Mrs. Byron’s Short Skirt
ANDREW GROPED HIS way in a dark passage. Was he in the right place? Was it the right hour, even the right night? Andrew scarcely knew anymore which door led to which place. What set of rules governed him. Who he was.
He pushed open the door. Color, people, steamy warmth enveloped him.
“Lord . . . Byron,” announced a heraldic voice.
His eyes adjusted. Speech Room lay before him.
“You’re fifteen minutes late,” snapped the same voice. “For the first rehearsal. My God, what an ego. Go on, take a seat. You’re not the last, for what that’s worth. No one, not even title roles, are to be late for rehearsal, is that understood? Those are my ground rules. We’ll have enough trouble pulling together this production without prima donnas. To start, it would be nice to have a script.”
Andrew stood there. Speech Room was warmer, cozier at night. You noticed the deep rust hue of the paint, the touches of gilt, the pillars rising like slender trees. A dozen students sat scattered across the first rows of chairs, down front; there was something strange about this scene, but Andrew couldn’t put his finger on it. On the stage stood a small man of about forty-five with fashion-forward wire glasses and gelled hair. He had square-featured good looks and wore a snarl and a collared sweater of bunched white wool that gave him the air of being a really pissed-off lamb.
Then it struck Andrew what was strange about the students lounging in the seats.
Some of them were girls.
Of course. He had heard about this from Hugh at lunch. Fawkes sees himself as an iconoclast, Hugh had told him in the affectedly knowing and bitchy style of theater folk. Fawkes recruited girls from North London Collegiate to play the girls’ parts in the Byron play. People say he does it to annoy the headmaster, because boys are supposed to play the female roles. That’s the tradition at Harrow, Hugh had continued, haughtily. If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for Piers Fawkes. There were three, four, Andrew counted . . . with Persephone, five girls; they were dressed to withstand the attention a boys’ school would bring—meticulously, but not ostentatiously—with two exceptions. One wore an attention-grabbing short brown dress and black stockings on curvy legs and possessed rich, brushed, chocolate-colored locks, with stylish bangs. The seat next to her—front row—was open. Up in the back sat Persephone. Andrew had to smile. She wore full Harrow dress—grey skirt, white shirt, and black tie Annie Hall–style—because she was the only girl who could. She had wedged herself between the pale Hugh and a strapping redheaded Sixth Former in whom she seemed to have acquired great interest. Her body turned toward the redhead and away from Andrew, while Andrew felt all the other eyes on him, heard all the murmurs: the whispered names of Byron and the American, and, quieter, with a hiss, Theo Ryder. He willed her to turn, but she wouldn’t. His smile faded. A vengeful hand guided him toward the seat next to the girl with the black stockings and short skirt.
He sat down and waited a beat, then leaned over to her.
“Who is that guy?” he growled resentfully in her ear, with a nod at the man on the stage.
Strands of perfumed, chocolate hair brushed Andrew’s cheek. Female contact. His skin sizzled. He wondered if Persephone was watching, or whether she was so preoccupied by the redhead that she would not see him.
“The director? That’s James Honey,” answered Short Skirt in a whisper. “He went to Harrow years ago. He did Royal Shakespeare. Then eight seasons of Nebula as the cyborg leader.” She paused. “He teaches here now. Didn’t you know?”
He didn’t. “What are we waiting for?”
“Piers Fawkes. He’s the real ego,” she said.
“Is he?” Andrew prompted. His evening with Fawkes suggested that the man knew a great deal about poetry and maybe did have a healthy professional ego. But Andrew had noticed something else, too: a lack of formality; a sincerity about his work. Andrew had liked it. Yet Fawkes seemed to inspire sour reactions in people. Andrew wondered why.
“Well, he is a Whitestone winner,” she sniffed.
Maybe that was it, Andrew mused.
