Finster Drummand was nodding off. He was on stage, awaiting the cue for his line. The so-called star of the show Edelle Priceworthy was droning on as she had for three hundred consecutive nights. A pretty face and ample bosom could unfortunately go far in this world.
Finster had been in the theatre most of his life, starting on stage at the age of nine. An orphan, he took to dancing and singing in the street for coins and found his way indoors where a band of actors taught him their art. He travelled throughout Europe from the most vermin-infested tavern to the gold-tinged halls of royalty. The audience would cheer or jeer, toss roses or lapidate them with garbage. Still, no matter where they were, at the end of the day he could be with his fellows, his troupe, his adopted family. Never married, he suspected he had several children but wasn’t quite sure in which countries he’d left them. Women would show up on the tours and hold up babies that looked familiar enough, but who knew for sure? He’d made his way in the world and was sure that any seed of his loins could do the same.
But tonight he was little more than furniture, waiting as Edelle flailed about the stage; wailing, whimpering and whining through her monologue. She drank up the attention like a starving piglet gnawing on her mother’s bloodied teat, and although she was easy on the eyes her shrill squeaking and squalling pinged painfully off the sanctified walls of the Whitefriars Court Theatre. Previously, great works of the Greeks, Romans and even Shakespeare’s latest plays rang out to fill the timbers with beautiful music. But this retch, this pining quibble, sprayed feckless farts from her mouth as a monkey would its festering ass.
Finster wondered if his cue would ever come. He was waiting, as he had for two hundred and ninety-nine previous nights, because he survived for too long. As a young man he reveled in the adventure, the harum-scarum life of scrumwrappling from town to town, with barely enough coin to make it to the next show but somehow the troupe cobbled together an audience, staying long enough to collect some ducats, bed some maids and be on to the next village. It was a grand undertaking and he loved the life: learning his craft, reciting the most beautiful words ever put to parchment and sometimes enlightening but always entertaining the wretched dregs that drank and ate and hollered and roared along with the show – a rare respite from their day to day squalor. He could play the fool, the ghost, the king, the executioner, the pirate, the god, the princess or the fairy because the play was indeed the thing and he had happily given himself to it decade after decade, so long as the seasons were in his favor.
Summer was the keenest time for the troupe, traveling easily over the hard-packed roads that skirted Europe’s great dark forests. Nights were warm, and highwaymen generally let them pass unmolested, knowing they would have little but jewels made of paste, tin crowns and diamonds of polished quartz. Spring was muddy but the fingerlings of green bursting through the softening ground lifted everyone’s spirit. Fall brought a bounty of food and a slight chill to the ether — a reminder of winter mingling with the sweet smoke of a welcoming fire. Winter meant a dark retreat, the troupe staying with a patron if fate was kind but more often scattering to suffer thin comfort in a basement, attic, under a porch or in the rank corner of some stable and very glad to have it. Winter’s cruel caress would usually dispatch a few members, with new apprentices recruited from the streets just as Finster had been so many years before.
But now, he waited, filled with longing for the play to end so he could limp backstage on his cursed gout-ridden foot, now more hoof than flesh and burning like iron beneath a bellows. He’d been to the healer, a witch in the woods promising relief for a high price but offering only a stinking salve of roots and twigs. The smell repelled everyone from his proximity — everyone except Edelle who acted as if there was no malodorous funk clouding Finster’s being.
Waiting to speak, the infernal limelight blinded and burned Finster simultaneously; the malevolent invention heated its quicklime candle until the ferocious glow nearly shown through a man charring his shadow to ash. He sat near the flickering flame; sweat dripping from his nose, and the humours draining from his head. Finster had taken to medicinal wine throughout the day to ease the misery of his cloven foot, but had forgotten to eat, sleeping through the cast’s pre-performance supper. His lids grew heavy, and sweat veiled his brow as he swayed like a loosely moored skiff.
Despite the wretchedness of his state, Finster knew he was lucky; lucky to have secured such a reliable and well-paid engagement, and to have so little to perform. For Edelle was the Prince’s mistress, and because she loved the theatre so did he. The Whitefriars Theatre became an appendage of the court, earning a Royal Warrant, thus securing its welfare and longevity.
During the day, the troupe practiced their craft, unmolested by the scramble for food and shelter. They wrote, rehearsed and refined their plays all within the gilded coop of royal patronage. The players were the opening act for the precociously awful Edelle who with her skillful lips and loins, quickly rose through the court, finding her winsome way at last to the prince.
Famed as much for her elevating talents as for thumping and flogging her way around the stage each night in a play not so much written but shat out by her microcephalied brother. A dullard, a fool, a boor, an obscenity that escaped his mother’s womb intact despite her deepest wish to hook and wire him into oblivion. Yet in his lurching composition Edelle’s brother, at his sister’s urging, wrote a part for an old man.
With a few lines and spending nearly the entire play onstage as the sage chorus to Edelle’s spastic soul searching, Finster gave the play gravitas, being well known for his stagecraft in voice, costume and character. The prince himself had recruited Finster, and such a request had only one answer. Finster later learned that Edelle had pressed the Prince to hire him, so that she could perform in the presence of a master. She was a fan, and was ceaselessly kind to Finster, often helping him as he hobbled onto and off of the stage. She wanted to improve her craft, begging Finster for honest critiques which he could never give despite them vibrating like nettles on the tip of his tongue. Instead he offered treacle-sweet critiques, dulled to the degree that they had no point at all. He tried to hate her, and mocked her when gossiping with other actors, but in the end decided she was just a spiteless fool.
