Chapter One
A deephush held the audience of the Queen’s West End theatre.The mostindifferent and bored among the young dilettante crowd were sittingforward in the best seats in the circle, where they formed aglittering half coronet.Fortnum’s peppermint creams remainedpoised en route to glossy O-shaped mouths.
The lights were down.Only the thinnest silver gleam lit thestage.All’s Well That EndsWell, the theatre programme declared, butthe title—always a challenge, irony wrapped round the very roots ofthe play—had never seemed such a mockery.Shakespeare had kept thewedding of Bertram and Helena well off-stage, glossed over andpresented as a fait accompli.Now it was restored, and the audienceconscripted as unwilling, fascinated guests.
Theactors played it out in dumb show.The lights came up slowly toreveal only three of them—a crooked, crabbed little priest in adirty surplice, the upcoming RADA grad Gem Lloyd in her role asHelena, and Laurence Fitzroy, now playing Shakespeare’s leastloveable hero.
Fitzroyhad done nothing to make Bertram any less of the heartless cowardhe was.And yet he pulled in—night after enraptured full-housenight—a huge swathe of London’s theatre-going population.They cameto see how Fitzroy, quiet and pale in street clothes for thismodern-dress version, could rise up out of his own stillness andbecome a monster.That was one half of the enchantment.The rest ofit lay in his terrible ability to make them love himanyway.
Thestage lights had tightened to a circle around the priest, bride andbridegroom, marooning them on a cold silver island, plunging therest of the house into darkness.The priest signalled to Bertramthat he should step up and take his bride’s hand.
Lauriedid so.He towered over Gem Lloyd by a foot, but that was nothing.The light turned his skin to marble, cast his hair and eyes tounfathomable black.He seized the girl by the wrist.
Gemrecoiled.Helena was a smart, ambitious healer who had traded herskills to get what she wanted.She was worth a million of herbridegroom, but still she shivered to her very bones.Wordlessly,without a movement of his beautiful lips, Bertram revealed to herwhat she might expect of their wedding night, of all the yearsahead.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Laurence Fitzroy’s silentnothingwould resound through thetheatre and the heads of his audience for weeks.The rest of theplay could not redeem it.The strangely tacked-on happy ending onlyunderscored Helena’s fate, her chances of happiness with this man.Bertram was a mean, callow puppy who had somehow captured one goodwoman’s heart.
And yet her heartwascaught.Along with it were captured, every night,nine hundred others, male and female, fresh and jaded, each one ofthem forced against taste, self-preservation and good sense to seeHelena’s point, to love what was unloveable, just because a youngactor—barely twenty one, only in his second West End season—haddecreed it should be so.Laurie took the ring the priest held outto him.He raised it so that its stone turned to cold fire.Helooked into the audience, and each one of the nine hundredfeltseen—seeninto, seen through, that bleak, brilliant gaze slicing deep,insisting that they too could fall as Helena had done.He turnedback to his bride.The ring had a plain band, but one critic hadalready claimed that it was made of tiny knots of barbedwire.
Thelights snapped to black.
***
Ariptide of applause roared through the wings.Laurie turned hisback to it, grabbed at the wheel of a giant prop cannon, symbol ofBertram’s sexual and soldierly adventures in Tuscany.The sound wasenough to sweep him away.Briefly it lessened, and he wondered ifBertram had pushed his luck too far tonight, but the change wasonly the drop of the vast velvet curtain behind him, dipping tostage as if giving its own bow back to the cheering crowd.Hetightened his grip.His vision would clear in a moment and he wouldstop seeing everyone around him—stage hands, fellow actorsgathering for curtain call—as tiny scurrying specks, microbes inthe cold sea of Bertram’s ego.
“Laurie!Laurie!Mr Hamlin!”
That wasAlison Jones, in her best whisper, which would carry across acrowded backstage area better than anyone else’s scream.She hadfollowed Laurie passionately from his debut at the small suburbantheatre in Rayne’s End, bulldozing her way onto the production teamof his every performance since.Her career had risen with his andhere at the Queen’s she was in charge of backstage admin, timingwith fierce exactitude entries and exits, lining up soldiers, kingsand tinkers to step forward at the moment of their cue.ArnoldHamlin, Laurie’s manager, was bustling out of the shadows to meether.
Arnoldstopped her by main force, her skinny frame rebounding off hisbulk.“For God’s sake, Alison,” he hissed, steadying her.“I wishParolles had half your projection.They’ll hear you in rowQ.”
“I know, I know.But I’ve got to talk to Laurie.Didn’t yousee?”
“See what?Give him a minute, will you?You know heneeds—”
“In the audience.TheBloodMoonproducer is here!”
Arnold scratched his balding head, where beads of sweat formedevery night as Laurie stepped onstage.It wasn’t that Arnold didn’ttrust him.He was just aware that he had on his hands the hottesttheatrical property since Olivier, even if Laurie was oblivious tothis fact himself, and every time Arnold exposed his asset to theworld, he ran a chance of losing him.“Blood Moon,” he repeated slowly, asif the name meant nothing to him.“The film?That pack of campvamps my ten-year-old daughter squeals over?”
“Blood Moon, thatmulti-billion-grossing movie phenomenon that’s made every teen girlin the Western hemisphere want to die of the vampire’s kiss.”Alison darted round Arnold’s own considerable hemisphere and ran upto Laurie.“You’re gonna be the next Valentine Frost, Laurie!Iknow you are!”
“Over my undead body,” Arnold growled, putting a meaty handbetween the girl and his treasure.Laurie was staring at herblindly, silver lights fading in his eyes.“Mr Fitzroy here is astage actor.And he needs you to leave him alone, young lady.Ittakes him a while to come back.”
Alison spun to face him.“Bollocks!Don’t you young-lady me.I’ve known Laurie since he walked off the streets into Paul Jacobs’theatre and turned into Hamlet.Then Claudius, then Gertrude, thenbloody Ophelia, one after the other.He can switch it on and offlike a tap, because he’s...”She heaved a breath in a frustratedsob.“Because he’sLaurie.Oh, darling, for God’s sakegive me a kiss!”
Lauriestepped back from her.It was less a deliberate retreat than thereflex of a cornered, confused beast, but her hug misfired and shepulled up short as if slapped.Arnold took her none too gently bythe arm.“Right!That’s enough.Long-time groupie or not, you’restaff around here, missy, so just go and do whatever it is they payyou to do.Laurence, it’s all right.Come over here with me for aminute, then you’ll have to take your curtain call before there’s ariot.”He paused, smiling, the waves of applause breaking over him.“Just listen to that!It’s like the fucking Colosseum.”
Laurie’sgaze focussed.He smiled too—an ordinary, tired grin.“Doesn’t thatmean the lions get to eat me, Arnie?”
“Well, there’s one from theGuardianin the cage tonight.TheIndependenttoo, and as far as I could see they were eating you upwholesale.All right now?Feeling better?”
Lauriecouldn’t remember anything being wrong.Alison Jones was stormingoff into the wings, her head down, hands shoved into her pockets.“Alison,” he called.“What’s the matter?”She threw him oneflushed, tearstained look over her shoulder, then disappeared intothe dark.“What did I say to her?”
“Oh, nothing.She’s just being a diva.”
No.That wasn’t true.Helena had asked Bertram for a kissafter their wedding.Just that—one kiss, before he deserted her infavour of freedom, philandery and the soldiering life.He’d turnedher down flat, shaming her in front of that arrogant,rattling-empty gourd of a hanger-on, Parolles.Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss...“Arnie.I need a minute.”
