Lady Deborah Prentice steered the midsize American rental car up the long driveway that led to the Jacobs Grand Hotel. She slowed down and, fighting her deeply ingrained instinct to pull over onto the left shoulder, steered the car to the right as flashing lights behind her signaled the approach of an ambulance. When it had passed, she picked up speed and continued the rest of the way to the hotel and then drove around to the back and parked. She opened the rear door of the vehicle, lifted out two plastic carrier bags from Fifth Avenue stores, and entered the hotel through the service entrance. The long, empty back corridor led in one direction to the kitchens and in the other to the theater space, with the lobby and registration desk beyond that. She turned in the direction of the theater.
Lady Deborah was just an inch or two short of six feet tall and finely made. She had that distinctive translucent skin so admired among the English aristocracy, and her carefully and expensively tinted blonde hair was swept back behind her ears and tied neatly with a small black velvet bow. Her eyes were a pale blue and her top lip was thin, with a full, pouty lower lip. She wore pearl earrings and a double-strand pearl necklace. Her Burberry raincoat was undone, revealing a tailored dark green suit. Her court shoes made no sound as she strode along the hallway, the Launer handbag she carried swinging gently in time with her steps.
A few minutes later, she pushed open a door marked “Backstage Area—No Admittance” and entered a large open space. A few plastic chairs were scattered around a concrete floor, but the area was empty. From somewhere off to her right came the muffled sound of voices. She turned toward them, pushed aside a couple of black curtains, and entered the wings. The actors were grouped together on the stage, some sitting on the floor, others standing.
“What’s going on?” she asked in a cut-glass English accent. “An ambulance passed me in the drive. Is it Brian?”
“I’m all right, darling,” Brian Prentice said, emerging from the shadows. “I’m fine. It’s Lauren Richmond. She’s poorly and been taken to hospital.”
“Poorly? What on earth’s the matter with her?”
“We don’t know, Lady Deborah,” Simon Dyer chimed in. “She didn’t turn up on time for rehearsal, so I sent someone to look for her, and she was discovered unwell in her room. And now, as Brian just said, she’s on her way to the hospital.”
“If she’s that unwell, I expect that’s the best place for her,” said Lady Deborah, in that clipped, British, no-nonsense way. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.” Brian took a step toward her as she turned to go.
“I’ll come with you.” He turned his gaze to Simon. “You’re finished with me for the afternoon, I take it?”
Simon nodded. “If you’re not feeling up to it, we’ll just have to manage without you.” He took a step closer and said in a lower voice so the other cast members couldn’t hear him, “We need to talk again. And soon.”
“If you’re coming with me, Brian, then you can make yourself useful and carry these.” Lady Deborah held out her carrier bags and, with an aggressive swipe, pulled the wings curtains aside, and the two left the stage, Brian trailing after her with a bag in each hand.
Simon watched Prentice and his wife leave and then opened his script and addressed the rest of the cast.
“Those of you not in the scene, clear the stage. The rest of you, places.”
“What about me?” asked Aaron. “Do you need me anymore?”
“No,” said Simon in a gentler tone. “Go back to whatever it is you were doing.”
*
Aaron opened the door to the costume department. The afternoon sun filtered through tall windows covered in a thin layer of winter dirt, casting long shadows and picking out the details of the worktable. Charlotte, her back to the door, was bent over her desk. She straightened at the sound of the door opening and turned slowly to see who it was.
“Oh, it’s you. Good. Come in and tell me what’s happening.”
Aaron set a mug of tea on her desk. “Here. Thought you could use this.”
She smiled at him. “Very thoughtful. Thank you. We didn’t quite finish our office tour, but there’s a little, well, you couldn’t really call it a kitchen, but a cupboard with a sink and a kettle and a little fridge just through there.” She pointed to a door off the main room. “It gets too expensive getting drinks in from the canteen, so I usually make my own tea. I just sent you to get drinks from the canteen this morning to give you something to do whilst I had a private word with Lauren. Normally we don’t put our drinks on the account. That’s just for special occasions.”
“I didn’t put these on the account, Charlotte. Paid for them myself.”
“That was sweet of you. Thank you. But before you sit down, would you mind picking up that can Lauren left on the worktable and taking it into the kitchen? I can’t believe I let it sit there all day. Too much going on, I suppose.”
