Murder in the Limelight Read Online Free PDF Page B

first night was the busiest night of the run; it was not only his job to usher in the scented and opera-hatted and to see that trailing silken trains were not sullied by the dirt of the thoroughfare but also to recognise the faces and, with a muttered aside to a pageboy, inform Mr Archibald that Lord and Lady So and So had arrived, or else pass on a suggestion that Lord X’s seats had best be changed forthwith owing to the fact that Lord X’s sister-in-law was in the audience and would be somewhat puzzled by Lord X’s companion! He would smooth the passage from carriage to door, then hand his charges over to a liveried usher who would ensure that the few steps up to the foyer were negotiated safely before they joined the milling, sparkling, bejewelled throng that was an essential ingredient of a Galaxy first night – or any first night at a London theatre in these carefree days of thenineties. But the Galaxy had one difference: it provided a touch of the daring, but a daring that one could allow one’s wife to see – if one so chose.
    In the auditorium a thousand pairs of open glasses undulated as aigrette-crowned ladies sought to establish who was present, their ostrich feather fans used more for effect than for air on this chill November evening. A sigh of pleasurable anticipation ran round the audience as Edward Hargreaves took his place on the rostrum.
    Hidden from them behind the ornate curtain was the stage manager. He was at the rear of the stage, checking the back set for the umpteenth time to see that all those ruddy dolls were in place. None was missing tonight. Not now that two spares had been hastily acquired from Messrs Hamleys. So nothing could go wrong tonight, could it?
    Apparently nothing could. The first night of
Miss Penelope’s Proposal
looked set fair to beat even its predecessor. Florence Lytton had never looked more lovely, trilled so sweetly. Perhaps, if one were to be critical, she had been not quite at her best in the song in which she confided her innermost longings to a marionette, but connoisseurs put it down to her not feeling at home with the rather fast tempo.
    Watching from the stalls and dress circle respectively, the Honourable Johnny Beauville and Lord Summerfield sat enraptured anew at the sight of all their little darlings.
    Lord Summerfield watched the show girls, those stately damsels who adorned the stage with such grace and elegant, tall beauty, not singing, not speaking, simply looking beautiful. His eyes were on Edna Purvis. She had let him kiss her in the carriage on the way back from Romano’s last week, and there was a look in her eye that suggested he might go a little further next time, though she had made it clear that she was a lady. Not like Christine Walters! He still smarted from that indignity. Perhaps Mother was right, he shouldmarry the Honourable Jane Biggleswade. But, on the other hand, Miss Purvis was so very pretty . . .
    The Honourable Johnny did not confine his admiration to the show girls. He loved all the little darlings – show girls, chorus girls, principals – they were all lovely, and he loved them all. He never noticed if they laughed at him, and would not have cared if he had. He was a humble man with no inflated opinion of his own intellectual powers. But as a connoisseur of female beauty, he rated himself highly.
    ‘There’s a little stunner,’ he remarked enthusiastically, if unguardedly, to his brother. ‘What a big—’ Only the stern eye of his boot faced sister-in-law stopped him from further enthusing on the female form. Why did she insist on coming if she disapproved so much? he asked himself. She’d sat poker-faced all through
Lady Bertha;
not a twitch of amusement on her haughty features.
    Herbert Sykes as the jealous toyshop owner had never looked more comic as when, in the last act, he faced the handsome Lord Harry, come in search of the lovely-voiced female who, out of his sight, had been operating the marionettes. In fact he