When the first two days passed with no word from Jack, Tory supposed it was simply because he had nothing to report. Those were, after all, the days he had to while away before his first performance at Drury Lane, assuming his coach had arrived on schedule and without mishap, and he might not dare to put pen to paper for fear all his misgivings would come pouring out. That's how she would feel, she knew. And as they had heard no report of a mail coach overturning en route to London — Alphonse went round to the Somerset Arms every day to inquire — she must at least content herself that Jack was safely arrived.
Still, a couple of brief lines to set her mind at ease would mean so much. He need not compose a lengthy tome — that was her job, she reminded herself, as she idly slid the goose feather of her quill pen between the latter pages of her logbook, the still-empty pages she was rapidly filling up. She had kept busy enough in his absence, editing and rewriting play scenes for the company to perform without him — a pantomime without a Harlequin, a romance without a hero, a comedy of marriage without a groom, as she brooded to herself. Four days now, and not so much as a word from Jack.
What would it cost him to send her a note? His debut at Drury Lane had been two nights ago, and even if he'd not been able to post until the following evening, she ought to have received something from him by this morning. But she might as well be on the moon, for all she'd heard about it. Even if the news were bad, were all his worst fears realized on the London stage, would he not share it with her? They had always shared everything. How could he possibly think it would make any odds to her, if he was a success in London or not?
Anyway, that was all beside the point. He had promised to write her. Every day, he said. And Jack had never broken a promise to her. Not ever.
Tory sighed when she noticed the ink had completely dried on the nib of her pen, while she'd let her brooding get the better of her. She sat up straighter at the tiny end table she'd commandeered as a writing desk, here in the parlor of the two rooms she was now sharing with Jenny for the week Jack would be gone, and tossed her head as if to shake some sense into it. Jack would be fine, she assured herself.
And there it was, the worst of all her fears, as clear and black as the ink in the well on the table before her. Unlike Jack, she did not fear that he would fail; her worst fear was that he would succeed too well.
Pushing this shameful truth aside, Tory flipped the page back to the last one she'd been writing on, her script becoming ever smaller and more cramped. Her old logbook had been a welcome source of clean pages with paper so dear — the players often copied out their parts on the backs of out-of-date playbills — but her pages were coming to an end and she was desperate to conserve them.
It was odd how this innocuous-looking object, it's mahogany-colored Spanish leather binding cracked from salt and sea air and use, its pages stuffed with loose play notes, had become the symbol of her new profession. By now, nearly everyone in the company had seen it clutched in her hand, at least in passing. Still, Tory could not let herself forget the danger its early pages contained, so she rarely took it to the theatre any more, where it might be carelessly left unattended for a moment. She did all of her actual writing and editing in the privacy of her own lodgings.
Now she read through the new dialogue for the scene she was altering in The Lure of the Indies. In Jack's absence, she was paring down the role of the guardian for Mr. Warendale, to conserve the old fellow's energies for the second act, when all the gentlemen players were wanted onstage as pirates or sailors. She would never put Jack onstage as a pirate, of course, so he never appeared in the second act, but she'd written the character plenty of unnecessary speeches and banter before then, the kind at which Jack excelled. If only he were here.
And so she found herself sitting at the table, staring at nothing, resisting the urge to gnash her quill down to the nib, when Jenny sailed in, beaming.
"Oh, my dear, you are not still shut away in here! You are missing a glorious autumn day outside!"
Tory smiled, if somewhat wanly, in return; it was impossible to resist her formerly caustic friend in the throes of bliss — especially now that she herself felt so bereft.
"Duty calls, I'm afraid," she told Jenny. "I'm just finishing up The Indies so Kit and Flora and Mr. W can copy out their revised parts before play night."
"But Kit is just outside," said Jenny, coming back into the parlor from the bedroom with a wide-brimmed straw hat. "Don't rush on his account. He can learn new business in a heartbeat!"
The family that ran the lodging house were generally broad-minded about the players who formed a major portion of their custom, but they were also conscious of the proprieties concerning unescorted ladies under their roof. But they liked Kit, and understood that he was acting manager in Jack's absence, so he was allowed limited access in the daylight hours. Tory supposed they entertained the notion, as many did, that mischief could only be gotten up to in the dark.
"Had you an atom of human feeling," Kit sallied, from the open doorway, "you would put it off until nightfall, so we can all enjoy the rest of the day."
