He looked down at Doll’s remarkable cleavage, and shook his aching head.
‘I think not, Doll. It will do me no good. This is a waste of time.’
He pushed the crackling papyruses on the table to one side. Though the sun was coming up through the dusty bow window of his rented rooms in Creechurch Lane, London, he realised Doll had only just returned home.
‘Let’s go and find a chop-house that’s open and, over breakfast, you can tell me what kept you out all night.’
Doll Pocket looked away guiltily from his gaze.
‘It was business, Joe. Honest.’
Malinferno hoped it was not Doll’s old business that she was referring to. He wouldn’t want that, even if they were stony-broke again. He had first met her in Madame de Trou’s bawdy house in Petticoat Lane. A gold sovereign had been burning a hole in his pocket, and he had a similar heat in his breeches. But having been introduced to Doll, whose blonde tresses had been covered up by a black wig, he had lost track of his carnal desires. She had been fascinated by something more alluring about Joe than his privates, and it had all been his fault. Before getting down to business, he could not resist showing off his erudition concerning Egyptology. The night had flown by as this raven-haired doxy absorbed all he knew about the subject. Doll was what one might call a rabid autodidact, not only absorbing knowledge from whom she could, but interpreting it in the process. That night, she finally pulled off her wig, shook out her natural hair, and revealed her true self. From that moment, Doll’s retirement from the business, and their friendship, was agreed. It was not long before she outstripped Malinferno in her understanding of many subjects, though she herself laughed at his description of her as a savant.
‘An idiot-savant more like,’ she once said, unfortunately mangling the French pronunciation. But he knew she was a natural talent, and indulged her. She refused to expose her erudition to anyone other than Joe, however, preferring to pass for a dumb-headed doxy in a male world that was only too eager to treat her as one.
Now she could see what was on Joe’s mind, and came clean about what she had been doing all night.
‘I was doing as you suggested a while ago, and trying to get a part in The Taming of the Shrew at Drury Lane. I met Kean himself.’
Malinferno gasped at Doll’s audacity. Though he had expressed admiration at her ability to imitate the manners of the nobility in more than one of their escapades, she had had no theatrical training. And here she was approaching the great actor Edmund Kean, currently celebrated for his interpretation of Shylock, to ask for a part in a Shakespearean comedy. Malinferno hesitated before daring to ask Doll what the master’s reply was to her enquiry. She grimaced, an unfamiliar blush appearing on her cheeks.
‘I… er… persuaded the stage doorman to let me backstage after the play finished.’
Malinferno looked at her charming figure, and could easily guess how she had achieved that. His silence urged her to continue.
‘I caught Mr Kean in his dressing room, and offered to clean the slap from his face.’ She paused. ‘That is the word we actors use for make-up, you know. Slap.’ Her blush spread down her neck at this mild exaggeration of her experience to date. ‘He allowed me to do so, and I wiped away the dark colouring of Shylock and teased the false beard from his chin. Of course I had to straddle his… thighs to achieve this, and as he was in a state of déshabillé, I found myself in some intimacy with him.’
By now the roseate blush had spread to Doll’s bosom, and Joe marvelled at the unfamiliar effect. He was also curious as to the result of her Herculean efforts.
‘And was your ploy successful?’
Doll pulled a face, and wrapped her shawl around her exposed flesh.
‘Nah. The bastard took me for that type of actress who is no better than a bawd. He groped me, and so I stuck my knee in his groin and beat a retreat.’ She sighed. ‘My days of being laced mutton are well and truly over.’
Malinferno burst out laughing, imagining the great tragedian turning an unusual shade of green and clutching his privates in agony. Perhaps the experience of exquisite pain could be drawn on when next he performed King Lear. But Doll Pocket was clearly in no mood to laugh.
‘And that’s my days as an actress over too. And before they’d even started. What am I going to do, Joe?’
Malinferno stifled his laughter and sympathised, stroking Doll’s shoulder.
‘There will be other parts, Doll.’
‘Yes, I suppose I could be a mountebank, and go bareback trick riding in Astley’s Amphitheatre.’
Picturing her in that famous circus bouncing along on the back of a horse, it was an image that Malinferno found irresistible. But he knew Doll was not of the same opinion. She so wanted to be a legitimate actress in one of the great theatres – either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But it seemed the most she could hope for was to feature in one of the unlicensed theatres that had sprung up all around London.
Disconsolate, she idly leafed through the papyrus sheets that Malinferno had been poring over so unsuccessfully. She turned her head as though trying to see them another way than how Joe had been construing them. She stared, and then twisted the paper round.
‘Which way do you look at these, Joe?’
Malinferno’s stomach was beginning to rumble at the thought of a chop for breakfast, and tried to divert Doll’s attention from the puzzle on the papyrus.
‘Upside down, if you wish. Now, what about the chop-house?’
Doll airily waved her hand, and sat down in the chair Joe had been occupying.
‘You go, Joe. I am not at all hungry.’
He sighed, knowing that, when her attention had been captured by something, Doll Pocket would not be moved by simple considerations of food and drink. He decided to let her be distracted from her disappointment about play-acting for a while. He was ravenous, if she was not. So, leaving her to gaze at the hieroglyphs, he grabbed his garrick, pulled the shabby but serviceable overcoat on, and went in search of food.
He eventually found himself trudging past the stench of Billingsgate fish market, and over the river at London Bridge. He had in his mind that he might find his old friend Augustus Bromhead at an unpretentious chop-house in Unicorn Passage just off Tooley Street, south of the Thames. Bromhead lived in a rickety tenement house in Bermondsey, and knew all the best eating houses on the south bank of the mighty river. He had introduced Malinferno to this establishment a year or two ago, but Joe had not been back since. He would not have walked so far, but was suddenly eager to conjoin good food with stimulating conversation.
On entering the low-ceilinged, smoky chop-house, he saw he was in luck. A curiously shaped fellow, resembling a tadpole because of his large, leonine head and stubby body, was perched on a high stool at the back of the premises. Augustus Bromhead was apparently breaking his fast with a steaming plate of well-cooked chops and boiled potatoes. Malinferno shimmied his way through the crowded room without disturbing the stolid transfer of food to the mouths of the numerous diners, and slid on to the bench opposite to his friend. The little man acknowledged his arrival with just a nod of his oversize head. His jaw was occupied with the mastication of his meal. When he finally swallowed, he wiped his lips with a stained napkin, and spoke.
‘Giuseppe…’ he always used Joe’s proper name, reminding him of his Italian origins, ‘… dear boy, you look as though you have been burning the midnight oils. I have not seen such baleful, red eyes since I stared into the awful face of Ben Crouch of the Borough Gang.’