A Christmas Homecoming - Anne Perry [29]
He smiled. “Not onstage. Bores don’t feel hurt, they just drive everyone else to drink. What are you getting at?”
“We don’t really care about Harker,” she explained. “We know he’s good, but we don’t care. And Van Helsing is a ‘know-it-all.’ We need him to defeat Dracula, and we believe he’s going to. In fact, I suppose we take it for granted. But Mina is good, really good—but vulnerable, too. She cares about other people. She’s brave but she has enough sense to be frightened as well, and later on when the holy wafer burns her, we know that Dracula has finally gotten to her. She is the one we need to care about, to see slowly pulled further and further down into the darkness, despite everything. I would mind terribly if anything happened to her, anything that Van Helsing couldn’t save her from.”
He sat up. “Would you?”
“Yes. Yes I would.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, gently and for a long time.
“Then we shall let them think Mina will not survive,” he said at last. “Thank you!”
allin attended the morning rehearsal the following day. Now he was quite open about his suggestions, and Alice was eager to adapt them. Douglas seemed less displeased, and Caroline noticed that when Lydia was not onstage playing the character of Lucy, they quite often stood together. They did so awkwardly at first, but then with increasing ease. They might have simply been commenting on the play and its progress—Caroline was not close enough to hear—but the unspoken communication between them told quite a different story. She had learned from Joshua the difference between text—the words on the page that actors spoke—and subtext—the emotional meaning that they conveyed and (if the acting was any good) that the audience understood. For Douglas and Lydia, the subtext was that they were increasingly drawn to each other. Alice either had not noticed, or else she had, and was not as disturbed by it.
Did Alice believe she could undo any damage as soon as Lydia left? Was she so confident of herself, or of Douglas’s love for her? Or had it perhaps to do with her father’s wealth and the opportunities that it would offer Douglas in the future? Was she really so shallow? So vain?
Caroline found herself hoping very much that the latter was not so. She liked Alice. She was highly individual, and perhaps she reminded Caroline rather a lot of her own daughter Charlotte, another young woman full of impractical dreams.
Or was it really that Alice reminded her of herself? After all, what kind of a woman with any sense would abandon a respectable and financially safe widowhood in order to marry a Jewish actor seventeen years her junior? Caroline shook her head and turned her attention back to the stage, where the drama was beginning to form a coherent whole. At last Joshua himself was acting, not merely reading his part and watching the situation and the details of others. The entry of Dracula made a world of difference.
Very carefully Caroline dimmed the lights, then brightened them slowly as the coffin lid opened, the creak of the wood pausing for just a moment before Joshua emerged.
She almost stopped breathing as he uncurled his body and stood up, his face wreathed in a terrible smile.
There was a gasp from Alice, sitting close in the front row, and Mercy gave a little shriek.
“Ah!” Ballin said with satisfaction. “But one small suggestion. May I show you? It might be simpler than trying to explain.”
Joshua’s jaw tightened, but he stepped aside. “Of course.”
Caroline dimmed the lights and began again.
Ballin climbed into the coffin and lowered the lid. There was a moment’s silence. Everyone was watching. Very slowly the lid rose again, perhaps two or three inches, then long, white fingers emerged, curling like talons, feeling around as if in search of something.
“Oh, God!” Mercy breathed, her own hands flying to her face.
The coffin lid continued to open very slowly. A full arm was visible. Then, still carefully, noiselessly, Ballin climbed