Excerpt from Theatre Of Marvels by Lianne Dillsworth, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After I arrived for my performance and before I was due to start getting ready to go onstage, I had taken to sitting before that countryside board and imagining myself in those meadows with Lord Vincent Woodward. I pictured him sitting alongside me, his hand twining in my hair, while he pointed out that all the land we could see was his, and would be ours when we were married. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost feel the tickle of the soft grass against my bare legs, smell the freshness of the strands I'd pulled up in tufts, hear the sound of sparrows chirping and church bells in the distance. I've never been much of a believer but those bells were probably the most important part of it. The ones I heard every Sunday from St. Paul's could be those same ones that carried on the gentle breeze in my imagined meadow. Their chimes were the sole thing that connected the place where I wanted to be with where I was now. You see, St. Giles may be where I was coming from, but I had no intention of staying. Crillick's and the Great Amazonia were my path out of there. I'd make sure of it.

Ellen always teased that I was away with the fairies when she found me sitting there, but she had her own dreams. When I'd first started at Crillick's, one of the very first things she'd told me was about the cousins in New York that she would go to as soon as she'd raised enough money to get her mum and sisters out of Galway. It was what had made me warm to her, that ambition to get on that burnt in me too. I judged her to be around twenty-five or so, five years older than myself. It was clear she knew her way around and, though I was streetwise enough, I saw in her someone who could help me learn the ways of the theatre. I'd not expected her to still be around, but nine months had passed since the day we met and here she still was, and talking about America less and less.

There was no time for dreaming now, though. The band had struck up, which meant that the curtain would soon rise. I strained my ears for its heavy velvet swoosh while I wriggled into the skins Amazonia wore. Ellen handed me my feathered cloak and beads. I pulled them on and sat down to chalk the soles of my feet so I wouldn't slip on the polished boards of the stage. Bouncer had been sleeping, but now he sat up and wagged his tail, sensing that things were about to start happening.

As soon as I was dressed, Ellen helped me paint my arms and face. I sat numbly as she smeared over me the mix of grease and soot, basting my arms and legs like a stuffed goose, so my skin gleamed dark. She murmured Crillick's instructions in a singsong while she worked—"Here you go then, blood of yer fallen enemies"—stabbing two fingers into a pot and drawing them across my cheeks to create twin pairs of dripping "tribal marks." The stuff inside the pot was made from poppy petals and thickened to a paste with water and flour. Where did Crillick get this idea of the tribal marks anyway? Would they mean anything to the Black man who sat waiting in the audience for the show to start, or anyone else in Africa either? Ellen made one more line down the center of my forehead for good measure. The skin puckered and she dabbed her finger to my face to correct the smudge, while I stood silent. Satisfied, she stepped back and looked me over.

"You'll do," she said.

Growing up, I'd hated how dark I was, how an afternoon in the sunshine would make the colour in me glow. Now it turned out I was not Black enough. In order to convince as the Great Amazonia, I must be the deep, rich colour of mahogany. The darker tone combined with the natural hazel of my eyes would increase my allure. At least, that's what Marcus Crillick had told me.

"There can't be a hint of the East End about you. What you need to be is Black as pitch. What was your father? Let me guess. An English gent, I think? We must remove every trace of him for the act to succeed, and no one can ever know of your deception."

Excerpted from Theatre Of Marvels by Lianne Dillsworth. Copyright © 2022 by Lianne Dillsworth. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.