God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been.
It is more impossible than rising the dead.
—Summa Theologica
The moment I was out of sight of the audience I broke away from Sid and ran to the dressing room. I flopped down on the first chair I saw, my head and arms trailed over its back, and I almost passed out. It wasn't a mind-wavery fit. Just normal faint.
I couldn't have been there long—well, not very long, though the battle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily from the stage—when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin's usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stage-armor and carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martin came after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast that buttons flew. I thought automatically, I'll have to sew those.
They laid her down on three chairs set side by side and hurried out. Unpinning the folded towel, which had fallen around his waist, Martin walked over and looked down at her. He yanked off his wig by a braid and tossed it at me.
I let it hit me and fall on the floor. I was looking at that white queenly face, eyes open and staring sightless at the ceiling, mouth open a little too with a thread of foam trailing from the corner, and at that ice-cream-cone bodice that never stirred. The blue fly came buzzing over my head and circled down toward her face.
"Martin," I said with difficulty, "I don't think I'm going to like what we're doing."
He turned on me, his short hair elfed, his fists planted high on his hips at the edge of his black tights, which now were all his clothes.
"You knew!" he said impatiently. "You knew you were signing up for more than acting when you said, 'Count me in the company.'"