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“Dan?” Lizzie asked from somewhere behind him. He couldn’t see her; the small mirror on his dressing room table didn’t show him much beyond his own face.
“Yes?” he replied, sponging the last stubborn traces of kohl from his lash line.
“Can we go out tonight? Just the two of us?”
Now that was a surprise. Not that she wanted to, necessarily, but that she’d come right out and ask. Lizzie didn’t ask for many things. Not directly, at least.
“Of course. Where did you have in mind?” He turned around to look at her, and this - was less of a surprise, really. She was dressed in a natty black evening suit. Probably a pawn shop special; it looked a little worn, but he could tell the fabric had been expensive when it was new. Someone - most likely Lizzie herself - had tailored it close to her body. But this wasn’t like what she wore onstage; not a hint of comedy or of titillation to be found. She’d broadened her shoulders, squared her hips, and her chest lay perfectly flat. With her curls slicked down close to her head, she looked every inch the young gentleman. A pretty young gentleman, certainly, but nothing too far out of the ordinary.
She raised an eyebrow. “I was thinking somewhere ladies aren’t allowed.”
He chuckled. “You still sore about the Reading Room?”
She grinned back at him. “Maybe just a little.”
“I think we can manage that. You’ll have to let me dig out some swell togs, though - wouldn’t want to put your finery to shame.”
She nodded, moving in to untie his corset laces and ease his stays open with practised hands. Once he was out of costume, she leaned against the back wall of the dressing room while he hunted around for an evening suit and climbed into it. When he glanced at her there was a quiet interest in her eyes; whether it was for how he looked in his smallclothes or simply for the niceties of formal dress, he couldn't say. Finally he knotted his tie, checked the set of it in the mirror, and reached up to grab them a topper each from the jumble of hats on his wardrobe. Lizzie donned hers with a flourish and gave him a quick salute with it, so it came down across her forehead at a jaunty angle.
“C’mon, fellow-me-lad,” she said, offering him her arm as they left the dressing room, “let’s go paint the town red.”
~
They’d taken a cab across the city to Soho, and Lizzie spent most of the journey trying on different voices; more upper class, more common, one with a hint of Lambeth and one that was pure Hackney. In the end she settled on something mellow, with just a slight West Country burr. Dan recognised it as belonging to Thom, who they’d taken on for the panto last year in one of the bit parts. It suited her.
“What about a name?” he asked. “Larry, maybe? Or Eliott? Or you could just kick out all your established syllables and go for Bartholemew.”
She snorted. “Bartholemew Lancelot Jones, a pleasure to meet you,” she said in her deepest, roundest toff’s voice, extending a languid hand to him in greeting. He made a great production of shaking it, and she paused, thoughtfully. “No, I like Eliott. Or Eli, to my friends.” She winked at him. “‘E lies by the fire with a quart of beer -”
“- and ‘e smokes a ten inch clay!” Dan sang with her, bringing in the harmony. She smiled, and gave his hand a little squeeze as she withdrew. “So, Eli, then. Eli Jones?”
“De Quincey,” she said decidedly. “I like De Quincey.”
“Eliott De Quincey,” he agreed. “It’s got a nice ring to it. My friend Mr De Quincey, up from the country.” He looked across the cab at her, to where she was settling into a new configuration. Loose-limbed, easy, legs spread just a little; a less cartoonish version of a principal boy. “You ready for this, Mr De Quincey?”
“Mr Leno,” she drawled, looking at him from under her lashes, “the real question is, are your other friends ready for me?”
~
Technically speaking, non-members of the club were only allowed as far as the Visitors’ Room, but since female guests were occasionally known to be granted admittance there it didn’t really fit the bill for the evening. Besides, Dan belonged to the Eccentric and, true to the name, few of the members were sticklers for the exact letter of the law. So he’d simply squared his shoulders and marched Lizzie through to one of the parlours, and nobody had chosen to make a scene about it.
He saw her eyes go wide for a couple of minutes as she glanced around, taking in the well-fed fire, the intricately patterned carpets, the wood panelled walls with their smattering of uninspired but expensive artworks. Then she’d nodded to herself and settled back into character, watching Dan carefully as he ordered port and a cigar and asking the same for herself. She sipped the liquor with a serious expression and smoked carefully, not giving herself away by inhaling too much and getting a coughing fit - and thereby doing better than many young men Dan had seen out in a club for the first time. She did lean in to murmur in Dan’s ear, “Do people actually enjoy these things?”
He smiled. “Never the first time they try them. It might grow on you, though.”
She hummed thoughtfully, and settled back into the heavy armchair she’d picked. It was a pleasure, he thought, to see her so relaxed, even knowing it was partly an act. Maybe that was the key, for Lizzie; maybe she needed to be acting, to let go of that tension that crackled through her body the rest of the time.
Dan was fairly popular in the club. Officially, of course, no distinction was made between members; either you were clubbable or you were not, and if you were then every man here was your peer. Even if they were a peer, Dan thought, idly packing the line away to see if it could be made into a proper joke later. But the reality was, most of these men had been to the same sort of schools and lived in the same sort of houses and went to the same sort of parties, and someone who had grown up without money and barely had any schooling at all was, by his nature, an entertaining novelty. And Dan did like to be entertaining. He wasn’t surprised, therefore, when word of his being in tonight spread and other members began to drop by in twos and threes.
