The Empire of Night

14

I made it all the way into the Great Hall without seeing anyone. I wouldn’t chance crossing the courtyard. I needed to give the appearance that I’d been on the grounds throughout Isabel Cobb’s concert. I would trust that Sir Albert had delegated any suspicions to Martin and the boys and was keeping his own attention on his actress and his acting.

I crossed to the library, which remained dark. I slipped in and went to the casement and opened it gently. I looked out. This eastern lawn seemed empty. Jeremy had somehow kept himself hidden here. But he’d had inside information.

I climbed out and pulled the window to.

I strolled now. Casually. I went to the stone wall at the cliff’s edge. I followed it north, and the only Gray Suits that gradually became visible were far away, guarding the north entryways to the house. A distant passerby was nothing they would automatically care about.

I followed the curve of the wall past the service wing, past the high-tea tent, and walked toward the music.

The marquee was lit inside by electrical light, the seats packed and the place ringed by standees. Mother had begun her encores. The orchestra was playing a song she could overact to her hammy heart’s content. “Some of These Days.” It was ridiculous, accompanied by strings and a salon-tempoed piano. Her acting talent was being challenged, no doubt, so as to hide her murderous feelings toward her accompanists.

I could see now, above the heads, the back of the pianist and his upright in front of him. Not Mother, who would be at the center of the stage.

But I began to hear her voice.

Not the words quite yet but her voice, floating out of the tent on a cloying cloud of strings and trying to keep its honky-tonk edge.

The torches were blazing still.

The standees were a welcome sight. The crowd was large and disorganized at the edges. Stockman surely was in the middle of all that. From his limited vantage point he might be willing to believe I’d been around all this time.

My mother’s voice clarified now, as she moved into the chorus. She sang, “Some of these days, you’ll miss me, honey.”

I hesitated in the dark, just outside the torchlight.

“Some of these days, you’ll feel so lonely.”

I looked along the tent line in both directions. No Gray Suits.

“You’re gonna miss my huggin’. You’re gonna miss my kissin’.”

I moved past the torches now and approached the backs of the standees who were even with the stage.

“You’re gonna miss me, honey, when I’m far away.”

I peeked between the heads and there, in a front row center folding chair, sat Stockman, his face lifted to Mama.

I didn’t even have to shift around to see her. I knew she was singing straight to him.

I backed off, beyond the torches, and I waited for the show to come to a close, not really listening to the music, my mother’s voice familiar in the way that a twenty-year-old memory that hadn’t come up for about nineteen years would be familiar. Jeremy came and went in my head. He was a pro. He was doing what he knew best to do in the way he wanted to do it. I didn’t have to think for him, didn’t have to save him. Stockman wanted to come into my head, wanted to rehearse my imminent encounter with him, but if I started scripting myself for Stockman, I’d end up sounding scripted, sounding like a liar. I needed to improvise. As if with Mama and me on a train. I stood and waited and now the crowd was applauding and some of the standees were starting to peel off.

I slipped forward, took a standing place at the edge of the tent but a few rows behind Stockman.

Mother was bowing.

I thought: If they keep applauding, she’ll keep singing.

But Stockman stood up as he clapped. She saw him. She recognized her cue to ring down the curtain. I saw her hands flip down a little. She’d been on the verge of raising them to stop the applause and cue the orchestra and keep on going. But she knew this was Sir Albert’s show.

A Blue Serge had appeared at Stockman’s side and handed over a bundle of red roses. Stockman headed for the steps up to the platform.

Isabel Cobb rolled her head to project the rolling of her eyes over the applause and she flared her hands, aw-shucksing to beat the band.

Others in the audience were rising too, especially the swells in attendance, seasoned theatergoers accustomed to giving a standing ovation to a famous actress. A small handful of the other folks were starting to slip away, just on the fringes. An outer-edge chair opened up in front of me, still to the rear of where Stockman had been sitting. I stepped forward and slipped in before the chair, as if I’d been there all along.

I applauded.

Stockman presented the roses and the applause surged and Isabel Cobb did her flourishing bow to the crowd, the one with a touch of the forehead and then a rolling hand salute descending as she bent deep.

All this good feeling went on for a while. Then at last the applause waned and Stockman stepped forward, the expert emcee, and just as the clapping stopped he announced in a throbbing tenor projected effortlessly as far as the very back row, “Thank you again, one and all, for coming tonight. Before we part, I ask everyone to rise to your feet so that we might honor our king and our country.”

Stockman motioned to the orchestra — this had clearly been arranged beforehand — and they began to play “God Save the King.”

As everyone rose, Stockman strode to the front edge of the stage and began to sing loudly, guiding the lyrics to the slightly different, earliest version of the song, from 1745, having his ironic little joke on his constituents, sounding as if he were a rabid British patriot, as if he were restoring the original words to personally address King George V, as if he were singing to this present monarch leading the country in its war with Germany while in fact he was singing to George II, born in Hanover, the second German king of England.

“God save great George our king,” he sang and the crowd joined him as one vast voice.

This had not, however, been arranged beforehand with Mother.

“Long live our noble king.”

She gave Stockman one small, unveiled glance: You bastard, whose spotlight do you think you’re stealing?

“God save the king.”

The crowd was joining in boisterously now, singing in defiance of the Huns and their gas bags.

“Send him victorious.”

The Huns’ secret gas bag smiled as he bellowed, even as his voice was absorbed into the crowd’s.

“Happy and glorious.”

Isabel Cobb was back in character, singing along, smiling all around.

“Long to reign over us.”

The orchestra was slowing the tempo. This was the big climax.

The voices filled and stretched at the tent like hydrogen in an airship: “God save the king.”

The music stopped, the voices stopped, the place light-switched into silence, and then, one beat later, flared into cheers.

Stockman lifted both his hands high above his head as if the adulation was all for him and then bloomed them outward like a chorus girl as he took a deep bow.

Perhaps no one else could read her as I could. Certainly no one was particularly aware of her at that moment. But Mama gave this guy a look that laid bare her true, undramatized desire: to put her foot in the middle of Sir Albert Stockman’s backside and launch him off the platform and into about the fourth row.