The Little Shadows

4.

A Change of Scene




FEBRUARY-MARCH 1912

The Parthenon, Helena

The People’s Hippodrome, Butte

The Digby Parthenon, Missoula

If you open the show, you have a considerable advantage in not having the stronger acts appear before you, so that the audience might compare them and applaud accordingly. Whatever place you are assigned by the management, take it uncomplainingly.

FREDERICK LADELLE, HOW TO ENTER VAUDEVILLE





At the end of February an announcement was posted at the theatre: the Fox–Drawbank Parthenon company would spend four weeks touring the circuit. Gentry assumed Flora would accompany the girls, but she laughed and said she’d have a holiday; Aurora was perfectly capable, and they would have Sybil and Julius to rely on in need.

In truth, she’d been totting up what they would spend in costs—every bit of their new-won pay—and had nervously determined that she must retain her waitress job. Even as she talked airily to Gentry, she was figuring in her head. Numb to worry for some time after Arthur’s death, she now felt it descend heavily on her; it seemed there were cartwheel grooves that her tired mind slid into over and over: hotel bills, supper, thread, shoes … She refused to allow the faintest tinge of fright to appear on her face, knowing nothing was more fatal to success than the appearance of failure.

The one thing that gave her pause was Bella—almost fourteen, and still not yet begun her womanly cycles, but ten to one she would do so any day, far from her mama’s guidance.

Aurora, hearing this fear, told her not to be silly; she and Clover could do all that was necessary, and Bella already knew all about it anyway, having watched her sisters washing out their monthly rags these last four years.

But as if to iron their path, that last worry vanished the day before the cavalcade was to set off: between the five and seven-thirty shows Bella came bursting into the dressing room with her face glowing, back from the privy, and announced, ‘It’s come! I’ve got it!’—so tickled to have achieved womanhood that nobody could be in doubt as to what she referred.

Her sisters clucked over her and rigged a temporary pinning, and warned her about the pain that might attend her, but Bella laughed and pooh-poohed them. Kitted up with the unfamiliar wad between her legs, she danced around the room to test it out, pleased as Punch. She did not even protest when Mama could not refrain from telling, yet one more time, the well-known tale of Aunt Queen in Madison, when Mama had rushed in from playing one day, ‘with no more idea than a bird of what had happened—I thought I’d cut myself! And she said, Well! Now you can have a baby. I asked, How on earth? And here’s what she said, the only knowledge she gave me: The man will stick his thing in you, and you’ll have a baby—can you feature it?’

All Mama’s stories ended that way, Clover thought: in disbelief at the lack of understanding in this cold old world. Except those ending ‘… then Arthur and I had our lovely children and all was worth the struggle.’ But she had made certain that her girls knew how babies came to be, even if her description of the mechanics was flowery and sun-dappled, and slightly vague as to biology.


Louis Heels

After an anxious morning of packing and repacking, Flora went with her girls to the station to participate in the general jollity of the company’s departure. She stood beside Gentry Fox to wave them off, the girls swathed in their warmest wraps. If only they’d had furs, which make leave-taking so festive! They had tried on their new dancing slippers the night before—white kid, Louis heels, tied with satin ribbons criss-crossing up the ankle—and their delight had been enough to stave off any slight regret Flora might have had about her locket. Arthur could not know, and what use had she for sentiment if the girls were ill-shod? She’d bought Bella proper boots at the New York Store too, and had even got the apostle spoons back from Hiram in the deal. She beamed wholeheartedly at the girls as they left, her mind at ease for once. They had good shoes and were guaranteed on the bill of the Ackerman–Harris travelling company for a solid month—programme sheets printed, and nobody the wiser about the cut-rate pay they’d be getting, which was still much better than nothing! She knew they would do well.

Gentry gave her a cup of tea in the station waiting room after the train departed, and she headed back to the Pioneer (allowing Gentry to assume that she was off to enjoy her leisure) more happily than her daughters might have expected.


The Jump

They would play the People’s Hippodrome in Butte the first week, meeting up there with several new acts. Swain’s Rats & Cats were off to Chicago, with a cheery wave of too many tails. Instead they would share the bill with the Furniture Tusslers and Victor Saborsky, Eccentric, whom Sybil and Julius knew well.

‘Oh yes, from a babe,’ Sybil told Bella and Clover, sitting across from them on the first leg of their trip. ‘His ma was an English variety dancer—well, she was Polish in fact, but married English, and him some kind of fiddler. Fabians, you know, very free, and then they took up with some heathen madman or other as well, odd as anything. Over they came, three or four years, with the little tyke in tow. This was after your ma had left us. He did his schooling in the dressing room, but his father was determined he get an education, very, so they upped back to England for a time, for him to attend a high-toned establishment, because the father, you know, was Someone in his own right before taking up with the Polish dancer. She was sweetly pretty, but a bit black in her moods from time to time; she struggled with her temper. Well, you’ll notice his nose, that was her doing. Not that she was alone in that—look for example, if you need one, at those poor Ninepins, Missus and the boy, and how they must creep around that Joe Dent, who has a kind heart I’m sure but is a demon when in drink, and you can’t tell me that boy is not being brutalized no matter how they blandish the authorities. And now he’s a certified Eccentric, working without a net—I mean Victor Saborsky, not Nando. Odd to see a little boy all grown up now, makes you feel a bit old. His face so thin and sad, he looks as old as us, however sweet his expression may be—but his turn is spectacular, ever an honour to be on the bill with him. Always excepting of course my dear Jay, Victor’s my favourite act on the circuits, this or any other year.’

From Butte, they would head east to Billings for a week; retrace their steps for a second week in Butte; and then shuffle west to Missoula for another week’s engagement before making their way back to Helena—which now seemed like home.

The green leather seats felt sticky under Bella’s tucked-up shins. In the warm train she had pushed her black stockings down from their elastic and rolled them tight-tight-tight around the tops of her new boots. Butte boot. Bella stared out the window at the hills rising oddly out of flat plains, the bones of the earth showing through, no decorations at all beyond a scrub of trees; here and there a blackened patch from fire.