Aaron disappeared into the kitchenette with the can before returning and pulling up a chair beside Charlotte’s desk.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“Trying to sort out the rest of the costumes for all three plays in production this season. When I have the list complete, we’ll have to check them. They’re put away dry-cleaned and mended, so we should be all right. Then we have to set up fittings for every actor, every costume, every scene, every play. It’s all very time consuming, so I’m glad you’re here. Between us, we can do two actors at a time. But tell me. What happened at the rehearsal? How did the cast take the news about Lauren?”
“Well, nobody really said anything, but to be honest, I don’t think anybody likes her very much. Then Lady What’s-her-name showed up, and her and Brian left.” He stifled a yawn.
“Aaron, you mustn’t call her Lady What’s-her-name. She’s Lady Deborah. Her father’s an earl. If you’re going to make it in the fashion business, you’ve got to work on your professionalism. In the theater, actors expect to be treated with a certain amount of deference, and if you can’t manage that, you should at least get people’s names right. And it’s not ‘her and Brian left,’ it’s ‘she and Brian left.’ You wouldn’t say, ‘Her left,’ would you?”
She sighed, took a sip of tea, and set the mug back down on the tray. Although she was only in her early forties, she suddenly felt old. She could hear her mother, a real stickler for good grammar, reflected in her own voice. “If you’re going to make something of yourself, Charlotte,” she’d said at least a thousand times, “you’ll have to speak properly.” But that was in Britain, where grammar and accents used to matter more than they did here in America.
“Sorry, Aaron,” she said. “Starting to sound like my mother. In the end, we all turn into our parents.”
“No worries.”
“What did you make of Lady Deborah?”
“She seemed a bit stuck up. Like she thinks she’s better than the rest of us.”
“In England, we call that ‘posh.’”
“Posh. Hmm. I like that word. Anyway, expensively put together, I’d say. Dressed way more formally than most people around here. Looked like she’d been shopping in the city. Had a couple of shopping bags from Saks and Barneys.”
“Saks and Barneys, eh?” Charlotte pursed her lips and nodded slightly. “Right, well, let’s get your work organized for the rest of the day. We’ve got to set up a meeting with Simon to offer our suggestions for costumes and to hear what he has to say. He may have some specific requests or ideas. The best directors always do. For example, he may need something done a certain way so it’ll work with what the lighting designer has in mind.”
Aaron made a little noise that seemed to indicate agreement. “That’s interesting. Hadn’t really thought of that. So when I’m designing for the runway, I need to keep lighting in mind.”
“Oh, I can teach you all kinds of tricks that’ll come in handy for the runway,” Charlotte replied. “For example, say a script requires a character to pull a revolver out of his pocket and shoot somebody. What are the implications of that for us in costume design?”
Aaron thought a moment, and then his face brightened. “He has to be wearing a costume that has a pocket?”
“That’s right! And not only must there be a pocket, it has to be deep enough and strong enough to hold the revolver.” Charlotte paused, and then continued.
“Okay. So, this season we’re opening with Romeo and Juliet, but we’re also doing King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s the cast list for each play.” She handed him a binder. “You’ll see who’s been cast in what part. Here’s the big question. Have you read the plays?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, no.”
She pointed to the bookshelf beside her desk. “You’ll find all the Shakespearean plays there. The complete works. Help yourself. You’ll have to be familiar with all three plays being performed this season, so if I were you, I’d start this afternoon with Romeo and Juliet, as that’s the first one up.”
Aaron flipped a few pages in the binder. “This information would be so much better set up on a spreadsheet. That way, you could see who’s playing what part in each play. And then, with one keystroke, you could sort the data by actors’ names so you could look up Brian Prentice, say, and see immediately all the roles he’s playing. So in effect, you’d know by play and by actor every costume that’s required.
“You could replace your little card system with spreadsheets of all the details on each actor. Measurements, roles, dates, and so on. You could print it out if you prefer working from paper and also have a record on your computer.”
Charlotte looked at him in admiration. “That would be wonderful! Would it be a big job?”
Aaron shook his head. “Nope. I could start setting it up for you this afternoon. That, and reading Romeo and Juliet, of course.”
Charlotte gave him a thumbs-up and then pulled a slightly tattered paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet from the bookshelf and slid it across the desk to him.
