The Rake's Bargain

What different paths the two girls had taken, thought Deb. It was inevitable, really, since one of them was the privileged daughter of a rich country gentleman and the other was a travelling player. Yet even so, to see her cousin at Vauxhall looking so very like her in feature and figure had shaken Deb badly.

She had wandered away into the crowds that day reminding herself that Paulette Palfreyman had no relevance whatsoever to her own life. Palfreyman had disowned his sister and her child completely, all those years ago; he hadn’t even come to his sister’s funeral. Deb had heard occasional news of Paulette; she’d married well last autumn, and was presumably content. No one was ever likely to link the two girls, were they? And did it matter if they did?

It might matter now. As she prepared to go out on the crude little stage, Deb was thinking—Mr Beaumaris may very well have met Paulette Palfreyman, since he is a friend of her father. What if he had spotted the likeness in the woods yesterday?

Mr Beaumaris would, she knew, be more than angry with his captors. In fact, he would be furious. But she’d comforted herself up till this moment with the knowledge that he would be unable to identify them.

Now, she had to think again.

The bells of the nearby church were beginning to strike midday. Picking up her two hats—the clown’s black-and-white pointed one and Viola’s jaunty green cap—she drew a deep breath, then stepped outside to a chorus of cheers and the occasional jeer. The inn yard was packed, she realised. Giving them a jaunty bow, she climbed lightly up to the makeshift wooden platform set in the inn’s courtyard, and several of the men whistled appreciatively at the way her breeches and hose displayed her legs. She grinned, gave them another extravagant bow, put on the clown’s hat and skipped lightly across the stage to begin one of the lively songs.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain...

They fell silent. They listened. After that they roared with applause, but silence descended anew as she went to put on the green cap, sat on a bale of hay placed at the corner of the stage and began Viola’s speech, recounting her sadness in finding herself stranded in a foreign country. The magic of the words took over, and her troubles were—for the moment—forgotten.

Deb was as amazed as ever to see how these country folk—rough and uneducated, most of them—completely melted on hearing Viola’s lovelorn words. After dextrously entwining the two parts and feasting her audience with some of Shakespeare’s loveliest verse, she rounded her performance with the clown’s last song.

A great while ago, the world began,

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

But that’s all one, our play is done,

And we’ll strive to please you every day.

They roared their approval. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she called above the din. ‘Thank you, so much!’ She bowed again and again as they applauded, blowing them kisses. One day, she vowed, I’ll have a theatre of my own in London. I will. It didn’t have to be big, or in an expensive part of the city. She wouldn’t be able to charge a fortune and seat hundreds, as the three big London theatres did—Drury Lane and Covent Garden and the Haymarket. But she would find the Lambeth Players a permanent home; one that her stepfather, Gerald O’Hara, would have been truly proud of.

Almost skipping back to the stable, she found Ned the pony poking his head over the stall and she fed him a handful of hay. ‘It went well, Ned,’ she whispered. ‘Really well.’ Taking off her jester’s hat, she smiled with reflective pleasure—oh, it was the best of lives, to be an actor! Then she froze.

Because she’d just realised that she and Ned weren’t the only ones in here.

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