Butte was always on fire in Mama’s tales of the old Death Trail—one of her best stories was the fire in the butcher shop in Butte where her company was playing on her very first tour, how the pigs in the back squealed through the crackle of the flames, and the smell of roast pork beginning—extremely gruesome. Bella could not get it out of her mind; it ran horrified prickles up and down her scalp. Mama had been in no danger, she had said so over and over, but Bella could not help imagining that her feet were burning, Mama’s feet, on the boards rigged over the butcher’s counter for a stage—little feet in embroidered satin slippers. The horse-drawn fire wagon had scrambled up to the front door of the butcher shop as all the audience was streaming out. Mayhem! But it was better to think of that little fire than the big fire in Butte, the explosion in 1895, before Mama left vaudeville and married Papa and had Aurora and left this life. That explosion was far from the theatre, but onstage they’d heard the roar of it, and when they stopped the play and went out into the street there was a boy’s body, blown several blocks by the blast—the whole thing like a scene from the war, dead bodies everywhere and blood seeping into the dirt of the road, and brains spattered here and there, parts of human beings. Bella had read the clipping in Mama’s scrapbook: ‘the cries and groans of the injured and dying and some of the bodies still quivering, remnants of human beings, legs and arms torn off … shapeless trunks quivered and died in the arms of the living.’

She shook her hands out quickly and lay down, her head on Clover’s lap. A boy like Mattie, perhaps, or—not Nando! After a moment she whispered, ‘In Butte there was a boy lying dead outside the theatre, and when they walked to see the explosion they passed parts of people quivering on the ground.’

Clover smoothed her hair. ‘That was years ago—we will not be exploded this time, I promise.’

‘I love you, Clover,’ Bella said, digging her cheek into Clover’s knee as if they were about to be separated by some great cataclysm. ‘I love you.’

Clover’s hand passed gently and constantly over her hair and her ears and presently she stopped thinking, and the swaying of the train over the tracks lulled her to sleep.

Stroking Bella’s hair, Clover was lonely. Bella’s childishness made her feel old and calm. Farther down the carriage Julius played pinochle with the leader of the Old Soldiers outfit, John Wendt Hayden. The son of a soldier, he had not seen action himself and bore no terrible wound; he had a lovely friendly voice. She could change seats and join them, but was disinclined to move. After the usual hubbub of the theatre it was nice to have quiet.

She could hear Julius holding forth to John Hayden: ‘I did attempt blackface for a year or so, travelling in the Antipodes. No more. The young comic Jolson goes corked for Sullivan–Considine—a mouth with a man attached. I saw him perform in San Francisco, unfazed in the aftermath of the earthquake; I won’t compete with him. I’d rather mock the German.’

Julius was easy to hear, but John had a low voice, so their conversation was an exchange of booms and murmurs, like Clover imagined the sound of the sea might be.

‘Yon Jolson transcends the genre because he is in some sense sending up his Hebraism, of which the audience is perfectly well aware. But it’s a pesky makeup to do. I have disliked it ever since, in my youth, I was persuaded to use coal dust one evening. Took seven months to rid my skin of the blue tinge. I looked like a damned Taffy, fresh from the mine.’ Puffing on a cheroot, Julius expanded. ‘When you work in concert with someone like Bert Williams, the race ceases to be abstraction, and becomes a collection of human beings, as noble, nasty, sharp or foolish as our own. Oddly, this transmogrification does not seem to attain with the German, whom I am never loath to loathe, and ever find more loathly on closer acquaintance—for example a railway journey, during which your German will always be provided with a frumious wurst of blemished origin, and an unsharp pocket knife to saw it with.’

As Julius’s trumpeted over John’s voice, his blatant body trumpeted too, lounging legs laid out into the aisle. ‘In New York last year, Flo Ziegfeld signed Bert Williams to star in the Follies—blackface over his own black face—and when the cast (a collection of gabies) threatened to walk out rather than appear onstage with him, Ziegfeld’s response was simple: Go if you want! I can replace every one of you—except the man you want me to fire!’

Clover thought of blackface as a costume. It startled her to think of the person under the makeup.

Across the aisle, Aurora stared at her own reflection in the train window, the abbreviated slant of her un-made-up brows and the jut of her too-strong chin. She tried to pull it in, experimenting with the angle to find how to make their next photos more flattering, and let the words to Last Rose, which Gentry had put permanently into their turn, run through her head: Thus kindly I’ll scatter thy leaves o’er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead. A manual for deadheading in the garden; that practical coolness could be used in the song too. But when it came to From love’s shining circle, the gems drop away, you could let the throb in there, open the coolness to the dark heart that lay under everyone’s life. All the dead sisters and brothers, the lost fathers and children of everyone in the audience would come and sit beside them briefly, because she was singing. Perhaps Gentry meant that it was a better thing to do with grief than just being sad alone.


A Thin Man, Not Too Tall

The Hippodrome in Butte was a brand-new theatre, but only one of seventeen operating in the wealthy copper town. The Grand Opera on Myers Avenue was the largest; the Lyric Opera the most notorious (according to Sybil, the fancy name was a front for gambling and prostitution); and the Hippodrome the newest. The girls climbed dirty-snowed streets from the train station, following the straggling artistes, and were rewarded. Inside and out, it was a beauty. The opulent lobby was freshly painted, the smell of linseed oil still strong.

Inside the house, Clover stopped on her way down the aisle to turn around and around, staring up at the ceiling. A bright wreath of flowers painted around the ventilated dome in the centre of the roof held four figures (ribbon-sashes for Music, Dancing, The Drama, and Tragedy draped prudently over bare chests) and a fruit-basket-upset of musical instruments. Instead of advertisements, like in most theatres they had seen, the front-drop curtain featured a painted Greek scene: ruins on the shore of a lake and a dangerous mountain range behind.

Bella and Aurora went down to the dressing rooms, but Clover stayed to watch the flymen run through the ropes, testing the rigging. Myriad backdrops swept up and down, each with its own wing pieces: a fancy drawing room with folding doors, a poor kitchen, two different streets (one elegant, one shabby), a ship dock, dawn in a forest glade, a rocky pass fit for brigands, and many others. As she delightedly inspected the detail of a starving artist’s garret (two mice fighting over a bit of cheese, a baby’s fat little fist visible above the rim of a cracked cradle), a voice spoke behind her.

‘Looks comfortable enough, and cheap, shall we move in?’

She turned quickly and saw a thin man, not too tall, with fluffy brown hair and a sharply bent nose. The sweetest face she’d ever seen: mild, interested, open to excitement. She liked his face on sight, more than any man’s she could remember, except—perhaps it reminded her a bit of Papa’s, abstraction combined with a suddenly present attention. He was attending to her at this moment.

‘Victor Smith,’ he said, indicating himself.

‘Clover Avery,’ she returned automatically, thinking he must be manager here. He did not look like a manager, but neither did Gentry Fox, and this man had something of Gentry’s air of being not from the place he found himself in. She held out her hand and he laughed, and raised it almost to his lips—in a European way, but jokingly.

