The Scarlet Wench by Marni Graff Read Free Book Online Page B

to our cook, Agnes.”
      “Mine, too,” Helen chimed in across the table. “I had a premonition this would be a wonderful home for us. Your cook must be very stable emotionally.”
      Simon didn’t feel compelled to answer, thinking of Agnes’ prolific swearing in her Scottish accent when things went awry.
      “I’ll have a refill.” Burt held out his cup.
      Simon leaned over to fill it.
      “Tell Agnes it was nice to have a proper dinner instead of a microwave ready-meal.” He lowered his voice. “What a crew, eh?”
      They looked down the table at the rest of the cast, who leaned toward their director, listening in varying degrees of rapt attention as he expounded on his start in theatre.
      “Decidedly different,” Simon agreed just as quietly. “But very talented, I’m sure.” These were, after all, his paying guests.
    *

    8:45 PM

    Burt Marsh wasn’t certain these idiotic fools were so talented. If they were, they’d be acting at a real theatre in Covent Garden or Drury Lane instead of rolling around the countryside playing to small audiences in this kind of place. A string of constant holidays it looked like to him, all right for some. What a lark. Find a nice place to put on your play, then con the management into thinking they’d increase their business and spend your time lolling around. Two or three performances and you were on your way to the next stop down the road. Skiving off, every one of them on the fiddle.
      His Estelle had loved the theatre, the real stuff. When they had met, he had been twenty-eight and Estelle a twenty-four-year-old English teacher who had arrived at Windermere St Anne’s School with her trunk full of plays and classics for her classroom.
      By the time they’d retired nine years ago, it was simply Windermere School, and they’d spent thirty-six years there, riding to school together every day, their holidays the same, their lives entwined with school activities and its calendar. Estelle had directed the school plays, too, and that was when he’d become a dab hand at lights and props. They had been quite a team.
      He could still summon up his first sighting of the slim woman with long, fair hair falling into her eyes as she struggled to drag a huge trunk along the hallway. Burt had gallantly taken hold of the heavy burden and carried it into her classroom.
      “My hero.” Estelle had introduced herself. “Thank you for the rescue.” It was a mantra she had repeated often. He’d rescued her from her loneliness, from her singleness, from being a solitary woman from Newton Abbot at a posting in a rural area she hadn’t known but had grown to love.
      “What’s in here?” Burt had been puzzled as to why a teacher would think it necessary to carry her own tools. All he had needed for science were the textbooks and lab equipment the school had provided.
      “The whole world’s in here! Travel, history, culture, the ways of man.” She had thrown open the lid to show him books by Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, with plays by Chekhov, Miller and Williams. There had even been three from an American named Neil Simon. “My students will have access to all of these.”
      He’d fallen in love with her a little bit then, but they’d dated for almost two years before marrying. By that time, he hadn’t even blinked when she’d confided her idea of a perfect honeymoon: a week in London attending the theatre. Each day they’d stood in line at the box office of a different theatre, getting discounts for that night’s available seats. After a day touring the Tower of London or the British Museum, they’d rushed back to their tiny rented room to wash and change for their evening out.
      He could still conjure up Estelle’s face the night they’d scored tickets high in the balcony to see Funny Girl at the Prince of Wales Theatre, its glowing corner tower making them feel cosmopolitan and worldly. When that tiny woman with the big voice had opened