Lovers Make Moan

love, so they went into the woods when they were not on the stage and practised being in love.”

“Very painstaking of them, but how do you know? I thought you were with Signora Moretti when you weren’t on stage.”

“Oh, that was only for the three proper nights. The other times we did as we liked, mostly. I used to get out of bed and go down to the woods and—”

Laura thought it was time to get away from Lysander and Hermia and their impromptu rehearsals in the woods. She managed this by asking, “Did Yolanda show you the other daggers?”

“Oh, no. Well, she couldn’t, because everybody was wearing them.”

“Except Mr Rinkley, I think. His dagger was in his belt and his belt would have been on the table. As I remember the play, he didn’t need it until the last scene.”

“We didn’t go near the tables. Yolanda showed me her knife, but on the real nights Yolanda wasn’t allowed to wear it any more until the part of the play us fairies never saw.”

“So you didn’t see what was on the tables at the side of the stage, not even the toy dog?”

“No, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see a toy dog when there were the real ones. Edmund cried when Mrs Yorke came and took the dogs out of our beds.”

“She bit me,” said Edmund. “That’s why I cried.”

“Of course she didn’t bite you. She said the dogs might bite you if they didn’t like being in bed,” said Rosamund.

“She bit me,” Edmund insisted.

“He got the idea in his head when Mrs Yorke took the dogs,” said Rosamund to Laura. “Cook said people should never put ideas in his head. She said it when Carrie was tossing the pancakes. Cook makes lovely pancakes, but she comes all over alike when they have to be tossed, so Carrie did it and Edmund watched her and it made him laugh, so he picked up the bowl that the batter was still in and threw the batter up in the air and it all fell on him. Cook was terribly cross.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Mummy said to Daddy, ‘You’re not to laugh at him. He’s a very naughty boy’, and Carrie had to take him away and bath him, so Cook had to turn the pancakes with a knife.”

“So you didn’t handle any of the daggers at the real play at all? Are you sure you didn’t?”

“We were with Signora. I told you! Auntie Deb was with us a lot of the time, too, and so was Mr Bourton and so was Peter Woolidge. Mr Bourton said to Auntie Deb, ‘Your eyes are lodestars’, and Auntie Deb said, ‘The dice are loaded, too, my lad, so don’t be silly’, and Mr Bourton said, ‘I always play with my own dice’, and Auntie Deb said, ‘Cheats never prosper’, and Signora said, ‘ben trovato’. Signora is really French and her name is Madame Moret, but we have to call her Signora because she says ‘Madame’ stinks of the bordello. What is a bordello?”

“A home for girls who haven’t got any other.”

“Who was Ben Trovato?”

“It does not mean a person. I think it is the Italian for well-played, or something like that.”

“Do you think Yolanda’s bouquet was bigger than mine?”

“Not if Mr Lynn is a gentleman, and I’m sure he is.”

“I’ve checked as far as I can,” said Laura to Dame Beatrice over the telephone when the children had gone out in the car with the chauffeur and handyman, “and it confirms what we already knew. There doesn’t seem any way in which the children—and I don’t mean Rosamund and Edmund only—could have gone anywhere near the props during the actual performances and mucked about with the daggers. The only exception would have been Yorke’s little girl, Yolanda, but it seems that, except when she went to the summerhouse to look at the bloodhounds, she was with her parents and wouldn’t have been allowed to handle the properties on the tables.”

“I have thought from the beginning that the daggers were changed over before that last performance began. I have talked with Jonathan and he thinks the likeliest thing is that the daggers slipped out of the pockets in the belts while they were being carried away at the end of the second performance and were put back in the wrong places before anybody wore them again. This, however, does not account for the theatrical dagger under the table. Of course, it was so unfortunate that the one person who would realise that Pyramus had been provided with the wrong dagger was not in a position to point this out.”

“Too busy expelling indigestible shellfish from his system. As our physiology lecturer used to say: ‘better two feet up than forty feet down’. The process was probably aided by alcohol. I am told that Rinkley had the name for being a bit of a sozzler. In any case, surely he must have known that the beastly things were indigestible?”

“Not if he had never eaten mussels before.”

“And if he hadn’t, it was a cloth-headed idea to try them for the first time before making what I suppose, to his way of thinking, was an important public appearance.”

“Perhaps he dined with friends and they provided the mussels. It might have been considered impolite to refuse them under such circumstances.”

“Are you, by any chance, acting as devil’s advocate?”

“Perhaps, and it seems that you are determined to refute me.”

“I always believe the worst and then it’s so much of a relief to find that things (and people) are not so black as I thought they were.”

“You Celts are born pessimists, of course. Let Rosamund prattle away and give ear to any interpolations Edmund may make. Something useful might emerge. One never knows. Rosamund has told us a good deal already, one way and another.”

“There is a bit to add. Bourton was not the only member of the cast to pursue his