A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(70)
“I believe we have permission,” Sarah said wryly, with one raised eyebrow.
It struck Nan then that before all this started, Sarah would have chuckled at that—and that neither of them had laughed since . . . well, since they’d seen the first victims. But how can we laugh when we know there is someone, something, out there that can rip the soul out of someone’s body? Knowing that . . . gets between me and everything else going on. It feels wrong doing anything except concentrating on the problem. It was probably just as well that Sarah’s choice of play was Hamlet, a tragedy. It wouldn’t have felt right, going to see Gilbert and Sullivan or something of the sort.
Feeling as if she needed to earn her brief respite from thinking about the problem, she applied herself grimly to it after breakfast and the usual chores, plowing through several desperately dreary tomes sent over by Lord Alderscroft from the White Lodge library; these were mostly dry and erudite treatises on obscure religions. They didn’t help either.
The two of them set off with a word to Mrs. Horace that they were going out and would be back by supper. Snow threatened, but so far was holding off. As they walked far enough to a ’bus stop and caught an omnibus, Nan found her spirits lifting a little at the prospect of getting away for a few hours. And immediately felt mingled relief and shame. Relief, that they were at least leaving the insoluble problem for one wretched afternoon . . . and shame that she was feeling relief.
Blast it, she thought, pulling her cloak tightly around her in the unheated ’bus. It’s not as if we’re going there with the intent to get pleasure out of it! We’re going to stop our heads from going in circles for a little while! There’s no shame in that!
She wished she had a mind like Sherlock’s in that moment—a mind that actually enjoyed teasing apart impossible things until he got to a solution, a mind that found the apparently insoluble to be stimulating. There didn’t seem to be any challenge so great that Holmes didn’t welcome it. But then . . . then my mind would be buzzing in aimless circles like his does when he doesn’t have a problem to solve, and his solution for that is cocaine . . . no, perhaps that is more of a curse than a blessing.
At matinee prices they could afford to splurge on good tickets, and so they did. They had arrived just as the box office opened, and so they were in good time to settle into very good seats in the dress circle before anyone else was in that row. The seats weren’t as plush as the ones in the boxes, of course, but they were a lot better than the ones in the balcony, and Nan felt a glimmer of pleasant anticipation. They both examined their programmes critically.
“Oh dear,” Sarah said, her brows creased as she encountered something in the programme.
“What?” Nan wanted to know. Surely there isn’t anything in an innocuous booklet to cause her to make that face.
“Well . . . we’ve got a very good Ophelia and Horatio, and quite sound actors for the other roles—but the Hamlet is an understudy. Not just that, but the third understudy.” Sarah’s mouth twisted wryly. “I fear the worst.”
“Well, he can’t be that bad, can he?” Nan replied, and clapped her hand to her mouth the moment the words came out of it. Because of course, now that she’d challenged Fate, fickle Fate would certainly take notice and prove her wrong. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Sarah sighed. “No. You shouldn’t.”
“Do you know anything about him?” Nan asked with trepidation. Perhaps Fate hadn’t noticed her blunder yet.
“No,” Sarah replied, a little grimly. “Well, the very worst that will happen is that either this will turn into a farce, or the producer will pull him and put the Ghost into his costume. I’d almost rather see a septuagenarian Hamlet than a terrible Hamlet.” Then her grim expression turned a little lighter. “If it turns into a farce, we can whisper rude things to each other and laugh at what are supposed to be the most serious parts. That should be ample punishment for him.”
It appeared, as the seats filled in around them, from the murmurings of their fellow audience members, that the rest of the audience, at least those down here in the dress circle, shared Sarah’s trepidations. And when the curtain came up—
—the Hamlet was every bit as dreadful as they’d feared.
Halfway through the first act, Nan decided that she had seen better acting at the Panto before Christmas than that man was producing in what was ostensibly a serious production. It was past belief. It was well past farce. In fact, Nan finally decided that since the tickets were paid for, she would just sit back and marvel at just how terrible it was—and, as Sarah had suggested, giggle at the places where he was overacting the worst. Perhaps she could get other audience members to share in her laughter. There was a certain sardonic pleasure in it—and it certainly was a distraction from their problem.
When the first interval came, and people began moving to the lobby for refreshment, she was about to ask Sarah about doing the same when—
She felt it. A familiar brush of cold, calculating evil. A flash of a cold, bleak London, where the trees were barren, but there were living things that ached with hatred, and behind it all was a savage, arrogant intelligence with a hunger great enough to devour a world. This was certainly the same ominous presence she had sensed in Amelia’s visions!
Her head snapped up like a hound that has caught a scent, but in the next moment, it was gone, leaving no trace of itself behind. As if the thing knew she had sensed it, and vanished out of her world and back into its own.