At first Lizzie was content to sit quietly, shaking hands and exchanging how d’you dos when introduced. But as Dan knew all too well, born performers found it difficult not to treat a group of interested listeners as an audience, and the more people joined them the more animated she became.
“Great wits, your London cab drivers,” she said, face the picture of innocence, selling the country mouse act for all it was worth. “I asked the fellow dropping me at my hotel, ‘Can you stop at the Embankment, please?’, and he said, ‘I’d better, or we’ll both end up in the river!’”
That got her a sustained ripple of laughter as some people took slightly longer to catch the joke than others, and they were off to the races. Dan sat back, happy to watch Lizzie work and bat back a punchline whenever she threw one to him. The character was good, he thought - a bright, engaging country lad who didn’t quite realise how twee his stories sounded to city ears. She could do something with it; a sketch, maybe, with him as the London swell. She’d obviously recognised the same spark, leaning into the moments of naivety, smiling so guilelessly you would never guess she knew they were laughing as much at Eli himself as at his repartee. Only the glee in her eyes when she glanced over at Dan gave her away.
The piece de resistance was a long, involved story about a competition to catch a greased pig at a country fair, complete with a colourful cast of local characters, and it was almost ready for the stage just as she told it. All it needed was a song to top it off. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what it got.
“If you think greased pigs are fun, De Quincey, you should try the game we used to play up at Oxford,” cut in one of the young men who’d just joined them; a Viscount something-or-other, Dan thought. “Catch the greased dollymop. Capital sport, and didn’t she squeal when you laid hands on her! Just like your pig, I suppose.”
Lizzie stiffened, and Dan saw the knuckles around her port glass go white.
“Yes, quite, capital,” she muttered to the floor. The Viscount’s friends, snorting with laughter, chose urging him to give more details over teasing the green boy about his shyness, which was probably the option to be preferred; but not by a lot.
Dan leaned over and touched Lizzie’s elbow. She whipped her head up to look at him with an almost snake-like quickness, and he nearly recoiled. He’d expected her to be upset, certainly, embarrassed possibly, and maybe angry too. But the blaze of cold fury in her eyes stopped him in his tracks. She looked ready to pull the whole building down around their ears and then set fire to the rubble. He pushed down a momentary, irrational sense of panic.
“Eli,” he said gently, “there’s an old friend of mine just come in. Could I steal you away to introduce you to him?”
She let out a long, slow breath, and nodded. As they got up, one of the other young men started some off-colour anecdote about how he’d reduced his fiancee to blushing confusion by telling her repeatedly how much he wanted to die in her lap. Halfway across the room towards the oldest, staidest gentleman Dan could pick out from the crowd, his voice was still carrying over to them in exaggerated falsetto.
“Oh Jeremy, why must you keep talking of laps, and - and dying? You must know it isn’t proper -” and then in his regular tone “as if I couldn’t tell it was heating her up. Scarlet red, she was.”
Lizzie’s hand tightened on Dan’s arm.
“Can I challenge him to a duel? Do people still do that here?”
“I’m afraid they don’t,” he said. “Besides,” he added, trying for something lightly comic and painfully aware he wasn’t doing his best work, “think of the hit to my reputation when you didn’t show up.”
“Who says I wouldn’t show up?” she said, deadpan or maybe just deadly serious; but she let him lead her away to safety. Whether her own or just his, he wasn’t sure.
~
He’d made their excuses not long after, and insisted on their sharing a cab back to somewhere near Lizzie’s lodgings. She looked out of the window in silence as they went, mouth pressed to a hard, tight line. She was coiled up again, shoulders hunched inward, everything held in place; all of the loose-limbed freedom she’d brought to the club had vanished. She was obviously still angry, which was only reasonable. Dan was angry himself, at having a perfectly enjoyable evening and a fine bit of mischief ruined by braying jackasses. But he wondered whether some of her anger was turned inward, now. Whether she was thinking that she ought to have laughed it off, stayed in character; she did hate to lose control. Perhaps it was his fault. He should have made a scene, maybe, said something cutting; it wasn’t as if he didn’t know how. But the moment he’d seen her face he’d only thought about getting her away. There had been something terrible about her anger, like a wound suddenly wrenched open in front of him.
“Dan,” she asked, interrupting his thoughts, “why -?” She broke off again, making a gesture of dismissal.
He looked down at his hands, twisting his fingers together in awkward shapes. There were a lot of possible questions. Why did men bond over coarseness about women, or coarseness at all? What made casual cruelty amusing to them? What made it amusing to anyone, come to that? In a sense, of course, Dan spent his whole professional life asking those questions, but he wasn’t sure he had any good answers. Not for Lizzie, not just then.
“Dan,” she said again, and this time when he looked at her she offered him a tentative smile. “Maybe you can tell me - why do they say die? To mean, you know,” she gestured again, airy and decidedly nonspecific. “It’s not really my area, of course, but it seems an odd word to use to mean something good, on the surface of it.”