‘I think you must be one of Les Très Belles Aurores?’

‘Well, we’re just the Belle Auroras,’ Clover said. ‘My sisters are Bella and Aurora, you see.’

‘No Clover in that name—does that mean I can pluck you loose from them?’

‘I sing alto,’ she said, as if that explained the whole thing.

‘Then you must definitely come over to my act. I need some sweet meadow flower to pull the bees. I am Victor Saborsky, when I am on the boards.’

‘Oh! Our friend Sybil Sutley knows you, sir.’

‘So she does. She was a good friend to my mother.’

‘As she is to mine,’ Clover said.

‘Then we are cousins,’ Victor said. He bowed to her, but shyness descended on her under his continued regard, so she turned again to watch the drops being raised and lowered—they were now in a stone square lit by shafts of moonlight, some European capital waiting for a princess to trip lightly down the stairs, or a king to abdicate—and when she raised her eyes he was gone. Vanished without a sound. She found herself looking up, as if for a bird. Nothing.


One Silver Dollar

The dressing rooms were shining clean, bright with mirrors. At one side a darling stove puffed heat into the room. Bella held her boots out one at a time to admire their gleam in the rows of electric bulbs. The first time they’d had electric lights in a dressing room, too. This was the fanciest place. Aurora had checked the bill and there were no other females on it—only Sybil, who had a dressing room of her own with Julius—so she let Bella pick the best spot and set out their things, with a place for Clover between them. Clover is the best friend of each of us, Bella thought, she is always between us. But she loved Aurora too. In some ways she and Aurora were the most alike: strong and bold. Clover was the sweetest of them, though.

A thousand thousand Bellas found the ranked mirrors entrancing. Their placement round the room showed her herself as a regiment of girls, all those shards, and ghosts dainty and slim, ready to dance. The Parthenon’s old mirrors had not been so flattering.

A tap on the door—and two heads poked around it, like another doubling mirror.

‘Mr. East and Mr. Verrall!’ Bella exclaimed, happy to see old friends. ‘Come in!’

‘Oh, we will not intrude,’ Verrall was saying, but East burst through his arm and into the room, to give each of the sisters a warm and slightly over-personal embrace.

Verrall flapped an envelope in his long fingers. Not entirely clean, Bella saw, after their railway journey, but her own hardly ever were either.

‘We were charged with, given, we—’

East snatched the letter from him. ‘Jimmy the Bat got us to bring this,’ he said, rolling his eyes at Verrall’s politesse. ‘Not knowing what hotel you would be putting up at—and do you know yourselves?’

‘I believe we are at Mrs. Seward’s,’ Aurora said. ‘It is only a boarding house.’

‘We will call it an hotel,’ Verrall declared. ‘We are there too.’

‘Mrs. Seward’s is the only place to stay in Butte,’ East announced, sunk in gloom.

‘Fine testimonial,’ Verrall said. ‘Not a paid endorsement.’

‘We are thinking about hotels, because our present routine, that we are breaking in on this western swing, is hotelly.’

‘It has a hotellishness about it,’ Verrall agreed.

‘A dark and hellish hotellishness.’

‘So, Miss Bella, we were wondering if you could be purr-suaded—’

‘We need, we have need, we are in need of, a good little girl …’

‘… to hotel for us tonight?’

No matter how they talked over each other you could always hear each one, Bella noticed. East was the funniest. Or maybe Verrall, with his sad eyes and bluish teeth.

‘We would add to your consequence the amount of one silver dollar.’ Verrall flourished the coin as if it were a king’s ransom.

‘Per diem,’ East put in hastily. ‘Not per showem.’

‘To help you in your act?’ Bella was astonished.

‘That very thing. You would have one or two lines, just old hokum, but would carry the day, and could wear whatever pretty little frock you’ve been singing in, without a change to trouble you.’

Aurora said, before Bella could agree, ‘We’d have to see the lines. There cannot be any suggestive nonsense.’ That chafed, but Bella knew that Aurora felt herself to be Mama while they were here, and was determined to look after their reputation as delicate girls.

‘What, none?’

‘No, no, East,’ Verrall said. ‘None of the kind, nothing, no. Only a sweet girl receptionist, a little stupid.’

‘A very stupid, but such a pretty little hen!’ said East, chucking Bella under the chin and almost kissing her, but managing to make Aurora smile about it.

Bella spun around till her skirt spread wide. ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, please!’ she cried.


Balance

While East and Verrall set about coaching Bella, Aurora read the letter they had brought her:

Dear Miss Aurora,

Miss Eleanor has decided to return East, which means I must go too for now. We’ve lost Mr. Hanrahan (who played her husband in the melodrama you might recall) and cannot do the show longer so she pulls it back to NY or Boston and we will do ‘The Slap’ again.

So it may be some time before I make it back Out West again and I am sorry for it. Keep up with your dancing and one of these turns it will be you and me.

Yours already, without any Right to style myself so,

JIMMY BATTLE

No, he did not have any right. It made her warm to think of it, but almost equally irritated. He was the puppy of that actress, even if he was working on a song-and-dance routine on the side. But it was comforting to think of him. She touched the signature, Jimmy Battle. Small writing, but not cramped. He would not ever shove her away and curse her. He was a good match for her; they were the same in many ways. But there ought to be some balance in things. Perhaps she too would find a patron for a while.


Glass Crash

The orchestra master knew his work and put the Belle Auroras through their cues like lightning, wasting no time at all on compliments but treating them like veterans, which was better. He nodded them off and turned to the more difficult cues for the Furniture Tusslers, a robust pair of young men with small eyes and ham-shaped arms who threw tables and chairs, and each other, across the stage at predetermined intervals, to the loud crashing of cymbals. The wood-crash operator was irritably busy stage right—when the girls crossed his line of vision he missed a cue. They fled.

Bella (who had looked back at the younger, quite-handsome Tussler) stomped on the foot of the waiting glass-crash man. He swore horribly, but gave her a black-toothed grin when she apologized. She loved his glittering basket of glass shards and the spare bottles he had lined up to break in it; but the wood-crash machine with its heavy handle frightened her. It sounded too much like a real man falling down stairs, or landing in a woodpile, or breaking a spindly Sheraton desk, depending on the velocity at which the handle was turned.

