After our marriage we moved to rented rooms in the Bayswater area of London, but we did not have long to wait before success smiled on me. In 1893 we bought the large house in St Johns Wood where we have lived ever since. In the same year our twin children, Graham and Helena, were born.
I have always kept my professional life separate from my family life. During the period I am describing I practised my profession from my office and workshop in Elgin Avenue, and when touring shows took me abroad or to remoter parts of Britain I did not take Sarah with me. When based in London, or when between shows, I lived quietly and contentedly at home with her.
I stress my contented domestic life because of what was soon to happen.
Shall I continue?
I think I must; yes. I suspect I know to what I am referring here.
I had been advertising in theatrical journals for a replacement lady assistant, because my existing young woman, Georgina Harris, was planning to marry. I always dreaded the upheaval caused by the arrival of a new member of staff, especially one so important as the stage assistant. When Olive Wenscombe wrote and applied for an interview she did not seem immediately suitable, and her letter went unanswered for some time.
She was, she said in her letter, twenty-six. This was a little older than I would have liked, and she went on to describe herself as a trained danseuse who had moved over to the work of magical assistant. Many illusionists do employ dance artistes because of their fit and supple bodies, but I have always preferred to employ young women with specific magical experience, rather than those who took it up simply because a job had been offered to them at some time in the past. Nevertheless, Olive Wenscombe's letter came during one of those times when good assistants were hard to find, and so I finally made an appointment with her.
The work of magician's assistant is not one to which many people are suited. A young woman has to possess certain physical characteristics. She has to be young, of course, and if not naturally pretty then she has to have pleasing features that are capable of being made up to look pretty. In addition she has to have a slim, lithe and strong body. She has to be willing to stand, crouch, kneel or lie in confined places, often for several minutes at a time, and on release appear perfectly relaxed and unmarked by her period of enclosure. Above all, she has to be willing to endure the unusual demands and strange requests made to her by her employer, in pursuit of his illusions.
Olive Wenscombe's interview took place, as did all such, at my workshop in Elgin Avenue. Here, in opened cabinets and mirrored cubes and curtained alcoves, were laid bare many of the incidental secrets of my business. Although I never made a point of showing any of my staff exactly how a trick was worked, unless of course that knowledge was crucial to their part in it, I wanted them to understand that each trick had a rational explanation behind it and that I knew what I was doing. Some stage illusions, and some of those that I performed, used knives or swords or even firearms, and from the auditorium looked dangerous. The New Transported Man, in particular, with its explosive electrical reactions and clouds of carbon discharge, regularly scares the wits out of the front six rows at any performance! But I wanted no one who worked for me to feel at risk. The only illusion whose secret I guarded fastidiously was The New Transported Man itself, and its working was concealed even from the young woman who shared the stage with me until the moment before the illusion began.
It should be clear from this that I do not work entirely alone, nor does any modern illusionist. In addition to my stage assistants, I had working for me Thomas Elbourne, my irreplaceable ingйnieur , and two of his own young artisans, who helped him build and maintain the apparatus. Thomas had been in my employ almost from the start. Before he worked for me he had been at the Egyptian Hall, under Maskelyne.
(Thomas Elbourne knew my most guarded secret; he had to. But I trusted him; I had to. I say this as simply as possible, to convey the simplicity of my belief in him. Thomas had worked with magicians all his life, and nothing any more surprised him. There is little I know about magic today that I did not learn from him one way or the other. Yet never once, in all the years I worked with him — he retired several years ago — did he ever explicitly reveal the secret of another magician to me or to anyone else. To call his trust into question would be to question my very sanity. Thomas was a Londoner from Tottenham, a married man without children. He was many years older than me, but I never discovered exactly how many. At the time Olive Wenscombe began working for me I assume he must have been in his middle or late sixties.)
I decided to employ Olive Wenscombe almost as soon as she arrived. She was neither tall nor broad, but had an attractive and slim body. She held her head erect as she walked or stood, and her face had well-defined features. She was American-born, and had an accent she identified as East Coast, but had lived and worked in London for several years. I introduced her as informally as possible to Thomas Elbourne and Georgina Harris, then asked to see whatever references she might have brought with her. I generally gave references a great deal of weight when assessing an applicant, because a recommendation from a magician whose work I knew would almost certainly gain the applicant the job. Olive had brought two such references with her, one was from a magician working the resort towns of Sussex and Hampshire, whose name I did not recognize, but the other was from Joseph Buatier de Kolta, one of the greatest living performers. I was, I admit, impressed. I quietly passed de Kolta's letter to Thomas Elbourne, and watched his expression.
"How long did you work for Monsieur de Kolta?" I asked her.
"Only for five months," she said. "I was hired for a tour of Europe, and he let me go at the end of it."
"So I see."
After that, employing her was something of a formality, but even so I felt I had to subject her to the usual tests. It was for these that Georgina had come along, as it would not be right to ask any applicant, even one as experienced as Olive Wenscombe, to demonstrate her abilities without the presence of a chaperone.
"Did you bring a rehearsal costume with you?" I said.
"Yes, sir, I did."
"Then if you would be so kind—"
A few minutes later, wearing a body-hugging costume, Olive Wenscombe was led by Thomas to a few of our cabinets, and asked to take up position inside one. The production of a living, healthy young woman from what appears to be an empty cabinet is one of the traditional stand-bys of magic. To bring off the effect, the assistant has to insinuate herself into a concealed compartment, and the smaller this compartment can be the more surprising the effect of the illusion. Careful choice of a voluminous costume, and one that is made of bright colours and has glittery ribbons sewn into the fabric, to catch and reflect the limelight, will enhance the mystery. It was obvious to us all that Olive was well versed in secret compartments and panels. Thomas took her first to our Palanquin (which even by that time we rarely used in the act, since the trick had become so well known), and she knew exactly where the hidden compartment was and promptly climbed into it.
Thomas and I next asked her to essay the illusion known as Vanity Fair, in which a young woman is apparently made to pass through a solid mirror. This is not a difficult illusion to perform, but it does require agility and quickness of movement on the part of the girl. Although Olive said she had not taken part in it before, after we had shown her the mechanism she showed she could wriggle through with commendable speed.