Love in Disguise Read Online Free PDF Page B

aware of the odor of rum on his breath, but his eyes seemed all right.
     “You’d best take a sensible view of the world, Fancy, m’girl. There are those with beauty and those willing to buy it. We’ve each got to use what gifts we have.”
    Fancy shook her head. “You mistake me, Uncle George. I do not intend to marry or - anything else. The theater is my life.”
    Cooke shook his head. “For now, m’dear. But there’ll be a man, I don’t doubt it. For you’ve your mama’s blood in you.”
    Fancy dropped her eyes in confusion. She had always suspected that Uncle George had loved Mama in those long ago days before she had met Papa. And perhaps Mama had even cared for him - though not in the same way she loved Papa. But there was no opportunity for her to say more for the greenroom began to fill up with players, all talking to each other in an effort to keep up their spirits, and she knew that the curtain would soon go up.
    Fancy, watching Uncle George laugh and joke with the others, knew that in a few moments, when he moved onto the stage, he would become an evil, dissimulating man, bent and deformed. And that deformity would not be indicated just by the padded hump on his back, but by the very cast of his features.
    And she herself, when she faced him as Lady Anne, widow of the Edward he had murdered, would be entirely that Anne. There, on the stage, in the magic of the footlights, Fancy and Uncle George would cease to exist and there would be only the beautiful young woman and the evil, cunning Richard whose wily words so appealed to her vanity that she would finally consent to become wife to a man she had every cause to hate and despise.
    As everyone scurried to their places, ready for the first act, Fancy felt her heart beating in her throat. The crowd out there was ugly, just as ugly as the one last night and the night before. And Uncle George had had quite a bit to drink. If he should get angry at them for refusing to listen - a shudder ran over Fancy. Then she scolded herself. Uncle George was a veteran of the stage. Nothing would shake his sense of presence.
    As the curtain went up on the scene of a London street, Fancy watched Cooke become the wicked hunchback and enter to impart to the audience his evil machinations. They greeted him first with applause, to indicate that their quarrel was not with him but with Kemble. And then they began to hiss. “Off! Off!”
    Not a word that Cooke spoke reached their ears. Groans and catcalls resounded throughout the house. Banners and placards were everywhere evident. Fancy caught her breath as she read one which had just been hoisted.
     
    COOKE DESERVES OUR PITY. KEMBLE OUR CONTEMPT.
     
    Fancy held her breath. If Cooke got his back up, he might let go at the audience. But as the act continued she slowly released her breath. Uncle George seemed oblivious to the audience. They did not exist for him. And shortly, when it came her turn to go on, Fancy, too, was able to ignore the disturbances out front.
    After Richard and Anne had exchanged insults and the cunning Richard had given the lady the opportunity to kill him, an opportunity he knew she would not be able to avail herself of, when she had spit upon him and been beguiled, and finally, left her place in the mourning procession of Henry VI and exited to wait at Crosby House for the pseudo-penitent Richard, Fancy stood again in the wings, exhausted. Her first big scene in London was over. And no one had even heard it.
    The play progressed, the catcalls and groans, hoots and hisses, never abating. Now and then a port horn echoed through the house and then suddenly the theater was full of pigeons, flying distractedly, landing here and there in confusion.
    Between acts Fancy met Uncle George coming back from his dressing room and the unnatural shine in his eyes told her plainly that he had been at his bottle. She really could not blame him. That audience was a horror to face and he was on stage almost constantly.