But he won for a collection he wrote sixteen years ago, she added. (This was the other part, Andrew figured; Fawkes once was mighty, and now that he was fallen people felt entitled to take their shot.) After casting for the Byron play was announced, all the actors had read it. She didn’t think much of it. Nothing but smut.
“Really?” said Andrew. He allowed himself a glance back at Persephone. She was still speaking, gesturing to the Redhead; but her eyes had wandered to him. A bolt of adrenaline passed down Andrew’s spine. She turned away quickly.
“Scenes from his sex life,” Short Skirt was saying. “Traveling across America. Are American girls really like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know, getting soaped in the bath by twins.”
Andrew’s eyes went wide in answer.
“One’s called Thirteen Ways of Buggering a Black Bird.”
“Wow,” Andrew said, imagining a younger Piers Fawkes leering like a satyr. It wasn’t hard to picture.
“He beats the bird joke to death. The girls have birds’ names. Robin, Jewess, large white teeth / footsied; cocked her til she queefed.” She blushed. “Revolting. And racist.”
“Yet you seem to have read it closely.”
“Well.” She tossed her head. “He did write the play.”
“Who are you?” Andrew asked.
She swung her head back around and met his eye. “I’m your wife.”
Andrew blinked; then he recovered. “I mean in real life.”
“What’s the difference?” She met his eye dramatically, then laughed and tossed her head again. She was flirting. It was working. Andrew crossed his legs. He hoped he wouldn’t have to stand up and read anytime soon. Now he felt Persephone’s presence keenly, beating at the back of his head like a hot sun.
“Rebecca.” She extended a slim, warm hand.
He took it. “Andrew.”
The door from Speech Room passage banged open. Piers Fawkes propped the door halfway, pushing it with his backside, then paused; he was carrying an armload of photocopied and stapled scripts, and he was reading through the top pages, proofing them as he walked. Honey cleared his throat. Fawkes looked up, did a stagey double take, earned a laugh from the cast. Then he charged into the center of the group at the level of the chairs, black robes flying behind him, leaving James Honey alone onstage. Honey waited for anybody to notice that he remained there, then, grumbling, he descended to Fawkes’s side. The cast clambered to Fawkes, hands extended for their copies, and sat back to bury their noses in the pages.
“Save one for me, Piers,” boomed Honey. “I’m only the director.”
Rebecca fought her way to the stage and brought back two scripts: one for her, one for Andrew. Andrew watched Persephone pass without giving him a glance.
Rebecca observed this. “Do you know Persephone Vine?” she asked privately.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Hm,” Rebecca opined primly. “She does know a lot of boys.”
A part of Andrew withered, as it was no doubt intended to. He watched Persephone chatter with the redhead, who had accompanied her to the front.
“I know her father teaches here,” Rebecca continued. “But it does seem ironic. Her, of all people, attending an all boys’ school.” These words were pronounced more loudly than was necessary. Persephone stood eight feet away; her antennae went up. Rebecca addressed the rest of her speech directly into Andrew’s ear. Her whisper tickled his nerves and he tried not to squirm and cringe with pleasure. “She’s slept with half of London,” she hissed. “Her nickname is Thumper. Like the rabbit.” Rebecca withdrew and screwed up her face in disapproval. “You understand?”
Andrew merely panted from the sensory assault. But he had no time to inquire further. Fawkes stood waiting for the students to settle.
“Tonight,” announced Fawkes, “is my night. After tonight there will be movement . . . emotion . . . brutality . . . and violence—all James’s department.” (They laughed. Honey mugged.) “But tonight, it’s words, words, words. We’ll read through the first act. You have it in your hand. By the way, we finally have a title. No longer ‘the play about Byron.’ Now, officially The Fever of Messolonghi. Until I change it.” He turned to the first page of the script. “We join Byron at the end of his life—a mere thirty-six; still young, eh James?—dying of a fever in Messolonghi, Greece, after joining the cause of Greek independence from the Turk. His one friend, a munitions officer, persuades him to tell his life story.” Fawkes paused for effect. “To find out who was Byron’s one true love. There are many, many to choose from,” said Fawkes with a grin. “Byron was, shall we say, a highly motivated lover. Let me introduce them. I’m having them come to Byron like the ghosts come to Scrooge. In order of appearance, then.” He gestured to one of the students in front of him, a skinny girl with short red hair and a nervous manner.
