The First Murder

Act Four

London, July 1821

Joe Malinferno peered at the lozenge-shaped figure again. The images wobbled in the flickering, yellow light of the single candle set on the surface that doubled as his desk and dining table. His eyes swam and his head ached. What did it mean, this little procession of pictures? He could make out the seated lion, the feather, and the two birds. Even the stylised palm of a hand was discernible. But what were all the other shapes for? And what did they all signify? He wrung out the wet cloth that had been soaking in a bowl of water at his elbow, and applied the cold poultice to his forehead. It eased the fevered ache, but did not bring enlightenment. A warm hand touched his hunched shoulder, and he looked up. It was Doll Pocket, a shawl wrapped around her bare shoulders and partly covering her high-bodiced muslin dress.

‘Time for bed, Joe. You’ll never figure it out, the state you’re in.’

He patted her hand, and sighed deeply. ‘I’ll never figure it out anyway.’

Malinferno had set himself up as an Egyptological expert a number of years ago in the wake of the fashionable fervour for all things to do with that far-off land. Of course, it had been England’s old enemy Napoleon Bonaparte who had started the craze after his expedition to Egypt in 1798. But that mattered not to London society, and soon there was a fashion amongst the wealthy for owning obelisks and statues plundered from the ancient past. Then more recently there grew a vogue for ‘unrolling’ mummies. At aristocratic soirées, Egyptian mummies that had lain untouched by grave-robbers for thousands of years were unceremoniously unravelling from their bindings. Their innermost secrets were exposed to the curious but ignorant stares of English lord and ladies in the name of entertainment. Malinferno had cashed in on the trend by selling his services as an expert ‘unroller’ to the élite. His decision to do so had not been entirely motivated by greed, though he did appropriate for himself some of the gems and scarabs hidden in the bandages wrapped round the mummies. He justified his actions by telling himself that someone less sensitive to the antiquarian value of the unrolling would destroy valuable finds on the altar of gross curiosity. He had recently found, in the process of unrolling three mummies, several small papyrus texts with Egyptian hieroglyphs on them, and salvaged them in the interests of scholarship. These curious symbols were inscribed on papyrus, carved on upright stones, and on walls and tombs all over Egypt. Malinferno, along with many other scholars and savants of the day, was fascinated by their mystery. It had become his fervent wish to be the first to unlock the mystery of these images. But two years of fevered thinking had brought him exactly nowhere.

Doll unwound the cold compress from his head, and stroked his damp and chilly brow.

‘Don’t despair, Joe. You’ll get there.’ She squatted before his hunched figure. ‘Shall we go to Montagu House again, and see the stone?’

Malinferno knew that Doll was referring to the famous stone classified as EA24 – Egyptian Antiquity 24 – that resided in the British Museum. Currently located in Montagu House, the museum had possession of the remarkable stone stolen from the French twenty years earlier. It was otherwise known as the Rosetta Stone. There was a text written in three languages on its broken surface, one of them being Greek, one an unknown language, and one being the mysterious hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. Over the years, many scholars had tried to decipher the pictograms found on Egyptian monuments and papyruses, and the Rosetta Stone was seen as the key. The physician and mathematician Thomas Young was the latest scholar in England to try his luck, but even he was struggling. Now Malinferno was beginning to wonder why he had had the temerity to imagine he could do it.

He looked down at Doll’s remarkable cleavage, and shook his aching head.

‘I think not, Doll. It will do me no good. This is a waste of time.’

He pushed the crackling papyruses on the table to one side. Though the sun was coming up through the dusty bow window of his rented rooms in Creechurch Lane, London, he realised Doll had only just returned home.

‘Let’s go and find a chop-house that’s open and, over breakfast, you can tell me what kept you out all night.’

Doll Pocket looked away guiltily from his gaze.

‘It was business, Joe. Honest.’

Malinferno hoped it was not Doll’s old business that she was referring to. He wouldn’t want that, even if they were stony-broke again. He had first met her in Madame de Trou’s bawdy house in Petticoat Lane. A gold sovereign had been burning a hole in his pocket, and he had a similar heat in his breeches. But having been introduced to Doll, whose blonde tresses had been covered up by a black wig, he had lost track of his carnal desires. She had been fascinated by something more alluring about Joe than his privates, and it had all been his fault. Before getting down to business, he could not resist showing off his erudition concerning Egyptology. The night had flown by as this raven-haired doxy absorbed all he knew about the subject. Doll was what one might call a rabid autodidact, not only absorbing knowledge from whom she could, but interpreting it in the process. That night, she finally pulled off her wig, shook out her natural hair, and revealed her true self. From that moment, Doll’s retirement from the business, and their friendship, was agreed. It was not long before she outstripped Malinferno in her understanding of many subjects, though she herself laughed at his description of her as a savant.

‘An idiot-savant more like,’ she once said, unfortunately mangling the French pronunciation. But he knew she was a natural talent, and indulged her. She refused to expose her erudition to anyone other than Joe, however, preferring to pass for a dumb-headed doxy in a male world that was only too eager to treat her as one.

Now she could see what was on Joe’s mind, and came clean about what she had been doing all night.

‘I was doing as you suggested a while ago, and trying to get a part in The Taming of the Shrew at Drury Lane. I met Kean himself.’

Malinferno gasped at Doll’s audacity. Though he had expressed admiration at her ability to imitate the manners of the nobility in more than one of their escapades, she had had no theatrical training. And here she was approaching the great actor Edmund Kean, currently celebrated for his interpretation of Shylock, to ask for a part in a Shakespearean comedy. Malinferno hesitated before daring to ask Doll what the master’s reply was to her enquiry. She grimaced, an unfamiliar blush appearing on her cheeks.

‘I… er… persuaded the stage doorman to let me backstage after the play finished.’

Malinferno looked at her charming figure, and could easily guess how she had achieved that. His silence urged her to continue.

‘I caught Mr Kean in his dressing room, and offered to clean the slap from his face.’ She paused. ‘That is the word we actors use for make-up, you know. Slap.’ Her blush spread down her neck at this mild exaggeration of her experience to date. ‘He allowed me to do so, and I wiped away the dark colouring of Shylock and teased the false beard from his chin. Of course I had to straddle his… thighs to achieve this, and as he was in a state of déshabillé, I found myself in some intimacy with him.’

By now the roseate blush had spread to Doll’s bosom, and Joe marvelled at the unfamiliar effect. He was also curious as to the result of her Herculean efforts.

‘And was your ploy successful?’

Doll pulled a face, and wrapped her shawl around her exposed flesh.

‘Nah. The bastard took me for that type of actress who is no better than a bawd. He groped me, and so I stuck my knee in his groin and beat a retreat.’ She sighed. ‘My days of being laced mutton are well and truly over.’

Malinferno burst out laughing, imagining the great tragedian turning an unusual shade of green and clutching his privates in agony. Perhaps the experience of exquisite pain could be drawn on when next he performed King Lear. But Doll Pocket was clearly in no mood to laugh.

‘And that’s my days as an actress over too. And before they’d even started. What am I going to do, Joe?’

Malinferno stifled his laughter and sympathised, stroking Doll’s shoulder.

‘There will be other parts, Doll.’

‘Yes, I suppose I could be a mountebank, and go bareback trick riding in Astley’s Amphitheatre.’

Picturing her in that famous circus bouncing along on the back of a horse, it was an image that Malinferno found irresistible. But he knew Doll was not of the same opinion. She so wanted to be a legitimate actress in one of the great theatres – either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But it seemed the most she could hope for was to feature in one of the unlicensed theatres that had sprung up all around London.

Disconsolate, she idly leafed through the papyrus sheets that Malinferno had been poring over so unsuccessfully. She turned her head as though trying to see them another way than how Joe had been construing them. She stared, and then twisted the paper round.

‘Which way do you look at these, Joe?’

Malinferno’s stomach was beginning to rumble at the thought of a chop for breakfast, and tried to divert Doll’s attention from the puzzle on the papyrus.

‘Upside down, if you wish. Now, what about the chop-house?’

Doll airily waved her hand, and sat down in the chair Joe had been occupying.

‘You go, Joe. I am not at all hungry.’

He sighed, knowing that, when her attention had been captured by something, Doll Pocket would not be moved by simple considerations of food and drink. He decided to let her be distracted from her disappointment about play-acting for a while. He was ravenous, if she was not. So, leaving her to gaze at the hieroglyphs, he grabbed his garrick, pulled the shabby but serviceable overcoat on, and went in search of food.

He eventually found himself trudging past the stench of Billingsgate fish market, and over the river at London Bridge. He had in his mind that he might find his old friend Augustus Bromhead at an unpretentious chop-house in Unicorn Passage just off Tooley Street, south of the Thames. Bromhead lived in a rickety tenement house in Bermondsey, and knew all the best eating houses on the south bank of the mighty river. He had introduced Malinferno to this establishment a year or two ago, but Joe had not been back since. He would not have walked so far, but was suddenly eager to conjoin good food with stimulating conversation.

On entering the low-ceilinged, smoky chop-house, he saw he was in luck. A curiously shaped fellow, resembling a tadpole because of his large, leonine head and stubby body, was perched on a high stool at the back of the premises. Augustus Bromhead was apparently breaking his fast with a steaming plate of well-cooked chops and boiled potatoes. Malinferno shimmied his way through the crowded room without disturbing the stolid transfer of food to the mouths of the numerous diners, and slid on to the bench opposite to his friend. The little man acknowledged his arrival with just a nod of his oversize head. His jaw was occupied with the mastication of his meal. When he finally swallowed, he wiped his lips with a stained napkin, and spoke.

‘Giuseppe…’ he always used Joe’s proper name, reminding him of his Italian origins, ‘… dear boy, you look as though you have been burning the midnight oils. I have not seen such baleful, red eyes since I stared into the awful face of Ben Crouch of the Borough Gang.’

He was referring to the notorious resurrection man and leader of a gang of body-snatchers who had nearly done for him and Malinferno both. Malinferno shuddered at being reminded of the incident.

‘I have been working on the Egyptian hieroglyphs in my possession. All to no avail, I fear.’

‘Ah.’

Malinferno could hear in the brief monosyllable the sound of Bromhead’s disapproval. Augustus was an antiquarian of some repute, but his obsession was British history. He considered this unseemly fad for the artefacts and symbols of a far-distant land a temporary aberration and complete waste of time. He had told Malinferno so several times, attempting to bring him back to the right and proper course of study by pointing him in the direction of British history, particularly King Arthur and his putative bones, on more than one occasion. Bromhead was deprecating about the significance of the Egyptian pictorial images, and now said so.

‘Take it from me they are no more than a rebus. A puzzle in pictures.’

‘That is not what Champollion thinks.’

Bromhead snorted in derision.

‘That upstart Frenchie? He knows nothing. And besides, has he not gone quiet the last few years?’

Malinferno had to admit that Champollion did seem to have disappeared off the face of scholarship after a brief blaze of early glory. Most English scholars now thought he had gone down a blind alley and, having failed miserably, hidden himself away in shame. The torch was now being carried in England by Thomas Young.

A waiter in a dirty long white apron, which betrayed the signs of several lost battles with the gravy on the plates he served, came and took Malinferno’s order. Both men were silent as the waiter cleared Augustus’ empty plate from the table. After he had gone, Bromhead reached down from his high stool, on which he had to sit to reach the level of the table, and groped for a leather satchel on the floor. When his outstretched fingers failed to reach it, Malinferno took pity. He lifted it up, noting how heavy it was.

‘What do you have in there, Gus? It feels like a whole library of books.’