"We're taking a walk with Tom along the river before dinner," Jenny went on. "Come with us, Tory!"
Glancing at her logbook, Tory shook her head. "I'm afraid I'd be poor company today . . . "
Jenny came over to the table with an anxious rustling of her skirts. "Don't worry," she urged gently. "He's fine. He's just busy, is all."
Kit collected the mail every morning, so Tory supposed Jenny knew there had been no letter from Jack. Everybody knew.
"You're right, I know," Tory agreed. "It's just . . . " She tried to bite back the rest of her words, but Jenny's odd-colored eyes were so full of sympathetic concern, she could not stop herself blundering on. "I can't help but feel that it's happened at last. Jack has gone to his mistress."
"Oh surely not!" said Jenny. "Any other man, I might believe it. But never Jack."
"It's true.” Tory sighed. "The London stage. She spurned him once, long ago, and he abandoned her. But she's tormented him ever since, given him not a moment's peace, and now it's time for a reckoning."
"But he'll come back," Jenny insisted. "I know men."
"Aye, he has only to get the wanton hussy out of his system," Kit agreed, from the doorway.
"Perhaps." Tory nodded, trying to agree with them, struggling against the melancholy ready to steal in again round all her sensible defenses. "But what if she won't give him up so easily this time?"
The darkness was the worst part, the infernal, neverending darkness. Hours of it, probably days, Jack was sure of it, but there was no way of telling. The light — or lack of it — never altered where he was. Wherever he was.
The floor was cold and solid, stone, not wood, not earth. The walls were thick in this confined space, uninterrupted by so much as an arrow slit, let alone a window of any kind. He'd crept round the walls "seeing" with his fingers at least a dozen times by now. The door was solid too, hewn from thick wooden planks, with a little square covered with a grille of wire mesh in the upper third. Through this tiny opening, Jack occasionally caught a glimmer of ghostly luminescence, a lantern or a torch passing by in the distance, he thought, but man-made light, not the sun. Never the sun.
This time, Jack grabbed it with both hands, calling, "Who's out there? Can you hear me?"
He had to pour a deep draught of beer into his dry mouth, before calling again, "Why am I here? What is this place?"
"You'll find out soon enough," came the reply, a male voice Jack didn't recognize. "Plenty of time until then to consider your crimes," it went on, echoing down a hallway, before it and its owner vanished again into the nothingness outside.
It was quiet just now. He'd noticed there were periods of activity in this place, a hum of voices, laughter, occasional snatches of lively music, filtering down to him from what seemed like very far off. These were interspersed with lengthy spells of quiet, like now, when there didn't seem to be much going on, but without daylight, he couldn't guess which was day or night.
Jack sat on the length of straw ticking on the floor with which his tiny cell was furnished, trying to think. The bitter reek from a chamber pot in the far corner mingled with the trace odors of cider and hops that seemed to permeate the air. A cellar, Jack told himself firmly, to prevent his thoughts straying to the word "dungeon." That was how the idea of arrow slits had occurred to him; the castle fortress of some third-rate melodrama.
Melodrama. That triggered something in his brain. He'd been trying to piece together his last memories before this place, but found them alarmingly vague. What was the last thing he remembered? Riding on a cart, out in the countryside. Going to Bath. Yes, Bath, the White Hart Inn, he remembered now, the bustle of the place and the people. Someone had given him a drink.
Why was he in Bath?
Jack propped one elbow on his knee and put his head in his hand, closing his eyes out of habit to try to focus. Other, fleeting memories, far less substantial wafted through his brain. Climbing a staircase, he thought, someone else's arm under his shoulders. Descending stairs again, or being dragged. Why couldn't he remember?
And then a vivid memory swam before his inner eye: Tory, her dark eyes impudent and sparkling, her conspiratorial smile irresistible. "Enjoy it!"
London! He was going to London. He had a contract. They were all depending on him. What in hell was he doing here? Wherever "here" was.
Of course he'd expected he might fail in London, but this was the first he'd heard it was a criminal offense. But he recognized this feeble jest for exactly what it was, an attempt to avoid the very real possibility that he was in prison, and for a far more dire offense of which he was all too guilty.
Wherever he was, he prayed that Tory was far away, if their pirate past had caught up to him at last.
Top: Screen capture from the movie Mansfield Park
Above: Pirate bounty proclamation, 1792
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