Since the court wanted the pleasure of the prince, and the prince was pleasured by Edelle, the play sold out every night and met with effusive applause. The actors would join hands, bow, and be showered with flowers and cheers of “Bravo!” Edelle always stood with Finster, warmly holding his hand as he struggled to steady himself.
At last his final cue rang out, and he replied, “Is it unwise to promise a heart to the heartless? A song to the deaf? Or a hug to the armless?” Finster shuddered a bit every time he said the horrible words aloud, but they did mean the dropping of the curtain. Tonight, he feared he was going to collapse into the orchestra pit, half hoping the fall would snap his neck. His training prevented this, since he could not allow even this horrible production to be interrupted no matter the reason.
Backstage, Edelle was visited by courtiers, showering her with prickly praise. Finster and the other actors were visited by comrades, and busily made plans for dinners and drinks. Finster, the elder statesman, traded quips but could no longer keep up with the younger members post-play pursuits. He felt shame when he cracked wise about Edelle’s performance; his jokes about the pig squeal timbre of her voice and her graceless ambulation about the stage. They enjoyed a laugh at her expense, but in fact Finster owed her everything. For without her patronage he would be left to hobble the streets, lucky to find work and more likely to wind up dead in a stairwell.
Finster answered a knock on his dressing room door with, “Who the hell is it?”
Edelle’s soft voice replied, “It’s Edelle Mr. Drummand.”
“Come in my dear, the door is open, but forgive me for not rising. My foot is especially cross tonight,” he said, bowing his head slightly as she entered.
“That’s what I’ve come to talk about, sir. I’ve spoken to His Majesty about your condition and he’s agreed to have his surgeon help you.”
Finster blushed, “My dear, you shouldn’t bother yourself with such matters. I’m old and near death, there is barely a husk left to save.”
“Please do not speak that way Mr. Drummand. I worry so about your health, and your love for the bottle. But I know that with the proper care you could be back in the pink in no time.”
“Miss Priceworthy, your kindness knows no bounds, but what ails me is a rotten soul that has finally worked its way to the surface, seeking final release.”
“I cannot believe that a man who can bring so much joy through his art can have anything but a worthy soul. You’ve fallen into bad habits and bad luck, that’s all. The surgeon can cure your foot and your need for drink, I’m sure of it. Please let me help.”
Finster felt tears welling in his eyes, covering his face with a kerchief and blowing his nose to camouflage being overcome. “My child, I cannot accept this gift from you because … because I have been most unkind.”
Edelle smiled, “I know you to be cantankerous as a sunburnt sow sir, but you’ve never been unkind to me. You are my mentor, and my master in the arts, I do not expect you to be my compatriot; the best teachers never are.”
Finster paused, afraid to tell Edelle what he’d be saying behind her back. With her out of sight and surrounded by his fellows, he never flinched from even the cruelest of slights. But now, with her kindness washing over him, he could not remember a single insult.
“My dear Edelle, I have not been a friend to you. I have been the opposite, and singularly unkind as well. I am ashamed, and I know this will mean our parting but you are not deserving of an ungrateful cur like me.”
Edelle considered Finster for a while, then started to laugh, “Mr. Drummand. My dear Mr. Drummand. One does not survive in the Prince’s court by being a fool, nor by having a thin hide. I know what you’ve said about me to your fellows, and in fact have been amused by some of your more poetic mocking. I understand your position with these fellows with whom you’ve shared years of trial and travail. You must keep face with them or surrender who you are. I know the court lies to me about my talents, I understand they would rather pierce me with thorns than shower me in roses. This is the way of things. Despite my ‘lurching manner and pig squeal voice,’ I do love the theatre, sir. My time on stage has secured this house, and though I do not have the gifts you have been given I am not without my own. Guile being one. By suffering the sticky-sweet arrows of the aristocracy over the past year, your acting troupe has had the safety to develop into a finely tuned team of thespians with numerous excellent plays to offer. I feel that I will soon retire from the stage, and merely be a sponsor of the arts rather than a participant. Audiences will be thrilled my brother and I have retired, and then you and yours will warmly welcomed back into the limelight.”
Finster began to cry and made no effort to cover it.
“My dear Miss Edelle, I am undone. I am a miserable stinking worm and you an angel spun from the heavens themselves.”
Edelle put her hand on Finster’s shoulder, “You sir are no devil, and I no angel. As with the whole of humanity we struggle to exist somewhere in between. That is why this theatre matters, why your gift matters and why I will do whatever I can to see that both continue. Now, will you agree to see the surgeon?”
“I will.”
“And to have wine only with your supper?”
“That as well.”
“I am so glad to hear it.”
The play continued for two more months, until Edelle announced that her work on the stage was too exhausting and would shift from performer to patron. Finster became the first artistic director of the Whitefriars and cured his gout by swearing off sweetbreads, shellfish and alcohol. Edelle’s dimwitted brother never penned another work, but found a happy role backstage working the ropes and levers that raised and lowered the curtain.