TWENTY-FOUR

For a while Catherine was left alone. While she waited she studied the little white chairs, and wondered if Mason and his sister arranged screenings for their hideous creations, or whether children had once been here to watch the actual cruelty plays. Neither option made her feel any better and an urge to flee the house nearly overwhelmed her into actual flight.

Rats she understood. The war tableau expressed a sensitive man’s trauma at the loss of his young brothers and at what he had experienced in war. But this slide into the grotesque and primitivism suggested a bloody and inhuman version of justice from the medieval era, within a Tudor and Stuart aesthetic. A regression into even darker times. But quite how he arrived there from the Great War mystified her.

The narrative of the play had been simple and sensational. A lurid tale for the unsophisticated with a crude and ugly cast, grubby animalistic presentations of the semi-human, the mob as animal. Mason’s insanity must have been fullblown by the fifties. But the film had been affecting. That she could not deny, even from a bad print without sound projected onto a white cloth.

There was none of the rapid jerking of early films or any sense of a miniaturized world. Onstage the figures had not glided like rod puppets, or bobbed in the telltale style of string puppetry, and she could not be certain she had seen any silvery threads against the background, even when it was black.

The stage was large enough to host child actors, but the figures could not have been children in costume because of the animal legs of some of the characters. All had moved according to what they had been constructed from. Animal limbs moved naturally, articulated wooden limbs moved as one would have expected them to move. So the play must have either been filmed slowly with cameras, frame by frame, or Edith’s uncle had employed several masterly puppeteers.

And the cast must have been comprised of the marionettes she had seen in the nursery. The heads were too similar to be anything else. Mason had indeed taken his bizarre and unpleasant art to a whole new level of artistry. And she’d been the first person to see it in decades.

The cinema screen was made from a rough weave of plain cloth. Multiple layers of fabric backdrops were tucked away in the wings, ready to be drawn by a flyman, when the stage was used for drama. The back of the theatre was pressed against the wall, but looking up from the front of the stage, Catherine could see no portable bridge, or platform behind the proscenium arches on which Mason or his sister would have knelt and concealed themselves from the audience without making a sound. If they were the puppeteers, they would have needed to crouch behind the stage, or stand behind the backcloth.

On closer inspection she found the joinery of the theatre to be masterful. A series of detachable wooden pegs allowed dismantling prior to transit and reassembly piecemeal. And the curtains were handmade by a highly skilled seamstress; Edith’s mother, Violet.

The ground-floor room must have become the theatre’s final resting place once public performance had been exhausted or found unfit for purpose, and perhaps once Mason was too old to continue the shows. But who was their intended audience, or what was the purpose of any of this?

Outside the room, the sound of Edith’s wheelchair prompted Catherine to step away from the stage. Being caught conducting an uninvited inspection would not go over well. Or, at least, she had a feeling that it would not.

By the time the door to the room had clicked open, Catherine had resumed her seat beside the antique projector.

‘Won’t you stop it!’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘It overheats!’

‘I don’t know how. I didn’t want to touch it.’

Maude bustled behind her chair and brought the whipping tail of the film to a clanking halt. To escape the glare from Edith’s red-rimmed eyes, Catherine went to the window, drew back the layered curtains and retracted the shutters quickly, as if she was desperate for clean air.

‘Well?’

‘It was . . .’

‘What? Speak, girl.’

‘Very clever. For its time. The movement of the pieces . . . Was it still-frame?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The animation. It must have taken hours.’

‘Nonsense. They were artists. They rehearsed. The performance was second nature. Shows in my uncle’s day were performed in one take. Once my uncle was satisfied with rehearsals he was never required to interfere with a performance.’

Catherine’s thoughts stumbled in an attempt to follow the conversation. She felt she was being given misleading information before a crowd of strangers who all stared at her. ‘Your uncle didn’t work alone?’

‘He trusted no one but my mother who was wardrobe and set designer.’