East and Verrall were quarrelling on the stairs as the girls went down, as they seemed almost always to be doing, when not performing or testing out their routines on personable girls. Bella knew that Aurora felt herself to be above them, although she could not have said why; and Clover liked them well enough but was still shy of their patterschtick. Bella, however, was one of their company now, and they put out black-suited arms to stop her halfway down, and got her to run through her lines again at a whisper. ‘Would you like to take a bath?’ ‘No thanks, I’ll leave it right where it is!’ and all the rest of the old gags. The second time through, Bella’s tongue tripped up and she said, ‘Would you like me to take a bath?’ Quick as lightning East said, ‘Whoo-hoo, absolutely!’—eyes goggling happily out of his head, hands somehow conjuring a claw-footed tub.

She didn’t hesitate either, but asked, as if it were his luggage, ‘Where would you like me to take it?’ which made East laugh out loud instead of carrying on—and that was winning the trick, so she was proud of herself.

But Verrall said the gag would get them tossed out of the theatre, even in the more relaxed environs of Butte, so they went back to the usual way. At the end of the whispering rehearsal Verrall shook her hand and told her she was histrionic, which she gathered was a good thing to be.

Butte was not Helena, no. The crowd was rougher—there was a woodsy smell in the theatre, a Paddockwood kind of smell, tobacco and tanned hides, drink, men’s working clothes; although there were women in the audience, they were well outnumbered by men. Faces visible in the spilling light were white and owl-eyed. Some of the men stood up when Aurora and Clover danced the Music-Box, the better to see them twirl.

And opening was not closing. The stone-cold crowd talked generally through the first number, Buffalo Gals, and gave only a smattering of applause. Bella, who had grown used to being liked, found that she was almost angry not to have that appreciative cushion; she put more vim into I Can’t Do the Sum and seemed to win the attention of the house. Aurora—and even, dutifully, Clover—twinkled and glimmered at the boxes and caught what eyes they could, but it was uphill work, and then went all downhill during Early One Morning, for which that crowd was definitely not in the mood.

As they cleaned their faces, Aurora said, ‘If we’d had another number prepared, we could have caught them. Something with a little pep—or maybe a sentimental number?’

Bella shook it off. But she did think Gentry was wrong about the crowd down here.


Had ’Em, Lost ’Em

Bella trotted up to the stage-right side to be ready for East & Verrall’s number, and caught the last of the Tusslers’ act. That younger one had rangy legs curving in strong lines front and back. Arms bare beneath a brocade waistcoat, clean-boned and taut. He saw her watching and stared at her so boldly that she looked away and went through her lines in her head.

East and Verrall crowded into the wings beside her, kissed each side of her face, and went on. With an afternoon of hard work they had whipped their hotel number into slightly better shape.

It started in one, the seafront olio drop covering up the terrible mess left in two and three by the Furniture Tusslers. Behind the drop the hands raced to clear that mess.

Bella loved the dual view she had from the wings: East and Verrall’s chatty number going on in front, bathed in the sweetness of the pinky golden light, all alive—while at the same time, behind the olio, deathly silent in faint blue light, stagehands going through their practised moves, soundlessly crouching, lifting slowly as if they were in a dream; the Furniture Tusslers walked like ghosts through their old life to retrieve their props.

In front, Verrall opened their number, minding his own business in a straw boater on the promenade, whistling idly till East came rolling onstage as if punched, brought up short and saved from the ocean by Verrall’s foot.

‘I was living the life of Riley,’ East said, dusting off his coat.

‘And then what happened?’

‘Riley came home.’

Verrall was sympathetic. ‘Women! You got to keep moving, Mr. East.’

East, looking nervously behind him: ‘Now I’ll have to move. Can you recommend a hotel?’

Their turn went on, light pattering music up and down under their voices in the same absurd style as their pattering conversation. On cue—exactly as the last of the stagehands whisked across behind a broom—the seafront olio rose to reveal a hotel lobby drop and a desk, in two, and Verrall strolled back to become the hotel manager.

Sidling up to the desk, East took out a cigar and chomped it between his teeth.

Verrall cried, ‘Hey, put that out, there’s no smoking in here.’

‘What makes you think I’m smoking?’ asked East, eyes wide open.

‘You’ve got a cigar in your mouth!’

‘I got boots on my feet, don’t mean I’m walking.’

Verrall told him, in deep disdain: ‘You’re going to make some woman a wonderful husband.’

With a wild, agonizing roll of the eyes East said, ‘I’m afraid so!’

‘You don’t even know what a husband is.’ Verrall’s superiority was massive.

‘Oh, yes I do!’ East snapped back, uncrushed. ‘A husband is what’s left of a sweetheart after the nerve has been killed.’

After they’d tangled a bit over the price of a room, Verrall tinged his little desk bell and yelled, ‘Front! Show the man the elevator!’

But East said, ‘No, no, I want a room with a bed in it.’

‘Will you be needing a bath, sir?’ Verrall asked, very cold.

‘How rude!’ Then, anxious, ‘Would you say I do?’

Verrall rang his bell again with vigour, and Bella went skittering on in her dancing slippers, eyes wide as saucers for her first dramatic role. She was as helpfully unhelpful as they’d rehearsed and she said the lines as they’d told her to, and when she got a laugh she could not help checking the audience and laughing too—her naive pleasure making it all the funnier; she was quick enough to play with that, the way East and Verrall played.

When they came off after their turn they told Bella she’d saved their bacon.

‘Cat-calls off, wolf-whistles on. That was all for you, cupcake,’ East said as they bundled her down the stairs at the intermission. He gave her bottom a thoughtful pat.

‘That last gag of yours was a three-person joke,’ Verrall told East. ‘I hope those three enjoyed themselves.’

‘Over the heads of the rest. Had ’em, lost ’em, had ’em, lost ’em—one long recurring nightmare. I’d hang myself if my belt would hold.’

‘It’ll be better at the second show, when the audience is half-cut.’ Verrall pulled the script out of his pocket and a pencil from the ribbon of his bowler hat, made a few swift strokes and scribbled a note. ‘Lose the dining room bit, lose They raise chickens in the cellar, the guests are fond of dark meat. Too highbrow for this house.’

‘We’ll have to put the girl back in,’ East said.

‘She was knocking on my door all night, but there were complaints and I had to let her out—’ Verrall scratched.

‘Good, that’ll lead into There’s a dead girl in the other bed …’

‘Yes, but how did you find out she’s dead?’ Verrall said, accusing the imaginary guest. ‘Or do you think that’s going too strong?’

Bella was laughing too hard to talk, so exhilarated she could have turned right around and gone back out again; and the best of it was, she’d be able to do it again at the second show, and at the third, and then all this week! She put her fist over her mouth and made herself calm down so she would have something left for the next two shows.


