Fantom Chapter 2, part 5.

   It was the next morning, and this time they were prepared for a trip to the Victorian era.  They had checked the clothes hamper, and Ruth and Agnes found dresses that at least seemed wearable, despite the hated bustles.    
   “We’re sure we want to go to the first night?” Patrick said.  “I looked it up and apparently the first night wasn’t very good.”
   “It’s still the first night, though,” Tom replied.  “The first night of any Gilbert & Sullivan production ever.  It’s worth seeing just for that.”
   “We could always go again later in the run,” Agnes said.  “What’s the date?”
   “26th December 1871, for the first night,”  Ruth said.  Tom entered the date on the machine.    “Ready?” he asked.
   Thespis was not quite what they had been expecting it to be.  Ruth couldn’t put her finger on anything wrong with it, as such, but it wasn’t the G&S they were used to.  She could see how it was related to the later shows, but it was obvious that the duo were yet to reach their greatest heights.
   She had forgotten that several of the leading male parts were actually played by women.  She wondered how some of the musical directors she’d had would have reacted to that.  But Thespis seemed to owe quite a bit to the pantomime tradition.  And it certainly helped with her long-standing grumble that the men got all the best parts.  
   “Well, I’m glad I’ve seen it,” she said as they made their way back to the TTC.  
   “I wish we could have got a score,” Tom said.  “Just imagine!  A Thespis score being found after all those years...”
   “Look!” said Patrick.  Opposite the door to the TTC was a rubbish bin, and poking out was a wad of paper, of which the title line was just visible- Thesp...
   Agnes pulled it out.  “It’s the score,” she said excitedly.  “Look!  ‘Throughout the night, ‘Oh I’m a celestial drudge,’ ‘Oh incident unprecedented’...all the way through to ‘We can’t stand this!’  It’s the whole thing!”
   “It’s been shoved in a bin, no one’ll miss it,” Patrick said.  
   For some reason, although Ruth wanted more than anything to take the score, something warned her against it.  Perhaps it was just that it seemed rather convenient to find a copy of the score right outside their time machine, especially a copy that no one would miss.  She took the score from Agnes and looked at it.  She was no musical expert.
   “Is it really a Thespis score?” she asked.  “Does the music look like it’s what we heard?”  She held out the score to Adam, who was the best at actually reading music.  He looked closely a few pages.
   “It looks like it,” he said.  “Anyway, why would it say Thespis if it’s not?”
   “They often changed stuff between printing and production,” Patrick said.  “This is probably just a rehearsal score, it doesn’t look like it was intended for publication- I don’t think Thespis ever was.  So there’ll probably be a few changes, but still- it’s the best we’ll ever get.”
   Ruth went with her wish, and offered no opposition as they took the score into the TTC and carefully tucked it into a drawer so that it didn’t get knocked about during their rough flight home.  She half expected it to have crumbled to dust when they opened it, back in the twenty-first century, but it was still there, just a bit crumpled from being in the bin but still legible.  
   Adam had worked out how to switch the keyboard from controlling the TTC to being just an ordinary musical instrument, and they played a few of the songs.  That was when Tom had the idea.
   “Wouldn’t it be great if we could perform this?” he said.  The others thought.
   “Everyone’s too busy with the Festival Ruddigore,” Adam replied doubtfully.  “Anyway, how would we explain how we got the score?”
   “Would we need to?” Patrick said.  “People have written their own Thespis scores before now.”
   “But ours is the original,” Ruth said.
   “It might be quite funny,” Patrick said, “to find out what people really thought.  Then, later on when we’ve worked out how to deal with this time travel thing, we can tell them it’s the original and watch everyone’s faces as they try to explain why they thought Sir Arthur Sullivan’s work was inferior!”
   “But we’ll have to tell the others something,” Ruth said.  “We can’t say we wrote it, and they’d never believe us anyway.”
   “We could say we found it online?” Tom suggested.
   “But how can we persuade them to perform it?  Like Adam said, everyone’s busy and, well, we five aren’t the most influential people on the society.”
  “Let’s just learn as much as we can ourselves,” Agnes said.  “If we perform it, maybe they’ll like it and want to get involved, once Ruddigore’s over.  Maybe we can show it at the Festival ourselves.”
   “It’s worth a try,” Adam said.

   Far away in the past, a black cloak swished in a corridor and heels clip-clopped over the bare wooden floor.  The figure reached the rubbish bin, and saw that it was empty.  She gave a thin-lipped smile, whether from annoyance or satisfaction it would have been hard for an onlooker to say.
   So, they had it then.  The stage was set, and soon it would be time for the curtain to rise.  Time.  She turned with a swoosh of skirt and cloak, and soon the echoes were the only remembrance of her presence.
 

The story continues...