening in brightly lit surroundings.
    Just to make sure, I tapped on the door. When it opened slowly and I saw a hideous form on the other side, it was all I could do not to scream and run. But I stood my ground and found myself staring at an old woman, bent over and with a nose like a witch’s. I almost believed she was the ghost until she cocked that head, like an old bird, and said, “I don’t know you. Go away. I’ll not have you upsetting Miss Lovejoy.”
    “I don’t intend to upset her,” I said. “I’ve come to help her. Oona Sheehan sent me—to help deal with the ghost.”
    “Well, I never.” The old woman was still looking at me with birdlike eyes. “You’d better come in then.” She ushered me into a small, cluttered room. I had expected a star’s dressing room to be spacious and glamorous, like Oona Sheehan’s rooms at the Hoffman House, but you could hardly swing a cat in here. Straight in front of me there was the dressing table with its mirror surrounded by electric lightbulbs and sticks of grease paint strewn higgledy-piggledy all over the table. On one side there was a screen, blocking off part of the room and hung with several costumes. In the other corner there was an armchair and a table beside it with a bottle of Irish whiskey on it.
    “You heard the scream, did you?” the old woman asked. “Something else must have happened then.”
    “She saw a face at the window when she went to open it.”
    “Oh dear. She’ll be in a proper state then. I’d better find her calming mixture.”
    “Calming mixture?”
    “Her doctor makes it up special. I’m not quite sure what’s in it but Miss Lovejoy says it’s like laudanum, only better. Opium, I suppose. Or morphine. Or both. Wait—that’s her coming now. You go and sit over there so you don’t startle her.”
    She motioned to the armchair. I obeyed just as the door burst open and two people came in. I suppose I had been expecting Blanche Lovejoy to be another Oona Sheehan—a delicate beauty. But the woman who came in was more cart horse than racehorse. She was big-boned, with an almost mannish face and a great mound of brassy blonde hair that made the face seem even bigger. She had a