“Lady Caroline Lamb,” he announced with a flourish. The girl stood. “Byron spends two years abroad, in what he would call self-imposed exile. What others would call a holiday.” This got a chuckle. “He publishes the first two cantos of Childe Harold, and—in his own phrase—he wakes up one morning to find himself famous. He’s invited to fancy London dinner parties, suddenly a sensation, ostensibly to scout out a wife. But he finds instead the married Caro—his nickname for her. She is potty about Byron. It later becomes clear, potty full stop. She chases Byron relentlessly, once gaining entrance to his rooms by disguising herself as a page boy, another time stealing into his study and scrawling Remember me! across the pages of the book. Byron responds with a poem.” Fawkes lifted a green book that Andrew recognized as the one he auditioned from.
“Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!”
The redheaded actress gave a mocking demonic cackle, and earned a laugh.
“Next. Miss Rebecca?” Fawkes gestured to the girl in the short skirt. Rebecca stood up next to Andrew in a cloud of perfume, her black stockings so tantalizingly close, Andrew thought he could feel their static electricity. “Annabella Milbanke. History has not made up its mind. Victim or victimizer? Either way, Byron makes a classically bad decision to marry her. He thinks she’s rich. She’s not. He thinks he can push her around. He can’t. He later satirizes their marriage, in Don Juan.” Fawkes read:
Don José and the Donna Inez led
For some time an unhappy sort of life,
Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead.
“It was a spectacularly unhappy marriage. And with good reason. All the while Lord Byron was having a sexual relationship with his own sister. Or half sister, Augusta Leigh.” He gestured to the back of the room, where Persephone had retaken her seat next to the redhead. “Miss Vine, if you please?”
Persephone rose.
“He brings his half sister along on his honeymoon, and perpetuates one of the most miserable and sadistic ménages à trois in literary history; the seeds of Brontë’s Heathcliff. Needless to say, I have a lot of fun with it. Byron is rather more sincere: For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart / I know myself secure, as thou in mine. He fathers a child by this sweet sister . . .”
Rebecca, in character, groaned.
Fawkes grinned. “And now that Byron has created a national scandal, he goes into proper exile, in Switzerland and Italy, and after much sampling, finds himself in love with the Countess Guiccioli. Stand up, Amanda?” A heavyset girl a few rows behind Andrew stood and blushed.
“Teresa Guiccioli is the closest Byron came to a nurturing, supportive, adult relationship in his life. No storms, no temper, no madness. Yet like Byron’s poetry, his late love turns from brooding to comic, and this one is a drawing room farce. First—typical—she’s married. And Byron somehow gets himself invited to live with the Count and Countess Guiccioli at their villa near Ravenna, and, a grown man, scampers around the place like a teenager trying to find places to snog without being caught. You can understand why he would choose political martyrdom, after that. He’s run away to Greece to fight for freedom. It’s there we find him. Lying on a pallet mortally ill. Where’s our munitions man? Hugh!” Hugh stood. “The prologue, if you please.”
Hugh cleared his throat and started in a clear, ringing voice. Andrew watched him and now understood why the others in the Lot teased him; the boy had lush eyelashes and rounded, freckled cheeks, the very picture of a tempting choirboy. Hugh began the story, setting the stage with confidence and an affected Cockney. Silence fell on the group.
Expert in my own craft, demolitions,
My tools in trade dynamite, nitroglycerine,
I never thought to find myself co-habitant with greatness.
Yet here lies the person of Lord Byron, whom even I, unlettered, know.
My dear Mum, when I wrote and told her, chided me to stay away.
(Then asked me many details—is he as handsome as they say?
