“Ah, yes. ‘Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me, and tune his merry note unto the sweet bird’s throat.’ ”
“Good gracious, Tom isn’t a gamekeeper, even if he does breed dogs! Neither am I Lady Chatterley. There was nothing improper in our encounters, I assure you. There were far too many people round and about, for one thing, for us to take any risks.”
“There was certainly one small and very inquisitive person to bear witness to the proceedings, so your circumspection was justified and I apologise for my lapsus linguae. I intended no odious comparisons. May we return to the matter in hand? It is serious enough, in all conscience. You must surely have been aware, very early on, that Jasper Lynn was infatuated with you. Boys of his age are adept at hiding some of their feelings, but the blind adoration of a beloved object is not among these.”
Barbara was silent for a full minute; then she said, “I don’t suppose you know this, but in the read-through of the play I was cast as Helena, not Hermia, and so I did not appear in the first scene until nobody was left on-stage except Emma and Tom. I knew that a gangling adolescent had been chosen as Egeus and my only concern was that he was hardly likely to be convincing in the part. As to his being billed as Emma’s father, well, I was thankful that they were only to play the opening scene together and that I didn’t have to appear with him, but when Emma turned down the part of Hermia and it was wished on me, the ludicrous aspect struck me all over again. It became embarrassing, though, when Brian Yorke, never the soul of tact, pulled the boy up in mid-speech in one of the early rehearsals.
“ ‘Look, Jasper, darling boy,’ he said, ‘you are suggesting that Barbara must either be put to death or become a nun if she doesn’t carry out your wishes. I realise that, left to your natural inclinations, you would not want either of these things to happen, but you are playing a part, not indulging in a visit to the Hesperides. Do pay attention to what is going on. Back to “With cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart”, and look daggers at Tom when you say it and then look at Barbara as though you’d like to give her a thrashing. All right, then. Now, please, everybody, put some pep in it. This scene sets the whole play moving.’ It was only then that I realised the boy had been making sheep’s eyes at me.”
“I can guess the next bit,” said Dame Beatrice. “The boy came to you at the end of the rehearsal and abased himself for making you conspicuous. You, I suppose, feeling sorry for him, gave him a kiss and obtained a response which, as a beautiful and experienced woman, you ought to have foreseen and allowed for.”
“I was never more astonished in my life. To me he was just an abashed and awkward schoolboy and suddenly to find myself locked in his arms and having to listen to the kind of stuff that would have made Antony and Cleopatra turn in their graves with embarrassment—well, it was not only ludicrous; it was quite alarming.”
The story unfolded. Dame Beatrice listened and decided to keep any questions unasked, if possible, until the narrative came to an end. Jasper had written a letter couched in the humblest and most contrite terms begging forgiveness ‘for my unpardonable conduct’, promising that he would ‘never again precipitate such a situation’, but offering ‘eternal homage and beseeching you to grant me the benison of your friendship’.
“After that,” continued Barbara, “I must say that, apart from adoring glances from him in the first scene, nothing happened because he was revising for his examinations, so, as he had no more speeches, he did not stay for the last scenes but went straight home to study. There was no fear, I mean, of his following Tom and me into the woods, or anything of that sort.” Barbara went on to say that the rehearsals continued as smoothly as could be expected considering that Rinkley of the unkind tongue and Donald Bourton of the amorous inclinations were in the cast. Then Deborah and Jonathan gave their cocktail party to which only the married couples were invited. This occurred some weeks before the dress rehearsal and was followed, at the next rehearsal, by a statement from Jasper which, at the time, scarcely registered with Barbara. Helping her off with her coat and laying it reverently on one of the trestle tables which, later, would be used for the props, he asked her how she would like it if he could make her a rich woman.
“ ‘I have the means, you know,’ he told me,” said Barbara. “ ‘You mean your father is a wealthy man? But it will be a long time, I hope, before you inherit anything from him and, when you do, you will think twice before giving any of it away,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, but,’ he said, ‘I’m not talking about my father’s money. I have no expectations there. Everything will go to Emma. That’s the usual arrangement between husbands and wives, isn’t it? It’s not as though I’m his son, you see.’ Well, this meant nothing to me at the time, Dame Beatrice. All I said was that I believed the wife was entitled to claim something when the husband died, and that, in my case, I knew that I was well provided for. ‘Anyway, I am more than likely to die before Donald does,’ I remember saying. He asked me what I would do if I had a lot of money. ‘Oh, I should form my own company and pick the parts I wanted for myself instead of having to wait for offers and then perhaps get saddled with something unsuitable,’ I told him, ‘and have to do the best I could with it.’ ”
“And now you are in a position to realise all your ambitions,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Well, yes, but if I had ever dreamed of how it would come about…”
“Quite; however, one cannot foresee some things.”
“Nobody could have foreseen that Rinkley would be taken ill at the last performance.”
“Oh, I am sure young Jasper had made sure of that. I suspect there had been something added to the drinks Mr Rinkley took back-stage.”
“Some of the men overdid it and not only Rinkley. Sometimes I think that if only Donald hadn’t been so drunk he might have realised, the minute he took it out of his belt, that he’d been given the wrong dagger. We all thought it must have been meant for Rinkley, though, if it wasn’t just somebody’s carelessness. Rinkley wasn’t popular, you know, and he would have known, as Donald should have, that he had the wrong dagger and no harm would have been done.”
“That point was made long ago and disposed of. The substitution of the lethal dagger for the harmless one can only have been made by one of the three persons who carried the properties from the house to the stage. Of these, Brian Yorke would have had no reason to harm any of his actors; the same applies to Marcus Lynn, who had subsidised the production and certainly would not want it disrupted. That leaves young Jasper, who, like a dutiful son, helped to carry down the properties each evening after the costumes had been distributed to the performers. Well, I think we may approach the end of this very unhappy story, don’t you?”
“Before we do, there is something I have to ask you. I see you know it all, and no doubt you have all the evidence you need. What will happen to Tom and Peter and me? The police are still looking for a murderer.”
“I am afraid you will have to tell them your story, but the verdict, now that the identity of the young boy’s body is not in doubt, will be suicide while the mind was disturbed. Where that suicide actually took place is beside the point, in a way, but it was a mistake, perhaps, on the part of one of you, to add the suicide weapon to Mr Lynn’s collection. However, he seems convinced that Jasper himself placed it there and that he killed himself with some other form of cold steel.”