Theodora Read Online Free PDF

had ever played, one of the few, shadowy memories she still kept of the father who’d been part of her first starring role. She roared, she snapped her dangerous teeth, she advanced on Theodora, who ducked beneath her little sister’s outstretched arms and clawed fingers, to come up behind her and hit the girl-as-bear lightly on the top of her head with the knife handle. Anastasia took on the bear’s bewildered look of pain and sorrow and their audience relaxed a little: seeing the girl punished with the knife handle, even if only in jest, accorded with their sense of propriety. Sensing the happier mood, Anastasia advanced, Theodora parried, back and forth, all the while offering asides to the relaxing audience. She commented on the excessive girth of the patrician Comito was now playing – funnier still because everyone knew the audience had spent half the night ogling Comito’s tall, lean and very fine body, and they all knew Theodora was really mocking the barrel shape of their evening’s host, with a perfect alliterative rhyme about the ‘lard-loaded lech’. While acrobatically fighting off the bear’s advances, her twists and turns applauded by the other girls in order to encourage applause from the real audience, she stage-whispered a lewd story about Chrysomallo and Claudia, describing over her shoulder, under her arm, and once, bent double, through her legs, the series of shocking pictures that had been running through their pretty but empty golden heads as they surveyed the room all night. Both girls stayed stock-still in their statue poses, one white with fear that she, with no skill in anything but dance and still-mime, would also be called on to improvise and help ease the tension, the other embarrassed by Theodora’s Hippodrome-coarse language, suffused with a deep pink blush that clashed horribly with her perfect golden hair.
    By the time the game was over the audience were crying with laughter, the bite had been tended by an obsequiousservant, and Menander’s girls were toasted in still more wine, Theodora above all. As Comito, the elder of the two mimes, and several of the older dancers were led away for the rest of their evening’s work, Theodora was grabbed up and hugged by the man with the bitten finger. He called out to Menander at the back of the room. ‘This one, I’ll take her. She has fire.’
    The dance master walked slowly to the man’s side, speaking quietly but firmly, in Latin rather than Greek, making his point with the language of the law. ‘I apologise, she is not yet mature sir, she cannot work further tonight. Besides,’ he added, taking Theodora firmly from the gentleman and sinking his thumb and forefinger into the fold of her collarbone, pinching hard, ‘it is her fault we were late beginning our performance. She is to be punished.’ He sighed, looked into the gentleman’s face for understanding of servants and students and women – even if he, as a eunuch, knew only the tribulations of two – and the men laughed together at all the burdens life had imposed on them.
    Menander was true to his word. While they waited for the older girls to finish the night’s entertainment, in the private bedrooms the host had prepared, he kept Theodora beside him, striking her every now and then with his cane, stinging blows to her back and buttocks while he sang a lullaby to the younger girls curled up on couches around the room. He lectured her about the placing of her head when she’d whispered two of her funnier asides, pointing out that if her chin had been slightly lower then even the gentlemen furthest distant would have heard her better and she wouldn’t have had to speak in such an obvious stage whisper, explaining in full detail exactly why the laughs she did get were not quite good enough, that her timing was just a little out, that her instinct was nothing and training was all. And Theodora, who at eleven was not yet old enough to go on the public stage alone, who had to