Bromhead ignored his companion’s deliberate shortening of his first name. He hated being called Gus, and Malinferno knew it. And he knew it was said just to provoke him, so he kept calm. He stroked the battered leather satchel.

‘You are not far wrong there, my friend. It is a whole series of plays in one, in fact.’

Bromhead lifted the flap of the satchel, and extracted a dusty tome from its interior. The leather was dry and cracked, and so old as to be of an indeterminate hue. He reverently tipped the book on its back and laid it on the table, carefully avoiding the wet ring left from the base of his ale mug. He brushed more dust from the book’s surface.

‘I found it in a poky little bookshop in a lane leading off Paternoster Row close by St Paul’s Cathedral. I had never seen the passage before as it was so narrow. And it was only out of curiosity that I ventured down it this time. The only shop open in the lane was a dingy affair that looked as though it had not changed since Jacobean times. The sign over the door read Dole’s Printers, and guessing that there might be some gems mouldering away inside the shop, I went in. The interior was a jumble of pamphlets and badly printed books, overseen by an old man who looked as antique as the shop itself. Indeed he blended so well into his surroundings that I did not see him until I had raised some dust by lifting a few tomes up. It caused him to cough like some diseased sheep. A sort of cross between a bleat and a death-rattle. I apologised and moved to the back of the shop, further away from his ink-stained desk. It was there I found this.’

He placed his hand on the book before them, patting it affectionately like the head of some favoured grandchild. Malinferno could bear the suspense no longer.

‘But what is it that makes you value it so much?’

There were no words embossed on the front of the book or the spine to give away its secret. And Bromhead was clearly determined to keep his companion in suspense a little longer. He was also keen to impress Malinferno with the marvellous bargain he had come across, so he ignored the question and continued his tale.

‘I could tell from the edges of the pages that it was old, because they are not made of paper but of vellum. Sheets of vellum stitched together at the edge, and bound in leather. I knew it would be something rare, but did not wish to reveal my interest to the old man in the shop. However, I could not resist a peep. I idly lifted the cover, and looked inside.’

He mimicked his action in the shop for Malinferno’s benefit. But as Malinferno bent down to examine the contents thus half-revealed, Augustus snapped the cover shut again. A little puff of dust flew out from the edge of the tome, causing Malinferno to sneeze. Apparently, he was to be kept in suspense a while longer.

‘What I saw convinced me I had to purchase the book. I lifted it up, aware for the first time of its weight, and walked across to the old man, who sat on his bench at the door like the guardian of Hell. When he saw what I had found, he sniffed disdainfully.

‘“Why should you want that old thing? It’s only some original manuscript for a set of plays my forebears printed off years ago. I was even told that bad luck follows those who enact the plays, especially that of ‘Cain and Abel’. However, I can sell you a fair copy of the eleventh edition set in Baskerville. Here, I will find it for you.”

‘Before I could protest, he rose creakily from his post, and wove his way through the piles of books that rose like accretions of sea-eroded rocks by the shore. He disappeared for a quarter of an hour in the back of the shop, and I was all for grabbing the manuscript and running. But finally he returned, even more dust-covered than he had been when he left. In his hand he held an old book, poorly bound with gold blocking on it that had faded over the years. But it was still possible to read it. It was called The Play of Adam. He thrust the printed book at me.

‘“Here it is. I knew we had a copy somewhere.”

‘Though I didn’t want it, I saw that I was not going to leave without the book he had found for me. So after some dickering we agreed a price that included both the printed text, and the manuscript. And it was a rare bargain, I can tell you.’

Bromhead finally sat back with a smug look on his round face. Malinferno took his chance, and opened the book at last. Thinking he was going to see the crabbed hand of some Jacobean writer, he was filled with curiosity about the contents. What he saw astonished him, and he turned the crackling pages with great care. Finally, he dared to speak.

‘It’s a medieval manuscript, isn’t it?’

Bromhead nodded eagerly. ‘In a very educated hand. It is not illuminated, but must be the- Take care, you idiot!’

His cry of anguish was not due to Malinferno’s handling of the book, but for the careless waiter who had finally brought Malinferno’s meal. The man dumped the chops and boiled potatoes in gravy heavily on the table, spattering the brown, greasy concoction in which the chops swam perilously close to the precious manuscript. He grunted an apology and would have compounded his error by wiping the surface of the manuscript with his dirty apron. But Bromhead managed to stay his hand, and he retreated grumbling about gentlemen treating the eating-house as if it were a library. While Malinferno tucked into his meal, Bromhead explained his plans for The Play of Adam.

‘I am seeking a theatre that might put on the plays included in this manuscript. It must be hundreds of years since they have last been performed. I have a little money available to me, though I shall need a rich sponsor too. I am to talk to Will Mossop, the manager of the Royal Coburg, this very day.’

Malinferno, who until this point had not paid much attention to what his friend had said, suddenly perked up. If Bromhead was prepared to pay to mount this play, maybe he would take on Doll in one of the parts. It did not need to be a major role, simply enough to assuage her desire to be an actress. Frankly, he thought she would not stick at it once she discovered how hard and repetitive the work was. He just needed to ensure she got the madcap scheme out of her system.

He swallowed a rather gristly piece of pork chop and, once recovered from the coughing fit it induced, enquired of Bromhead how far he had progressed in selecting a cast. The little man swayed on his seat, shaking his overlarge dome in such a way that Malinferno thought he might topple from his perch.

‘I have not yet settled on the theatre, let alone thought of actors. That is why I am seeing Mossop. Anyway, I would leave the choice of actors to the theatre manager.’

Malinferno grimaced. It would not be so easy to persuade an experienced theatrical person to go along with choosing Doll. On the other hand, the money man should carry some weight, so it was as well to keep in with Bromhead.

The Egyptological expert pushed his empty plate to one side, scrutinised the first page of the manuscript, and read the opening words out loud.

‘“I am gracious and great God without beginning.

I am maker unmade; all might is in me.

I am life and way, unto weal winning.

I am foremost and first; as I bid, shall it be.”’

They were obviously the words of God, so that wouldn’t be a part for Doll Pocket. He wondered if there was some small part for her to play. And as he turned the heavy, stiff pages he saw it. The next play was ‘The Fall of Man’, and he read aloud the dialogue down to the seductive words spoken by Eve to Adam as she offered him the apple.

‘“Bite on boldly, for it is true;

We shall be gods, and know everything!”’

He looked at Bromhead with a winning smile on his face.

‘I know just the actress for the role of Eve.’

The very person he had in mind was at that moment not thinking at all of her career as an actress. Doll had become engrossed in the puzzle of the Egyptian hieroglyphs that had so exercised Malinferno’s brain. She had read his notebook, where he had recorded the discoveries of Thomas Young concerning the name Ptolemy. It had astonished Doll to learn from Malinferno that this ruler of Egypt wasn’t really Egyptian, but Greek. And his name, according to Young, appeared on the Rosetta Stone at least three times. The mathematician had even tentatively identified some of the symbols as spelling out Ptolemy’s name sound by sound. And as Ptolemy had wed Berenice, Young assumed the next cartouche was her name, and identified some other sounds. But Young and many others still considered the signs and symbols on obelisks and papyruses as representing ideas not words. It was only the foreign Greek names that were different. So Doll spent the morning comparing Young’s translated sounds with the cartouches in Joe’s papyrus texts. The most promising name was frustratingly close to completion, and yet so far away. She looked at the word she had scribbled down in Joe’s notebook inserting dashes for the letters Young could not supply.

– OLE I P KE-KE

It was not very promising, but it had fired her imagination. She could see another possibility if only the bird symbol was not the ‘ke’ sound from the end of Berenice. Just as she began to try other sequences of symbols, she heard the creak of the stairs up to the first-floor rooms that Joe rented from Mrs Stanhope. She knew his gait, and the way he took two steps at a time when he was excited. She pushed the pen and ink aside, and turned round in the chair that was one of only two in the sparsely furnished parlour. The door burst open, and Malinferno entered with a look of the deepest pleasure on his face.

‘Doll. I have some news for you.’

She grinned, patting the papyruses on the table. ‘And I for you. I think I have made a breakthrough with the hieroglyphs… ’

She stopped in her tracks when she saw the dark look that came over his face at her news. She realised she had made a mistake by telling him she had potentially solved in a few hours a problem that had had him stumped for weeks, if not months. She changed tack, rising from the chair, and crossing the room towards him.

‘But it’s probably all wrong. Tell me what your news is.’

Malinferno, crushed by what Doll had said, looked cautiously at her. ‘You’re sure you want to know?’

She hugged him close to her ample bosom, and squeaked in the most mindless way she could muster, ‘Ooooh, yes, kind sir. What treats do you have in store for me?’

He couldn’t help himself, and a smile cracked his downcast features.

‘I may have a part for you in a play.’

Doll Pocket gasped. Despite the distractions of her Egyptian studies, this was news indeed.

‘Really?’ Her voice, normally low and seductive, went up a pitch in genuinely uncontrolled excitement. She looked hard into Joe’s eyes, however. ‘You’re not teasing me, are you? Only I wouldn’t forgive you if you were.’

‘Would I do that? No, Bromhead has found an old copy of some Biblical plays, and fancies to put them on in the West End.’

Doll gasped. The matter of the plays didn’t sound alluring, but the idea of performing in the shadow of Drury Lane or Covent Garden certainly was.

‘When can we talk to him about it? Which theatre has he booked?’

Malinferno saw he had run a little ahead of himself in his desires to cheer up Doll. She had pulled away from his embrace, and had grabbed the empty ewer on the sideboard. She was all for fetching some fresh water, and reviving herself with a wash and some perfume preparatory to meeting Bromhead in his new guise of impresario. But before she could dash out the door to get some water from Mrs Stanhope, Malinferno put a restraining hand on her arm.

‘Hold on, Doll. He hasn’t quite got there yet. He has only just found this medieval manuscript of something called The Play of Adam. It’s all Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and the Flood and such. But he hasn’t sold his idea to anyone yet.’

Doll’s shoulders slumped. ‘I knew it was too much to hope for. Damn it, Joe, I was looking forward to it already. I could be the first woman, Eve.’

It was of course the very thought that Malinferno had had over breakfast, and which he had mooted with Bromhead. And the idea of Doll Pocket as the naked seductress still aroused him in a familiar way.

‘It will happen, Doll. Only just not yet.’

His companion did not look convinced, and Malinferno wished he hadn’t mentioned Augustus’ idea. He rested his backside on the table edge, and the papyrus rustled beneath him. It gave him an idea of how to raise Doll from her sudden depression.

‘Now, how about we follow your suggestion, and go to the British Museum, and take a look at exhibit EA24.’

Doll smiled, and immediately reached for her favourite headgear, an oriental turban in lavish brocaded material of the sort also favoured by Queen Caroline.

Montagu House was quite crowded, especially in the Egyptian Gallery, where everyone was hurrying to the far end of the room. As Malinferno and Doll Pocket approached the back of the tightly packed mob, they could see what all the fuss was about. Set between two tall windows in order to give it the best light stood the massive bust that was known as Young Memnon. One of Malinferno’s countrymen, Giovanni Belzoni, had engineered its shipment from Egypt to London. There the Royal Corps of Sappers and Miners had used a huge block-and-tackle system set in an A-frame to hoist the head onto the plinth on which it now stood. It had been a Herculean task, and the bust was only recently cleared of its encumbrances of thick ropes and struts. It was now a glorious sight, despite the hole drilled in its right shoulder by the Frenchman Drovetti for the insertion of dynamite. It had been his idea to blast the colossus to pieces in order to reduce its mass for shipment. Belzoni, a hydraulic engineer and circus strongman, had managed the task without such drastic action being taken. It was now the latest wonder for the Egyptian-obsessed gentry to marvel at.

