I glanced down. I always loved being up here in the balcony with the music rooms behind me and a sea of faces turned up and hanging on my every word. I’d had some of my greatest actorly moments from this very spot, a suitably dramatic place to go down in a hail of arrows.

But the play wouldn’t end that way. Not today. No tragedies for William. I was in strictly comic mode, which is, I suppose, why I pulled the ladder over and started shinning up to the trap in the canopy. I started up, dodged another arrow, nearly fell to a messy death on the stage below, and wrenched the trap open. As the officer below started barking more orders and the crowd began to panic, I climbed, skirts hitched round my knees.

Inside the roof canopy was what the company members mock-ingly called “the gods.” It was from here that we lowered some poor bastard in dreadful makeup at the end of those awful the-plot-has-fallen-apart-and-only-some-ludicrously-unrealistic-device-can-cobble-together-an-ending plays. There wasn’t much up there but rafters, a winch, and another ladder up onto the thatch. I was up it before you could say “death wish.” The audience, those who weren’t running to get out before they were held responsible for this little fiasco, applauded me. No one liked the Empire all that much.

There was a chimney stack at one part of the thatched ridge, and I flung myself at it and clung on for dear life, wondering vaguely what lunatic scheme was likely to get me out of this unskewered. The roof ran only around a part of the stage and the perimeter galleries, so I could see the chaos in the yard below quite clearly. I leaned out to look down, and another arrow shot up and came within a cricket’s knee joint of finding my throat. Rufus was on the stage, shouting and pointing like the fool he was. And I was sitting on the roof in a dress being shot at by the Empire.