An Artiste

Later in the bill, Clover slipped backstage again to watch Victor Saborsky. His act used a very complicated technical rigging which he checked and rechecked during the Old Soldiers’ performance, and right after the intermission Clover had seen him standing motionless at the very back of the stage behind the last olio drop, lost in thought, or in prayer.

‘A true artiste,’ Sibyl had whispered as they filed past him. ‘Nothing comes before performance, with him. You don’t often find that in this business, really, that kind of concentrated effort. People work hard—look at East and Verrall!—but he’s a maniac.’

Clover had not mentioned him to her sisters, and she went up alone into the wings to watch him. Her white skirt and waist would be too evident in the wings, she thought, so she wrapped herself in a grey shawl and stood like a modest ghost just outside the hemp-bed’s painted line. The blue light from the prompt box shone on her pale, pointed face and haloed her hair. Victor saw her and smiled, because she had come up for his turn, then looked quickly away.

He wore a great-collared black velvet dress-coat, threadbare and ornate—he might have stolen it from an opera wardrobe, or inherited it from Beethoven. High-waisted black trousers made his long legs twice as long; he wore elongated boots that flapped slightly but retained a worn elegance of line. Clover could see the pattern of soft cracks filled in with black polish. The lights dimmed, the music changed, and the curtain opened to reveal two.

A country road, a tree. Evening.

Tattered silk battens, blown gently by a stagehand on the wind machine, gave the appearance of mist drifting over the stage. The drop, keeping the stage in two, showed a blurred grey landscape with the suggestion of a moon hidden behind clouds. Victor wandered onstage as if he had walked for a long time in those long black boots, and began to talk to the people in front. Clover had never imagined anything so charming and easy (but it was not easy, she knew, to make them yours).

‘Long ago I was a boy, and all alone,’ Victor told them, confidingly. ‘My father having died, and my mother being lost. She went to the Fabians, you know, and from them to even stranger company …’ He was a portrait of sadness. ‘But one must not repine.’

His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown askew, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.

‘Life is not without its difficulties,’ Victor said, and a sudden imaginary gust blew him back through three standing flips—his hands never moved from holding his coat, his body merely seeming to revolve on a still fulcrum. Lightning flashed in the blasted landscape. The thunder-sheet was directly across from where Clover stood—she could see the man yank mightily on the metal to make it crack, but jumped anyway when the thunder boomed out.

Victor staggered back again and hid behind the small tree, clutching at it—and as the wind continued to blow, his feet lifted off in the gale until his body flew straight out sideways, a black pennant waving in the wind.

At his farthest extent the wind dropped, the lights changed, music rippled through a discordant change into an old minuet, and Victor leaped into a story, which he told while tuning a battered violin (where had it appeared from?), rosining his bow, and finally playing it. In a very few words he sketched an ancient Polish music-master teaching him to play. The violin slid from dominating virtuoso to hopeless student, and back again: shimmering from the violent, impatient commands of the master to the trust and willingness to learn of the boy, Victor seemed to waver from seven feet tall to three. The pupil’s music grew from squawks to mastery, and then the master died, and Victor assumed his greatcoat.

Clover found her eyes aching for her father, for how he as much as Mama had set their feet on this path from her earliest memory.

Then the violin vanished into thin air, and lighter music began from the orchestra.

‘My next trick!’ Victor announced. He swept the black frockcoat into a wheeling circle and from it retrieved an egg, a feather fan, a bowler hat and a bamboo walking stick. He juggled first the egg, then the egg and the fan, then hat-egg-fan while twirling the bamboo cane in a windmill. The cane landed on his nose, the hat flipped up onto the cane, and he juggled the egg while fanning himself. While he was so occupied, with understandable concentration, his feet began a clattering dance, the boot-ends clacking a gay percussion.

His absurdity, thought Clover, is not of the idiot variety, but of someone wanting too much, reaching for the moon. Every motion was comic, every flex of foot and straight-edge of elevated leg.

‘Yes, for some time I made my living rationally, as a juggler. But too much influenced by the moon, I became—if not an out-and-out lunatic—an eccentric. I shiver to see the moon each night, preposterous and separate. Why should we be so far from what we long for? But how to reach it?’

He pulled from his coat a large brass compass. ‘My only inheritance,’ he said, showing it off. ‘From my father, a moral compass … My great treasure!’ Flourishing it, he dropped it—oh no!—but caught it, dropped it, batted it forward, ran fast enough to be below it when it fell; he sighed with relief and shook it, and it all fell to pieces in his hand.

Clover was as horrified as Victor seemed. In a fumbling jumble he reassembled the pieces, making the compass into a birdcage, a lantern (lit!), and a drinking goblet before managing to shuffle it once more into a compass—although larger, and wilder. There was one piece left over: the glass cover, which he could not get to fix. Instead, abandoning the attempt, he stuck it into his eye as a monocle. It shone in the light and showed that eye magnificently magnified.

As Victor goggled at the audience, seeming to see everything new, the second drop rose and the stage was revealed in three: a dark forest of bare trees. Behind them a huge full moon and the night sky peppered with salty stars. Clover thought perhaps it would be a lady-moon, but saw no face—a faint suggestion of a rabbit was only shadows of pits and craters. Or was that a face, yellowy-green, hanging upside down?

Victor checked his compass to see how he should proceed, and showed the audience its needle wildly spinning. As the light increased, seeming to shine from the moon (but from the wings Clover could see the Klieg light), a path appeared in the darkness behind Victor, shining upwards, like a moonbeam. She took a breath, as the audience did—as Victor did, when he spun and saw the road shining before him.

‘My destination!’ he cried, looking back over his shoulder to bring the audience along with him. He tried to walk up it: fell through, of course, because it was only beams of light. He backed up and ran, and somersaulted through as if it were a cobweb, seeming to stick … and fell.

Victor picked himself up and hobbled back to teeter on the edge of the stage, between two silver footlights. He raised himself on his long toes and leaped, dove forward into a handspring and a cartwheel and a fan of arms and legs and somehow—how? even in the wings Clover could not tell!—up onto the ribbon of light descending from the moon. She saw the stagehand hauling on his harness from the other side, but Victor moved so naturally as he strode up the sky that it was hard to connect the two. He leaped over the tall trees and forward and at last he put out a hand and touched the moon’s strange face, leaned in and kissed it, and exhorted the moon to explain to him: life, gravity, the persistent eternal pull of the tide, and of course, Love.

Receiving no answer but the hoot of a lonely owl, he brought out a silk kerchief and philosophically polished up that pallid face. ‘Until we meet again,’ he told the moon, with a lover’s caressing promise. Then he turned away from the moon and leaped—so far forward that Clover was in terror—and landed again on the forestage, precisely in one, and stood triumphant.