Doll and Joe, however, gave it only a cursory glance. There were no hieroglyphs on the bust, and so it was not a curiosity to hold their attention for long. They carried on down the gallery, lingering only to cast their eyes over the obsidian monolith that was Nectanebo’s sarcophagus. It too was covered in hieroglyphs, and so merited passing attention. But EA24 was their goal.

The battered block of stone was almost black in colour. However, Malinferno had been told by his friend Thomas Elder, who worked at the BM, that it was so because someone had covered it with boot polish in order to make the whitened inscriptions stand out better. At the bottom of the stone, with only the right corner lost, was a text in Greek. Above it was a band of writing in an unknown script. Then above that stood the fragmentary section of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And in the midst of the puzzling symbols, there was the cartouche Malinferno and Doll had been trying to decipher. They were alone before the mysterious object, and stood in silence, examining its surface. Malinferno felt as if he were communing directly with the ancient scholar who had carved the stone. The man’s lips were making the shape of words, but no sound was issuing forth. So he simply could not understand what the scribe was attempting to say to him. Meanwhile, Doll had leaned closer to the stone and her eyes moved from side to side along the Greek text. Malinferno could see that her lips, too, were moving silently. Puzzled by his companion’s actions, he went to speak. But Doll held up her hand to stop him, and she carried on scanning the lines of Greek text.

After a while, she still ignored Malinferno’s obvious signs of boredom, and turned her attention to the hieroglyphs at the top. So he ambled away to look at some more of the artefacts that had been taken from the French at the turn of the century. When the French in Egypt had surrendered to the English in 1801, one of the spoils of war had been a large collection of items gathered by French savants. The stone EA24 had been one, and Nectanebo’s sarcophagus another. Malinferno drifted over to further spoils in the form of a row of lion-headed statues of the goddess Sekhmet. Then he heard a bitter voice ringing out down the long gallery.

‘Look, Étienne. Yet more of the English plunder like that taken from us twenty years ago.’

Surprised by the familiar voice, Malinferno looked towards its source. Standing at the back of the mêlée that still clung around Young Memnon, he saw a figure he recognised. It was of an old man dressed in an antiquated form of court garb that had gone out of fashion years ago. And atop the fellow’s head was a powdered, white wig only affected by footmen these days. He was leaning heavily on a cane, and favouring his left leg which, though sporting a well-shaped calf, Malinferno knew to be wooden. Thomas Chippendale the Younger would have been proud of its shape. Indeed, he may well have turned it in his workshop.

Jean-Claude Casteix was one of those savants who had collected Egyptian artefacts for Napoleon Bonaparte, only to see them stolen by the British. Swallowing his pride, Casteix and some of his colleagues had followed them to London. The French general Menou had been scornful of the scientists’ behaviour, suggesting they could be ‘stuffed for the purpose’ of the voyage, along with their trinkets. Casteix reviled the English, and hated his exile, but had preferred to stay with the goods he had accumulated in Egypt. Now he stood sneering at the latest English outrage: the huge statue of Young Memnon stolen by Belzoni from under the very nose of the French Consul-General, Bernadino Drovetti.

His remark, intended to carry through the Egyptian Gallery, and overheard by Malinferno, was addressed to his companion, an elegant and, in contrast to Casteix, fashionably attired young man. Casteix’s disdainful gaze turned Malinferno’s way, and fell on him just as Doll called out to him.

‘Joe, I’ve just worked out something interesting.’

Malinferno tried to ignore Casteix, whom he had once consulted to learn more about Egyptology, only to be regaled with a tale concerning the loss of the Frenchman’s left leg to the snapping bite of a crocodile in the Nile waters. He hurried back to Doll Pocket, but could hear the stomping thud of Casteix’s wooden leg approaching up the gallery.

‘What’s that, Doll?’

Doll’s eyes were bright. ‘I’ve just calculated that there are some four hundred and eighty Greek words on the stone.’

Malinferno knew better than to question Doll’s figure, even though he knew she could not have had time to count every word. But she was fearfully adept with mathematical calculations. So he confined himself to querying the import of this revelation.

‘And what use is that in deciphering the words on the stone?’

‘Indeed, young lady, what can be the import of such irrelevant knowledge?’

The second enquiry, disdainful in its tone, came from the breathless Jean-Claude Casteix, who had now joined them before EA24. The other man, fitter apparently, for his breathing hardly increased at all, stood at his friend’s shoulder, his head cocked on one side like an alert hound.

Doll Pocket smiled enigmatically. ‘It is meaningless. Unless you compare it with the number of hieroglyphs on the stone. By my reckoning, there are one thousand four hundred and ten of those.’

Casteix’s companion looked puzzled, and, pointing with his silver-topped cane, spoke up in a distinct and, to Doll’s ears, engaging French accent. ‘Madame, what have all these numbers to do with decipherment?’

Casteix hurriedly interposed an explanation of the other man’s interest, introducing him with a flourish of his hand. ‘Monsieur Étienne Quatremain, here, is, like Champollion, a student of hieroglyphs.’

Quatremain waved away his friend’s flattering description. ‘I am no more than an amateur filled with curiosity. Not to be compared with Champollion, the future translator of hieroglyphs.’

Doll looked askance at Malinferno, who contained his disbelief over Quatremain’s claim for his countryman. He merely raised his eyes to the ornate ceiling over their heads. The preening Frenchman meanwhile continued in his charming tones.

‘But you have still not explained, Madame, your obsession with the numbers.’

Doll smiled sweetly, and fluttered her eyelids at the young Frenchman. Malinferno could see all the signs of Doll being in one of her moods when she pretended to be dim-witted to fool someone. Such a deception usually ended in the discomfiture of the other party. Surprisingly, though, she did not spring the trap on Quatremain this time. Instead she giggled inanely.

‘I’m sure there is some meaning in them, sir. But for the moment I cannot see it.’

Casteix snorted, his opinion of womankind confirmed.

‘Come, Étienne, let us seek more stimulating company elsewhere.’

His sweeping gesture was somewhat spoiled by his hand almost knocking his antique wig off his head. He clutched at it and, leaving it a little askew, stomped off down the gallery, scattering the idle gawpers in front of Young Memnon. His young companion bowed elegantly, his cane held to one side, and turned to follow. But not before he cast a wink in the direction of Doll. Malinferno wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a simpering smile of pleasure fleetingly play across her features. And it did not seem feigned to his jealous eye. With a proprietorial gesture, he took her arm.

‘What was all that about numbers of words on the stone?’

‘Don’t you see? It’s obvious.’

He always got vexed when Doll made it clear that he was slow in reaching what for her was an obvious conclusion. He might have walked away and sulked for the rest of the day, except he desperately wanted to know what she had concluded.

‘No, I don’t see. And I don’t understand why, if it is so obvious, you didn’t tell Casteix and what’shisname.’

He feigned not recalling Quatremain’s name, as if the man was of no significance to him, when in fact he had got under his skin.

Doll squeezed his arm, pulling him close to her side. ‘Is Joe just a teensy bit jealous of the elegant Monsieur Étienne? He is quite handsome, isn’t he? But the reason why I didn’t tell them my conclusion was so that the old man didn’t rush off and beat us to it.’

‘Beat us?’

‘To solving the riddle of the hieroglyphs.’

Malinferno’s curiosity overcame his exasperation at Doll’s obtuseness. ‘And how is the riddle to be solved by us?’

Doll stuck her fingers under her turban and scratched her head. ‘Well, it’s only a start, you understand.’

Malinferno growled, and Doll held up her hands defensively.

‘If the Greek text is made up of four hundred and eighty words and the hieroglyphs amount to one thousand four hundred…’

‘… and ten. You said one thousand four hundred and ten.’

Doll grinned conspiratorially. ‘Oh, I added the ten to my estimate to make it sound more clever. But the point is, bearing in mind that the two texts are the same, then the disparity in numbers suggests that-’

Malinferno broke in. ‘That each hieroglyph is a letter, not a symbol of ideas or a full word.’

‘Give the man a prize!’

‘But it still doesn’t tell us their meanings.’

Doll’s face fell a little. ‘I know, but it’s a start. Now we know each picture is a letter. Let’s go back and see if we can decipher that cartouche. You see, I have an idea.’

They had hurried back to Creechurch Lane, intent on cracking the code. But an exciting message diverted them from even looking at the papyruses left lying on the table. As they climbed the stairs to Malinferno’s rooms, a rotund figure waddled out of the ground-floor parlour. It was their landlady. Mrs Stanhope’s mobcap sat askew on her head, and her face was flushed. When she spoke, her slurred voice betrayed her having imbibed the best part of a bottle of gin, despite it being not yet the middle of the day. She leaned on the doorframe or she might have fallen over, and called up the rickety stairs to her lodgers.

‘Mr Mali… Manli… Joe, there is an urgent message for you.’

Malinferno descended the stairs, and stood before his landlady. She grinned inanely.

‘A message you say?’ he prompted her.

Mrs Stanhope tilted her head to one side as if pondering the depths of his question. He observed in fascination as her mobcap failed to tip with her head, slipping down until it covered one eye.

‘Yes. From a perfect tadpole of a man. I could have wrapped him in a nappy and had him suckle at my breast.’

Malinferno recognised Bromhead from her description, and cast from his mind the image of Augustus as a baby on his landlady’s large and fulsome tit. He prompted her again.

‘May I have the message?’

Slowly, Mrs Stanhope’s hand went up to her face, where one long finger tapped the side of her nose. The other hand slipped into the pocket of her apron, where it rummaged around interminably. Finally it drew out a slip of paper, which was then offered to Malinferno. He took it, and read it. Excited by its contents, he went back up to Doll, who was hovering on the landing. She could tell by the look on his face that the message bore interesting news.

‘What does it say, Joe?’

‘That we should go directly to the Royal Coburg Theatre, where Augustus Bromhead is casting his play. He says there is a part for you.’

Doll Pocket gave out a whoop, forgetting all about ancient hieroglyphs. This was the chance of a lifetime, and she was not about to give it up. She grabbed Joe’s hand, and dragged him back down the stairs. Mrs Stanhope gave them a befuddled wave as they dashed out into the lane and past the church on the corner to find a cab.

They managed to hail a small fly and, having given the cabby the theatre’s name, they settled back under the flimsy hood. The driver turned south, and they crossed the river by the grand new Waterloo Bridge, named for Wellington’s great victory six years earlier. For some reason, Doll was beginning to have doubts about the scheme. The Thames looked grey and oily as it roiled around the Doric pillars that divided up each of the nine arches of Waterloo Bridge. The journey to the south bank seemed to take for ever, and the far side looked most unwelcoming with looming rain clouds racing towards them. She clutched Joe’s arm.

‘Is this the right choice to make, Joe? I mean, the Royal Coburg is not Drury Lane or Covent Garden. It is south of the river, and is not even allowed to put on serious drama. What is this play of Gus’s like?’

Malinferno knew that Doll yearned to be an actress in what she called the ‘legit’ theatres she had mentioned by name. All other theatres in London were restricted to melodrama or burlesque. And it wasn’t as if the theatre they were now approaching was even in the West End. But it was a grand theatre, and had taken its name from Princess Charlotte, King George’s only child with Queen Caroline, when she had married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Charlotte’s death in childbirth had been a terrible tragedy, but had not marred the Royal Coburg Theatre’s reputation as a popular place for entertainment. Malinferno tried to reassure Doll.

‘The play is… a classic. You shall see.’