Is his foot clubbed or cloven? Is he poxy with corruption?
Or does he shine with the surface perfection
of the Enemy of God?) She does not ask about his poetry.
I do not tell her we share a chamber pot.
Byron stoops to make himself my companion.
Tells me tales of the Levant and the crimes of Lord Elgin.
Drinks late, till poetic madness takes him (and then quotes himself at some length),
Warns against donne Italiane and even here, watches his weight.
Or did. Now he’s sick. And a poor place to be so this is:
Bound in a bunker, surrounded by bogs, mosquitoes, Turks;
I mop his brow for him. We wait upon a surgeon.
We wait for everything. Powder. Bullets. Dry food, clean water.
To while the time—when he’s conscious—he’s taken to confessing.
Heaving over his living secrets, to make a lighter deathly crossing.
My mother writes me not to listen, or I may myself learn lore
Unsuited to my station: how to love like a baron,
Prowl palace and gutter for conquests; how to cuckold at scale.
Yet even the corrupt and very rich deserve friends, at death’s brink.
I will hear for myself, in this tiny theater—
A rectangle of cold plaster, with dampness creeping in the corners—
The deeds of a hero, of sorts, from his own lips.
Why should he spare me any humiliating truth?
His looks grow waxy. His time is short. He speaks!
And suddenly Fawkes—with his sad, popping eyes—rounded on Andrew and pointed. All faces turned to him. He went hot. He gripped the pages of the script until they buckled, damp in his sweating fingers, and began to read.
THE GROUP TUMBLED out through the narrow Speech Room corridor together, excited. The play was rollicking, more fun than they’d expected. The actors liked their roles, each secretly believing his or hers was best, from the nervous, thin, and zitty Lady Caroline Lamb to the tall, very sincere athlete who’d been recruited to play Hobhouse, Byron’s best friend. Andrew had fared pretty well. Though James Honey had embarrassed him by informing him, in front of everyone, twice, that he would need to work on both elocution and accent training—Lord Byron can’t be from Connecticut, he had said—Hugh had stopped Andrew afterward and told him he’d been not bad at all, really. After the read-through, he felt himself jostling right along with the others. But then he stopped in the Speech Room passage, waiting there in the dark. He heard the wind roaring outside; he saw yellow leaves dancing on the spindly boughs and heard the rain patter against the brick. At last Persephone emerged. She stopped short in the entranceway when she saw him. She stood in the light, he in the dark. She pushed past him into the rain.
He followed her. Drops smacked his face. He caught up with her on the stairs that led down to the street.
“Why are you upset?” he called after her.
She turned, looking up at him, her face grim and set. She was clutching her books, shielding them from the rain. But she was growing wet herself, the white Harrow shirt staining grey.
“I thought we could be friends, that’s all,” she said. “But I see you’d rather be with them.”
“Who’s . . .”
“I heard you and Rebecca in there. I’m not deaf, you know.”
“Rebecca?” Andrew sputtered, blushing.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
She set off again, across the road, buffeted by wind and rain and chill. She cut between two buildings on the High Street to a steep stairwell that led down to the rolling park behind the school.
Andrew followed her. The high walls of the chapel and library on either side protected them from the wind, but raindrops smacked the roofs and walls and managed to spatter them. Andrew shivered.
“I didn’t say anything to Rebecca,” he called to her back.
“Stop pretending,” Persephone said, still clutching her books to her chest. “I went to school with those witches for four years. I know what they think of me. I just thought that by coming here, I’d have a clean slate. Which was totally stupid.” She stopped and turned to him. “You’re new. Be their friend. They’ll make you popular. They’ll be your personal PR agency. They seem to be mine.” She started moving again and Andrew saw that they had come to the verge of Harrow Park.
