Edwin walks to the Haymarket Theatre, imagining his father a young man on these same streets, passing many of these same buildings. He enters through the columns edging the portico, goes up the stairs and onto the dark stage. The green curtain falls in folds before him. Everything he sees feels heavy with history.

He’s introduced as the star of the season to the rest of the company. He’s not imagining their unfriendliness. Edwin’s kept his hair long so that he can play Hamlet without a wig. “Is that how men wear their hair in America?” a man who might play Falstaff asks and Edwin understands that it’s not a question but a mockery. Someone is quoting Shakespeare—“ ‘There’s many a man hath more hair than wit’ ”—but he can’t quickly locate the source. He thinks it came from a man who, were casting left to Edwin, would play nothing but ghosts.

He hasn’t been bullied since he was a boy, but oh, how quickly the feelings come back. “ ‘They have a plentiful lack of wit,’ ” he says, but only to himself.

“It was fine,” Edwin tells Mary that night. His head is in her lap and she’s rubbing his temples. He’s relieved to see her radiant again. His cheek lies next to the slight curve in her belly that is their baby. He sees her hair coiling over her breasts. “But they think me a bumpkin. They told me that in England no one spits on the stage, as if I were about to do that.”

Edwin set such value on wowing London. As the days tick towards his opening, his nerves snap and twang. He can’t sleep without drinking, though drink only works for an hour or two, and then he’s awake again, lying stiffly immobile so as not to wake Mary as well. He’s never seen the dark come so early nor stay so late. He can see that Mary is worrying about him.

With good reason.

The season does not go well. The audiences are appreciative. He finishes each evening stepping forward to acknowledge the sustained applause. He returns to Mary well satisfied. And then morning comes and with it his reviews. The critics are muted in their praise—“good, but not great”—except when they’re savage—“bobbing fiercely hither and thither like a dumpling in a boiling pot.” He tells Mary that only the audience matters, and he tries to believe it, but he’s losing his way onstage. He needs her and her notes. He needs someone outside himself to tell him what he’s done. Mary is too advanced in her pregnancy for this. He has his first understanding of how the baby will usurp her attention.

Other circumstances conspire against him.