Punch when parted from his dear,
Still must sing in doleful tune.
I couldn’t see what Lesley was doing, but judging from the song she was acting out the scene where punch watches a gallows being assembled outside his prison window. There were doors at either end of the orchestra pit – they had to reach backstage one way or the other. I elbowed my way through the musicians towards the nearest door leaving a trail of squawks, twangs, squeals and crashes behind me. The door led into another narrow breezeblock passageway with other, identical-looking passageways branching off left and right. Since I’d exited stage left, I guessed another left turn would get me backstage. I was right, only the Royal Opera House didn’t have a backstage, it had an aircraft hangar, a huge, high-ceilinged room at least three times the size of the main stage that you could have parked a Zeppelin in. All the stage managers, prompts and whoever else lurks out of sight during a performance had crowded into the wings, transfixed by whatever influence Henry Pyke was using on the audience. Getting away from that influence had given me a chance to cool down and think. The damage to Lesley had been done; if I stuck her with the tranquilliser now, her face would fall off. Rushing onto the stage wasn’t going to help – for all I knew, me blundering in was part of Henry Pyke’s script. I sidled among the stagehands and tried to get as close to the stage as I could without showing myself.
They hadn’t built a gallows. Instead, a noose had been lowered from above, as if from a yardarm. Either Henry Pyke was even more organised than I thought he was, or the original opera had involved someone getting hanged. Presumably after a lot of singing.
Lesley, still playing the role of Punch, mimed languishing behind a barred window. She didn’t seem to be following the Piccini script any longer, but instead was regaling the audience with the life story of one Henry Pyke, aspiring actor, from his humble beginnings in a small Warwickshire village to his burgeoning career on the London stage.
‘And there I was,’ declaimed Lesley, ‘no longer a young man but a seasoned actor, my God-given gifts augmented by years of experience dearly won on the hard and unforgiving stages of London.’
That nobody among the stage managers was even sniggering showed the strength of the compulsion they were under. Since Nightingale hadn’t yet started me on ‘compulsion for beginners’， I didn’t know how much magic it took to hold over two thousand people in thrall, but I bet it was a lot, and that’s when I decided it was probably better for Lesley to have her face fall off than her brain shrivel up. I looked around. There had to be a first-aid kit close by. Dr Walid had said I was going to need saline solution and bandages to wrap around her head if I was going to keep her alive long enough for the ambulance to get there. I spotted the kit mounted on the wall above a selection of fire extinguishers, contained in an impressively large suitcase of red ballistic plastic that would also come in handy as an offensive weapon. I got my last syrette ready, and with the first-aid kit in my other hand I sidled into the wings. By the time I had sight of the stage again, Lesley – I couldn’t bear to think of her as Punch or Henry Pyke – was giving a full and detailed description of Henry’s disappointments. Most of which he blamed on Charles Macklin who, Henry claimed, had turned his hand against him out of spite and when challenged, outside this very theatre, had cruelly struck Henry down.
‘He should have swung for that,’ said Lesley. ‘Just as he should have swung for poor Thomas Hallum that he did for in the Theatre Royal. But he has the luck of the Irish and the gift of the gab.’
That’s when I realised what Henry Pyke was waiting for. Charles Macklin had been a regular at the Royal Opera House until his death. According to legend, Macklin’s ghost was supposed to have been seen on numerous occasions in his favourite seat in the stalls. Henry Pyke was trying to draw him out, but I didn’t think he was going to turn up. Lesley paced the width of the poop deck, peering out into the stalls.
‘Show yourself, Macklin,’ she called. I thought there was uncertainty in her voice now. The poop deck was a raised section of the stage, too high at the sides for me to climb. The only access would be up the stairs at the front – but there was no way to sneak up on Lesley. I was going to have to do something stupid.
I stepped boldly onto the stage, and then made the mistake of looking out at the audience. I couldn’t see much beyond the footlights, but I could see enough to register the great mass of people staring back at me from the towering darkness. I stumbled over my own feet and caught myself on a prop cannon.