“I don’t want Rebecca as a friend,” he said while trying to keep up. “I want us to be friends.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he hesitated. He had only a moment or two to keep her attention. He would tell her, then, even though he had promised himself he would tell no one. Persephone surely was different. He took a deep breath and blurted: “Something weird has been happening since Theo died.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Theo? Don’t use that as an excuse.”
He almost choked the next words out. “I haven’t told anyone about this. I’ve been scared to.”
“Then why tell me?”
“I want you to see I’m not like the others. And I trust you because . . . you’re not, either. You just said so.”
She searched his face. “All right, then. Come on,” she finally said, testily. “I’m freezing to death.”
SHE LED HIM around the foundations of the chapel to the Classics Schools and opened a door on the first floor. It was a rectangular classroom, and in the near dark Andrew made out a long oval table in the center and a corduroy-upholstered armchair in the corner. A line of Latin was scribbled on the blackboard, pock-marked with scansion.
CONUBIIS SUMMOQUE ULULARUNT UERTICE NYMPHAE
“It’s never locked,” explained Persephone. “Mr. Toombs’s classroom. One of my refuges from Sir Alan.”
Since night was falling on the rain-soaked park outside, the overhead lights would have set the room aglow and made them visible for a mile. So, in tacit agreement, they stood in the patchwork glimmer filtering from the lanterns in the nearby headmaster’s garden. Persephone squeezed the rain out of her hair and shuddered. Andrew lunged for her bluer, which she had been carrying, and started to wrap it around her shoulders. She jerked it away from him.
“I’ve got it.” She moved a few paces away. “So what’s your story?”
“I . . .”
“Better hurry,” she snapped. “I swore to myself I would never speak to you again.”
“Yeah, okay . . . so something has been happening. Only . . . I was wrong, just now. It hasn’t been since Theo died. It was when he died.” He crossed his arms, shivering himself. “I saw something.”
“You found him. I know. I am sorry.”
“I saw him.” He held her eyes. He wished he could tell her without being forced to put it in words. “I saw him being killed,” Andrew said, whispering now, even though there was no one to overhear them. “He was suffocated to death.”
“What?” Her eyes searched him fiercely. But she saw sincerity there. “By whom?”
“This . . . guy.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“No.”
“Why ever not, Andrew?”
“Because.” He rolled his eyes at himself, laughing a nervous and despairing laugh. “Because the killer disappeared.”
“Disappeared.”
“He was there one minute, and then he wasn’t.”
They both hesitated.
“Are you having me on, Andrew?”
“I wish.”
“So you’re seeing things.” Her voice was crisp, distant. “Have you seen Dr. Rogers about this?”
He snorted. “Why? Because I must be sick?”
“I only . . .”
“Well, what if there are things to see?” he went on hotly. “Am I still crazy? Never mind. I thought you would understand. I was obviously wrong.”
Persephone became conscious of the fact that just moments ago she had been flinging accusations at him for being conventional, for believing what others told him. This was supposed to be her turf. She drew a deep, preparatory breath.
“I’m trying to be helpful,” she countered. “I won’t judge. Go on.”
“You mean it?”
“I swear.”
Andrew crossed to the corduroy chair. He needed to sit.
“I saw the guy again,” he said.
“Again? Here at school? Who is he?”
“In the Lot,” he said. He raised his eyes to her. “He was being picked on. He was a student here. A long time ago, maybe.”
“How many years ago?”
“A long, long time ago.”
Persephone’s eyes opened a little wider as she started to understand what he was getting at.
“Hang on . . . you think he’s a ghost?”
“Something happened to him,” Andrew went on. “He was normal. Or looked normal, when I saw him in the Lot. But before, with Theo . . .” Andrew scowled. “He was emaciated, like a . . . cadaver.”
Andrew’s eyes glowed at her: grey, arctic, pleading for help. Insane or not, this boy is completely alone, she realized. He has no one, he is miles away from anyone he knows, and you were browbeating him, she scolded herself. She took two steps and knelt beside him. She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder to comfort him. The rainwater, gathered in the fibers of his wool jacket, was cold.