The people went wild and Saborsky bowed a gigantic bow, wheeling his arms in a wild sunburst-rolling jump and bowing again, shouting ‘Encore!’ for himself. He took fourteen bows, tossing and picking up (with enormously vulnerable gratitude and some elastic-string mechanism) the same two bouquets of red silk roses over and over, terribly reminiscent of Sunderland and Pettibone applauding each other, and almost the funniest bit of all.

Clover’s whole heart and self was won.

Standing at the back of the hall beside Sybil, who had made them come up for a rare treat, her sisters watched too, and each in her own way saw how Saborsky’s true skill outshone every little thing they might do themselves.


A Chance Not to Be Missed

Mrs. Seward’s boarding hotel was a large, noisy place full of vaudeville people visiting with acquaintances from other theatres in town; a general movement through the house seemed to go on almost all night.

At 3 a.m. Mrs. Seward emerged in awful dudgeon and rang a little bell, and everyone went back to their own rooms, as East and Verrall had promised Aurora would happen. Finally something close to silence fell over the house and the girls could sleep, though Aurora was kept awake a little longer with the sick knowledge that they’d have to be up in four hours to make the band call for the next day’s performances.

The next night, Friday night, a proposal floated through the dressing rooms, to go after the show to hear members of the Hippodrome orchestra moonlighting at a roadhouse in the nearby countryside. Most of the company were going. An important visiting impresario was to put in an appearance.

‘A chance not to be missed,’ Julius confided, leaning in to their dressing room. His eyes popped at Aurora earnestly: a surprising pale green, like peeled grapes floating in custard. ‘We work, we strive, art is all—but at a certain juncture, management is a necessity. Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew is a rising man and was last winter at the Follies. I think it worth the excursion.’

Aurora considered the proposal as she creamed off her makeup, listening to Sybil’s rippling account of how such a party would be perfectly permissible and even educational. The hotel would be in a din till three again, anyway. She and Clover had been to country dances at home in Paddockwood, some quite rambunctious, and could certainly take care of themselves; besides, they’d be with all their friends from the Parthenon company. She did briefly wonder whether she ought to leave Bella behind at Mrs. Seward’s, but Bella heard her saying as much to Clover and scotched that plan.

‘Cat piss! I am just as fit as you to go out in the country without Mama,’ Bella cried. ‘You can’t leave me here while you two go gallivanting!’

‘I’m thinking of your good,’ Aurora told her sharply. ‘You’re still a child.’

‘Ha, no, I’m not any more, and you know it! Don’t you treat me like a baby.’

‘Only our own dear Baby,’ Clover said, using Bella’s old pet-name. ‘We must look out for you.’

‘If I’m old enough to be in the show, I’m old enough to go out with you.’

Aurora would have fought her down, but the boarding hotel with its wandering artistes was no safer a place for a girl alone. Instead she did a quick job on Bella’s eyes, then Clover’s and her own, as if looking older would better fortify them to cope with any questionable doings they might encounter. In any case, they had done nothing but work and strive for many months—it was delightful to think of a trip to the woods.

After the last show the whole party together rode the streetcar till the track ended, at a blank crossroads. After a chilly wait, a long cutter came jingling out of the darkness. A man with surprisingly few teeth jumped down to help them up into the hay that filled the wagon-bed, and then to plump carriage robes around them, paying some special attention to the girls’ knees and feet until Julius growled at him; then they slid slowly off into the night woods.

The full moon had risen long before and rode above them, a silver orange dangling just out of reach. Clover was squashed in beside Mr. Verrall, but if she craned her neck slightly her cheek grazed the coat of Victor Saborsky, sitting on the wagon’s sidebar. At one corner the wagon lurched and Victor put out a hand to save her from being tossed out. It was too dark to see his eyes but his hand felt warm right through her melton coat-sleeve.

The silence of the forest was broken by a chuffing, a huffing. The cutter drew to one side of the narrow track; the clattering sewing-machine sound rose, and a touring car burst out of the shadows behind them. It squeezed past, honking, headlamps flaring in the darkness, and off around a bend, the commotion gradually fading.

‘Fitzjohn Mayhew,’ Julius pronounced. ‘His imprimatur.’

It was peaceful once the automobile had gone. The cutter slid on, runners scraping over gravel—winter was drying out to spring. Before long music twined out of the woods, and around another dark, piney dogleg they found a warm-lit huddle under the trees, a low log-built house with small windows under its eaves, each one a prick of light; buggies and wagons ranged alongside. Aurora took Bella’s arm on one side and Clover caught her other hand, and they followed Sybil and Julius, and went before East & Verrall, Victor Saborsky, the Tussler boys and the musicians, crowding up into the ante-porch and through a cracked, moss-packed door into a cacophony of noise and smoke.

Aurora tried to make out the room through the haze. A low dive, she thought, and the smell was fierce, but there was music playing over the racket of talk, and none of the men seemed instantly violent. Miners, she thought, and officials at the mines. Girls moved through the crowd, a sprinkling among the men: well-dressed working women, a few drunken drabs. Wan, skinny chits who looked like God’s last leftovers carried tin jugs of beer and unlabelled bottles. Although it irked her, Aurora saw she had made a mistake in coming. It was not a box-house—the kind of place she’d heard Sybil tell of, where girls went straight down from the stage to dally with the patrons in small enclosed boxes, for a little extra income—but it was not at all a respectable place. She kept a good grip on Bella’s hand.

Across one end of the long room a slightly raised platform held the musicians. Silver plates on an accordion flashed in the lamplight as the musicians squashed together to make a larger empty space on the platform. Blurry forms of dancers waited to begin.

East took Clover’s elbow to steer the girls to a half-empty table, then vanished with Verrall, reappearing with small stools to crowd in tight about the table. Aurora did a quick check of the room. No sign of the promised impresario. There was no one who could possibly have come in that touring car. There must be other rooms—or perhaps a different class of entertainment, in the outbuildings crouched around the wagon yard. She settled herself to watch, but kept one eye on the room.


A Little Less Sad

This was a wild place, Bella thought. Just what her mood required! The thin girls serving and the thin men drinking interested her equally. The trampled floor was dark dirt; the long, low-ceilinged room felt dank with a distillery brew of yeasty sweat, but the woodsmoke and deer-hide smell reminded her of country dances in Paddockwood, and the theatre people seemed like old friends too: East and Verrall, of course, but Saborsky and the Tusslers too. The older Tussler gave her a wink and she gave him a twinkling one back, so he elbowed his brother and guffawed, winking again and again. Bella decided he was not entirely right in his head.

