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Cecily turned to Bellmaine. “ ‘I’ll warrant you: Fear me not— withdraw, I hear him coming.’ ”

In a single, oddly graceful movement for one aping age, Bellmaine slipped behind the screen.

Orlando came onto the stage. “ ‘Now, Mother, what’s the matter?’ ”

“ ‘Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,’ ” Cecily answered, her voice carrying the same considered music.

Orlando’s face was strained, his eyes wide and dark. There was a harshness in him of emotion so tightly held in, and yet so tormented, he was at the edge of breaking. “ ‘Mother, you have my father much offended.’ ”

Pitt watched in fascination as people he had seen in totally different characters took on the roles familiar to every generation for nearly three hundred years. He had studied Hamlet in the schoolroom on Sir Arthur Desmond’s estate. He had read the soliloquy himself with Matthew and pulled it apart to its separate elements. Yet in front of him it now became a story of people with lives as real as his own. He watched the queen’s guilt, Polonius’s death, Hamlet’s torture, all created with voice and gestures on a bare stage and then shattered in an instant as the actors stopped, threw parts aside, and became themselves again.

“Too quick,” Bellmaine criticized, looking at Orlando. “Your accusation blurs the words. Hamlet is in fury and indignation, but the audience still needs to hear the substance of his charge. You are too realistic.”

Orlando smiled. “Sorry. Should I hesitate before ‘heaven’s face doth glow’?”

“Try it,” Bellmaine agreed with enthusiasm. He turned to Cecily. “You are pleading. Guilt is angrier. You are trying too hard to win the audience’s sympathy.”

She shrugged an apology.

“Again,” he ordered. “From Hamlet’s entrance.”

Pitt watched them go through it a second time, and a third, and a fourth. He marveled at their patience, and even more at the emotional energy that invested them with passion each time, picking up halfway through a scene, with its changing moods, and throwing themselves into it. Only twice did anyone need prompting, and then continuance was immediate. They seemed able to create the illusion of an entire world by the power of their own belief, and yet to remember someone else’s words and speak them as if they were their own.

Finally Bellmaine allowed them some respite, and for the first time Pitt noticed that several other actors and actresses had appeared, ready to rehearse their parts. He tried to imagine them in the costumes of a far earlier period, and see them as they would be in character. A young woman with fair hair and a high forehead he thought to be Ophelia, and as soon as the recognition came to him, he saw Delbert Cathcart obscenely splayed out in the punt, dressed in the green velvet gown in parody of ecstasy and death.

He rose to his feet from where he had been sitting on a pine box.

“Excuse me . . .”

“My dear fellow,” Bellmaine said straightaway. “I can’t be doing auditioning now. Go and see Mr. Jackson. He’ll talk with you. If you can be prompt, come and go exactly as you are told, stay sober and only speak when you are spoken to, a guinea a week and you have begun your career on the stage.” He smiled, and his whole countenance was illuminated with sudden charm. “You never know where it will lead. Tour with us in the provinces, get a small part and we’ll pay you up to twenty-five shillings . . . thirty-five in time. Now be a good chap and go and look for Jackson. He’s probably around at the back somewhere, scenery and lighting, don’t you know.”

Pitt smiled in spite of himself. “I’m not looking for a career on the stage, Mr. Bellmaine. I am from the Bow Street police station . . . Superintendent Pitt . . .”

Cecily looked up from the edge of the stage where she was sitting. “My goodness, it’s the policeman friend of Joshua’s. Polonius is alive and well, I assure you!” Since Bellmaine was standing between them, that was incontestable.

“I should hardly arrest Hamlet, ma’am,” Pitt promised. “The nation would never forgive me.”

“The