“I’m not really sure,” Dan answered, bemused but not unhappy that this was what she had chosen to lighten the mood. “It has a long tradition behind it; goes back to Shakespeare and further.”
She leaned across, bumping him with her elbow. “You and Shakespeare.”
“Me and Shakespeare, what about it?” he said, bumping her back. After a pause he added, “I’ve always thought maybe it was because of the sounds.”
“Oh?”
“Well, moaning, crying out, stuttering breaths, all of that. Pain and pleasure seem very alike, at least in terms of sound.”
She cocked her head at him. “That’s interesting. Does that say something profound, do you think? About human nature?”
“Well, everything does that.” He grinned at her. “It’s all about how you tell ‘em.”
“And nobody tells ‘em like you.” She whistled the opening bars of ‘The Muffin Man’ at him, and he hummed along with the chorus as the dark, squat buildings of Limehouse began to rise around them out of the smog.
~
The next night Dan had to argue with some of the theatre’s technical people about a new lighting rig, and the evening after that he had a meeting with some backers that he really couldn’t wriggle out of, so it wasn’t until the third day that Dan came looking for Lizzie after the show finished. He found her curled up in an old chair in the wings, reading a small leatherbound book. She slipped it into her reticule as she heard him approach, and smiled as she looked him over. He had on an old dress from a production a few seasons back, the styling a little outdated but not overblown, and he’d softened his make up to something more naturalistic. With his wig done up in a bun and pinned under a hat, he looked almost respectable. Almost.
“Turnabout is fair play?” he suggested, dropping her a little curtsey. “I thought it might wash the bad taste out of your mouth.”
She didn’t say a word, just rose, dusted herself down, and slipped her arm through his.
They headed for a local public house and he stood them each a gin. For a while they sat and sipped their drinks, and talked about the show a little and nothing personal at all. Then someone at the back of the room began banging out country airs on the battered upright piano which was, miraculously, mostly in tune.
“Come on,” Lizzie said, tugging him to his feet, “I want to dance.”
They whirled about through a couple of songs, changing who was leading whenever they felt like it. The other dancers were jumbled together, more women than men and paired together in all sorts of different ways. He and Lizzie didn't stand out, which was one of the reasons he'd picked the place. There was a small but energetic crowd gathered by the time the man at the piano excused himself to head back to the bar.
“Hey,” one of the nearby women called out, her voice dropping into the sudden quiet, “it’s Lizzie! Lambeth Marsh Lizzie! Sing us a song, Lizzie!” The crowd took it up, shouting, “Sing us a song!” and Lizzie didn't take much persuading. She ducked her head close to Dan’s and whispered what she wanted before she allowed herself, with only the most token of protests, to be towed to the piano. Dan made his way over there too, and slid onto the freshly vacated stool.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he announced in his most ringing all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-circle voice, “I give you - Lambeth Marsh Lizzie!” He made his way quickly up the octaves, tararan tararan tarara, and trilled a few twinkling notes at the top of the keyboard.
Lizzie struck an attitude as a swooning damsel, and Dan played the opening chords softly. The spectators quietened down, murmuring to each other as they recognised perhaps the softest and most sentimental of the drawing room ballads. Some of them had already begun to sigh romantically. And then Lizzie let rip in her loudest, broadest Cockney accent.
“Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat night has flown,” she sang, laying a suggestive hand on her thigh as she hit the word ‘garden’. She changed attitudes and dropped in pitch; now she was a young man, hips cocked. “Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.” On ‘alone’ she winked saucily at one of the girls at the front of the crowd, who let out a peel of laughter.
It was a brilliant idea; it was all Dan could do not to laugh himself. Their little audience started to grow as she went on, laughing and singing along and ‘oohing’ at anything they thought particularly daring. As they reached the end of the second verse, Lizzie draped herself backwards on the piano.
“To faint in his light and to die,” Lizzie sang, as Dan faded the accompaniment to a low rumble.
And then she took a little, stuttering breath, and moaned, quiet but intense, as though somebody had punched the sound out of her. She lolled her head back as she did it, and for the briefest moment her eyes met Dan’s, and it felt like an almost physical shock. They both looked away at once. The crowd was roaring with laughter, but Dan hardly heard them; he hardly heard the rest of the song.
It should have been nothing. But Dan had a sudden, absolute conviction that that moan had been real, something that she’d heard, up close and terribly, terribly personal. That could have meant any number of things, of course. Lizzie was a fine mimic, and she'd lived a life. She could have taken that noise from anywhere. But - pain and pleasure seem very alike, at least in terms of sound, he'd told her.
And her eyes had been too strange, too bright, when they met his. Alight with something he didn’t have words for. The mirrored opposite of her cold fury; a sort of mad, burning joy that wrenched her open just as thoroughly. And somehow, whatever was on the other side was even more frightening to catch a glimpse of.
As the song finished the patrons barely finished applauding before they started crowding in, offering Lizzie congratulations, asking for autographs (which she gave) and kisses (which she didn’t). Dan sat at the piano, fingers slack over the final chords. And though there were bodies pressed up all around him, he somehow felt cold all over.