Notes from the Trapdoor

The orchestra pit smelled of damp spruce, spit valves, and powdered resin.

To reach it, I slipped past the two marine sentries Hollósy had posted by the main hatchway, ducking beneath the tiered pine seating where sixty off-duty privateers usually spat tobacco juice during our overtures. My velvet skirts caught twice on rough fir splinters before I squeezed between two reinforced deck carlings and dropped onto the lower catwalk.

Zsófia Panyiczky sat cross-legged between an overturned double-bass case and her gilded Celtic harp, using a strip of scrap buckram to polish her silver flute. She did not startle when my boots touched the deck planks; in the subterranean belly of the ship, an orchestra player’s ears register the pitch of every creaking knee-timber long before a body comes into view.

"The low D on the bassoon has gone sour again," Zsófia said without looking up, blowing a speck of lint from her instrument's embouchure. "The humidity off the bilges swells the pads every twenty leagues. If Maestro Kelemen insists on taking the third-act romanza at eighty beats to the minute, I will personally throw his metronome over the starboard rail."

"Ignác Pálffy is currently lying cold on the upper deck with four ounces of grape-shot through his lungs," I said, crouching beside her instrument crate. "I doubt he will complain about the bassoon."

"Ignác always complained about the bassoon," she replied evenly. "He claimed the lower register vibrated into his diaphragmatic column and ruined his high B-flat. Though I suppose he won't be throwing his wig at the pit tonight." She set the flute into its velvet-lined walnut case and latched the brass toggles. "You didn't crawl down through the cable tier to discuss timber dampness, Borbála."

"I came because you sit twelve inches beneath the front apron," I said. "You hear every shoe tap, every dropped prop, and every stagehand swearing through the floorboards. Did anyone walk across the under-stage gantry during Act Two?"

Zsófia tilted her head toward the ceiling timbers. Her fingers tapped out a steady four-four rhythm against her knee. "Gizella sang her cavatina twenty bars slower than the rehearsal score. She dragged every fermata until Maestro Kelemen’s right wrist nearly snapped. During her cadenza, when the brass went fortissimo to drown out her cracked top note, there was a metallic clatter directly under the center trap."

"What kind of clatter?"

"Not a dropped coin. Iron against oak, with considerable weight behind it. Three heavy scrapes, followed by a thud like a carpenter driving an iron bolt into seasoned pitch pine. It lasted perhaps forty bars. Exactly two minutes, while the trombones covered the resonance."

"And the direction?"

"Four feet aft of the prompt box," Zsófia said, pointing her tuning fork toward the narrow, cobwebbed crevice running between the central fly runners and the trapdoor winch. "Directly below the quick-change cubicle."

I squeezed my shears tighter in their leather holster, taking a shielded tin horn lantern from behind her harp box. "Zsófia, keep your eyes on the lower hatch. If Hollósy’s red-coated watch comes poking down the companionway, practice your scales loudly."

"I will play the Hungarian March in B minor," she said dryly. "It usually clears a deck faster than grape-shot."

Leaving her among the violin cases, I dropped flat onto my stomach and pulled myself into the low crawl space beneath the stage framing.

The clearance was barely eighteen inches. Above my head, the rough white-pine boards of the stage ceiling groaned under the weight of the deserted set pieces. Below me, thirty feet of dark hold dropped away into the damp ballast stones and stagnant bilge water. I dragged my skirts through centuries of dried pine shavings, fallen sequins, and greasy graphite dust, pushing the dark lantern ahead with my left forearm.

Here, in the ship's mechanical throat, the counterweight ropes for the scenery flats ran across brass sheaves set into the deck beams. Every rolling swell sent a shudder through the timber frames. Dust sifted down into my hair, smelling faintly of sulfur and the salt-soaked hemp cables.

Four feet aft of the prompt box, the timber framing opened into a narrow maintenance shelf flanked by two oak braces. This was the support cradle for the center trapdoor, where the stage demon was cranked upward through clouds of powdered lycopodium during the finale.

I slid the tin shutter of the lantern open by a quarter of an inch. A slender beam of yellow candlelight sliced across the timbers.

The wood here was scored with fresh gouges. Unlike the dull, greyish abrasions left by stagehands shifting scenery flats, these cuts bit deep into the yellow pitch-pine grain, curling fresh white splinters at their edges.

I unhooked my tailor's shears and used the blunted tip of the lower blade to measure the groove. It was three-quarters of an inch wide, concave, and heavily indented at the southern end. Someone had wedged an iron cylinder against the oak knee-timber, using the solid frame of the ship as a mechanical fulcrum to generate crushing downward force.

It answered the question that had bothered me since I examined the split blunderbuss barrel in the wings. To ram an oversized naval grape-shot pellet past a fouled, rust-bitten brass bore required eighty pounds of dead weight. Gizella could not have generated that force with both arms braced against her corseted ribs. But wedged here, clamped between the deck beam and an iron fulcrum, anyone with decent leverage and strong shoulders could have driven the charge home with a single violent heave.

My fingers brushed against the floorboards near the edge of the maintenance gantry. Something small, round, and metallic rolled against my knuckles.

I brought the lantern closer.

It was an iron ramrod guide—the secondary sleeve that holds an iron ramrod flush against the belly of a naval musket stock. The brass mounting screws had been sheared clean off with a cold chisel, their threads stripped by brutal torque. The outer sleeve bore a fresh, dark streak where someone had wiped away the thick protective beef tallow with a square of woven ribbon.

Beside the sleeve lay the ribbon itself: two inches of pale green satin ribbon, dusted with blue resin powder and French theatrical rice powder.

I lifted the ribbon to my nose. Beneath the bitter chalkiness of the blue stage rosin lay the distinct, sickeningly sweet perfume of Damascus rosewater—the exclusive toilet scent favored by our prima ballerina, Mariska Bánhegyi.

Directly above my head, a two-inch gap between the stage floorboards led straight into the floor of the ballerina’s private quick-change screen. Through the seam, a single white goose feather drifted downward through the gloom, settling gently upon the bloodless iron of the sleeve.

I picked up the ramrod guide, wrapped it securely within the scented green satin scrap, and slipped both into the deep inner pocket of my stays. Then I blew out the lantern's candle, backing slowly out of the crawl space into the cold dark of the orchestra pit.