Of course as the villain Feltheryn got that wonderful scene in the second act in which he soliloquized about the joys of lust: and the scene that followed was not without satisfaction as he got to order the torture (horrible, but off stage) of Snegelringe, who would soon deserve torture if he didn't stay out of the bedchambers of some of Sanctuary's better class of bored ladies. Rounsnouf, the company comedian, got to play the torturer and he was quite good at it; although one had to keep an iron hand on his performance or he would chew the scenery to such a degree that the audience would begin to laugh, and that was unforgivable in a play of such passion and violence.
It was a good play, no doubt about that! But Feltheryn would have preferred to delay his own murder to the last act. As it was, he lay dead in a puddle of pig's blood at the end of the second act, and there was naught for him to do for a full third of the play but sit backstage in his costume and makeup waiting to take a bow at the end. And he had a sneaking suspicion that the applause he got would have been considerably greater if the audience had not had time to forget how good he was when Glisselrand plunged the knife from the supper table into his throat.
But enough of that! It was time the company took on a comedy, and The Chambermaid's Wedding was probably the best comedy ever written. Tragedy was all very fine, and it inevitably drew a crowd, but Sanctuary was a town with plenty of tragedy of its own; Sanctuary could use a few laughs, and Feltheryn intended to provide them.
There was only one small difficulty, and that was the lack, in the troupe, of a third-string female. Glisselrand would of course play the Countess, and Evenita the title role of the Chambermaid. But there was Serafina, the Schoolgirl, to cast as well, and one needed a strong actress for that because there were a great many lines, a song, and most of the time on stage the school was disguised as a schoolboy. That was because she had a schoolgirl crush on the Countess and, in an innocent schoolgirl way, wanted the Countess to make love to her.
They had tried doing the play with a boy in the part and it had proved a disaster. That was before Lempchin had joined the company. If they were forced to use Lempchin it would be worse than a disaster! Besides which, audiences loved to see a pretty young girl dressed up in tight pants pretending to be a boy. It was traditional, and even a bit erotic.
No, Feltheryn sighed to himself as he sat at the kitchen table looking at the script; they would have to find another female, that was all there was to it. And the best place to look for women was in the Street of Red Lanterns, at the Aphrodisia House. Myrtis had helped them before, she might be able to help them again.
He went upstairs to where Glisselrand was preparing for an afternoon nap, explained carefully what he had in mind, and got her blessing. Whatever else might be thought of The Chambermaid's Wedding, it was the one play in which all the sympathy and love went to the older woman, not to the younger title role; and Glisselrand was of an age to appreciate that-
Feltheryn would of course play the Count, who was also in a way a villain; but at least he would be on stage right up to the final curtain.
His trip to the Aphrodisia House was despoiled only by the presence of the offending broadsides distributed by Vomistritus. Apparently Lempchin had not yet got to the Street of Red Lanterns. Feltheryn pulled a few down as he passed them, but the glue was beginning to dry and it was difficult to get it off his hands once it was on. He had to beg pardon at the door when he finally arrived and ask for a basin and then, as the glue was much tackier than he had thought, he had to ask for help from one of the ladies of the house.
Feltheryn was not beyond appreciating the charms of the lovely young woman who helped him, nor was he in the least insensitive to the finetuned professionalism of her performance, displayed in even so humble an activity as helping him get his hands clean. The world's oldest profession was at least eighty percent theater, he recalled from his wild and reckless youth. Any woman could offer sex for money, but it took talent to make that sex so desirable that the audience returned again and again for the show.
And it was a show: the act itself was only the last curtain of an evening compounded of beautiful costumes, exotic perfumes, graceful movement, tantalizing conversation, stimulating music, and a setting that was a marvel of womanly design. To visit the Aphrodisia House was to enjoy a show with only one plot but a constantly changing cast of characters: and it was that fact which made the difference between Myrtis's elegant courtesans and the sad and desperate women who walked by night in the Promise of Heaven.
"There now!" said the young woman, drying his hands with an embroidered towel. "We've got it all off, Master Feltheryn. I'll clean up this mess, and you can go talk with the madam. Do you know the way to her room?"
"No, I am afraid I have not had that pleasure," Feltheryn answered in his most courtly fashion as he stood from the little table.
"Then I'll have one of the girls show you," she said, beginning quickly to clean as she had said she would. "Shawme! Shawme, would you please show Master Feltheryn up to Myrtis's room? I sent word up to her that he was here."
Shawme, a mere child whose blue eyes held inordinate pride, smiled at Feltheryn and led him up the stairs. A moment later he was seated in a small parlour, explaining his needs to Myrtis, the proprietrix of the Aphrodisia House, and sipping the blackberry tea she provided.
"-so you see, lovely lady," he finished, "she must be talented and willing to leam to act if she cannot, and reasonably beautiful, but she must also have the sort of figure which lends itself to wearing men's clothing. For most of the play she must be disguised as a man, and it must not appear laughable that she is so disguised. The audience will suspend its disbelief to see a young girl in tight pants, but it will not accept a full-blown womanly figure in the same outfit. I very much want to do the play, but without your help I fear I cannot."
Myrtis laughed-
"My dear Feltheryn! The fact is, there are plenty of people running around this town in the clothes of the opposite sex, and most of them are women. For some strange reason they assume cross-dressing to be the one way in the world they can protect their precious chastity. Not that I am in any wise tolerant of any man abusing a woman, mind you, but really, there are so many other and better ways of preventing rape! Why, you will never find a softer, more engagingly femimne roster of ladies than reside within my walls; but any one of them could tell you a dozen ways to keep a man in place if he tried to take something that wasn't his. Yet it is not the lovely, soft, delicate ones who worry, and who sometimes should. It is those hard, intolerant women: the ones with some kind of chip on their shoulder. They never in their lives have tried to make themselves attractive to men, yet they assume they are irresistible to anything on three legs. Ha! They should try working here, coaxing some poor merchant to arousal who is more worried about whether the money is well spent than whether he is having a good time! But beyond that, these women have gone to extremes to make themselves less than attractive to men, have often learned some devastating martial an in response to their fear, and they have acquired manners that would get them barred from my house if they were men; and still, they go through life assuming that rape is around every corner! So they disguise themselves as men, and spend most of their life energy worrying about whether they will be found out. It saddens me deeply, A woman should live her life going forward at full charge, not cringing back in fear of something that may never happen."
"But Myrtis," said Feltheryn, "some women do get raped."
"Well of course they do!" said the madam- "And some get murdered and some get robbed and some get tortured and a great many are beaten by their husbands in the cozy confines of respectable marriage. By far the greatest number of women die in childbirth! But life is about living. Master Player, not about the piddling little moment at the end when you die. Oh, some of these fearful women are dear friends of mine, and I try to understand. But it does seem foolish to put such a high value on rape when a woman in this town is far more likely to be robbed or murdered. What a rapist seeks to take he really cannot, unless the woman lets him; and that is not her body, but her dignity. She may not like the physical part, it may sit with her like a canker for her lifetime if she lets it; but frankly, nobody can use my body to humiliate me. I am flesh, but I am more than that. I am a woman, and inordinately proud of the fact, and neither pain nor humiliation can touch that. Besides, men get raped too, so it's not much of a disguise in the long run. In fact, in Sanctuary, disguising yourself as a goat wouldn't be much better!"