Aunt Catherine laughed out loud. “It’s like a dance at the Grange run by the inmates of Bedlam!”
Ogden Frank himself was oblivious to these minor lapses of organization, for he stood proudly in front of the oaken double-doors, accoutred in the military uniform his father had worn at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. He exclaimed his welcomes so effusively that no one except his wife had any idea what he was sputtering at them. Madge Frank stood just behind him and took tickets from those few people she didn’t know and tried her best to smile on those she did. The three Frank children were acting as ushers inside, guiding patrons to their boxes or pointing others to the gallery above or the benches in the pit.
Marc boosted Aunt Catherine up the final step and into their box at the back-left of the main room. He held out a chair for her, then sat down beside her. There were two other chairs in the box, but no-one else came to join them.
“Milady Surprised,” Aunt Catherine read from the hastily printed program. “A Farce in Two Acts. I think we’d better brace ourselves.”
Marc was looking at the transformed theatre around him. Candles, which had been lit in candelabra along the walls, threw a wash of pale light over the hundred or so people who were now filling the available seats. The stage area itself was brightly lit from above by three chandeliers and from below by six Argand lamps that served as footlights. Several flats had been erected at the rear of the stage to give the illusion of a windowed interior, and the most prominent feature of the various domestic props within it was a gigantic bed-Jeremiah’s handiwork, no doubt.
“I see what you mean,” Marc said.
To the left of the stage, near the curtained door, the enterprising Franks had set up a bar, behind which was temptingly displayed a tapped keg of ale. The interval should prove lively, Marc thought, even if the play doesn’t.
“Oh, there’re your friends, I think,” Aunt Catherine said.
In a box on the wall opposite but right next to the stage itself sat Owen Jenkin and Rick Hilliard among several other officers from the garrison. Rick was leaning on the railing, the better to stare into Tessa’s eyes during the performance. Jenkin waved at Marc and smiled. In the other two boxes across from him, Marc noticed many familiar faces from among the members of the Family Compact, along with two ardent Reformers, Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks. Those in the pit and the gallery at the back looked to be a cross-section of tradesmen, small businessmen, and local farmers out on the town.
“My God, I don’t believe what I’m seeing!”
“What is it, Marc?”
“Over there, in the front row of the gallery. It’s Constable Cobb.”
“Why, so it is,” Aunt Catherine said cheerfully, and waved a hanky until she got Cobb’s attention. In turn he waved and smiled, as did the woman seated beside him.
“And he’s brought Dora. How nice.”
“You’ve met his wife?”
“Oh, yes. Horatio brought her along one day last August, for a new hat. She’s a very interesting woman.”
Constable Cobb had been a significant and courageous partner in the investigation Marc had led into the death of a privy councillor, during which the policeman had had occasion to visit the millinery shop and, thereafter, to stop in on his patrol regularly for tea and gossip. Since then, Marc had bumped into Cobb on the street from time to time, and always spent a few minutes reminiscing about their joint adventure. But the rough-edged constable’s appearance in the audience of a French farce surprised him. Was he here on some sort of official business? Nothing more could be said about the matter, however, because the players had now arrived onstage to an enthusiastic welcome from the drama-starved citizens of Toronto and York County.
Mrs. Thedford had assured them earlier that what they would see this evening would not in any way reflect the fractious goings-on of the afternoon rehearsal. And she was right. These were professionals through and through. Tessa’s French maid, in black satin and crocheted cap-and-apron, was sprightly, and her staccato dialogue and double-takes delivered with a speed and confidence that belied her youth and inexperience. Even the Yankee twang and dropped g’s had vanished. And, as Mrs. Thedford had insisted, it was Dorothea Clarkson who did have to carry the play as the paramour of the philandering husband in the piece. As such, she was plopped in and under and behind the big, adulterous bed at stage-centre, in addition to being stuffed into a trunk and made immobile behind an arras, all the while emitting a series of aborted shrieks, cries of surprise, and wails of uncorrectable regret set amongst sympathy-gaining appeals to the capricious gods of love. She gave no sign of illness or fatigue and, in fact, her energy seemed to feed on the laughter she drew in raucous waves from every corner of the theatre.
Merriwether played the ageing, and alas married, roué with stolid good humour, while Mrs. Thedford shone as the outraged wife, even though her scenes were few in Act One. Clarence Beasley played the hapless bumpkin from the country in hopeless pursuit of Mistress Thea with much body-wit and mugging of face, qualities that Marc would not have inferred from the young man’s somewhat wooden attempts at Shakespeare. Here the dreadful nasalities from south of the border were deliberately deployed to great comic effect. Finally, if Dawson Armstrong had unearthed another bottle of whiskey, it did nothing to diminish his polished performance as the innkeeper who is the ostensible friend and co-conspirator of the cheating spouse but at the same time lusts after his chum’s wife when he isn’t ogling the maid.
The first act ended with a burst of applause and approbation that was sustained for a full minute. In the midst of which it occurred to Marc that here in this simple chamber was represented a cross-section of Upper Canadian society, including the staunchest members of both the Tory and Reform parties, and they had just joined together, spontaneously, in a kind of communal laughter in which social boundaries and political divisions had been magically dissolved. It was hard to believe that at this moment treasonous rallies might actually be taking place within a mile of where they were sitting.
“You can bring me up a glass of wine if they have any,” Aunt Catherine said to Marc as he started down the ladder from their box. “I don’t fancy risking those steps again.”
Marc nodded and stepped down into the crush below. After he had handed up a glass to Aunt Catherine, Marc nudged his way through the throng and thickening pipe-smoke to where Cobb and Dora were standing at the foot of the ladder to the gallery, munching on apples they had brought with them. They had not spotted him yet, so Marc stopped for a second to have a long look at Cobb and gain some first impressions of his wife.
Cobb looked much the same as he always did, a sinewy troll of a man with a face that could have played Nym or Bardolph on the Regency’s stage without makeup, and an incongruous pot-belly that had no forewarning slope to it, top or bottom: it was as abrupt as a butte on a prairie. Tonight, though, it was partially camouflaged by the waistcoat of the suit he was wearing, one that had probably been his wedding attire, with the trousers now let out several inches and lapels that were a good foot from meeting each other. A bowler hat concealed the uprising of his soot-black hair. And while the angular features were softened by shadow, the mellow but flickering candlelight accelerated the glow of his big nose and the wart blinking nearby.
Mrs. Dora Cobb was something else again. Marc thought instantly of Mr. Spratt and his missus, for Dora was as round as she was high (which wasn’t more than four foot ten), but her obesity was modulated by the perfect neatness of her dress and person, by the tightly curled black hair, by the Indian-bead necklace placed just so, by the exact meridian of her wide leather belt, by the creaseless fit of her blouse and skirt, and by the trim shoes on surprisingly tiny feet. She so resembled a child’s bulbous top that Marc was chary of bumping against her for fear he might set her rolling out of control. Her expression peered out at the world from a penumbra of cheeks and chins that merely accentuated the cheerful kindliness of her whole demeanour, while the eyes alone signalled that here was a woman who, when challenged, would brook no nonsense and give no quarter.