If Malinferno had witnessed on the following day the meeting at the Royal Coburg of Doll and Morton Stanley, he would have been really worried. The actor bore a striking resemblance to Baron Pergami, being around thirty, over six foot tall, and with a splendid physique and black curly hair, which extended down into luxuriant muttonchop whiskers. Doll, still new to the ways of theatrical folk, almost swooned away when Stanley gave her an exaggerated bow, and lifted her hand to his full red lips. Her normal perceptiveness was swamped by his manner, or she would have noticed his obvious vanity. He twirled his moustachios, and Doll simpered like one of the young girls she had seen auditioning for the role she was now to perform. Then a deep and resonant voice came from the depths of the auditorium.
‘Ah, I see you have won over another beautiful lady, Stan.’
The young actor’s face contorted into a mask of sheer hatred at the sound. He turned away from Doll to peer into the darkness of the rows of seats, and spoke in a baritone voice.
‘I wondered who Mossop would get to play the part of fat King George. I might have known it would be you, Percy.’
Doll watched as a rotund, and cheery-faced man made his way down the central aisle of the ornately decorated auditorium. The man Morton called Percy did indeed resemble the King, or at least the popular caricatures of George, being portly and red-faced. He lumbered up the steps leading on to the stage, giving Doll a bow and a buss on the back of her hand. He winked conspiratorially at her.
‘Perceval Tristram at your service, madam. But beware, beautiful lady, Stan will break your heart, take it from me.’
Stanley’s face darkened, and he strode off into the wings, calling for Will Mossop.
Malinferno, meanwhile, had called on Augustus Bromhead in his rickety tenement in Bermondsey. The tall, narrow building, squashed between its newer neighbours was a structure from an older age. In fact, its foundations were built on the footings of an even older building. Bromhead’s cellar revealed part of the arched ceiling of the crypt of Bermondsey Abbey. The antiquarian revelled in the thought that his very residence was piled up on the foundations of something so old. It matched his own life, which was built on the quest for the keys to ancient Britain. It was no accident that his study lay at the very apex of the old house, for he saw himself as at the peak of antiquarian studies. He worked surrounded by a very blizzard of old manuscripts and printed books, perched on a high stool to bring him to the height of his sloped work desk, a former accounting bench. Malinferno sat in a more comfortable armchair by the high gabled window that let the sallow light of fog-bound London into the attic room. He had in his lap the printed version of The Play of Adam, purchased from Dole’s Printers. In front of Bromhead the precious original manuscript itself lay open. He had stopped at a point where his fingers had felt a rough spot on the reverse of a page. Peering closer he thought he could see the remains of red sealing wax. The wax had all but gone, leaving only a roughened red patch, but he could also see some faded writing. He turned back the page and read what was written on the correct side. Puzzled, he ran his finger down the page again, before calling out to Malinferno.
‘Read the ending of “Cain and Abel” to me.’
Malinferno turned the stiff pages of his printed book until he came to the relevant passage.
‘It’s Cain’s final speech after the angel hands down God’s curse on him. It ends,
“The devil take both Him and thee!
Foul may you fall!
Here is a crooked company;
Therefore, God’s curse upon you all!”’
Bromhead tapped his original gleefully. ‘I knew there was something different. There are two more lines attributed to the angel at the end here in the manuscript.’
‘What do they say?’
Bromhead intoned the extra lines in his most solemn voice, though it cracked a little and somewhat spoiled the effect.
‘“Beware the sins of envy and vainglory,
Else foul murder ends your story.”’
Malinferno rose from his chair and leaned to look over his friend’s shoulder.
‘Let me see. Oh, yes. And yet they look like an addition done in a different hand. Could they have been added at a much later date?’
Bromhead frowned, peering closely at the intruders on the neat page of handwritten text.
‘I don’t think so. The script is still very old, and I would swear that it has been done by the same hand. The only difference is that the two lines are in a quickly written bastard script, whereas the rest is a more formal book hand. The whole of the rest of the book was carefully inscribed in a way suggesting the author wished his work to last down the ages. These words were stuck at the bottom of the page, below the lines drawn for the proper text. As though they were an afterthought. And a warning.’
Malinferno laughed. ‘A warning? Have you been reading Mary Shelley?’
Bromhead gave him a scandalised look for suggesting he of all people would be reading such modern Gothic rubbish as Malinferno referred to. He shrugged.
‘I suppose it’s nothing really.’
‘Of course it’s not. The writer of the play was a monk, yes? He probably had second thoughts about finishing Cain and Abel on a curse, and made a late addition. A salutary lesson to avoid… what does he say?… “envy and vainglory”.’
Bromhead nodded at Malinferno’s wise words. But a nagging doubt remained in his mind. If he had known what was going on at the first rehearsal of The Play of Adam at the Royal Coburg, he might have been more worried.
‘I’ll kill you, Jed Lawless, you incompetent nincompoop.’
Morton Stanley had been in a bad mood since realising he would have to share the stage with Perceval Tristram. Doll noted that, when he came back from talking to Will Mossop, his temper had been unalloyed. The first run-through of “Adam and Eve”, with Tristram as a rather corpulent serpent, had gone badly. It had terminated when a canvas backcloth, painted with a scene more reminiscent of a prim English woodland than the Garden of Eden, came tumbling down into a crumpled heap close on the heels of Stanley. He had leaped away just as the wooden beam at the top of the backcloth crashed to the ground. With years of dust rising in clouds, and a shocked silence hanging in the air, the tall actor had laid into the chief stagehand. It must have been Lawless’s grip on the cloth that had failed.
Lawless himself, a wizened but wiry old fellow with a club foot, had emerged from the gloom of the wings, ashen-faced, but determined not to be railed at by a mere actor. He cast a glance into the auditorium where Mossop sat giving his instructions.
‘He can’t talk like that to me, Mr Mossop. It was a genuine accident. The rope gave way.’
Will Mossop gave a deep sigh, and waved a hand in his stagehand’s direction.
‘Just tidy up the mess, Jed. Anyway, haven’t we got anything better for the Garden of Eden. I’m sure that backdrop was last used as Birnam Woods in the Scottish play.’
Lawless grinned toothlessly at the theatre manager. ‘It’s true, what you say. We could always use the backdrop of Jack and the Giant.’
He ambled offstage and, as he passed Doll, shot her a comment out of the side of his mouth: ‘He won’t like that. It’s got a ruddy great beanstalk in the middle of it.’
Mossop called the cast to order as the offending backcloth was hauled back up into place. The collapse had creased the painting badly, and Birnam Woods was now mottled with gashes of bare canvas and flaking paint. The effect was most surreal.
Mossop clapped his hands to gain everyone’s attention.