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dead, you are quite the wisest, Abbess Hildegard, for you’ve given me to understand that this treasure, unearthed, would prove a bane worse than the Black Death —belonged to Sister Margaret, but Chloe could not speak it, being about to faint.
    Having noticed the rushing red gobbets, Fanny straightaway swooped to the rescue, saying, “You are quite the wisest woman I know, Abbess Hildegard, dead or alive, for you have taught me how this treasure would prove a burden as dire as death—and now we must away, for Sister Margaret is enduring an onslaught of the vapors.”
    Fanny curled an arm about Chloe’s shoulder, and together they staggered out of the crypt, at which juncture the set, the theatre, and the world went black.
    Upon returning to consciousness Chloe found herself backstage, sprawled across the four-poster that had served as Abbess Hildegard’s deathbed in act one. Fanny knelt beside her, cooling her brow with a damp kerchief, whilst Ellen Tree sponged away the sanguine remnants of the frightening event. Props from Olympic Theatre productions gone by loomed out of the shadows—a ball gown, a suit of armor, a siege cannon, Macbeth’s head on a pike.
    â€œAm I dying?” asked Chloe.
    â€œNot in the least,” said Fanny. “Be still. Tomorrow we feed you beef for breakfast—”
    â€œAt my expense,” said Ellen Tree.
    â€œBy way of restoring the blood you’ve lost,” Fanny explained.
    â€œBlood—and everything,” said Chloe as relief and exultation washed through her, borne on a tide of qualified remorse.
    â€œDon’t worry about tomorrow night’s performance,” said Fanny. “I shall collapse Margaret and Angelica into a single character.”
    â€œI myself once endured the very trial that befell you tonight,” added Ellen Tree. “You are likely to recover in full.”
    â€œFor reasons known but to Himself, God decrees that certain creatures must not come into the world,” said Fanny, an observation on which Chloe was willing to let the whole cataclysmic matter rest.
    *   *   *
    But for the fact that the audience who’d witnessed Chloe’s improvisation during the Wednesday evening performance of The Beauteous Buccaneer included a journalist in the employ of the Times, the affair might never have come to the public’s attention. Owing to the efforts of that anonymous scribbler, however, half the city spent the following Friday gossiping about Miss Bathurst’s gallows speech. DISTURBANCE AT ADELPHI THEATRE , shouted the page-two headline for the 17th of March, 1848. ACTRESS HARANGUES AUDIENCE WITH POLITICAL RANT , ran the first subheading. MOB VIOLENCE NARROWLY AVERTED . Amongst the consumers of this narrative was Chloe herself, who, upon reading of her recklessness, felt as if she were back on the gallows, the trapdoor opening beneath her feet. Seeking to distract herself, she fixed on an adjacent article summarizing the arguments of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, including their colorful conclusion that “the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers,” the victory of the proletariat over the propertied classes having been ordained by a Wheel of History impossible to roll back—an idea she found genuinely diverting, though not sufficiently so to alleviate the misery caused by her emergent notoriety.
    Later that afternoon, upon arriving at the theatre, Chloe discovered a note from Mr. Kean attached with sealing wax to her dressing-room mirror. Report to me immediately, it read.
    Nervous and fretful, she approached the manager’s office, her palms so damp she could barely turn the doorknob. Mr. Kean stood behind his desk, mallet in hand, tapping a nail into the plaster. Upon completing the task, he decorated the wall with a framed certificate indicating that Her Majesty had appointed him Master of Revels.
    Seated on plush chairs, Fanny, Mrs.