The Wicked Marquess by Maggie MacKeever

and Dorothea Jordan, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons. Mr. Atchison’s infernal prosing made a fellow yawn until his jaw cracked.
    The ladies were not similarly affected. They hung on his words. Furthering Mr. Burton’s annoyance was the fact that he was not enjoying the play. For one thing, he disliked loud noises. For another, the fanciest theatrical backdrops could only fail to impress someone who had seen the shiny roofs of Tipoo Sultan’s palace, the sugar-white minarets of his mosque, the flat boulders of the River Cauvery which encircled the island of Seringapatam, and the shell-shattered trees and hedges that had concealed the British siege-works.
    Mr. Burton was mistaken upon at least one matter: no one was hanging upon Mr. Atchison’s words. Nonie, though she had enjoyed the entertainment, preferred Gothic melodrama enacted in gloomy, ruined abbeys and featuring outcasts and ghosts, long lost relatives and long concealed crimes, for example The Castle Spectre , written by Monk Lewis, which had had a prodigious theatrical run due largely to the wondrous effect of sinking the ghost in flame. Sir Kenrick was contemplating improvements in the Argand lamps, stage lighting devices that employed cylindrical wicks and glass chimneys to control the relative proportions of oxygen and oil. Miranda was mulling over the moral of the evening’s entertainment, and comparing herself to the heedless young wife who persuaded her husband’s servant to admit her to the forbidden Blue Chamber.
    But Miranda hadn’t been admitted, had she, and thus had no opportunity to discover whether skeletons lurked in Sinbad’s lair. Even though he had agreed to assist her in – what had he called it? – her ‘fall from grace’.
    The curtain descended, a hazy green drapery depicting the classical muse of Comedy and a waterfall in a glade. One of the actors stepped forward and announced that following a brief intermission there would be renderings by a popular vocalist and some conjuring tricks. The audience applauded, shouted, hissed. The actor bowed himself out through one of the doors, with brass knockers on them, which always stood open upon the stage.
    Mr. Atchison immediately suggested that the ladies might benefit from gentle exercise and a breath of fresher air. Mr. Dowlin, less fast on his feet but nonetheless no flat, allowed that he would benefit from the same, a statement that caused Mr. Burton to gnash his teeth, because he hadn’t been attending and had therefore allowed his rivals to pull such a sly trick.
    Mr. Burton refused to trail after Miss Russell like some love-struck clunch. He withdrew to the Green Room behind the stage, a general dressing area scattered with tables and wig stands, where gentlemen visited with the cast between acts. Sir Kenrick, who agreed with Antoinette’s opinion that none of these youngsters would do for Miranda, took himself off to quiz various of his acquaintances about their marital aspirations under the pretext of discussing Argand lamps.
    Lamps were also on the mind of Mr. Atchison, and candles as well, for fire was a constant danger in the theaters. It took only one careless sceneshifter to set flimsy stage dresses and scenery alight. The original theater at Drury Lane had been badly damaged by fire some nine years after it opened, and had subsequently been rebuilt. But the ladies were not to worry! The current theater was rendered fireproof by water tanks placed in the roof, the contents of which had been used to good effect in The Virgin Unmasked , when they were emptied splashing and dashing and tumbling over artificial rocks. Though he could not know it, there was considerable irony in Mr. Atchison’s claims: the theater would burst into flame some few years hence and blaze with such fury that it illuminated Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the brightness of day.
    Mr. Atchison was trying very hard to win favor with Miranda. He had even applied juice of whatever-it-was to the freckles