He knew it was stretching the truth to call ‘a classic’ the ancient set of mystery plays that he had seen only a brief part of. But it seemed to mollify Doll, and she perked up despite the splashes of raindrops hitting the soft cab roof. Then, as the cabby, who sat behind them to drive, turned off the Waterloo Road into The Cut, she saw the façade of the theatre straight ahead. It was an imposing and classical structure, all arches and pediments. A sudden thrill of pleasure ran up her spine, and her doubts disappeared.

Descending, Malinferno passed a silver sixpence to the driver of the fly, and he and Doll dashed across the pavement in the sudden downpour that blew over their heads. Under the cover of the theatre’s portico, they paused while Doll rearranged her turban with its long ostrich feather. She reasoned she would have to look her best for the audition for the part of Eve, even if the character she might play would have originally been as naked as the day she was born. A sudden thought came to her, and she hesitated on the threshold of the auditorium, grasping Malinferno’s arm.

‘Joe. Was Eve born, or was she created?’

Malinferno gave her a puzzled look. ‘Born of Adam’s rib, of course.’

That still didn’t answer Doll’s question, and she felt full of confusion. How was she to play Eve, if she didn’t even know the slightest thing about her? She saw that this acting lark was not as straightforward as she had anticipated. Well, she would have to rely on her manifest charms to see her through. They had served her well in the past, after all. Resolute once more, she pushed the heavy oak doors open.

Inside, the auditorium all was dark, save for a blaze of light on the stage, which must have been lit by a hundred candles. And in the light was a bevy of pretty young girls, most showing off well developed décolletages. Doll heard Malinferno sigh deeply at the array of cleavages, and suddenly she felt very old. After all, her thirtieth birthday was fast approaching. Someone in the dark of the auditorium called out a name, and the girl first in line stepped forward. She pouted and posed with her breasts thrust out, looking friskily at the huddle of figures seated in the front row of the stalls.

A male voice rang out. ‘No. Next.’

The girl stamped her slipper-clad foot, and stormed offstage. The next buxom offering stepped up, only to receive the same short shrift. This one burst into tears, and ran into the wings. A flurry of ‘no’s accompanied Doll’s walk down the aisle to the front of the auditorium. Malinferno spotted the large head of Bromhead at the end of the front row, and he slipped into the seat next to him. Doll sat too, as the queue of hopefuls was whittled down inexorably. She began to slump in her seat. What hope did she stand if such young pulchritude was being discarded? Bromhead looked at Malinferno, and patted him on the knee. Then he turned to the young man who sat on his other side. He was a well-formed young man with a head of black curls, and was the source of the negative responses to the procession of girls on the stage. He listened to Bromhead’s whisper, and held his hand up as the final girl stepped to the front of the stage. He leaned forward in his seat, and looked along at Doll. A smile broke out on his handsome face. He waved a dismissive hand at the girl onstage.

‘No. You may go, Bess. I have found my Eve.’

‘Gawd, Will. You said the part was mine.’ The girl was clearly annoyed at the man. ‘I even-’

Will rose quickly from his seat, and strode to the front of the stage. He leaned on the edge, and whispered words that seemed to mollify the angry actress. Malinferno guessed that future promises were being made in response to what he assumed was the girl’s amorous offering to Will. She walked away into the darkness of the wings with a disdainful look at Doll, who still sat on the end of the front row. Bromhead rose from his seat, though his doing so didn’t increase his height much from when he had been seated. He took Doll’s hand, and raised her up.

‘Doll Pocket, this is Will Mossop, manager of the Royal Coburg, and producer of The Play of Adam.’

Will tossed his curly head, and bowed elegantly, kissing Doll’s proffered hand.

‘Mistress Pocket, I am delighted to meet you at last. Augustus has told me much about you, and until you appeared I was fearful that we would never fill the part of Eve. Now I am a happy man.’

Once again, Malinferno witnessed Doll’s simpering. This time it was at Mossop’s complimentary tones, just as it had been when the Frenchman, Quatremain, fell all over her. He slumped sulkily in his seat, and wished some of the buxom young girls were still on display, so that he could simper over them and make Doll jealous. For the first time, he took note of the pile of newspapers and caricatures strewn on the crimson carpet. They were mostly of Queen Caroline and the King. The farce of the Queen being kept out of George’s coronation ceremony, and their independent sexual adventures had caused a storm of cartoons in magazines like John Bull. And printers like George Humphrey had produced a whole series of denigratory caricatures aimed at the royals. Some of them lay at Mossop’s feet now, and he picked one up. It showed a corpulent Caroline sitting at a table surrounded by her advisors, one of whom was Alderman Matthew Wood in the form of a naked, hairy devil. On a pile of books on the table stood a little mannequin Pergami, the Queen’s lover who had been abandoned on the continent. The caption read: ‘The Effusions of a Troubled Brain’.

Since the Queen had been turned away from the coronation of her husband due to their estranged relationship, Caroline had been a figure of great debate. These caricatures lampooned her and her Italian lover, a handsome courtier, who had been bought a defunct baronage by Caroline. The cartoons did show him to best effect, though. In the caricature, as in life, he was tall, with an enviable physique and a full head of curly black hair, luxuriant moustachios and side whiskers.

Malinferno was about to replace the caricatures on the stack of papers, when Bromhead, noticing what his friend had seen, whispered in his ear, ‘Doll will make a fine Queen, do you not think?’

Malinferno was puzzled. ‘I thought she was to be cast as Eve.’

Augustus waved his hand at the cartoon in Malinferno’s hand, his face reddening slightly. ‘Did I not explain in my note to you?’

Malinferno brought out the piece of paper given to him by Mrs Stanhope. He realised that his landlady, in tucking it securely into the pocket of her pinafore, had folded it several times. Malinferno had omitted to open the last fold, and beneath it he read the explanation for Bromhead’s words. He looked his friend in the eye.

‘You are to give The Play of Adam a topical twist to suit the present mood for matters royal?’

Bromhead pulled a face. ‘Yes. It was the only way I could get the play accepted. I tried several theatres without any luck, before Will Mossop suggested that each scene should be brought bang up to date by having the characters resemble the royals. So Adam himself will look like Baron Pergami; the snake will be King George, and Eve, Queen Caroline. Each scene will be performed in that way. The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General will appear in “The Fall of Man”, and Cain and Abel will be George and Pergami once again.’

Malinferno laughed out loud. He realised now why all the pretty girls had been rejected in favour of Doll. They had all been too young to bear any passing resemblance to the Queen, who was over fifty, and overweight. He wondered when the truth would dawn on Doll, and he cast a glance over at where she and Mossop were talking animatedly. As he looked on, he saw her face cloud over, and annoyance spread across her normally buoyant features. She stormed over to where Malinferno and Bromhead sat.

‘I am to play Eve, because of my apparent resemblance to the Queen, Joe.’

Malinferno tried to keep a straight face. Both he and Doll had seen Caroline at closer quarters than most of the common crowd. Only a few months ago, they had been embroiled in a murder and scandal at a soirée on Solsbury Hill. The Queen had attended incognito under the name Hat Vaughan, and they had both received personal thanks from her when they had saved her already tarnished reputation from further scandal. The consequence was that neither could tell anyone of their intimacy with Caroline, having been sworn to secrecy. But they both knew that the Queen’s unusually liberal lifestyle had told on her. Doll had at first taken the buxom and blowsy lady for an aging trollop, employed to amuse the titled gentlemen at the soirée. It was only later they had learned she was the Queen. Now Doll was being selected because of her likeness to Caroline.

Malinferno strove to find words to soften the blow.

‘I am sure it is because of your shapeliness and not because of any reference to her age. The leading lady of a play must still be a great beauty, Doll.’

Bromhead’s great leonine head nodded vigorously in agreement. ‘Indeed, Doll. You will portray her obvious charms… ’ he described two orbs with cupped hands, ‘… so well, and win over the mob in the pit, hungry to view great beauty.’

Doll narrowed her eyes, trying to guess whether the two men were mocking her. Satisfied they weren’t, she dipped her eyes in an exaggerated show of modest concurrence with their sentiments. She turned back to Will Mossop, who looked anxiously on. He had, after all, sent away all the other actresses, including apparently one to whom he had already promised the part of Eve.

‘I will do it, Mr Mossop.’

Malinferno could already detect in her tones something of the prima donna, and sighed. She would be insufferable if this mad scheme came off, as well it might. The coronation, so very recent, was already being performed in pageant form at Drury Lane with Robert Elliston impersonating the King so well that it played to full houses. Mossop was all smiles.

‘Excellent, Miss Pocket. We begin rehearsing tomorrow.’

‘So soon?’

‘Oh, yes, the play must open in two weeks’ time, if we are to benefit from the topical nature of its presentation. And tomorrow is when you will meet Mr Morton Stanley – your Pergami.’

Malinferno didn’t like the broad wink that accompanied this declaration from the theatre manager. He felt this Stanley fellow would be another seeker after Doll’s attention. His comfortable position as Doll’s paramour seemed to be under siege from all sides.

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.

‘Look here, everyone. I want to move on to the Cain and Abel scene, and block it in before we call it a day.’

He pointed at the quiet, middle-aged actor who had already played several minor roles as angels. He had been so self-effacing that Doll had not yet learned his name. Mossop now provided it.

‘Harry, you are the yokel, Brewbarrel, and you come on from stage left.’ He waved his hand disdainfully. ‘Do your usual moping and leering.’

Harry blushed, and nodded as he walked off into the wings. Doll followed him offstage as she was not needed in this scene.

Standing by him in the darkness of the wingspace, she whispered in his ear, ‘What’s blocking?’

He cast a curious glance at her, thinking she perhaps was trying to take a rise out of him. But the genuinely puzzled look on her face showed him that this attractive, voluptuous woman with whom he was sharing this intimate little space was truly ignorant of theatrical jargon. He guessed that she had probably had to provide her services on the couch in Mossop’s office to get the part, rather than by dint of her acting skills. He glanced onstage, and saw that he had time to explain. Mossop was still manoeuvring Stanley and Tristram around the vast open space. He put his mouth to her pretty shell of an ear, and pointed onstage.

‘That is blocking. Giving the actors their moves, and hoping they will remember them at the next rehearsal.’

Doll breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank goodness. I thought it was going to be something quite painful.’

Harry grinned, observing how Morton Stanley was stumbling around the stage, much to Mossop’s exasperation.

‘Oh, for some actors of limited brain it is very painful, I assure you.’

Mossop’s harassed voice coming from the auditorium broke off their conversation.

‘Harry, that’s your entrance.’

The blocking lasted another full day, and then on the third day work began in earnest. Mossop wished the actors to concentrate on the tale of Adam and Eve, and Doll, Morton Stanley, and Perceval Trsitram, who played the part of King George/Satan, went over their lines again and again. Doll had spent the previous night learning her words with Malinferno, who had had to read both Adam and Satan. He had seemed to have taken great relish in the speech after the eating of the apple.

‘“Alas, my wife I blame, for so she to me said-”’ He broke off. ‘This text is quite up-to-date, is it not, Doll?’

Doll cuffed him around the head with her copy of the play. ‘I shouldn’t need to remind you, Joe Malinferno, that I am no wife of yours. Thanks to your reluctance to make an honest woman of me.’

Malinferno’s face went a little pale at the mention of marriage, but he diverted Doll’s sally into the running battle between them concerning making of her an honest woman.

‘What are you going to do about the fact that Adam and Eve are naked, my dear?’

Doll leered at him. ‘I shall be clad in the sheerest of muslin, and Morton will be bare-chested and wearing the tightest pair of breeches you have ever seen.’

