Punch, feeling frolicsome, was doing a whirling dance with the string of sausages when a headless puppet entered, also dancing, the stump of its neck bobbing up and down to the beat of the accelerated organ music. Punch was terrified by this apparition until Horrabin explained that it was only his pal Scaramouche, “and isn’t it fun to be pals with things everybody else is afraid of?” Punch pondered this, knob chin on his fist, then laughed, nodded, and resumed his dance. Even the Horrabin puppet was dancing on its stilts, and Doyle was awed to think of the contortions the puppeteer must have been going through to keep three puppets dancing and the music going too.
Now a fourth puppet whirled on stage—it was a woman, with the sort of exaggeratedly voluptuous figure that little boys chalk on walls, but her white face, dark eyes and long white veils made it clear that she was meant to be a ghost. “Judy, my sweet creature!” exclaimed Punch, still dancing, “you’re ever so much more beautiful now!”
Punch jigged to the front of the stage, and all at once the music stopped and a curtain dropped behind him, isolating him from the others. He did a few more hesitant steps and then halted, for a new puppet had appeared—a somber figure in a black hood, and it was pushing along a gallows with a little noose swinging from it. ,
“Jack Ketch!” said Punch.
“Aye, Jack Ketch,” said the newcomer, “or Mr. Graball, or the Grimy Reaper. It don’t make no difference what you call me, Punch. I’ve come to execute you, by order of the Law.”
Horrabin’s head popped out for a moment from the wings. “See if you can kill him,” he said, and withdrew.
Punch clapped his hands. Then with a lot of double talk he got Jack Ketch to put the noose around his own neck, just to show how it’s done, and Punch pulled the rope, hoisting the executioner puppet into the air, its legs somehow kicking realistically. Punch laughed and turned to the audience with spread, welcoming arms. “Hooray!” he cried in his cartoon character voice. “Now Death is dead, and we can all do as we please!”
The curtain behind him snapped back up and the music came on with a crash, very fast and wild now, and the puppets were all dancing around the gallows, Punch hand in hand with Judy’s ghost. A couple of the boys and one of the old men got up from the pavement and walked away, the old man shaking his head in disgust.
Punch and the Judy ghost danced up to the front, so that when the curtain dropped again and the music ceased they were alone at the front of the stage. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” piped Punch, “was the new and corrected Punch’s Opera.” Punch slowly looked round his audience—thinned down to only two old bums, three boys and Doyle. Then he did a quick jig and pinched the ghost puppet obscenely. “Horrabin did your humble servant a good turn or two, lads,” he said. “And any of you that’s interested can come talk to me backstage.” He gave Doyle a stare that was surprisingly intense for glass eyes, and then the outer curtains swept in from the sides. The show was over.
One old man and one boy walked around with Doyle to the back of the narrow booth, and the Punch puppet, looking very small away from the scaled down stage, waved at them from over the top of the curtain that served as a stage door.
“My admirers!” the puppet squeaked. “One at a time—Lord Foreigner last.”
Feeling like a fool, Doyle stood behind the evidently imbecilic boy while the old man shuffled into the booth. It’s as though we’re waiting to get into a confessional, he thought glumly. The image was reinforced by the murmured questions and answers he could hear from inside.
Doyle soon noticed that certain members of the milling market crowd were looking at him in peculiar ways; a well-dressed man leading a child by the hand glanced at him with a mixture of pity and contempt, one stout old fellow stared with obvious envy, and a policeman—to Doyle’s alarm—gave him a squinting, tight-lipped stare as though half resolved to arrest him on the spot. Doyle stared down at the sprung, bag-like shoes Chris and Meg had let him have in exchange for his elegant boots. Whatever it is, he thought, if there’s money in it and it’s not too illegal, I’ll take it—for a while, anyway, just till I get on my feet in this damned century.
The old man pushed the curtain aside and walked away without a glance at the boy or Doyle, and Doyle, watching him recede into the crowd, was unable to guess whether the old fellow was pleased or disappointed. The boy had stepped inside, and could soon be heard laughing delightedly. He was outside again in a moment, skipping away with a bright new shilling in his hand—and, Doyle noticed, a chalked cross in a, circle, which definitely hadn’t been there before, on the back of his oversized coat.
He looked back at the booth and met the cunningly worked gaze of the voluptuous Judy puppet peering around the curtain at him. “Come play in my pint pot,” she whispered, and winked.
The kid got a shilling, he reminded himself as he stepped forward—and I’ll check my coat afterward for chalk marks.
The puppet disappeared inside a moment before Doyle swept the curtain aside and edged in. The interior was dark, but he could see a little stool, and he sank onto it.
He could just make out the silhouette, a foot or two away, of a head in a tall, pointed hat and an upper torso in a coat with grotesquely padded shoulders; the form moved, leaning forward, and he knew it was his host. “And now the ruined foreigner,” came a fluty voice, “trying to look at ease in an alien land. Where do you come from?”
“Uh… America. And I am broke—penniless. So if you do have some kind of job offer, I’ll be—gaah!”
The sliding panel of a dark lantern had been clanked open, and the silhouette was abruptly revealed to be a clown, its face hideously pied with red and green and white paint, its inflamed eyes wide open and crossed, and a startlingly long tongue protruding from between puffed-out cheeks. It was the same clown he’d seen stumping about the market on stilts earlier, the model of the Horrabin puppet.
The tongue withdrew and the face relaxed, but even in repose the face paint made it impossible to guess its expression, or even much of its form. The clown was perched cross-legged on a stool a little higher than Doyle’s. “I perceive you’ve nearly used up your woodpile,” the clown said, “and are about to start shoving the chairs and curtains, even the books, into the fireplace. Lucky I came across you today—tomorrow or the day after I don’t think there’d have been much left of you.”
Doyle closed his eyes and let his heartbeat slow down. He was alarmed to note that even this scanty sympathy made him feel ready to burst into tears. He sighed deeply and then opened his eyes. “If you have an offer,” he said quietly, “state it.”
The clown grinned, revealing a set of yellowed teeth that pointed every which way, like tombstones in an old and shifting graveyard. “Haven’t quite ripped up the floorboards yet,” he noted approvingly. “Good. You have, milord, a sensitive and intelligent face; it’s clear that you’ve been well brought up and that garbage clothes like these aren’t what you’re accustomed to. Have you ever been interested in the dramatic arts?”
“Well… no, not particularly. I was in a play or two in school.”
“Do you think you could learn a part, gauge an audience and alter your role to suit their tastes, become whatever sort of character they’d be most sympathetic toward?”
Doyle was mystified, but timidly hopeful. “I suppose so. If I could just get some food and a bed first. I know for a fact that I don’t get stage fright, because—”