Fitful light fell from oil lamps set on tables and hung from beams, not bright enough to make it truly cheerful, but she felt like she knew the ropes here. In a back L of the room—closer to the still-room, she guessed, since the jugs of beer came from that end—men and a few women were playing cards.

The dancers came on: a man and woman, both wearing tattered street clothes and caps. The music changed to a danse Apache rag, and the man grabbed the woman’s arm. He pulled her to him and slapped her, hard! But she didn’t seem to mind. Still holding her arm, the man and his partner did a cocky strut till he grabbed her into a bear-hug and a rough little quickstep. They clung together, then the man threw the woman to the floor and yanked her back up to dance a squatting parody of a waltz. It was tight and harsh and none of it pretty; exciting to witness, like a fight on the street.

Next up was a singer, an older woman with a rasping voice and low-slung breasts that threatened to burst out of her stained satin dress. She did music-hall stuff at a rattling pace, with no stinting of lewd gestures and eye-rollings. Ugly, but with enough assurance to put her songs across, and the music was lively.

At first it had been lovely to sit in the warmth, cozied up between Clover and Aurora, but now Bella was hot and the place seemed only ordinary after all. She got up and wound round tables to the back of the long room as if she might be looking for a way out to the privy, but she had no need, only restlessness. Aurora had let her wear her dainty-flowered shirtwaist. She must look as old as her sisters, with her eyes darkened so.

There was a stronger odour back here, a hay smell or a burning-barrel. She supposed it was some unusual cure of tobacco. East had followed her and caught her sniffing at the air. He said, ‘That’s loco weed, that’s all, hashish cigarillos.’ Verrall came up beside him, and added, ‘Makes these folk feel a little less sad, for a while.’

‘But you wouldn’t want that, no, no,’ East said, steering her slightly wide of that table. ‘Although we are as sad as can be. We need it to be comic in our Art.’

‘No sadness for you,’ Verrall agreed. ‘Cards, though—we could all use some of the innocent joy that gambling brings to the hectic personality.’

At home in Paddockwood Bella had frequently played with the men. Her papa had taught her how to play poker, how to make it look like she couldn’t play very well. Though that joke worked only once, she did enjoy trotting it out. East tucked her into the crowd watching a small table where a heavy-set woman was dealing and talking, talking and dealing. Bella could see that she was good.

The younger of the Tusslers was playing at the table, but he dashed his hand down in disgust as East and Bella joined the group, and the older brother replaced him. The younger stood beside them to watch a hand or two, commenting scornfully on the play under his breath to East, who stayed silent and watched; admiring his detached alertness, Bella copied him, a trill of pleasure running under her skin to be out in this wild place, at night. She was not the baby sister here. She was herself.


A Very Fine Suit

Near the end of a song from an angry woman with lank blonde hair, there was a commotion at the door and a large man came in, a bevy of theatre people around him chattering and showing off, oblivious to the performance going on. From his white silk scarf and pointed beard, from the cut of the astrakhan-collared overcoat, and from the very fine suit revealed as he doffed his coat (which was whisked to safety by one of his entourage), Aurora knew this must be Mr. Fitzjohn Mayhew.

The singer onstage knew it too—she snapped urgent fingers at the bandleader and the music changed to a hotter song, syncopated and loud, and she shouted a welcome over the heads of the crowd: ‘Fitz! About time you came back to the sticks!’ Mayhew raised his cane and saluted her, everything fine about him, even his manners. He waved to encourage the music, and the singer went on with a bawdy piece about her loving cup and the man to fill it up. Sybil, sitting alert in the shadow of Julius’s bulk, pressed an importunate hand on Aurora’s arm. ‘You must sing next,’ she hissed.

‘Oh, no,’ Aurora said, surprised. ‘They’ve got plenty here to entertain.’

‘Julius will work it. It’s your best chance for Fitz Mayhew. He’s got an eye for a pretty girl. You go ahead. You can’t say no!’

Aurora could not, of course. Julius had already lumbered up and was talking to the band captain, gesturing back at the table.

But what to sing? Not their Parthenon act; Mayhew might have caught the show. Something different for this crowd. They’ve been riotous, she thought, violent and loud, so we’ll be simple and sad. After the Ball? But it was long and didn’t make sense without all the verses, and she wasn’t sure she and Clover could get through to the last without losing the crowd. And the band didn’t know them, and they had no sides. Julius came back and escorted Clover up to the stage. Bella was nowhere to be seen, but Aurora dared not hesitate or they would lose this chance. She needed something to catch the heart, to catch the attention of this Mayhew. Aurora leaned across to the fiddler and asked him, with her most engaging smile and a small, apologetic, enlisting shrug—what is to be done?—if they could borrow the loan of his violin for just one song. He blushed and handed it over.

‘Songs My Mother,’ she whispered to Clover, who gave her a strange eye back but dutifully tuned the fiddle, plick-plick-plick, swung it under her chin, and with her thin hip, edged behind Aurora into better position for her bow arm to begin the intro. Obedient to the music, the crowd quietened to listen. Aurora sang alone, not too high but rising into alt at the end of each line.

‘Songs my mother taught me,

In the days long vanished;

Seldom from her eyelids

Were the teardrops banished …’

There was nothing to that song: just a little door opened to the mother that you missed so dreadfully, who had loved you as nobody else ever could; and now that she was dead, who would pray for you? As the verse ended Clover went soaring on the fiddle, a yellowy amateurish-looking thing that wept convincingly. Aurora sent the song streaming straight from her sadness, confusion stripped away and only one-bladed pain remaining. Missing you, missing you, the violin sang. Missing Papa’s violin too, which had been sold in the first batch of selling, because they could hope to get another someday. The piano had not gone for another six months. Clover’s bow pulled strongly down and rose sweetly up. Then Aurora, with the verses again, no embellishment:

‘Now I teach my children,

Each melodious measure.

Oft the tears are flowing,

Oft they flow from my memory’s treasure.’

It was a sentimental song and therefore could not be sung sentimentally. Back in Helena, Mama would be washing dishes and cleaning tables, humming to herself to keep her cheer—but not this song, which always made her weep uncontrollably.

Aurora’s clear voice freed the audience to be sad, in their own hearts, or glad of their mothers, or perhaps to mourn for never having had one. But she herself only thought of Mama’s cracked red hands and empty purse, and that they’d better make some money very soon and double-quick.