That had shut Joe up, and now at the rehearsal, Doll examined the aforesaid actor’s shapely form from the wings, as she awaited her next entrance.

‘No good looking at that, dearie. Didn’t you know that Morton Stanley plays backgammon with the boys?’

It was Jed Lawless who had spoken out of the gloom where all the ropes for the backdrops came down to a series of cleats on the wall. It reminded Doll somewhat of a ship at sea, with taut ropes holding masts and sails in place. At the Royal Coburg, they disappeared into the space above the stage that she had learned was called the flies. This wing-space was Lawless’s domain, and he was often to be seen hauling on ropes and tying them off again. Usually, his crude comments were spoken sotto voce to his crew of scene shifters, but this time he had aimed his comment at Doll. He had also spoken too loud, and a red-faced Stanley stormed into the wings, brushing against Doll as he passed. He grabbed the unrepentant Lawless by the neck.

‘Make such unfounded allegations again, and I will kill you.’

The stagehand seemed unworried by the actor’s violent behaviour, and simply grinned at him. The even-tempered Harry, who had been playing an angel to Stanley’s Adam, hurried over and prised his colleague’s hand from Lawless’s throat.

‘Come, Morton, let’s get on. We have less than two weeks to opening night.’

Stanley growled deep in his throat, pushing Lawless back against the row of cleats.

As he strode back on to the stage, Doll heard the stagehand whisper to himself, ‘Kill me, Molly? Not before I have killed you first.’

Doll wanted to ask Lawless how he knew about Morton’s preference for boys, but before she could say anything, she heard her cue, and she was onstage. Strangely, the rehearsal progressed well after the altercation. Morton Stanley’s anger appeared to bring his performance to a higher pitch. And when they came to the expulsion from Eden, which was now represented by a field with a large beanstalk in it, he took hold of Doll in a feverish embrace.

‘“Oh, Eve, to see us is a shameful sight.

We both, who were in bliss so bright,

Must now go naked, day and night.”’

As he held her to him, she felt his manhood hard against her thigh. Her eyes flashed at him, and he grinned in a way that belied Lawless’s allegation. Then the spell was ruined as sporadic applause broke out in the auditorium. Doll held out her hand to shield her eyes from the light of the candles at her feet, and peered out to see who was watching. Two gentlemen were seated side by side in the stalls a few rows back. One was rather languid, with curly hair, and handsome in a rather feminine way. The other she recognised immediately. His silver-topped cane and elegant pose gave him away.

‘Why, Mr Quatremain! How did you find me?’

The charming Frenchman, whom Doll had last seen in the British Museum, rose from his seat, and bowed gravely.

‘It is a miracle, Mam’selle Pocket. I was invited by my friend, here… ’ He indicated the man at his side, who nodded her way but remained seated. ‘… to view a play he was funding. He knows I have some interest in the theatre due to my uncle, who was temporarily the commissioner for the Comédie Française in Paris. So I know they call such backers as my friend “angels” in theatre parlance. And an angel he is, for he has brought us together again.’

He walked down the aisle and leaned with his left elbow on the front edge of the stage. His cane remained extended to the right in a foppish pose.

‘And this time I will not let you go so easily.’

A light cough from Will Mossop interrupted the tête-à-tête, and Doll gave Quatremain a winning smile.

‘We shall meet after the rehearsal, Mr Quatremain.’

‘Oh, please. It’s Étienne. And, yes, I shall be waiting. My friend Mr Bankes and I are completely enthralled by your performance.’

He retreated to his seat, sliding down beside the handsome man, who was part-funding Bromhead’s endeavour. His teeth flashed a smile, and Doll turned reluctantly back to the task in hand. Morton was staring out into the auditorium, and she wondered what he felt about Quatremain’s presence. She felt a flush warming her face at the thought of choosing between these two rivals for her attention. Though whether the rampant Stanley, or the suave Quatremain was the devil or the deep sea, she was not sure.

Malinferno, meanwhile, had returned to Creechurch Lane with thoughts of the doom-laden Play of Adam racing around his brain. He had hoped Doll would be back from the theatre, but his rooms were in darkness. The only sound was that of Mrs Stanhope’s gin-soaked snores from below. He lit an oil-lamp, and slumped down at his table, at a loss as to what to do with this new information. Would he put off Doll from chasing her dream, if he mentioned Augustus’ comment about the warning in the old manuscript? Or would she merely laugh at his worries? He idly drew the papyrus sheets towards him, and looked at the cartouche in the centre of the top one again. Recalling that Doll had suggested she had made some progress, where he had signally failed, he reached out for his notebook in case she had written something in it. After the last page of his own notes, there was a single word in her sprawling hand.

– OLE I P KE-KE

It was gobbledegook, and he sighed, having hoped for more. But despite having felt annoyed when she had intimated that she had made a breakthrough, he knew Doll was more likely to solve the riddle than he was. Maybe using her latest idea of single letters for each hieroglyph, rather than Dr Young’s idea of sounds, would pay dividends. He began scouring her other notes for inspiration.

It was only when the oil lamp wick burned low and the room was plunged into darkness, that he realised how much time had passed. And that Doll was still not home. He stepped over to the bow window, which looked down onto the narrow street, and saw two figures approaching the end of Creechurch Lane. Turning in past St Katherine Cree, they were lit momentarily by the yellow light of the new gaslamps on Leadenhall Street. Such illumination had not yet crept down Malinferno’s little lane, and the two people were soon enveloped in darkness again. But he had seen who they were. One was Doll Pocket with her favourite turban perched jauntily on her head of blonde hair. And the other fellow, identifiable from the silver-topped cane that swung on the end of his elegantly clad arm, was surely the Frenchie Étienne Quatremain. As the two figures approached Mrs Stanhope’s house, his fears were confirmed. Quatremain was fashionably dressed in a rich blue tailcoat and brown fall-front trousers topped by a white waistcoat, shirt, and cravat. And Doll hung on tightly to his arm with both hands.

Malinferno stayed by the window but hugged the shadows of his darkened room. From there he observed Quatremain escorting Doll to the very front door of Mrs Stanhope’s house. He doffed his tall hat, and kissed Doll lingeringly on her outstretched hand. Malinferno could see the simpering look on her face from where he stood. As Doll entered Mrs Stanhope’s front door, the Frenchie looked up at the first-floor window, and his gaze locked with Malinferno’s. He smiled triumphantly and turned away, striding down the lane back to the lights of Leadenhall Street.

The stairs creaked familiarly, and Doll, apparently a little drunk, reeled into the room where Malinferno stood. She clutched her head, tilting the turban over one eye.

‘Joe! Are you still up? You gave me quite a shock, lurking in the shadows, there.’

‘I have been working. How about you?’

Doll puffed out her cheeks, and slumped in one of the two dining chairs. It groaned in protest.

‘Oh, it is such hard work being an actress, Joe. You can’t imagine.’

‘So hard that you have to spend the rest of the evening relaxing, I suppose.’

Doll gave Malinferno a peculiar look, until enlightenment dawned.

‘Oh, you mean my drink with Étienne? He was at the theatre, Joe. It would have been rude not to accept his invitation. We ain’t married, after all.’

Malinferno pulled a sour face, knowing how his continuing aversion to such a commitment irked Doll. He sat on the other dining chair, set at the table where he had been working until the lamp wick had died.

‘Now it’s all my fault, I suppose.’

Wearily, Doll rose from her chair, and plonked herself in Malinferno’s lap. The chair beneath the two of them groaned more ominously than its partner.

‘Silly boy.’ She twirled a hank of Malinferno’s dark locks in her slender finger. ‘Étienne was at the theatre with another gentleman, who was putting money into the play. I had to be good to him, didn’t I?’

Malinferno pouted, twisting his head away from Doll’s wheedling.

‘Why?’

She laughed. ‘Because his name was Mr William Bankes.’

Malinferno gave her a blank look. Then the truth dawned.

‘William Bankes of Kingston Lacey?’

Doll nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, the same William Bankes who has just returned from Abu Simbel and Philae in Egypt. He’s brought an obelisk back, and will show it me. It lies at Deptford right now.’

Malinferno pondered this exciting news for a moment before anxiously questioning Doll further.

‘What did Bankes demand of you for this favour?’

Doll hugged Joe gleefully, causing the chair almost to collapse beneath her onslaught.

‘Why, it’s nothing like that, Joe. William Bankes is, as Jed Lawless puts it, a backgammon player.’

‘Why should I care about his gambling propensities?’

Doll guffawed. ‘No, you sweet innocent. In the business,’ Doll always used this expression to mean her former trade of doxy, ‘that means he likes to enter through the back passage.’

Malinferno gasped, never comfortable with Doll’s relapses into crudity.

‘You mean he frequents molly-houses?’

‘Yes, Joe. He likes to dress as a woman, and is more likely to be interested in Morton Stanley than me.’

Even though Malinferno had been reassured by Doll’s innocent explanations of her various beaux, he still managed somehow to be at the Royal Coburg for the next few days. But the endless repetition of the short religious scenes from The Play of Adam began to pall. Even the topical references to the Queen’s love life, and the meetings between the King and Pergami in the guise of Cain and Abel – meetings that had never happened in real life – failed to stimulate his interest. And Mossop was ever prone to changing his mind about the location of the actors onstage. He prowled around the auditorium like a shaggy-maned lion, examining the stage from all angles.

‘It is to observe all the sight-lines, do you see?’ he explained when Augustus Bromhead taxed him on his restlessness. The antiquarian nodded wisely, though he had not understood a word, and was still perplexed by Mossop’s actions. Just as he was about to ask for clarification, the manager broke away. He rushed down to the front of the stage, and berated the stagehands. They had dragged a large hip-bath on the stage, and had clearly not located it in the correct position.

‘No, no, no, Jed. Can you not see the cross I chalked on the stage? The bath must be there. Dead centre.’

Jed Lawless grumbled under his breath, and took the reprimand out on his two assistants. He cuffed the ear of the nearest youth, a spotty-faced lad with wire-rimmed glasses hooked over his protruding ears.

‘Tom, you stupid idiot, can’t you see the mark?’

Tom clearly couldn’t, and blushed. The other boy grinned and pushed the bath in place.

Malinferno leaned across the seats to where Bromhead was sitting, and whispered in his ear, ‘Isn’t this supposed to be the Garden of Eden? Where does a bath come into it?’

Bromhead shrugged wearily. He had tried to persuade Mossop not to use the pantomime backcloth for the scene, but had withdrawn his objection when asked for some more money for a new backcloth. Now, Mossop had inserted a bath into the scene. He began to explain to his friend.

‘Will is taken by Theodore Lane’s cartoon showing Queen Caroline and Pergami frolicking in a bath together. He is determined to reproduce it in the play, and insists “The Fall of Man” is the best place. God knows how he plans to show Adam and Eve in all their nakedness.’

Malinferno had a good idea how from what Doll had told him, and his fears were realised immediately. Doll and Stanley emerged from the darkness of the wings in their attire for this scene. The handsome Stanley was stripped to the waist, showing off a hairy chest and a tight waist. His nether garment was no more than a tight pair of breeches that did little to obscure his well-endowed manhood. Malinferno thought he heard an indrawn breath from behind him where William Bankes sat. This was followed by a long-drawn-out expression of admiration in French from Quatremain, who sat next to Bankes. Of course, the Frenchman’s salute was not for Stanley, but for Doll. She was clad in nothing more than a thin muslin shift, which did nothing to hide her manifest charms. Especially when the candlelight shone on her.

Stanley led Doll over to the bath, and held her hand as she stepped into it.

