The Dropt Kerchief

Short Fiction ~ Oliver Barton

Honourable Mention, Strands International Flash Fiction Competition - 19 
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Last night I went to see The Dropt Kerchief at the Playhouse, that restoration tragedy by William Shapworth.
You probably don’t know it – it’s interminably long and rather gruesome – but they’d cut it and pared it down, and it’s a spanking good romp now, if you can call a tragedy a romp. The plot is one of those convoluted affairs. The crucial bit, ignoring loads of sub-plots and machinations, is that the Earl of Leicester is fearsomely jealous of his young wife, and suspects her of having eyes for every half handsome man who passes by, as well she might, for he is a pedantic bore. As his paranoia reaches its height, he is passing through the garden and finds a handkerchief on the ground, bearing her initials. Immediately he concludes that she has been having an assignation with a young buck, and stabs her to death in his fury. Then he finds that the young buck also has the same initials as her and a rather fancy line in handkerchiefs, so the Earl goes off and stabs himself in contrition. Plenty of other things happen, but that’s where the title comes from.
I know that’s what the plot’s about because I first saw the play last week, and thought it would be educational for my chum Algy to see it, so we went along last night. It was all going fine until that fateful moment that the Earl of Leicester finds the dropped handkerchief. On he came, brow furrowed, uttering a monologue that scratched at his neuroses about his wife’s fidelity, until it reached the climax where he spots the handkerchief. Nothing there. I saw him look at the spot and he stopped mid-speech. He looked around discretely, then ever more frantically to see if it was lying in the wrong place. No kerchief. Pas de mouchoir.
By now he had been silent rather long, wondering, I imagine, what to do. The audience, who mostly had no idea what was supposed to happen, began to sense something was up, particularly when a muffled hoarse whisper came from off-stage to prompt him: “Heaven, but what do I see?” The Earl looked into the wings and I could tell he was mouthing “It’s not there!”
What do you do if the title of the play is missing? He did the only thing he could; he pretended he saw the kerchief, he pretended to pick it up, he pretended to read the initials. He might have got away with it had it not been for a young lad near the front, who I suspect is impossible to live with without throttling, when the Earl cried “Upon my life, ‘tis my Eliza’s kerchief!”, spoke out with perfect diction and splendid clarity and informed the Earl that it wasn’t; he was not holding a kerchief, he was not holding anything.
The effect on the Earl was disastrous. He started giggling. At this point a white object could be seen sliding across the stage from the wings, pushed by a long bamboo rod. The Earl gazed, transfixed. Again the mystery voice prompted him, louder this time: “Heaven, but what do I see?” It was too much. The giggle returned. The Earl tried to pull himself together and suppress it, but succeeded only in going deep purple until eventually the laughter exploded out of him, cascading over the stalls, where it started infecting the audience, who chuckled despite themselves, and it grew and grew and spread until the entire theatre was corpsed.
The curtain descended mercifully on an Earl collapsed to his knees, heaving in a paroxysm of mirth and incapable of anything. What else could they do? It took a full ten minutes for the audience to regain their composure. They chattered animatedly. Algy said it was the best theatrical experience he’d ever had and certainly the funniest tragedy. Then onto the stage, in front of the curtains, advanced a man, presumably the stage manager. He held a hand up for silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he proclaimed. ‘We apologise for a slight technical error…’
‘With your patience,’ he continued when the laughter and chatter abated once more, ‘we will restart Act 3 in a few minutes.’
And so they did. This time, the kerchief was duly present as the Earl’s soliloquy approached. The anticipation was electric. Nobody breathed. The Earl’s eyes lighted on the kerchief. ‘Heaven, but what do I see?’ he declaimed, steady as a rock, not a trace of a giggle, a trooper if ever there was one. He bent to pick it up. There was an audible click, and he stayed like that, bent double. After a pause that felt like an eternity, in the silence everyone heard him gasp, ‘My back! I can’t move!’
It was unfeeling of us, unkind, cruel even, but we couldn’t help it. The laughter bubbled up again, took over, and drowned us. We wept, we choked, we hammered the arms of our seats. It was remorseless.
They rang the curtain down again – what else could they do? - refunds were offered, and that was that.
As we strolled to the nearest bar, Algy asked me how the play was supposed to end up. ‘Badly,’ I said, ‘very badly for the Earl.’
‘Ah well, at least they got that right,’ he said. He always was heartless.

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Oliver Barton used to write Computer User Manuals, but having retired, now prefers to replace telling facts that nobody reads with writing whimsical fiction that lots of people can enjoy. He lives in Abergavenny, Wales. In his writing, he seeks to bring a wry touch to the commonplace activities of everyday life – “in the ordinary is the extraordinary.” Frequently, angels and bad-tempered mythical beings such as garden gnomes creep in, despite his best endeavours. His Deri Press has published a collection of his short stories “Away with the Fairies”, his first novel “Of Mouse and Man” and the second “Creation”.

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