The Mad Courtesan by Edward Marston Page B

upon his queen were really aimed at the inscrutable beauty in the middle of the lower gallery, the eloquent movements were a dance of desire to ensnare her interest. But whenever he stole a glance at the object of his passion, she remained calm and uninvolved. This drove him on to even more sublime heights but she still refused to show obeisance before her king. Black eyes hardly flickered in an impassive face. He was acting at someone who seemed to have a heart of stone.
    And yet she was not indifferent. Her attention did not wander and her interest did not slacken.
Love’s Sacrifice
got the same level gaze throughout. It held her without moving her. The Rose bestowed its wonder on Lawrence Firethorn. The intimacy on which he commented earlier allowed him – in his mind’s eye – to reach out and touch her a hundred times. Indeed, his wooing of Queen Elsin became a gentle fondling of the mysterious creature inthe audience. When he had done this with other female spectators, they had usually succumbed to his charms with gushing readiness but he had signally failed on this occasion. That failure only sharpened the edge of his desire and turned up the flame of his already crackling performance. When he and his star-crossed queen lay dead together at the end of the play, a communal groan of horror went up. Gondar had been the epitome of military honour and courtly love. His fall was the stuff of tragedy.
    The play was not yet over. As the soldiers stood around the royal corpses, the actor who had been such a mesmerising Benvolio held up his hands to command silence. When he had drawn out the pause to its full, agonising length, he used sonorous tones to deliver a speech that had been cut during the rehearsal. Lawrence Firethorn stiffened and let out a growl of disapproval from beyond the grave but Benvolio would not be deflected. The still, sad music of his voice was a fitting epitaph for the doomed lovers.
    Adieu, sweet friends, and take thy praise to heaven,
    Embrace that joy for which you both have striven.
    Benvolio shed a real tear then motioned in the soldiers to load the bodies onto their respective biers. As the pair were borne out with due solemnity, King Gondar half opened an eye to catch a fleeting glimpse of the lower gallery. The exercise was a painful one. For the first timein the whole afternoon, his inamorata was visibly moved. Sadness crumpled her face and she brought a hand up to her mouth. In one brief and unscheduled elegy, Owen Elias had achieved what Firethorn – with a hundred speeches – had failed to do. It was galling. The actor-manager bristled posthumously.
    Once offstage, he abdicated his kingship to direct a string of foul oaths at his colleague but his imprecations were muffled by the avalanche of applause that tumbled down on their ears. Postponing his fury, he put on his most imperious smile and led out his company to take their bow.
Love’s Sacrifice
was an unqualified success, a superb account of a brilliant new play that was set to take pride of place in the company’s repertoire. Though feeding greedily on the ovation, Lawrence Firethorn was interested in only two people in the auditorium. His most obsequious bow went to the delighted Lord Westfield and a more cavalier flourish was aimed at the lower gallery. While his patron responded with frantic clapping, however, the dark lady of his fantasies gave him no more than a level stare. It was enough. The desire which had steadily grown throughout the last two hours now blossomed into complete infatuation.
    The spectators clapped, cheered and stamped their feet for minutes on end but one of them declined to join in. He was a tall, saturnine figure who had sat in discomfort all afternoon as the drama’s excellence was unfolded and as Firethorn’s primacy was reinforced yet again. His visit to The Rose had been redeemed in the closing speech. Twenty lines of versehad made him look with intense curiosity at Owen Elias and bank down his