Two days later
Two days laterFrom its strings held high, the marionette twirled slowly. With its huge hook of a nose, vast eyes that were nearly all whites, horsehair eyebrows like a tavern door’s boot-brush, a red s***h of a wildly grinning mouth, it was a spinning grotesque. Yet when it settled, it was beside a face that many would find just as disturbing.
The man knew it. ‘Are we not a match, Punchinello and I?’ Simeon Critchollow asked, laughing, his voice a deep roll. ‘Mind, I never was handsome. When I began in the theatre, all I played were servants and roughs, not once a noble lord.’ He reached up, ran a finger across the bright scar that bisected his twisted nose. ‘So, in some ways, that cavalier at Naseby did me favour. I would have starved as an actor. Yet now I am a leading p