Mossop then called out to Stanley, ‘Morton, kneel behind the bath. It will mask your lower half.’

The actor did so, and the rolled edge of the hip-bath all but obscured his breeches. He looked naked. Stanley flicked some imaginary water at Doll, just as in the cartoon, and they recited their lines, Stanley first.

‘“Ah, Eve, you are to blame;

To this you enticed me -

My body gives me shame;

For I am naked, it seems to me.”’

Then it was Doll’s turn as Eve.

‘“Alas! Oh, Adam, so am I!”’

That was as far as she got, for she burst into a fit of the giggles, and covered her breasts with her hands. Mossop rushed down to the front of the stage.

‘Eve! Doll, what is the matter?’

Doll could not stop her laughter, merely pointing into the wings. Everyone turned to see what had amused her. The hot faces of the two young stagehands, formerly agog at Doll’s nakedness, suddenly disappeared into the darkness.

That interlude proved the highlight of a long and arduous day’s rehearsal. When the only short break they did have arrived, Doll was steered to one side by Étienne Quatremain, and Malinferno was left to talk to William Bankes. It could have been very enlightening for Malinferno, as he knew Bankes too was a student of hieroglyphics, but the man seemed distracted by Morton Stanley’s deliberate avoidance of him. The actor first complained to Mossop about some minor matter, then deliberately joined Quatremain and Doll rather than talk to Bankes or Malinferno. Bankes was obviously put out, and all he did in response to Malinferno’s questions about the obelisk he had brought back from Egypt was wave a hand and sigh. Malinferno was actually glad when the rehearsal began again in earnest.

Soon, only Doll, Morton, Perceval and Harry were left onstage, and the auditorium was empty but for Malinferno. All the other onlookers, including Bankes, Bromhead and Quatremain had long since gone, driven out by the tedium of actors repeating the same scenes and words over and over again. Mossop had been particularly irritated by Morton Stanley, who seemed unable to remember his words from one run-through to the next. At one point Mossop stalked towards Malinferno cursing under his breath, and making his feelings clear.

‘I would get rid of him if I could. In fact I would murder him, if only I had a replacement.’

But he concealed his annoyance, and patiently called out to the actors to begin again.

Malinferno eventually gave up too, and returned to Creechurch Lane, where he sat down on one of the creaky chairs and awaited Doll’s return. When evening drew on, he sent out for chops and gravy, which a skinny boy delivered on a tray almost as big as he was. But there was no sign of Doll, and Malinferno did not feel like eating alone. Both meals eventually lay cold and congealed on their respective plates. He looked to pass the time until Doll’s return with some more research into hieroglyphs, but was unable to find his notebook. He assumed Doll had misplaced it, as it was she who had been scribbling in it the previous evening. He remembered because she had been excited and had wanted to show him something, but he had been too sulky. He wished he had let her reveal her secret now.

When she finally came in, and flopped on the other chair, much to its creaky consternation, he taxed her with the missing notebook. She flapped a hand wearily.

‘Lawks, Joe, I don’t know where it is. My brain is all a muddle of “move stage right” and “avoid masking the other actor”. Why can’t they use plain English in the theatre?’

Malinferno knew he was being a little hard on her, and knew why too. He was resentful how Doll had become the centre of attention lately, on stage and over the cracking of the hieroglyphic code. But that didn’t stop him chiding her.

‘You had the book last. Where did you put it?’

Doll sighed, knowing that, when Joe was in this sort of mood, he would not give up. She got up and crossed the room.

‘I hid it behind the sherry bottle. I put it there for safety. That sherry-wine is so awful no one would go near it.’

She groped behind the dark brown bottle in question.

‘It’s not there.’

Malinferno groaned. ‘I know it’s not there. That was the first place I looked. It is my hidy-hole too, after all.’

Doll’s face lost the grey weariness that had spoiled her looks when she entered the room. She was now concerned, and peered sharply at the shelf where the bottle stood.

‘The bottle’s been moved. Look, you can see its original sticky ring on the shelf. The bottle is not where it was before. And I had an idea about the bird symbol I wanted to share with you.’ She looked around the room. ‘The papyrus sheets have been disturbed too. I left them stacked up at the back of the table. The one with the cartouche I copied into the notebook was on the top.’ She shuffled through the crackling sheets. ‘It’s gone. The one with the cartouche is gone.’

Malinferno held his head in his hands.

‘All my notes… and yours… gone. We shall have to start again.’ He looked up at his worried companion. ‘What was the idea you had that you wanted to tell me last night?’

‘Oh, yes. The bird symbol. I think Young was wrong, and if you substituted an “a” for the “ke”, you had-’

Suddenly, Doll held a finger to her lips. Joe looked at her quizzically, and she pointed at the door to their rooms.

‘The stairs creaked. There is someone out there,’ she whispered in his ear.

Malinferno tiptoed to the door, and with a glance at Doll, flung it open.

‘Oh, sir, sorry, is your meal finished. I’ve come to fetch the plates.’

It was the chop-house boy, come back with his vast tray, which he now held like a shield. Doll laughed, and ushered him in.

‘The meal, I am afraid, is uneaten. But you can take it away.’ She scanned his skinny frame. ‘Do you think you could find someone who could eat it up, all cold and congealed as it is?’

The boy’s eyes widened at the feast on offer, and nodded eagerly. Once he had cleared all the crockery and left the room, Malinferno turned the key in the lock of the living room door. It was too late, but he knew he would feel safer with no possibility of further intrusions. He still wanted to know Doll’s theory, though, and followed her to the bedroom. But she was already snoring by the time he entered.

The month end had come, and with August arrived, there were only three more days to go before curtain up on The Play of Adam. Rehearsals at the Royal Coburg Theatre were taking on a very serious mood. It was Friday, and the hangers-on were no longer in attendance. Even Malinferno had avoided going, but then he had other concerns. He was trying to resurrect his and Doll’s notes on the papyrus documents, especially the one with the cartouche on it that Doll had almost deciphered. He wracked his brains to recall the sequence of letters she had noted down. Was it ‘-OLT I M KE-KE’? That didn’t look right, but the letters were borrowed from the ones assumed to spell out Ptolemy. He scribbled something else down – ‘-OLE I P KE-KE’. Yes, that was it. It didn’t make sense, but then she had wanted to substitute another letter for the final two. The trouble was, he couldn’t recall what the letter was. He began to retrace his steps through other papyri, searching for other cartouches – those little clusters of hieroglyphs that were supposed to be names from the past. He reached for a damp cloth to cool his throbbing head.

One of the young stagehands hadn’t bothered turning up to the rehearsal, and Jed Lawless had sent a message to the theatre saying that he himself was sick. Will Mossop assumed it was a hangover. Lawless drank too much gin, and he had a mind to fire him again. The trouble was, Lawless knew the ropes inside out at the Royal Coburg – literally. The ropes and pulleys that raised and lowered the backcloths and the counterweighted ropes used to cause actors to seem to fly were Lawless’s private domain. No one knew them better, and besides, he was the best stage manager this side of the river. Mossop was aware that firing him would necessitate re-hiring him the following day. And that would be an exercise in humiliation for Will that he did not wish to undertake.

The rehearsal had started without Jed, and the boy with the glasses was just about coping on his own. But the next scene was ‘The Fall of Man’, and required the Garden of Eden backcloth and the hip bath. The boy scurried on stage and pushed the heavy bath roughly into position. Doll, in her thin muslin gown, stepped into it, and Morton Stanley kneeled behind it. There was a pause while everyone waited for the Garden of Eden to descend. It didn’t, and Mossop called out to the boy to set the correct backcloth. His head popped out from the wrong side of the stage, his face red, and his glasses askew. Then he rushed across stage into the opposite wing-space where all the ropes were cleated up. There was a short pause. Then a squeal of pain rang out from the wings, quickly followed by a strange whirring sound, fast and high-pitched. Doll was half-aware of something large descending from above, and she instinctively closed her eyes and flinched, throwing her arms over her head. There followed a huge thump, and the stage under the bath shook as though from an earthquake. A snake-like form draped itself suddenly over Doll’s upraised arms, and she screamed, struggling to cast it off as it wrapped itself around her. When her scream stopped, a deathly silence hung over the theatre for a long moment.

She opened her eyes to see a cloud of dust rising around her. She coughed, choking on it, and fought the snake that had entangled her. It turned out it was merely a rope, and she pushed it off her, grasping the side of the bath. Beside the bath was the humped form of a filled sack, the sort of sack used as a counterweight to a human body in the flying device. This time, though, an actor was not at the other end of the rope. It now lay on the floor, where Doll had cast it. A body, however, did lie underneath the heavy, sand-filled sack that had plummeted from the heavens. It was the body of Morton Stanley and, judging by the blood that was seeping from under the sack and being absorbed by some of the sand that burst from it, the actor was dead.

Doll heard a whimpering noise coming from the wings. She clambered out of the bath, and ran across the stage. Everyone else seemed stunned into immobility by the catastrophe. In the darkness, she could just make out a small shape – someone kneeling in front of the morass of ropes leading down to the cleats on the wall. It was the bespectacled boy – Doll was ashamed she didn’t even know his name – and he twisted round, holding out his hands to her. She could see that the skin on his palms was red and torn.

‘The rope just ran through my hands, lady,’ he blubbered. ‘It should not have been that heavy. It was only the back-cloth.’ He looked up at her with reddened eyes. ‘What happened?’

Doll grimaced, thinking the poor boy had made a mistake. He had been hurried into doing a job he knew nothing about, and had dropped the counterweight.

‘It was the wrong rope, lad.’

This was Will Mossop’s voice coming from the stage. It shook with anger and emotion. The boy looked up at Doll, ashen-faced.

‘It wasn’t, lady. Look. The cleats are all marked.’ He pointed at the clear, hand-painted black letters on the cleat that no longer had a rope attached. The deadly rope. Doll read the letters: ‘US3.’

‘Upstage backcloth number three,’ the boy explained.

Mossop by now was in the wings too. He strode over to the cleats, and yanked on the rope secured round the next cleat to US3. Following the angle of the rope as it soared into the flies, both Mossop and Doll could see the Garden of Eden backcloth shuddering in response to his tug on its rope. Mossop pointed at the cleat the backcloth was on.

‘FL1. Fly one. The ropes have got crossed over. This is Jed Lawless’s fault.’

Doll peered back onto the stage, where a small knot of actors stood around the heavy sack.

‘Is Morton…?’

Mossop nodded.

‘Dead for sure. I shall have to call for the magistrate, but it is surely nothing more than a tragic accident.’

Doll was about to offer a different opinion, but saw the far-off look in Will’s eyes. She knew he was already thinking of the implications for the play. She took his arm and drew him to one side, casting a glance at the whimpering boy.

‘Will, look after the boy.’

Mossop shook his head, as though trying to clear his thoughts.

‘What? Oh, Tom, you mean? Yes, I will get a doctor to put some salve on his hands. He will be fine.’ He looked at his disconsolate band of actors onstage, then at Doll.

‘You had all better wait for the magistrate, and when he is finished, you can all go home. I will send a message round telling what I propose to do when I know myself.’

Doll could see her chance at stardom slipping away. But for now there were other matters to deal with, and she didn’t propose to be held up by some interfering magistrate. She threw a cloak over her diaphanous shift, slipped out the stage door of the theatre, and called a cab.

‘Morton Stanley has been murdered?’

Malinferno had reacted in shock at Doll’s pronouncement. Bromhead’s dire prediction was still uppermost in his mind, and now it seemed the warning had not been for nothing. He was pacing the landing that separated their two rooms, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t so. He called out to Doll, who was changing into something more decent in the bedroom.