“This Brian Prentice guy,” said Aaron thoughtfully, as he picked up the book and glanced at the cover.
“Yes. What about him?”
“Well, it’s just that when his wife arrived . . .” he looked up from the book and continued, “Lady Deborah . . . when she arrived, the first thing she said was something like, ‘Is it Brian? Is he okay?’”
“So?”
“That just seemed a bit weird. Why would she think something had happened to Brian? I mean, if I saw an ambulance in the drive, I wouldn’t automatically assume it was there for a specific person. Why did she think the ambulance was there for Brian?”
“Well, it’s pretty well known that Brian’s got a drinking problem, so she might have thought something had happened to him. He’s been drinking heavily for a long time. That may be part of the reason he didn’t do as well as people thought he would. His career never really took off the way it should have. At one time, he was a rising star, and the theater world expected great things from him. The next Laurence Olivier, everyone said. But he didn’t live up to his promise, unfortunately.”
“I guess that explains what he’s doing in a place like this, then. I wondered about that.” Aaron narrowed his eyes slightly and gave her a quizzical look. “His wife must have money of her own, because he’s not buying stuff for her at stores like Saks and Barneys on what my uncle pays him.”
“Speaking of your uncle, I think you should go and see him and make sure he’s informed about what happened to Lauren.”
*
Brian Prentice poured himself a couple of fingers of scotch, held the glass up to the light in a mildly pretentious gesture, tipped it slightly in his wife’s direction, and then drained it.
Lady Deborah crossed her legs and gave him a level, measured look, tinged with the contempt she no longer took any pains to conceal.
“I had lunch in town with Harriette Ainsworth,” she said. “She mentioned a reception at the British consulate coming up in a couple of weeks. They’re invited. I wonder why we’re not.”
“Probably because the people at the consulate don’t know we’re here,” Brian replied. “Why don’t you ring them and let them know? Ask them to put us on the guest list. Or better yet, suggest they hold a reception for me.”
“For you? I think they’d be more likely to hold one for me. Anyway, asking people to give a party for you doesn’t seem like good form.”
“Really, Deborah, nobody takes any notice of that sort of thing nowadays. If those consulate people had known we were here, they’d surely have invited us. Make the call, why don’t you? You can be very persuasive. They’ll put us on the standing guest list, and that’ll give us six months of lovely parties with free drinks. Speaking of which . . .” He turned back to the drinks table and reached for the bottle.
“I think you’ve had enough, don’t you?” Lady Deborah said in a voice dripping with ice. With a frustrated sigh, Brian set the bottle down and dropped heavily into the armchair at right angles to the sofa.
While the rest of the cast was housed in the former staff bedrooms on the second floor of the hotel, with room and board costs deducted from their wages, six months’ accommodation in the bungalow reserved for the exclusive use of the season’s star performer was included in Brian’s contract. The two-bedroom dwelling was clean and comfortable but in sad need of a refurbishment. Brian’s eyes wandered over the flowered curtains, worn brown carpet, and old-fashioned furniture. The back of his chair even had an antimacassar, and it was against this that his head now rested.
“God, I hate this place already, and we’ve only been here five minutes,” he said, gazing up at the water-stained ceiling.
“Oddly enough, I rather like it,” said Deborah. “Reminds me a little of nanny’s old flat when I was a girl. Which we only got to see if we’d been very good. It was always such a treat to have our tea there. Of course, her flat wasn’t nearly as shabby as this place—Mummy saw to that—but still.”
Brian shifted in his chair. “I think I’ll have a bit of a lie down before dinner.”
“You do that. It’s getting a bit late now, but I’ll ring the consulate on some pretext or other tomorrow and try to wrangle an invitation to the party. I don’t suppose you’ve lost your passport, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just that a lost passport would be the perfect excuse to ring them. Oh well. I’ll think of something. As you say, I can be very persuasive.”
As he stood up, she gave him a sly look and remarked, “You know, a party at the consulate would be just the thing. Give us the chance to mix with a better class of person. Not to mention a perfect opportunity to give a ring or brooch a bit of an airing. People do so enjoy seeing a little something from the splendid Roxborough collection every now and then.”
Brian hesitated for a moment in the doorway and then disappeared into the bedroom, chased by the sound of her shallow laughter.