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mutually beneficial to hire him on as an apprentice.”
    The young man smirked knowingly at Mr. Wilton. “I guess ya could say that I knows where Mister Wilton has hid the bodies,” he said cheerily. “Faith, how difficult can it be to slap a few words on paper?”
    I was fumbling for a reply when Mr. Wilton whisked the young man off to meet his wife and daughter.
    Mrs. Wilton, her left leg bandaged from ankle to knee, was in the process of berating Mr. Sharpe for the previous Saturday’s accident. She wielded a cane, newly borrowed from the Properties Department, directly at Mr. Sharpe’s person. “Where were you,” she demanded, “when you should have been protecting me from imminent danger?”
    Mr. Sharpe seemed genuinely apologetic; he is a good actor for a stagehand. “T’other side of the stage, ma’am,” he stammered, “where I was told to be for the changeover into the dream sequence.”
    “The other side of the stage?” Mrs. Wilton snorted, moving so quickly toward Mr. Sharpe that she momentarily forgot her injury. “And who, pray, told you to stand there?”
    “Mr. Phillips, ma’am.” Mrs. Wilton cast a withering glance my way, and I began wishing for a vampire trap of my own – or some such exit, camouflaged and mounted in the wall – into which I might disappear.
    The other stagehands were going about their work, all the while listening to the conversation between Mr. Sharpe and Mrs. Wilton. None of them had been sorry to hear of Mrs. Wilton’s run-in with the chair in the wings. Mrs. Wilton noticed that they were moving a trifle more slowly than usual. “And what about Mr. Hampton?” she said, casting a frumpled glance at the retired sailor who now made much of his living whistling up in the fly tower. He suddenly began marching about the backstage area as if the setup for tonight’s bill depended entirely upon him. “Where was he?”
    “Looking after the fire can, ma’am,” said Mr. Sharpe, more firmly now. “Mr. Wilton warned us that we can’t have another crinoline catching fire like we did two weeks ago.”
    “And what of Mr. Manning?”
    “He’ll have to speak for himself, ma’am. I can’t be accountable for everyone here.”
    At that precise moment, Mr. Wilton happened to be standing beside his wife, with Mr. Tyrone nearby. “Sarah,” Mr. Wilton said, “I would like you to meet our new playwright’s apprentice, Mr. Tyrone.”
    Mrs. Wilton held her hand out to the young man as though she were Queen of England, not just queen of the New Albion Theatre; a complete change had come over her. “Goodness knows,” she said, “that you have arrived at a fortuitous moment, young man. The national theatre is in decline for want of another Shakespeare. Mr. Farquhar Pratt has done his best in our little establishment, but he has proven himself capable of little more than Newgate sensations. Have you anything in your portfolio with a strong role for the soubrette?”
    Mr. Tyrone stood gawking at Mrs. Wilton’s outstretched hand for a moment before taking it in his own and shaking it vigorously. “I don’t thoroughly know what a portfolio is,” he replied, “but if yer meanin to ask if I’ve ever put pen to paper before, the answer is yes – at the gaff over in Islington but, more importantly, to sign my cheques over to the Prince of Wales whilst I bin drinkin there.”
    Momentarily ignoring the apprentice’s social ineptitude, Mrs. Wilton turned to her husband with a hurt expression. “The stage hands are all against me,” she whined. “They are trying to pretend that their absence at the vampire trap for my last exit on Saturday evening was an oversight when, in truth, they are happy to see that I have fallen in harm’s way.”
    Mr. Wilton’s expression back at her was a mixture of consolation and recognition, on his part, that she was correct in her assumptions. “I’m certain that they intended no harm,” he said quietly.
    “But they did intend to harm me,”