They must have been taking a break from the audition process because there was so much chatting going on. She tried to match the voices with the speakers.
“What is so remarkable to me, as a writer,” said Humphrey Porter in his inimitably patrician and slightly pompous cadences, “is that Austen had written more than half her mature oeuvre by 1801, yet with Pride and Prejudice, for instance, she couldn’t get a publisher to look at it, much less offer to print it.”
“It makes you wonder how many other works of great genius were rejected by those who claimed superior knowledge of the profession—or of the market,” Ralph Merino concurred.
Humphrey continued his dissertation, pleased to have an audience. “But while Jane kept her writing a secret from the outside world, scribbling in private and sliding her pages under a placemat whenever anyone walked in the door, her father believed in her work. Amazing, isn’t it? Jane was only twenty-two years old when Reverend Austen brought the manuscript of P and P to a publisher, who rejected it before he’d even read it.”
“I was reading about the Austen home when we were researching designs for the set,” Ralph said. “In 1801, before they retrenched, I suppose, their library boasted more than five hundred volumes.”
C.J. continued to listen to their fragmented conversations, not knowing whether she’d been hallucinating the recent events of her life, or if she had indeed somehow traveled through time; whether her journey to 1801 had been a singular phenomenon, or if she could repeat it at will. Her attempt to return to her own century had not proven entirely successful. What if she could not penetrate the blackness that lay between her and the people in the Bedford Street Playhouse? It had to be done!
As she assayed another step toward the By a Lady staff, a gust of wind tinged with the pungent odor of cigar smoke blew toward her, filling her nostrils and stinging her eyes. C.J. cried out in pain when she slammed her shin into an immovable object. She blinked several times in an effort to refocus her eyes.
Wait! She was here! She had done it! Returned to her own place and time. C.J. stifled a squeal of discovery when she realized that her leg had come into contact with an enormous gilt throne. But . . . she remembered seeing nothing like it backstage at the Bedford Street Playhouse. C.J. poked around, looking for familiar furniture—and to her dismay, she found it: the stained- glass panels from the Theatre Royal, Bath’s production of De Montfort, and the unwieldy silk hedgerow. She looked down at her body and realized that her saffron-colored De Montfort costume had somehow evanesced.
There has to be something supernatural about this theatre, C.J. reasoned. Or else she would not have ended up here in the first place. Should she poke around and see if there was another “open sesame” that would lead her home . . . a wardrobe, for example? It had worked for C. S. Lewis. The taste of failure lingered bitterly on her lips. She had to try again to return to her own place and time. The notion that she might be forever trapped in the nineteenth century was not one she was willing to accept, let alone embrace. C.J. rummaged backstage, seeking trap doors and secret passages, but her search was cut short by the sound of voices close at hand.
She followed the acrid aroma of tobacco smoke that wafted through the open door leading from the backstage area into the alley just outside the theatre. Two powerfully built men with muscular forearms stopped in midconversation when they saw C.J. leave the building and try to sneak past them. An awkward standoff ensued as C.J. and the stagehands exchanged glances.
“What do you think you were doin’ snoopin’ around in there?” demanded one of them, crushing the stub of his cheroot beneath his boot heel. “There’s no performance today, miss.” C.J.’s heart palpitated like a pair of castanets and her mouth went dry, all sense of improvisation deserting her.
The other man drew a small tin from his pocket, took a pinch of brown snuff between a dirty thumb and forefinger, and inhaled it with a quick snort, his gaze never leaving C.J. as he addressed his companion. “Did you hear what Mrs. Siddons did last night, Turpin? Almost refused to go on as the Thane’s wife—seems she’d mislaid her lucky rabbit’s foot, and she didn’t want to set foot on the stage without it—seeing how it’s ‘The Scottish Play’ and all.”
Wait! If Siddons was performing Macbeth last night, according to the stagehands, and C.J. had tried to return to the future during De Montfort, then how much time had elapsed between her attempt to get home and the present? How long had she been struggling in the void between the centuries before she was bounced back to 1801? How might she find out without appearing daft?
The two stagehands stood like street toughs blocking C.J.’s path to the safety of the avenue beyond the alleyway. “You haven’t told us what you were about in a dark theatre, young lady,” Turpin said.
Her brain was already addled from trying to account for the time lapse; now her heart was pounding more heavily as she fought to think fast on her feet. “I . . . work for Mrs. Siddons,” C.J. fibbed in a flash of inspiration. “I was just bringing her rabbit’s foot back to the theatre to leave it in her dressing room. She had . . . taken it home by mistake.” A dreadfully lame alibi, but she prayed it would work.
The stagehands eyed C.J. suspiciously, then must have decided that she was telling the truth and that her despair was born out of fear of being sacked by the great Siddons. Warily, they let her pass. She walked quickly through the alley and out into the street, whistling an English country dance melody
