Nigel brightened up at that. Alfie Breckenridge owed him a favor, and a big one. Nigel had loaned him the collateral to buy the set of lodgings in the first place, when Alfie had retired from the stage. His wife Sarah was a sharp one, and they wouldn’t
“What’s the terms?” he asked.
“They’ll let her have it—knowing it’s you that’s paying for it for now—at a quarter the going rate until the show is in production and she can pay for it herself.” Arthur looked understandably pleased at that. “Alfie told me it’s too dear for most of our performers anyway, and it went vacant half the time, so he won’t be losing that much by it. He was thinking of cutting it up into rooms, but if our scheme works, Nina will be there in permanent residence. Care to walk over and cast an eye on it after we eat?”
“Anything to get from behind this desk.” Nigel gratefully cleaned his pen and pushed his chair away. Arthur tucked Wolf away inside his coat with the parrot’s head sticking out under his chin, and off they went.
“You should get a secretary to take care of that,” Arthur observed, as they left the building via the stage door, turned up their collars against the drizzle, and headed in the direction of the Dial, which was the name of the Imperial Music Hall version of the pub that sprang up in the vicinity of every theater Nigel had ever seen. Not for the benefit of theater patrons, no. For the benefit of the entertainers. It generally would take a great deal of effort on the part of a casual theatergoer to find these pubs, tucked in as they were in backstreet corners, generally behind the theaters themselves.
And always no more than a few yards from the stage door. They pushed open the doors to a place that had not significantly changed in decades, except for electric lighting instead of gas. A fire burned on the hearth, and the air smelled of tobacco smoke, woodsmoke and bacon. Wolf popped out of Arthur’s coat and took his usual place on Arthur’s shoulder.
Yellowing playbills and fading autographed photos adorned the walls of pubs such as this. The bill of fare was plain, cheap, and always available. It was clean, but it had seen better days . . . probably its better days had been about a century ago. It was generally run by someone who had once been in the theatrical trade himself—seldom long enough to have garnered a name of his own, but long enough to have gotten a fair notion of what players and acts and musicians needed—or would put up with.
In the case of the Dial, the proprietor was a benevolent sort. The food was decent, the service prompt, the prices reasonable, and people tended to look the other way if your trained animal came in with you as long as it was well-behaved. Champagne was available, something you didn’t find in many pubs, because theatrical folks had a taste for it.
The place was full, since morning band-call was over and everyone that didn’t have another place to go had crowded in here to get a bite between band-call and afternoon rehearsal. Most of the people in here were the stagehands, who greeted Nigel, Arthur and Wolf with genial respect. Wolf generally took care to act like a bird around them, and confined himself only to the very occasional clever comment audible to the room. Nigel knew that Arthur’s companion had an ongoing prank though; at quiet moments the bird would lean down and mutter something in Arthur’s ear to try and get him to laugh.
Not today, though. There was only so much time until the early afternoon rehearsals started; Arthur was needed there and Nigel liked to watch the acts for signs of trouble. Performers were kittle cattle; some were reliable, stable, and would go on until they dropped, giving one solid performance after another. But most weren’t. There was always the ongoing curse of the showman to contend with; the life of a performer, gypsy-like as it was, was not a good one for making and keeping friends or lovers. Performers’ egos being what they were . . .
And then there was that ongoing curse of the showman, the bottle. Performers being performers, none of this would show when the time came for the curtain to go up. But cracks would appear at afternoon rehearsals, particularly if they weren’t going well. Nigel liked to slip into the back of a box—never the same twice—and watch. Especially now, when he had his prize, his leading lady, for this new kind of music hall idea. Now he wanted to get a solid lot of acts to fit into this show, and he needed to know he would be able to depend on them for most of a year. That meant no missed performances for being drunk, no replacement of partners for infidelity, no screaming fights backstage, no trouble. They would have to comport themselves like the big theatrical and operatic companies did in Europe, where everyone was permanent, you knew who the stars were, and everyone had to get along, at least marginally. Music hall performers were hard workers, but they weren’t used to that.
