“Where does that door go?” Rick asked, glancing to his left.
“Oh, that takes you into Mr. Frank’s quarters,” Tessa burbled, reaching down for Rick’s hand. “The Franks’ve got the most beautiful furniture you’ve ever seen. It’s just like a doll’s house!”
They crossed the stage-the chandelier was now extinguished-and, through the wings on the right, down into another unlit space. There was a door to their left and a set of steep stairs straight ahead. The door appeared to be the only link between theatre and tavern. Tessa eased it open. They could see the bar just ahead and beyond it a room full of boisterous patrons, not of the drama but the bottle. Tessa eased it closed again.
“Show us your rooms,” Rick suggested slyly.
“Oh, wait till you see them! We had nothin’ like this in Buffalo!” Tessa testified, and skipped up the stairs with Rick on her heels. The party paused on a landing, and then continued up again to the second floor directly above the theatre.
“Is this the only way in here?” Marc asked anxiously. The upper storey of Frank’s addition appeared to be self-contained and separate from the original building.
“That’s right,” Tessa said. “Unless you want to go through that window at the far end of this hall and jump off the balcony onto the street.”
“I could call for you like Romeo from underneath the balcony out there,” Rick teased.
“What if there’s a fire?” Marc asked.
“My, would you look at this!” Rick cried, ignoring Marc’s question. He pointed through the partly opened door to the first room on their right.
Tessa blushed, giving the effect of a white carnation magically transformed into a red one. “That’s our bathroom. You ain’t supposed to peek in there!”
But peek they must.
An elephantine copper tub squatted ostentatiously in the centre of the room, around which, on clothes-horses, were arrayed a dozen bath towels of varying pastel tints. In a far corner a Chinese folding-screen offered privacy to the diffident bather. On top of a pot-bellied stove, spitting and aglow, sat a kettle big enough to swim in.
“The Franks have a maid who readies the bath whenever we wish,” Tessa said.
“Looks like that tub could hold more than one person,” Rick said, and was rewarded with another full-petalled blush.
A guttural cry directly across the hall from the bathroom interrupted this bit of by-play, as if someone had muttered a curse while stumbling over a coal-scuttle or bag of nails.
“What on earth was that?” Jenkin asked.
“Oh, that’s just Jeremiah’s babble-talk,” Tessa said. “Don’t pay him no mind.”
At this, the three men turned to the open doorway of a storeroom, where a huge black man was staring at them with white-eyed, menacing curiosity.
Tessa made what appeared at first to be several flirtatious gestures with her hands and fingers across the top of her bosom. Jeremiah, if that’s who he was, relaxed immediately, and greeted the newcomers with a gleaming smile that consumed most of his large, round face and bald head.
“He doesn’t speak English?” Rick wondered.
Tessa laughed, a bubbling little-girl laugh. “He don’t speak at all.”
“He’s mute, then?” Jenkin said.
“Aaargh,” Jeremiah said forcefully, with a painful contortion of both lips.
“He’s deaf and dumb,” Tessa said matter-of-factly. “But he can read and write and read lips a little-can’t ya, Jeremiah?” Here she flashed him a sign, and he nodded vigorously.
“He does the haulin’ and settin’ up of the flats. Annie-Mrs. Thedford-picked him up off the street and gave him a place to sleep. I told her he was probably a runaway slave but she don’t bother listenin’ to anyone, especially when it comes to pickin’ up strays.”
Like you, Marc thought, and raised his opinion of the imperial Mrs. Thedford another notch.
“What’s that?” Jenkin asked, indicating a slate that hung by a rope from the man’s neck.
Jeremiah smiled, and Marc could discern the intelligence in that face, whose age might have been twenty-five or forty. He realized that the overly demonstrative facial gestures and hand movements were an attempt to communicate almost physically, but might easily lead people to assume he was a simpleton. Marc thought of Beth’s brother Aaron and winced inwardly.
Jeremiah drew a piece of chalk from a big pocket in his smock and wrote something on the slate: “My name is Jeremiah Jefferson.” Then he held the slate out to Major Jenkin, who erased what was there with the sleeve of his tunic, and wrote: “I am Owen Jenkin.” and accompanied her command with several intimidating hand-signs. “You got props to get ready for the farce tonight.”
Jeremiah did not seem to take offense at this rude outburst. He merely bowed his head and backed into the storeroom, but what lay behind the mask of his eyes and his practised public demeanour could only be guessed at. In the room behind him, they saw a straw pallet surrounded by half a dozen steamer-trunks.
“You brought all this with you?” Rick said with enough interest to have Tessa pause and lean against his nearest shoulder.
“Those are trunks with the props and costumes we’re gonna need in Detroit next week but not here. There’s one or two more downstairs somewheres that Mr. Merriwether’s plannin’ to send back to New York-stuff we used in Buffalo but don’t need no more.”
“But how on earth do you haul all of this stuff?” Jenkin asked, his quartermaster’s curiosity piqued. “Not over our roads?”
Tessa gave him an indulgent smile, glanced at Rick, and said, “Our stuff comes down the Erie Canal on a barge and then up from Buffalo by boat on the Welland Canal. That’s what we got Jeremiah for-to ride with it. And, of course, to protect us from dangerous strangers.” She batted her near-invisible lashes at Rick.
“But he’s deaf,” Rick said with real concern.
“He sleeps right there at the top of them stairs with the door open all night. The teensiest vibration will wake him up straightaway.”
Jeremiah was busy opening one of the trunks as they turned to move farther along the carpeted hallway.
“We each got a trunk in our rooms. We’re responsible for our own costumes once they get here, though we do help each other dress.” She checked out Rick’s response to this double entendre, and was not disappointed.
“Who does the repair work?” Jenkin asked, ever interested in the care and deployment of uniforms. He stumbled for a second over a decorative spittoon near one of the doors, righted himself, and continued: “You must have a lot of it with all the costume changes.”
“Thea does the little bits of stitchin’ an’ patchin’. She’s real handy with a needle. But if we’re stayin’ put for a week or so, like here, Mr. Merriwether finds us a local seamstress.” They were moving down the hall now, where doors on either side indicated the sleeping chambers of the cast. Tessa revelled in her role as tour-guide, with Rick at her elbow endeavouring to bump against her at every opportunity. “This here’s Clarence’s room and that one’s Mr. Armstrong’s,” she said, pointing to the next two rooms on the right, and then putting a forefinger against her pretty lips. “They like to have a snooze after the afternoon rehearsal.”