Perdita Read Online Free Page A

without getting an answer. The windows were too high off the ground to effect an entry in daylight. Had it been dark, I would have tried it.
    I was so tired and so frustrated that in the end I decided to have some dinner, and go like a patron to the hall a quarter of an hour before the performance began. Dinner was only nominally dinner. A lone lady did not venture into a common room. I had a sandwich at a teashop, the last customer to enter, just before the door was locked. Anger was rising to the top of my emotions as I paid my way into Reimer’s Hall, reducing my cash to practically nothing. Once inside I did not take a seat, but went backstage, ready to pull Perdita by the scruff of the neck out of the disreputable place.
    I blush to relate the conditions under which the troupe made their preparations. The females were wedged, three or four to a cubicle, behind hanging curtains that did not even come to the floor. There were ten or twelve inches of ankle and leg exposed. The women darted in and out with no great regard for pulling the curtain closed behind them. The place was a voyeur’s delight. There were several greasy-looking men just outside, peering greedily in each time the curtain was opened. Being a stranger in their midst, I was subjected to my share of scrutiny from the bucks. When one of them rolled up to me, with his great wadded shoulders sticking out a foot from his body, I asked in the haughtiest tone I own for Mr. Daugherty.
    The man looked me boldly up and down, hunched his wadding as though to imply my anatomy was not up to the company’s high standard, then walked away, waving a hand for me to follow in his footsteps.
    Mr. Daugherty had set aside a cubbyhole for himself amidst the backstage squalor. I think it was a broom closet actually. In it he sat with a wine bottle and a glass, bent over a sheet of closely-written figures, balanced on his knee. He did not recognize me.
    After repeating the ocular examination that was apparently an inevitable result of a female’s venturing behind stage, he asked "What’s your act, miss? I have all the girls I can use, unless you have something special to offer.”
    “I am not looking for work, sir. I am looking for my charge, who joined you at Chippenham last night.”
    He raised his brows, hunched his shoulders, threw out his hands and regarded me with a conning smile. "I don’t know what you’re talking about, miss. I was in Marlborough last night,” he said, with an Irish accent that I shan’t attempt to duplicate. It added something to his speech, but would detract from the telling to go jumbling up the letters.
    "Your outfit was in Chippenham. She joined it,” I said coolly, though I did not actually know anything of the sort. “If you do not produce her this instant, I shall call in a constable. She is a minor, under my charge.
    “A minor, you say?”
    “That’s right. Any attempt to force her . . ."
    “Force! Nay, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick I swear. There was no forcing,” he said at once, an expression of alarmed fear lighting on his visage, which was rather handsome, incidentally.
    “When it is a minor in question, the onus falls on the older party,” I said, not sure of my legal facts, but sure Mr. Daugherty would have no notion whether they were true, nor question them, so long as they sounded bold and menacing.
    He licked his lips, ran his fingers nervously through his hair, and blurted out the truth. “She’s gone to sit in the audience and see the show.”
    As I turned to leave, he called after me, “But I didn’t force her. She came running after us!”
    I knew perfectly well it was true, so said nothing, but only hurried out to scan the audience for her bold face. What an audience it was! The worst rabble ever assembled in the country, ninety percent of it male, and the other ten percent lightskirts. I felt perfectly degraded to enter the hall, but at least Perdita was sitting in a dark corner with an elderly,