The self-serious tone Edith adopted about her uncle’s work suddenly made Catherine want to laugh madly again. Did the woman believe that what she had just watched was real? Edith was not going to be much help in understanding her uncle’s marionettes.

‘One can only admire how such small actors could issue such power, don’t you think?’

‘Quite.’

‘It is the greatest testament to my uncle’s art that he can still captivate an audience, even with this poor facsimile of the original, more colourful, work.’

Perhaps it was time to play along with the woman’s enthusiasm and delusions. This was no place for logic. Maybe her visit could only be survived by collusion with fantasy.

‘This is the only film we have left. It was the first of the cruelty plays that my uncle learned. A very old play. I often think it fitting this tribute survived. The other films are damaged and will no longer play. The Face at the Window and The Dead Witness were the last to go.’

‘Learned?’

‘Yes! Do you know nothing of our great dramatic history? Barnaby Pettigrew and Wesley Spettyl toured this play for years. At Stourbridge Fair, Worcester Theatre, Coventry. Even Covent Garden and Bartholomew Fair. It was always a sensation. It was their duty that Henry Strader was not forgotten.’

‘Who?’

‘You know, my uncle even believed the Master of Revels’ head was carved by the great Billy Purvis, head-carver and puppet-maker. And the Master of Revels was ready when my dear uncle reminded him of his calling!’

‘Sorry, who was Henry Strader?’

Edith sucked in her breath as if scandalized. ‘The greatest of them all. The first known Martyr. Did you learn nothing at school? Were you even now paying attention? You have just watched the account of his terrible end. The very title of this play is ’Tis Pity Henry Strader was Broken Upon the Wheel. Murdered for his art in Smithfield. The Smooth Field, my dear. In London, in . . . in sixteen-something. I forget. Executed for sedition, for witchcraft. He was then torn apart in the street by a mob. It was the first history lesson my mother taught me in this very room.’

‘Afraid I’m unaware of him.’

‘What an appalling education you must have received. Are you telling me you know nothing of Strader’s great march on London?’

‘Sorry, I—’

‘The lame flocked to Strader, dear. And followed his troupe from Stourbridge Fair to London. Some even called it the second Children’s Crusade, but it was perceived to be a rebellion. Strader’s following became so great, so unruly, he was murdered for his vision by the authorities. His killers made his troupe watch. Can you imagine it? He was the first of the known Martyrs of Rod and String. A local hero no less! Born near here. Parts of his remains were said to be holy, and were even returned to this part of the world after his execution. I was schooled in this black history right here.’

Again Catherine was confused and mystified by what Edith was referring to, or the timescale involved in what she appeared to be suggesting was a theatrical legacy continued by her uncle. And not one she had ever heard of.

Edith was wasting her time and Catherine felt another flare of annoyance. The puppets were unsellable. They were an unpleasant curiosity that she could dine out on for years, if she could bear to remember them, but they were nothing else. Edith’s history lesson was almost certainly pure fantasy. This and the nursery had nothing to do with her valuation and the first day of her visit was nearly over.

‘My uncle saved an entire English tradition, my dear. Outlawed for being in league with one devil or another, by fools. Ha! Did you know that Tiberius suppressed them, and that Claudius banished them too? This troupe have known dangerous times. Their entire history has been one of persecution. I mean,’ she lowered her voice as if in fear, ‘you saw what happened to poor Henry Strader at the Smooth Field for resurrecting the tradition. For daring to contradict the Church and government. He was the first martyr my uncle could even find a name for, my dear. But there were others. After him, for certain. And before him, too, you can be sure of that, though he never traced them.’

Edith sat back in her chair, smiled, and showed her yellow teeth, as if delighted at the opportunity to correct her guest’s woeful ignorance. ‘You know, in the summer when I was a girl, we had theatre on the lawn. My uncle staged those plays of Henry Strader that were remembered. The Martyr wrote nothing down. It was too dangerous. And much was lost. But in his own time he was more popular than Shakespeare. I saw The Magician’s Fate and The Beauteous Sacrifice before I was ten. Now, how many little girls do you know who can say that?’