The Lantern Players rehearsed in the old carriage-house behind the stables, where the roof still let in a grey stripe of light along one wall and the floor still smelled of axle-grease from the years when the house had kept a coach. Someone had hung nine iron hooks from the beams along the back wall, one for each lamp in the last scene of the play, and the hooks were bare. The tenth lamp, which the play called the cold lamp and the company called the Mantle’s chair, hung on its own hook at the far end, unlit, and nobody liked to stand under it for long.
Benedek Sly stood under it now, in his shirtsleeves, with the green-bound script in one hand and a cup of cold tea in the other, and he was quoting himself.
“‘The house has no master,’ the Lord says in the second act, ‘because the house has been master of itself since the day its walls were first built, and a master who thinks he owns a thing is only a tenant who has forgotten the rent.’” He lowered the script and looked round the company with enormous satisfaction. “That line was given to me in a dream, in the Lessary capital, in a hotel with bedbugs. It was not improved by the Coldharbour critic, who called it a sermon wearing the lord’s coat. I have never forgiven him. I have quoted him in every performance since, and I shall quote him at the…
