The Resurrectionist Read Online Free PDF Page B

limelight her face shivers, as if she were at once real and insubstantial, a creature composed not of matter but of the substance of dreams. Marked out against the ghostly pale of the stage paint, her eyes look huge, liquid, her mouth wide as an ache.
    Amidst the swirling colour of the ball upon the stage she stands like a point of stillness, and I stare at her, hungry, frightened she might somehow evaporate or I might wake, losing the sense of her lines in the urgency of this feeling. In the pit the orchestra is playing again, the audience laughs, then she replaces her mask and steps aside so her companion might speak once more.
    The play is a drama, a thing of pirates and Turks set in a Venetian palace. She plays not the heroine, but a smaller role, a friend, and as the play proceeds she comes and goes, sometimes lingering with the heroine or the man who would be her lover, sometimes with the actor who plays the man that she herself desires. Her largest scene is the attemptedseduction of her by the villain of the piece, which she plays with a strange kind of resignation, as if she has already lost herself to him in her mind, and her own lover’s rescue of her, when it comes, is already too late. Each time she appears she takes the audience’s attention, all of us, even the murmuring crowd in the stalls below falling quiet when she speaks. Why this should be is not clear, for she does not play to them as the others do, nor does she invest her lines with great drama. Indeed the part seems no more than a semblance, meant to disguise something else, something unrevealed and unsaid, an illusion within an illusion.
    Later, in the rooms to which we repair, I see her pass through. Her face is clean of the paint, and she seems smaller, almost fragile. She walks with a pair of men and a young woman with blonde hair. She does not look our way as she moves through the room, but I cannot help but tense. May’s mouth comes close to my ear.
    ‘What is it you see, my little bird?’
    ‘That woman, she was in the play,’ I say, not sure whether it is a question or a statement.
    ‘She was,’ May says. His breath is hot. ‘You think her beautiful?’
    I nod, and May chuckles. Chifley too has seen me looking at her.
    ‘Your prentice is learning your habits, de Mandeville,’ he declares. There is laughter then, but also the look in Chifley’s eye as he laughs, the chill of his appraisal.

T HE KNOCK COMES unexpectedly, loud in the empty house. As the door opens, there is the noise of the street, a voice, the words inaudible. Then, sure and steady, the sound of a man’s boots, overhead, moving closer.
    Uneasily I rise, turning to face the figure who descends the stairs. He is tall, and powerful, and though no longer young moves with the tread of a man aware of his own strength and unafraid of it. By the fire he stops, opening his hands to warm them.
    ‘A wet night,’ he says. His voice is deep, its tones those of a gentleman.
    ‘Indeed,’ I say, glancing towards Mrs Gunn, who stands on the stairs behind him. She does not speak, just shakes her head, her face communicating some warning I cannot understand.
    ‘They say a child was taken down a drain in Finsbury and drowned,’ he says, looking at me as if to see how I will respond.
    ‘What is your business here?’ I ask. ‘Whom do you seek?’
    He smiles at this.
    ‘Your name is Swift, is it not?’ he asks, his eyes narrowing.
    ‘It is,’ I say carefully. He nods, his gaze straying to the books spread upon the table. On one page is a diagram, a picture of a child still huddled in its mother’s womb, the image engraved with terrible precision. Reaching down he lets his fingers stray over it, then turns the page so he may see the next.
    ‘You are apprenticed here, they say, bound by your guardian, your master’s cousin.’
    It makes me uneasy that he should know such things. In the silence he looks up again.
    ‘Who are you?’ I ask, and he laughs, a curiously silky