Читать онлайн «The Fair Maid of Bohemia»

Chapter One

They all saw her. Sooner or later, every eye in the company was drawn ineluctably up to the place where she sat in the lower gallery. The yard of the Queen’s Head was filled to shoulder-jostling capacity, as the eager citizens of London converged on Gracechurch Street to see a performance by Westfield’s Men of The Knights of Malta, yet she still stood out clearly from the mass of bodies all around her. She was like a bright star in a troubled sky, a fixed point of illumination from which all could take direction and reassurance. A sign from above.

What was remarkable was the fact that she evidently did not set out to become a cynosure. There was a natural poise and a becoming modesty about her which forbade any deliberate attempt to court attention. Not for her the vivid plumage which some ladies wore or the extravagant gestures with which some gallants sought to make their presence felt. Her attire was sober, her manner restrained. That was the paradox. Here was a young woman whose desire to be invisible somehow made her strikingly conspicuous.

Owen Elias was the first to notice her. When he came out in a black cloak to deliver the Prologue, he was so dazzled by her that he all but forgot the rhyming couplet which ended the speech. The ebullient Welshman swept into the tiring-house at the rear of the makeshift stage and passed the warning on to Lawrence Firethorn.

‘Beware!’ he whispered.

‘Why?’ asked Firethorn.

‘An angel has come to look down on us.

‘Nothing can distract me!’ asserted Firethorn, inflating his barrel chest. ‘When I marshal my knights in Malta, the sight of Saint Peter and a whole choir of angels would not lead me astray. My art is adamantine proof. ’

‘She sits with Lord Westfield himself. ’

‘Some costly trull he keeps for amusement. ’

‘No trull, Lawrence, I do assure you. ’

‘Stand aside, Owen. ’

‘A heavenly creature in every particular. ’

‘They want me. ’

As the martial music sounded, Firethorn, in the person of Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Order, strutted imperiously onto the stage, with four knights in rudimentary armour at his back. It was a majestic entrance and it brought a round of applause from the throng. Lawrence Firethorn was the company’s actor-manager, a man of towering histrionic skills with an incomparable record of success on the boards. He could breathe life into the most moribund character and transmute even the most banal verse into the purest poetry. Declaiming his first speech, he convinced his audience that he had a whole army at his behest and not a mere quartet of puny soldiers in rusty helmets and dented breast-plates.