“It's a totally 'rough' experience.”
“Exactly. The only thing not authentic is that we, the audience, aren't allowed to bring in overripe fruit and vegetables to throw at the actors.”
Jessica's behind already felt sore on the hard wood “terrace” seats. Taking her mind off the lack of creature comforts, Jessica noticed other buildings standing about, also with Tudor construction and thatch roofs. “What goes on there?” she asked, pointing.
“Just opened the final phase of the project, two museums, or rather one an educational center, and a three-hundred-seat small theater designed from blueprints left by Elizabethan architect Inigo Jones. Plan is to have them all operational by 2001 and have a gala millennium party alongside the 401st performance on the Globe stage at the same time.”
“What an undertaking! It's magnificent,” she conceded.
“The theater itself is fully operational now, and will support the cost of its operation. I firmly believe that, as a member of the board of trustees.”
“Ahhh, no wonder you know so much about it.”
“It's become a passion, something to give myself over to so that I am not wholly swallowed up by my job, as in the past.”
She thought momentarily of how her own work had swallowed up relationships, such as her and Jim Parry's irreconcilable problems, which prompted her to say, “Something all of us in law enforcement must… guard against.”
“Something indeed… When I allowed my job to consume me, well… for my troubles my wife gave me my walking papers.”
“Divorce. I'm sorry.”
“You see, too much time devoted to my work, not enough to the ones I love.”
“I'm so sorry for any pain you've been put through, Richard.”
“Pain, depression, you can say the whole gamut came down around me. Had to take some time off, get back my focus, regroup. The Globe project, when it came along, well, it worked as a lifesaver for me.”
Jessica settled in comfortably, excited at the same time. Then the curtains, faithful to history, were hand-pulled back to reveal the opening scene in Lear. She soon learned that Richard hadn't exaggerated in the least about the method of “special effects” here. Sounds and sights were indeed faithfully reproduced, even the firing off of a cannon like the one that burned down the original Globe.
King Lear had always held a great fascination for Jessica. Especially interesting to her was the tragic tyrant who, when he had eyes, could not see, and when blind, could see. The play, she believed, actually represented a metaphor for all mankind, the blind lives we all lead.
At the close of evening, walking from the theater, Sharpe asked if she'd like to see the Thames from Blackfriar's Bridge. She accepted, and they made the short stroll to the center of the bridge overlooking the river and nearby massive St. Paul's Cathedral by moonlight.
While there he reached out, took her hand in his, telling her, “You are an extraordinary woman, Jessica Coran. I've not met anyone like you before.”
“Funny,” she replied, squeezing the hand that he'd placed in hers. “I've been thinking the same thought about you, Richard Sharpe.”
“Perhaps we should do something about our feelings?” It came out as a question. He added a warm smile.
She dropped her gaze from his. “Perhaps. If you feel it won't jeopardize our working relationship.”
“We won't allow it to.”
“Are you sure? It often changes things.”
He kissed her under the pale lampposts of Blackfriar's Bridge. She eagerly kissed him back. It had been a long time since a man had made her feel light-headed, giddy, and wanted all at once.
“Let's go to my place,” he suggested. “I can make you breakfast there.”
“Why not enjoy the York? We'll order room service,” she countered.
“I have no other reply than… Yes, why not?” With Richard Sharpe's deep, rhythmic breathing a soothing anthem alongside her, Jessica studied his peacefully dozing countenance. Unfortunately with her evil friend insomnia also in bed with her, Jessica took only fitful breaths of air; at the same time, she brought back the images and the wonder of Sharpe's and her intermingling. They'd meshed effortlessly, naturally, intuitively in their lovemaking; the two of them in sync, in symbiosis. How truly free and extraordinary.
Unable to sleep, Jessica cautiously pulled herself up to a sitting position, not wishing to disturb Richard. She sat contemplating the feelings within her, stirrings which Richard had left rummaging about inside her. Jessica carefully brought her legs over the bed. She searched through her purse on the bedside table, and from it, she pulled forth the last letter she had received from James Perry.
Both she and James had tried to hold on to the unraveling shreds of a long-distance relationship. Trying to make love work from across oceans and continents was hard to do in any time zone, and in any historical era. Was it an impossibility in the late 1990s, she wondered, or simply an impossibility for the likes of Dr. Jessica Coran? At any rate, their long-nurtured, long-distance affair had proved impossible, no matter whose fault, hers or Jim's or theirs.
Perhaps, she simply hadn't the determination required to maintain any close relationship. “So what do I do?” she muttered to herself. “I intentionally seek out relationships divided by continents and pernicious seas. Ultimately, safer that way,” she finished with a disdainful moan. She then stared down at Richard, whose catlike serenity irked her; she so envied it. A part of her, a large part of her, wanted to simply cry her eyes out, here and now. She wanted to cry for James, cry for the death of their love, cry for the confusion she felt, cry for Richard and herself, for what they had now undertaken together, cry for the future of their obvious long-distance relationship-the one that could come of this night, if she let it. She wondered if it would simply be a great deal easier and wiser and cleaner and better if she told Richard they had no future whatever together. That he must immediately forget any thoughts along those lines. She wondered if she ought not to simply lie to him, tell him that she could never love him as she did James. “Would certainly make things simpler,” she mumbled aloud.
She wanted to bum Jim's last letter, bum it in effigy to their several “reconciliations” and get the anger out. Instead, she sat rereading it, reminding herself that her intuition, upon reading the letter the first time around, had told her the relationship was over. She'd stubbornly and foolishly ignored the information from within, denial being the predator of all reason, the predator of all who failed to heed their own inner voices.
Jessica realized now for the second time, that all the signals had been given her then, and they were vivid, huge signals, like billboards in the sky. Signs she had simply chosen to ignore; signs she unconsciously shunned, like an insistent dream that one ignored only to find it coming to full-blown life.
“And me with my handwriting expertise, learned the hard way on the job,” she muttered in a whisper. “If only I'd subjected this letter to the same analysis I would a criminal's letter.” If only I had paid attention to the handwriting, the hesitation marks that skitter between the lines, she thought now. But like a motorist on an interstate, she'd been moving too fast to read the fine print on the billboard.
She imagined that if she closely examined his last several letters, she would find signs of the impending doom that had befallen the two of them. Love makes you blind, she told herself. She told her shadow self, the one keeping her awake, something altogether different. “Love's a war, a battle for one's soul, and in the battle pieces are lost, scars won, mostly scars bearing the appearance of defensive wounds. Love's poison. Love's a bitch. Love's a killing offense.”
Richard-half asleep and in what appeared a muddled nightmare-crinkled his forehead and mumbled something about a bastard, stakes, and crosses. Jessica imagined his personal nightmare of the moment filled to overflowing with the spirits of menace in a place thickly populated by demons. A pained gasp for air made her wonder if he were dreaming of his own crucifixion death, pinned to a cross, unable to move or to fight back. Then as suddenly as the darkness had swept over his brow, the dreamer smiled a grin similar to those she'd seen on Coibby and Burton, one of contentment, peace.