The three men cease talking as soon as they are aware of her reappearance. Bess assumes a coquettish pose: left leg slightly forward; hands clasped behind her back to emphasise the slight swell of her breasts; head tilted to one side. Kukol and Vickery applaud. Harry, who has stripped off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, kisses her hand.
‘My Lovely Lady Fauntleroy …’
Still holding her hand, he allows her to pirouette like a dancer. Then he says, very businesslike, ‘Let’s get to work.’
And she knows she is ready now.
31
STANDING in the wings one hour into the Wednesday matinee, she watches her husband raise his hands, urging the audience to fall silent. She is surprised how calm she feels when she hears him announce that his celebrated milk-can routine will not be presented that afternoon. He pauses, to allow some discontented muttering and even a chorus of boos from the cheap seats to swell and fade, before saying in a loud voice that the reason for the program change is the return of the astounding Metamorphosis effect featuring his original and most lovely assistant, Mrs Harry Houdini!
The applause as Bess steps on to stage is less than he has anticipated. But spectators are unaware how long it has been since her last appearance, and Harry is more affronted than she is by some wolf-whistles and crude comments about her legs from a drunk in the stalls. As Bess approaches the stage-front she senses a hush as people wonder what they will witness.
They see Bess take up a position next to the cabinet, which is taller than she is and broader still. Its front is open to the audience: a full-length dark-blue curtain has been pulled to Bess’s side. Within the cabinet is a trunk, its corners protected by brass flanges. Pulling together, their exertions calculated to make it seem heavier than it is, Vickery and Kukol manoeuvre the trunk forward, out of the cabinet, and use several keys to open padlocks securing its lid. From within they produce a black flannel bag, like a sack seven-feet long, a roll of tape, and some sealing-wax.
With Bess looking on, Harry – wearing a dress shirt, white bow-tie, and black trousers – steps into the bag with his hands tied and makes no protest as the sides of the bag are pulled up over him. Vickery winds tape around the opening; using a candle, Kukol melts wax to seal the ends. Spectators in the front rows are urged to inspect the result: Bess fancies she sees Rickards himself watching carefully. The assistants then hoist the bag with Harry inside and place it within the trunk. Its lid is closed; the locks secured. From within comes some muffled thumping, which causes laughter mixed with apprehension. Is there sufficient air for a man to breathe? Then the trunk is pushed back inside the cabinet. Kukol and Vickery withdraw to the wings. This is Bess’s moment. She can feel the audience watching her. Hear them. Smell them. For a few seconds she is all they can see. She wants to prolong this tantalising sense of expectation.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she calls out. Her voice seems thin and soft. ‘You must pay complete attention! I shall now clap my hands three times, and on the third and last occasion I invite you to watch closely for the effect.’
She claps once. Twice. All those eyes watching her … Three times. And as she does so, she steps back and to the side, within the opening of the cabinet, drawing the curtain closed behind herself.
The audience sees a tiny female figure – some lads at the side wonder if the Mysteriarch’s wife is actually being impersonated by a young boy – disappear from view. Then, almost at once, certainly no more than a few seconds later, the curtain is opened again with a flourish. But it is not the woman who made the announcement stepping forward, arms wide like a fisherman celebrating a catch. It is Houdini himself, the man sealed inside the trunk. The trunk that is now tugged to the front once again by the two assistants. Its padlocks are still in place. Keys are inserted and turned. The black bag is within. Kukol and Vickery lift it out tenderly, as if its contents are fragile. Its end is sealed. Houdini uses a knife to cut the tape.
The bag is opened and – even as spectators gasp and cheer – Mrs Houdini steps out, her hair barely ruffled, her hands tied just as her husband’s had been, her eyes very large, smiling broadly as Harry takes her hand.
‘We did it, my sweet,’ he says to her.
The audience cannot hear this, nor Vickery’s muttered comment to Kukol after an inspection of his watch:
‘Three and a half seconds – not bad at all.’
Spectators are unaware of what happened out of sight: Harry freeing his hands as soon as the bag is sealed and using a blade to slit one of its seams, then releasing a panel at the rear of the trunk. He was out even as Bess closed the curtain. While he was making his triumphant reappearance, she was reversing all his moves: slithering inside the trunk and then into the bag; breathing in the darkness and the scent of secrets. As Harry’s assistants tugged the trunk forward, she was completing the final step, using her teeth to secure the knot in the ribbon around her wrists. There is room for improvement – her exertions made the trunk wobble after the curtain had been opened – but she is exultant. She can do it still. But has he seen it?
As she takes her bows with her husband, she scans the front rows. Rickards catches her eyes and replicates her bow while, behind him – could it be …?
Just as the audience doesn’t know what happens within the cabinet, Harry is ignorant of the visitor who calls on his wife soon after the successful completion of the Metamorphosis routine. Harry is on stage, prone on a wooden bed-frame, wriggling and writhing for thirteen minutes to extricate himself from a mummy-like array of bandages. It is Vickery who seeks out Bess to tell her that a gentleman is waiting for her at the stage-door. She expects it is Rickards, paying his compliments. But her visitor is taller than the promoter. Taller, and with his face half-hidden by a broad-brimmed hat. She feels naked once again, though she has removed only her slippers.