At the back of the smoky room, she could see Mayhew’s head turned, watching them. He had a dramatic, upright bearing; an air that hesitated between distinguished and raffish, like she imagined Florenz Ziegfeld must look. He’d left off his beaver hat, so his silver-dusted hair showed, but his stiff collar kept him looking formal in this rough place.

The lines of the song ran out, after the same two verses repeated, and then there was no ending, as there is no ending to remembering, only fading a little and folding and refolding, and the violin wept one last short chord, and they were done.

Aurora curtsied, accepting with grateful modesty the applause of this difficult crowd, won over. She took Clover’s hand to pull her forward, and they curtsied together. Clover gave back the fiddle with a little bow. At the side of the platform the jagged dancers kissed them, the woman weeping quite openly. ‘Dvorak!’ she sobbed. The girls nodded, clasping their arms in return, and then the band started up again into a reeling Irish tune and two cloggers came out onto the stage, and Aurora and Clover could sit.

Clover had an empty stool beside her. Victor came out of the shadows to perch on it.

‘I did not know you played the fiddle too.’

She bent her head. ‘No, I’m out of practice, I believe I must give it up for good.’

‘I like your playing, so clean and warm. I am myself in need of a fiddler.’

Clover looked up into his face. ‘For my act,’ he said. ‘I work best without orchestra, only a ghostly fiddle in the wings. Will you consider playing for me?’

‘I have no violin,’ she said.

‘Let us go out of this oppressive room and figure out a way for you to find one.’ He stood and offered her his hand. ‘The woods are good for walking, here, and it is not too cold.’

Clover looked at Aurora.

‘May I take your sister for some air, dear miss?’ Victor asked.

Aurora considered him. Friend of their friend, gentle-seeming, and well-known to the vaudeville folk. His had been the best number she’d ever seen. And Clover’s face was shining, as she had not seen it shine since—for ages. She turned her own face away so Clover would not see that in her eyes.

‘Of course,’ she said coolly, engrossed again in the musicians.

Victor tucked Clover’s hand in his arm and led her through the maze of tables. Aurora turned her head and watched them as they went, lifting her chin in a bob to acknowledge Mayhew’s wave of appreciation as he caught her eye, and his kindly nod to Clover when she and Victor passed him at the door.


Penny-dreadful

Mayhew had watched the singer and her little sister, the two of them reminding him forcibly of the penny-dreadful play The Two Orphans: Henriette the orphan girl and her blind sister who sang in the streets of Paris and were, naturally, discovered to be aristocrats. Maybe the play could be adapted … His agile mind trotted the idea through its paces and discarded it. Unless he had a pretty pair of sisters, one a singer.

The singer’s face—open planes, flat eyelids over lustrous dark orbs, the pearly skin illumined even in this dark place, drawing the lantern-light—was as much a part of her charm as the abundant floss of golden hair. Delicate line of cheek and chin. He calculated her value.

But it was difficult to stick to the task; the heart kept attempting to fly out of his breast as he listened. A young swan, looking up to catch back bright tears; the odd, thin bird behind her playing a borrowed fiddle. Not the usual run of artiste at Leary’s roadhouse.

When the song was over the little sister left their table, going out with Victor Saborsky; that was interesting. Victor was famous for his reserve; held himself aloof, as Mayhew knew to his slight pain. For him to single out one of the sisters, that suggested a higher value than he’d tallied himself.

A space vacant beside the beauty. (The line of her neck taut as she looked towards the door; a little aloofness of her own in her bearing.) Mayhew made his way across the room, shedding his jolly party as he went, like drops of rain from an astrakhan collar.


Sham Pain

‘Champagne for my true friends,’ Mayhew told Julius, saluting him, ‘and true pain for my sham friends.’

Aurora laughed as her ear leaped to his joke. As if champagne were available at this out-of-the-way place. But a tray was coming, one of Mayhew’s minions balancing glasses and two bottles with foil-wrapped necks. Aurora had never yet had champagne.

‘Brought it out from Butte,’ Mayhew murmured in her ear, as the others exclaimed. He took the first bottle, ripped off the foil and untwisted a little metal trap, and very efficiently swirled the bottle while holding the cork—which promptly exploded out of the neck of the bottle, foam spilling in a rush over the table and onto Aurora’s dark skirt.

‘Damn it all!’ he cried. ‘You’ve shaken the bottle, Bert.’ He let champagne flow into glasses as he dabbed at Aurora’s skirt with the napkin from the bottle, until they were both generally damped, except for their spirits. The champagne was sharp, sweet; Aurora did not let herself gulp it.


It Is Spring

Victor and Clover walked in the winter woods, Clover thinking, It is spring, it is spring. Victor led her away from the buildings and noise, out along a deer path cut through a stand of pale birch, winding off into the darkness.

‘Is it true that your mother is a Fabian?’ Clover asked.

‘Everything I ever say is true,’ Victor answered. ‘Someday I will tell you all about her adventures with the movement, and about her teacher, Galichen the moon-mad.’

The white-paper bark of birch trees caught the moon as they went farther into the woods. It was a paler version of Victor’s empty forest backdrop.

She said, when he asked, that her father had taught her to play the violin.

‘My own father is dead,’ he told her. ‘A year ago. Long enough that I am resigned.’

‘My father, too,’ she said. ‘Two years ago. And my little brother, before that.’

‘Yes, Sybil told me. I am sorry.’

‘It set us off on our travels,’ she said. Without those deaths, they would still be in Paddockwood together, cozy in the teacherage but dreaming still, not yet awakened into the world. Papa reading to them in the evenings, Mama trying to keep cheerful in her long exile. Impossible to say that was better.

But Clover’s breath stuttered anyway at the thought of Harry walking beside her, as he always used to. ‘He did not talk much, my brother. We all understood him, so he had no need. I cannot remember his voice. I think it was … a little croaking.’ She remembered the feel of Harry’s small fingers, delicate on her closed eyelids in the morning, seeing if she was awake. ‘He was not yet four,’ Clover said to Victor, as if to apologize for sadness at such an ordinary death.

Victor took her hand. A plain handclasp, restful and ordinary. ‘There is no going back,’ he said. ‘So we keep our eyes open and go forward.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are a dear thing, Clover.’

She smiled, shielded by the dark.

‘I ought to tell you what I already know,’ he said. ‘That you are she, for me.’

She could not help but laugh.

‘You only saw me yesterday—how can you know?’

‘My eyes are open.’

There was no snow left under their feet. The leaves had faded, winter-cured to a thick, soft carpet. Clover put out a hand to a young birch, to touch something, as if it were a lightning rod.