Nigel and Arthur ate quickly, but quietly, with Wolf helping himself to what he liked off both their plates. Most of the stagehands were finishing up just as they did, and there was a little awkwardness at the door, quickly settled as Arthur stepped aside so Wolf could climb back into his coat.
Like most music halls—except, perhaps, in London—this one was also surrounded by buildings given over to theatrical lodgings. These were, as might be expected, of variable quality. Some were actual boarding houses, where the lodgers could expect at least two and sometimes three meals along with their room. Some provided little more than a cheerless, shabby furnished room. Some had actual flats that included rudimentary kitchens. The one thing they all had in common was that the landlords expected the tenants to be there for no less than the week of their engagement, but not much more, and anticipated they would have nothing more with them than would fit in a suitcase and prop-trunk.
Alfie Breckenridge was unusual in that he and his wife had both been in the theater before retiring to run a theatrical lodging. Most of the house was a classical boarding-house. Sarah kept a good table and their rooms were always full. Breckenridge was able to pick and choose his lodgers, and as a consequence, there were usually no unpleasant folks in his house.
Two houses, really; he and Sarah had done so well they had purchased the building next to theirs, put in a passage between them, and converted the second from flats to suites of two and three rooms.
Arthur rang the bell of the first house; Alfie must have been expecting them, since the door flew open, and it was Alfie himself standing there rather than the maid. “Gents! Glad you could make it before rehearsals started! Nige, Sarah’s been asking after you, wonderin’ when you were comin’ for a good dinner. She don’t half fret about that cook of yours.”
“She’s the one who recommended Mrs. Graves, you know,” Nigel said with a grin. “Surely she doesn’t think so poorly of her own judgment.”
“Oh you know, Sarah, always second-guessing herself.” Alfie chuckled. “Made her a good partner for my comic-patter though. Well, right, let’s show you these rooms an’ we’ll see if you think they’re good enough for your bally-dancer wench.”
He led the way through the communal sitting-room to the passage that had been cut in the wall between the two houses. “When we got the place, I had the notion I wanted to set things up for them as wanted a bit more privacy and a bit more space. House was four flats, I sectioned it up into bed-sitters with one or two bedrooms, so people that had an act with family could lodge together and couples—” here Alfie winked, and Nigel smiled, since he knew Alfie was not in the least concerned if the “couples” in question were married or not “—could have a bit more privacy. But we left the flat at the top alone, thinkin’ mebbe we could let it out to them as stay longer than just a week or so.” He shook his head, leading the way up the stairs. “Happen you didn’t book a lot of those, and it’s a bit of a journey from here to, say, the Opera House. I was just about to call in the carpenters and give the orders to cut it up too, when Arthur rang me up. And here we are!”
He stopped at the top landing, took out a key with a flourish, and opened the door.
Nigel stepped inside and looked around. He nodded with approval. The rose-papered sitting room had clearly been furnished by a woman, Sarah probably. Light, airy, and comfortable. Plain, but good furniture upholstered in dark rose. Small fireplace with a wooden mantel, and a mirror over the mantelpiece. Electric lighting, which was far safer than gas. Not as ostentatious as his own flat, but he
“Got a small kitchen here, bit of a pantry, but Sarah an’ me are figuring your gel will want us to cater her,” Alfie explained, throwing up the door on a doll’s kitchen, with a tiny stove and oven. “This’s enough for her maid to cook her up an egg and a bit of toast and the like, or keep dinner warm in the oven for her. That’s what everyone else in this flat has done, sent down to us for real meals and all. Some of them even come down to eat around the big table with the rest.” He opened the next door. “This’d be the maid’s room, I reckon. Last person that let the place was a family act, they had their daughter in here.”
A small, neat, plain white bedroom with a thick blue coverlet and blanket on the bed, blue china washbasin and pitcher on the stand, with a blue-curtained window looking out on the backyard seemed adequate enough to Nigel. It didn’t have a fire, but maids’ rooms seldom did, and it did share the wall with the kitchen, which should