‘Couldn’t it have been an accident? If the kid released the wrong rope, then it was just unlucky that Stanley was underneath the sack of sand.’

Doll stepped out of the bedroom, and would have spoken, but she noticed that their landlady, Mrs Stanhope, was hovering at the bottom of the staircase all agog, so she steered Joe back into their living room. She closed the door, and leaned against it. Her bosom, now clad in more demure white cotton, heaved.

‘It was no accident. The boy knew what he was doing, and chose what should have been the correct rope.’

Malinferno frowned, still unconvinced.

‘He wore spectacles, didn’t he? That may have caused his confusion.’

‘No. He chose the correct cleat. But the ropes had been switched, and I think it was done deliberately.’

‘Who would have cause to murder Morton Stanley?’

Doll barked out a laugh. ‘Nearly everyone who had been in the theatre the previous day. Percy Tristram and Morton have been at each other’s throats for years, apparently. Percy used to get the leads, but now he’s older and fatter, Morton has replaced him. He gets Morton’s goat by calling him Stan. It seems that when he started out on the boards, Morton Stanley was plain Stan Morton. When his star began to wax, he suddenly emerged as Morton Stanley. Percy doesn’t let him forget the old days.’

Malinferno held up a cautionary finger at this point. ‘Yes, but if they have been old enemies, why kill him now, and so openly, too?’

Doll sighed. ‘The very same thought had occurred to me. And I can’t give you an explanation. But it had to be someone theatrical, who knew about all the ropes and pulleys.’

‘Will Mossop must know.’

‘What makes you think Will murdered Morton?’

Malinferno recalled the rehearsal he had attended when Stanley’s ineptitude had driven Mossop to distraction.

‘He actually said to me something about wanting to get rid of him if he could. I can recall his very words. He said, “In fact I would murder him, if only I had a replacement.”’

Doll shook her head. ‘Nah. That’s just theatre-speak. They all go to excess like that.’

Malinferno was not so certain.

‘We should not rule him out nevertheless. Who else is there with a motive?’

Doll grimaced, thinking of the exchange between Morton and the chief stagehand.

‘The obvious suspect has to be Jed Lawless.’

She told Malinferno of the incident in the wings when Morton threatened to kill Lawless, grabbing the club-footed stagehand by the scruff of his neck.

‘It was when Jed accused him of being a player of backgammon in a rather loud voice. Morton threatened him with violence, and Will had to separate them. They cooled down, but I heard more than I was supposed to when Jed stalked off. He made a threat, spoken in a whisper.’

‘What was it?’

‘“Kill me, Molly? Not before I have killed you first.”’

This time, she didn’t have to explain to Joe that ‘molly’ was a derogatory name for a man who liked to dress as a woman. The euphemism ‘playing backgammon’ had been sufficient education for him.

‘But doesn’t the same apply to Lawless as to Will Mossop? Could that not just have been all wind and bluster?’

‘Not the way he said it.’

Malinferno gathered up his garrick greatcoat, and tossed her cloak at Doll.

‘Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the theatre, of course. I need to see the scene of the crime.’

Doll groaned, and was about to complain that the last place she wanted to go right now was the Royal Coburg. In fact, she wanted to say that she was heartily sick of the place, but Joe was already halfway down the staircase.

She called after him. ‘Go to the end of the lane, and find a Tilbury. I’m not walking there this late at night.’

The little Tilbury cab came to a halt outside the imposing front of the theatre. A mist had risen from the river, and it drifted down the Waterloo Road, turning the façade of the Royal Coburg into something from a Mary Shelley novel. Malinferno paid the cabby, and watched as the Tilbury disappeared back over the river. Despite his heavy coat, he shivered as the cab was swallowed in the swirling fog. Doll grabbed his arm.

‘Come on. It’s bleeding cold out here. Job will have a nip of something in his cubbyhole.’

‘Job?’

Doll dragged him down a dark side street that ran between Waterloo Road and Webber Street.

‘Job is the stage-door man. He always has some gin tucked away somewhere.’ She grinned. ‘I call it his little comforter.’

Malinferno groaned at the pun, but allowed himself to be led to a dingy door set deep in the recesses of the grimy brick wall at the rear of the theatre. Doll pushed it open, and it creaked theatrically.

‘Job? It’s only me, Doll Pocket. Are you there?’

There was no reply, and the little office with its window on the corridor that led backstage was empty. Doll frowned.

‘That’s odd. He should be here. He practically lives in that office.’

Malinferno glanced nervously over his shoulder. There was something eerie about an empty theatre, devoid of actors and the noise and bustle of performance.

‘Shouldn’t we just go?’

Doll laughed. ‘Nah. You wanted to see where Morton snuffed it, and see it you will. It’s only along here.’

She led the way confidently down the darkened corridor, and Malinferno followed, groping along the wall uncertainly. At the end of the corridor, which he presumed led onto the stage, there was a glimmer of light. The yellowish glow of candles. As they got closer, Doll suddenly stopped. Malinferno came up behind her.

‘What is it, Doll?’ he whispered into her ear.

‘There’s someone on the stage, and he has candles lit.’ She looked around the wings. ‘Where the hell is Job when you want him?’

Malinferno peered over Doll’s shoulder.

‘Could that be him lying in the middle of the stage?’

Doll turned her gaze where Joe had indicated, and gasped. The body of an elderly, unshaven man lay face up right where the sack had plummeted down onto Morton Stanley. She turned to Joe, and was about to speak, when he held a finger up to her lips. He pointed towards the wings on the other side of the stage. Jed Lawless limped out of the darkness, his club foot clomping on the boards. He bent over the body of the stage-door man, and peered at his face. Doll gasped involuntarily.

‘Poor Job, what’s Jed gone and done to him?’

‘It’s easy to find out,’ Malinferno responded decisively. ‘He can’t run far with his gammy leg.’

He rushed out of the wings towards the murderer. His approach surprised Jed, who fell back from the body. But just before Malinferno could grab him, the body reared up.

‘What the hell…?’

Malinferno was stunned, and stared at Job, who appeared to have come back from the dead. It was Jed who broke the deadlock.

‘What you doing here? And who are you, anyway?’

Doll emerged from the wings to settle the impasse.

‘Jed, this is Mr Malinferno. He has been to see the rehearsals, don’t you recall?’

Jed waved a dismissive hand. ‘Ahhh. I don’t have time to look out beyond the proscenium arch. I’m too busy backstage.’

Malinferno couldn’t help himself, and threw out an accusation: ‘Setting up traps to kill innocent actors?’

Lawless gaped at Malinferno, and then he barked out a derisive laugh. ‘You don’t think I did for him, do you?’

Doll added her voice to Malinferno’s. ‘You did say you would kill him before he killed you.’

The diminutive stage-hand frowned. ‘Did I? When?’

‘When you cast that slur on his masculinity, Jed.’

‘Oh, that. You mean when I called him a backgammon player and a molly.’ Lawless was unperturbed. ‘That was just talk. But if you think his murder has to do with his private proclivities, you should look at that Bankes fellow. Him what put up all that money, and got Stanley the part.’

It was Malinferno’s turn to frown.

‘William Bankes, the MP? What has he to do with Morton Stanley?’

‘I don’t know if he is a Member of Parliament or not. What I do know is that him and the molly-man was close friends.’ He winked. ‘Very close friends, if you take my meaning.’

Malinferno suddenly recalled the frosty atmosphere at an earlier rehearsal between Bankes and Stanley. The actor had deliberately snubbed Bankes. Was that the start of a row that had led to murder?

Lawless turned his back and proffered a hand to Job, who was still on the floor. The old man was having difficulty getting back to his feet, though apparently not having been murdered at all. When Doll asked what they were up to, Jed explained that he wanted to find out what had been done with the counterweight and the fatal rope. Job had been lying where Stanley had been in order to see up into the flies. The old boy turned to Lawless, and pointed upwards as if to God.

‘You were right, Jed, the pulleys have been moved.’

Jed snapped his fingers. ‘I knew it. And the counterweight reversed.’

Malinferno was puzzled. ‘Reversed?’

Lawless snorted at Malinferno’s ignorance of matters theatrical. ‘The sack should have been in the wings, and the other end hooked onto the actor, who would have been onstage. That’s how the flying rig works. We manipulate the weight in the wings and make the actor rise or descend onstage. The weight should never have been above the stage, so someone deliberately put it there, if you ask me.’

Job pointed at the chalked cross drawn on the stage.

‘Right above where Stanley was due to hit his mark.’

Doll stared at the scuffed mark, and felt a chill run down her spine. She clutched at Joe’s arm.

‘Come on, Joe. We won’t get any further standing here.’

‘But-’ Malinferno wanted to share his suspicions of William Bankes, but Doll was determined to go.

‘Come on!’

She dragged the puzzled Malinferno off the stage, leaving Jed Lawless to sort out his tangled web of ropes and pulleys. As they retraced their steps along the dark corridor leading to the stage door, Malinferno asked her what the hurry was, bursting with his new idea.

‘We were just getting somewhere there. Just imagine if it was a…’ He sought the right word. ‘… a lover’s tiff between Bankes and Stanley. Or if Stanley was about to let society know of Bankes’s leanings, it could have destroyed his reputation. That makes it a very good reason for Bankes murdering Stanley.’

Doll remained silent until they had escaped the gloomy confines of the backstage area of the Royal Coburg. But once they were out again in the street, she took a deep breath, and the words tumbled out of her mouth.

‘You’re exactly right, Joe. It makes a good reason for murdering Morton. But the problem is that we aren’t looking for someone who set out to kill Morton.’

Malinferno stared at Doll, not comprehending her meaning. ‘We aren’t? Why not?’

‘Because Morton Stanley wasn’t the intended victim.’

She pointed over her shoulder at the large and looming edifice that was the Royal Coburg, still shrouded eerily in mist. Malinferno was completely lost.

‘Then who was?’

Doll Pocket pulled a grim face. ‘Me.’

Doll promised to tell Malinferno all if he first bought her a meal.

‘The truth has made me feel famished.’

Now, they sat in the anonymous chop-house in Unicorn Passage, just off Tooley Street, where Malinferno had first become acquainted with Bromhead’s copy of The Play of Adam. He was beginning to feel that the warning written at the end of ‘Cain and Abel’ had some meaning to it after all. And that it was his fault that Doll’s life had been placed in jeopardy. It was he who had suggested that she should audition for a part in the play. As they ate, he confessed to Doll that the play was cursed, but that he’d only learned this much later. He wanted to know why she thought the deadly trap had been set for her. But Doll refused to enlighten Joe until she had finished the food placed before her. Finally, she wiped the brown gravy from her lips with a napkin, and dabbed the splash that had marred the pristine white of the front of her gown.

‘I hope that doesn’t stain. I paid a lot of money for this gown.’

Through gritted teeth, Malinferno begged Doll to explain why she thought she had been the target of the heavy bag of sand.

‘It was when Job pointed at the chalk cross marked on the stage.’

‘Yes. He said it was Morton Stanley’s mark. You yourself told me he couldn’t remember all his positions. Mossop must have put it there to make sure he was in the right place.’

Doll smiled fleetingly.

‘Yes, we thespians call it hitting your mark.’

‘And the sandbag certainly hit Morton’s mark. With deadly results.’

Doll spat on her napkin, and worried at the gravy stain that marred the material over her cleavage.

‘But that is the whole point. It wasn’t a mark placed there for Morton to hit. It was there to show young Tom where to put the bath.’

‘Tom, the stagehand?’

‘Yes.’

Doll watched as understanding blossomed in Joe’s eyes.