‘Bella, Signora Beatrice,’ the composer says, his voice husky. ‘Molto bella. I must not stay. Like you I must be here, then – pronto! – not here.’
He rests his hands on her shoulders and leans forward to whisper something. His cheek brushes her ear, then he is gone. There is cheering in the theatre. Harry has shucked himself free of his bandages at last.
32
HARRY rubs his eyes and considers the note he has just begun:
‘Rosabelle, Sweet Rosabelle, I love you more than I can tell.’
He runs his fingers over the paper, careful not to smear the wet ink. When he took up his pen the lines appealed to him, but now they just seem trite and silly. He screws up the page and leaves the crumpled ball beside the single candle he has lit. Harry usually finds that composing a note to Bess helps calm him down whenever he wakes early from his fitful sleep. But not this time. Peering across the darkened room, he can make out the shape of his wife in her bed. He knows she will be lying on one side with her head tucked into her chest like a cat. But even after sixteen years of marriage there is still much he can’t fathom, such as her long silences. And what had she meant by her assertion the previous week: I need more?
He had just showered her with a greater sum of money than most women could ever hope to see. And she is his wife. Beatrice Rahner from Brooklyn, New York, is Mrs Harry Houdini, closest associate of the most celebrated escape artist in the world, now on the verge of clinching a fresh triumph in a new field. Still she seems discontented. Yet she can rest so effortlessly; settle into a slumber so deep that her sheets and pillow are barely disturbed in the morning. This seems a miraculous achievement to Harry. Even as a baby he would sleep only in snatches. His mother has told him how he would lie in his crib, eyes scanning the ceiling and walls surrounding him, as if assessing ways to get free.
Cecilia Weiss, née Steiner, has been a widow for close to eighteen years. Rarely has there been a day in which Harry has not thought about her. Now his mother is in New York; he is in Melbourne. All those miles between them, an elastic stretched far beyond its usual breaking-point, have only increased the anxiety he feels about her. She is close to seventy. Every passing year leaves her more frail. A puff of wind could blow her away. While listening to his wife’s soft breathing he recalls the last time he saw Cecilia, five months earlier at the Southampton docks.
HIS mother is going home after crossing the Atlantic to join him and Bess during his sell-out tour of England. He pleads with her to accompany them to the continent, where he has engagements in Germany, but she replies, simply but firmly, nein. She has other children: Nathan and William; Theodore, Leopold, and Carrie. Harry has never liked being reminded he is one of many, but knows that once her mind is made up she is immoveable.
He must perform in Plymouth the evening before she leaves. To ensure he is in Southampton in the morning, he catches the midnight train. Rain hammers on the windows of his compartment. Passing lights blur in the darkness. On the dock, as the steamer’s whistle sounds its final warning to those still ashore, he wraps his mother in an embrace, breathing in her scent of cloves, and vows he will be home just as soon as he is able. She looks up at him with watery eyes and speaks in German the words he can still hear:
‘But Ehrich, perhaps I won’t be there when you return.’
He tries to kiss her once again. There is only the slightest contact of lips on powdered cheeks before she turns away:
‘Get along, in God’s name.’
He scans all the rows of waving figures but cannot see her at the railing as the steamer pulls away from the pier.
Before he can embrace his beloved Cecilia once again, he has another fortnight in Melbourne and then a Sydney season before the tedious, gut-churning voyage back to the United States. And if something should happen to her before then …
Harry gets up to dismiss this thought. He loathes this sense of helplessness: the ‘World Famous Self Liberator’ cannot escape time or distance. His movement causes the candle on the desk to flicker. But he knows now he cannot finish the note for his wife. Instead, he will leave on her pillow a single bloom from the bouquet he gave her the other day. He checks the time. It is 5.05; Jordan will be coming in twenty-five minutes.
The driver is still not confident the roads to Diggers Rest will have dried. But Harry needs to feel he is closer to getting the Voisin off the ground. And he wants to instil in Brassac some of his own sense of urgency. Too many days have now been lost to the weather. Harry yawns and extinguishes the candle, but knows he will not return to bed. His mind is whirling: if he lies down, he will be plagued by unsettling thoughts. He may never see his mother again. His wife needs more. And Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle, has passed him like a woman in the street who leaves a distracting cloud of perfume behind her.
He dresses in the dark, stumbling into clothes he discarded late the previous night. If Bess were awake she would reproach him for his slovenliness and lay out fresh garments. But he cannot be bothered rummaging through the cupboard. There will be time enough later in the day to bathe and shave and don clean underwear and a bleached shirt stiff with starch. But will his wife be on stage with him again in the evening?
Harry performed the Metamorphosis routine with Bess twice the previous day: first at the matinee and then the evening show. Her second appearance was less successful, Kukol confirming to him quietly what Harry had suspected on stage himself – she was slightly slower, taking almost five seconds to execute her moves. Audience members near the front might even have noticed a shuddering of the chest as the curtain was drawn open.
