Free Will Starling by Ian Weir Page A

sniggered a voice beside us. “Dirty little devil.”
    Two of Miss Smollet’s friends had joined us, in paint and plumage. They were actresses as well, more or less, but in the meantime they were more reconciled than she to Cyprian endeavour. The one who’d just spoke so wittily — an arch individual with eyes like a badger’s — was actually an acquaintance of Mr Edmund Kean. So I later discovered. She had in fact known him very well for almost ten minutes during the second interval of Richard III the previous November. Right now she stood snorting with drollery.
    Miss Smollet blushed most fetchingly, and raised one hand to hide it. I expect her aim was to cover her mouth, cos I fear Miss Smollet’s teeth were not quite everything you’d hope, seen up close. But I only loved her more for her imperfections.
    The Badger and her chum were already moving away. Miss Smollet went with them, and never looked back.
    Tucking the rose into my buttonhole, I wormed my way into the crowd outside the entrance to the Pit, where they’d been lining up to see Mr Edmund Kean — by the hundreds, and then the thousands — since four o’clock.
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    The theatre was an enchanted palace, blazing with light, with room for three thousand, all crammed together in the smoke from the oil lights and the candelabras. The din was prodigious and remained so right through the pantomime and the musical interlude, cos it was always that way at the theatre. A cracking good play — or a dunghill play, for that matter, or even a play that was middling putrid — provided much to talk about. Besides, half the audience never came for the play at all. They were much more interested in seeing friends, or being seen, or securing a bottle of claret and transacting a brisk encounter at the back of a box with one of the scores of Cyprians who attended each night, drawn from the dozens of brothels in the district.
    For my threepenny admission, I managed to struggle my way to the back of the passage that surrounds the Pit, where I was wedged in so tight that I could lift my stampers right off the floor. For an extra three-and-sixpence I could have gone up to the boxes — providing I had such blunt in my pocket, which I didn’t, and assuming I could have extricated myself from the crush, which was impossible. So I tried my best to breathe, and glimpsed from time to time through the wall of reeking humanity a flicker of movement upon the stage.
    To watch Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. That’s what someone had said — Coleridge, I think — and I wish I could tell you whether I agreed. I’d seen Kean twice before, and it was always the same: I had an impression of a diminutive dark figure, much smaller than you’d expect, flinging himself herk-a-jerk about the stage. Over the din I heard a voice unexpectedly hoarse, not at all like the sonorous instrument that Philip Kemble possessed, and all tragedians were expected to emulate. But that is all I can relate. No fits amongst the audience. No poets clutching at their throats like poleaxed oxen, or otherwise. I suppose you can’t have everything in a play.
    I stayed for the comic afterpiece, after which I should by rights have gone home to Cripplegate. But I’d overheard something the Badger said earlier, as she’d swept Annie Smollet away.
    â€œWe’re invited,” she had said. “All of us, after the play.”
    â€œInvited where?” asked Annie.
    â€œThe Coal Hole, my dove. Where else would they go?”
    â€œYou mean, the Wolves?”
    â€œOf course!”
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    The Coal Hole was a song-and-supper room, the likes of which had begun to sprout like mushrooms about London. This one lay below the Strand in Fountain Court, at the foot of a narrow passage that reeked equally of yeast and urine. A cellar, low-ceilinged and heavy-beamed, with a horseshoe bar looming yonder