‘The bath in which you were to sit. Then if Tom hadn’t missed the mark in his haste, you would have been right under the counterweight.’

Doll nodded, and Joe squeezed her hand.

‘You would have been crushed to death. Just as Morton was.’

‘Yes. So you see, we are looking for someone who wanted me dead, not Morton Stanley.’

‘But…’

Malinferno didn’t want to believe what Doll was telling him. He wanted another explanation for the falling sack that had taken Stanley’s life. Then he wouldn’t feel so guilty.

‘But, why would anyone at the theatre want to kill you? Unless Bankes was jealous of the attentions Morton was paying you.’

Doll gave up trying to remove the gravy stain, and patted Joe’s hand.

‘I think he would have known that Morton’s embraces onstage were all for show – a pretence for everyone else. But I believe that you are right to point the finger at William Bankes. Remember the other incident that occurred this week?’

Malinferno frowned, and then recalled what had vexed him so earlier.

‘The theft of my notebook with all the workings you and I had made on hieroglyphs?’

‘Yes. The murder took place after that notebook was taken, so perhaps something in it drove the killer to set the trap up at the theatre.’

‘But very few people were there when Stanley was killed, apart from the actors and Will Mossop. Do you think it was one of them?’

‘No. The beauty of the trap was that someone else would spring it unwittingly. It could easily have been Jed Lawless, and maybe that was what the murderer intended. To shift the blame on to Jed. As it turned out, Jed was ill and poor young Tom released the rope that was supposed to lower the Garden of Eden backcloth. But it was the rope that now held the counterweight of the flying rig. With the bath in place and me sitting in it…’

Doll brought her hand down on the table with a crash, and their cutlery rattled. A few heads in the chop-house turned to look at them. But Doll just stared back brazenly, and the onlookers’ eyes fell back to their own meals.

She leaned towards Joe, and hissed in his ear, ‘I’d’ve been squashed as flat as a pancake.’ She looked around for the waiter. ‘And talking of food, do you think we could get some plum pudding? This evading death by a whisker makes me feel starved.’

Only when the puddings were laid before them would Doll continue with her diatribe.

‘No, I reckon it’s what I wrote in your notebook that almost did for me.’

‘And you think Bankes was responsible?’

Doll inclined her head. ‘Something like that.’

She shovelled a spoonful of plum pudding in her mouth, and winked at Joe. He felt ill, pushed his bowl aside, and pursued the line of thinking.

‘He is, after all, an Egyptian scholar himself. If he saw that you had cracked the code of the hieroglyphs, he had every reason to kill you and claim the breakthrough for himself.’

Doll waved her spoon in the air as if about to say something, but her mouth was still full of sweet pudding. So Malinferno pressed on.

‘I think we should follow up your suspicions, Doll. We know that he has shipped an obelisk to London from Philae on the ship Dispatch. And that it has just landed. He told you so. The obelisk lies on the quay at Deptford, and it is likely Bankes will be there to view his prize. We should confront him there immediately. And even if he’s not there, we may at least learn something of his plans.’

Malinferno pulled on his garrick, and was almost out the door before Doll could spoon the last of her pudding into her mouth. She grabbed her hooded cloak and followed him. Once in Tooley Street, they searched in vain for a cab of any sort. The night was cold and it began to drizzle, causing Doll to doubt the urgency of their mission. But Malinferno was not to be put off.

‘Come on, Doll, it’s not far from here. We can walk it.’

He strode off towards Deptford, and Doll sighed, wrapping her cloak close around her. Her satin slippers were not the most appropriate footwear for the weather, and soon her feet were soaked and frozen. The rain began to come down more heavily, and soon a rising wind was driving it in their faces. But finally the dreary sight of the Royal Dockyards came into view. Ten years ago, this had been a bustling area where ships bound for the Napoleonic Wars were built. Now, with the threat from the continent over, and victualling the only use for the dockyards, it was a run down and almost deserted place. The stench of rotting food drifted on the wind along with the rain, and any night watchman worth his salt would be snug and warm out of sight. Malinferno led the way to the main wharf where he guessed the Dispatch was moored up. The obelisk it had brought back from Egypt had to be so big that it would be hard to miss. Even in the gloom of a dreary London night.

Suddenly the persistent drizzle turned to a downpour. The quay was inky black, and merged with the sky as the sullen rain clouds scudded over. Malinferno stumbled on a loose coil of ropes, losing his footing. Doll grabbed his arm and he regained his balance. It was so dark, he could barely make out the location of the quayside, but thought he saw the outline of masts and rigging. Holding on to Doll’s arm tightly, he groped his way towards the ship. A long, dark shape, lying on its side, loomed out of the pelting rain, blocking their way to the Dispatch. Malinferno could see that it was fully six foot high and square, but it tapered away evenly to their left. He touched its surface, and he could feel carvings all along its length. It was the Philae obelisk, lying where it had been offloaded onto the quay. Fascinated, he took a step along it, but Doll held his arm, stopping him.

‘Listen,’ she hissed under her breath, and held a cupped hand to her ear.

He did so, and discerned a sound like someone chipping at the stone. It was coming from the other side of the obelisk. Malinferno indicated that he would go to the left, and that Doll should go to the right around the base of the prostrate pillar.

‘Just position yourself at the end,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘but don’t show yourself until I have had time to get close to Bankes.’

She would have asked how Joe knew it was William Bankes who was chipping away at the obelisk, but he disappeared into the darkness before she had a chance. She shrugged, and pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders. Somehow the rain was penetrating her cloak, and a cold dribble was running down her neck. She tiptoed towards the end of the mighty monument, stroking her fingers along the cold stone, admiring the hieroglyphs that disturbed its surface. She was almost stopped in her tracks by a familiar cartouche, but realised that if she examined it she would not be in place to trap whoever it was on the other side of the obelisk. She pressed on. The base of the stone was smoothly cut, and as she rounded it she could now see the ship at its mooring and the grey surface of the Thames beyond. The water was like a wide, undulating grey ribbon caught between the darkness of the sky and the quayside. Raindrops pockmarked its otherwise dark and mysterious surface. She peered cautiously around the end of the stone, knowing that Joe would not yet be in place.

Despite the gloom, she could make out a tall elegant figure, shrouded in a heavy coat similar to Joe’s garrick. He was apparently poking and prodding with one hand at the surface of the obelisk. He held a cane in his other hand, which was pressed against the surface of the obelisk for balance.

As Doll observed him, he looked nervously down the length of the obelisk towards where Joe would emerge. He must have heard something. She decided to act before he got worried and ran for it. She stepped out from the base of the stone and strode towards the figure.

‘Hello, Étienne. What have you found? Cleopatra’s cartouche?’

The Frenchman spun round, astonished at Doll’s presence.

‘Cleopatra? What do you mean?’

‘It was you, wasn’t it? Who stole Joe’s notebook with my translation of the cartouche in it. You could tell from the different handwriting that it was my discovery, not Joe’s. And that my experimental replacement of the two “ke”s at the end of the word with “a”s gave me most of a familiar name. Cleopatra. That is why you decided to murder me at the Royal Coburg. You could not bear the thought that a mere Englishwoman would beat you to the great prize of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unfortunately for you, and Morton Stanley, the bath I was in was misplaced. So your heavyweight trap fell on the wrong person. You even absented yourself from the theatre at the moment the apparent accident was to take place so as not to be suspected of foul play.’

Quatremain sneered, recovering his sang-froid.

‘Yes, I invited myself to Bankes’s celebration of the arrival of the obelisk to these shores.’ He patted the prostrate stone. ‘So neither of us was at the theatre when the… accident happened.’

He took a step away from the obelisk, and closer to the quayside.

‘No one could accuse either of us of dropping the counterweight on you. And neither of us would be suspected of knowing enough of backstage matters to set the trap, if it was seen as something more than a mere accident.’

‘Except you made the mistake of telling me that your uncle was once the manager of the Comédie Française in Paris.’

Quatremain poked with his cane at the gaps in the stone slabs of the quay. His right hand was behind his back.

‘Ah. I had thought that you would not remember me saying that. Now I have two reasons to kill you.’

‘Before you do, do tell me what you were doing to the obelisk.’

‘I was trying to obliterate the Cleopatra cartouche so that neither you nor Bankes would see it and get to decipher hieroglyphs before I did. Now I must use this hammer for another purpose.’

He brought his hand from behind his back, and swung the hammer he held in it high in the air. But before he could bring it down, Malinferno, who had been sneaking up behind Quatremain as Doll diverted his attention, grabbed at his arm. However, the Frenchman must have seen the look in Doll’s eyes, betraying her accomplice’s presence to him. He twisted round at the last moment, and Malinferno missed Quatremain’s upraised arm. Instead he caught his shoulder, and the Frenchman stumbled sideways. He dropped the hammer, and reached out to break his fall. But there was nothing behind him but air. He teetered on the brink of the quay, and his elegant shoes slipped on the wet, rainy surface. The edge of the dock was curved and did not help him regain his balance. For a long moment he hung in the air. Then he moaned and, still clutching his cane, fell into the waters below.

Cautiously, both Joe and Doll stepped to the edge of the quay, and peered into the inky Thames. The tide was fast flowing out to sea, and Quatremain had already disappeared into the river’s depths. Malinferno ran up and down the quayside for a while, but could see nothing of the Frenchman.

Then Doll cried out, ‘Look!’

She pointed downstream at the middle of the torrent. Malinferno gazed hopelessly into the teeming rain, the gap between the downpour and the river hardly discernible. Then he spotted what Doll had seen. An elegantly clad arm was raised above the waves holding on to a silver-topped cane. To Malinferno, it resembled the outstretched arm of the Lady of the Lake holding Excalibur. But then, he had been embroiled in several Arthurian escapades lately, and his fevered fancy was aroused. As they both watched, the arm slid slowly beneath the waters, still clutching the cane.

Malinferno and Doll Pocket met Augustus Bromhead in the eerily silent Royal Coburg Theatre the following day. Will Mossop was supposed to be present, but had left a note with Job, the stage-door man. It apologised for his absence due to ‘pressing matters’. Bromhead sighed.

‘He means he is busy finding a replacement for The Play of Adam, which has been cancelled.’

Doll joined her sigh to Bromhead’s as she scuffed at the chalk cross on the stage that was to mark the place of her death.

‘I suppose that, after losing the leading man, today’s news was the final straw for the production.’

Everyone knew to what she was referring. Since the farce of the King’s coronation, and her failure even to gain access to the Abbey, Queen Caroline had taken to her bed. She complained of persistent stomach pains, for which she took copious amounts of milk of magnesia laced with laudanum. Late on the previous night, when Joe and Doll were struggling with Étienne Quatremain in Deptford Docks, Caroline had given up her struggle to live. Her death had put an end to Mossop’s topical version of Augustus’ rediscovered play. No one was in the mood to satirise a dead queen. Actually, Doll was not too disappointed.

‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be an actress, Joe. It’s too much like hard work.’

Bromhead also expressed some relief at the demise of the project.

‘My heart ceased to be in the production ever since Mossop changed it into a modern satire, I must say. And as for the curse of “Cain and Abel”, it has convinced me to lock the manuscript and the old book in a box well away from prying eyes. As I have no children, I have bequeathed all my books to the boy of my second cousin. Thackeray by name. Young Will is a bit of a ne’er-do-well and I don’t suppose he will amount to much, or even read any of my collection. Though he may pass it on to a library, if he has any sense. Personally, I hope The Play of Adam is never found again, or if it is, that no one tries to revive it. The first murder in history should be the only one associated with this cursed play.’