The Little Shadows

Perhaps a Dead Mouse

From the back of the room, Bella had stared after Clover walking out into the night with the tired-faced genius. Her arms goose-prickled again, thinking of his number. Aurora must have let Clover go out.

Humph! They’d sung without her, and Bella had not decided yet whether to be cross or let it go. Very likely they’d only had a moment’s notice, and had not been able to see her. But she still hadn’t found a way to join the card game, and this was dull stuff, stuck watching all night long.

‘Need some air,’ the Tussler beside her said, suddenly. ‘Want a walk?’

Bella was surprised.

‘Or don’t you dare to walk in the darkness?’

Bella laughed. She was never frightened of the dark. And why not go for a walk? Clover could. So could she.

Black-velvet country darkness made the roadhouse clearing seem like the entrance to a fairy tale. The woods that swallow Snow White when she runs away, Bella thought. Clover and Victor had disappeared up a trail into the birch woods, so Bella made the Tussler walk the other way, towards the dark hill. She had not been told his name and it felt a bit foolish to ask.

‘Ought to be a still-room out here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Could find us a beer, you’d like that.’

She would not, she did not like beer. But a search for treasure was always to her taste. He took the lantern hanging above the chopping block, and she took one sitting by an empty wagon and lit it from his with a tuft of straw.

The straw flared up and almost singed his eyebrows, and he dodged backwards, making her laugh. He did not like that, she saw. She stopped.

They set off, the Tussler looking for some telltale smoke or a lit door, but there was none to be seen. The huge darkness of the night was shoved back by the light from the oil lanterns. They could not see the stars for the jangling, swinging light around them.

Bella caught a glimpse, a gleam of metal—there—it was a handle. A door cut into the hill. She pointed. ‘A root cellar!’

‘Might be good in there,’ he agreed.

He must think of nothing but his stomach. But sometimes neither did she. He was a gangly boy, and not very bright, she thought. His bottom lip hung sulky and loose. She’d almost rather be back inside watching the card-play with East and Verrall. But it would be good fun to explore the root cellar.

It was nothing but a cave dug into the hillside, a tiny wooden door making it look like a fairy house, where the moth-girls might live. The door stuck a little, then gave way, leather hinges letting it fall askew after she dragged it open over the snow.

Bella loved dark places—nothing to be afraid of in the darkness. It was people you had to fear. Shadows shifted around thin pillars, like inside a mine—perhaps there were jewels down there, or a dragon’s hoard of gold. The Tussler crowded behind her, so she stepped forward into the low space. Once her eyes had adjusted she saw straggling shelves lining the dirt walls, some with dull jars, some empty, furred with dust. Trays of carrots and apples in sand, jars of beets, pickles, jam, crocks of preserved eggs in isinglass. It was a treasure trove, but only of food.

‘We ought not to be in here,’ she said, sadly, and turned to go.

But he was in her way, blocking the passage to the door. He had set his lantern on a shelf and he fumbled with something she could not see beneath his coat. He took her hand and pulled it towards him, and she thought he was going to put something in it—an egg, or perhaps a dead mouse.

Instead he yanked her hand between his legs where he had something bulging. His manhood, she supposed. She had only seen down there in quite small boys, who went swimming in the slough behind the schoolhouse in Paddockwood and jumped into the air, little front-tails waggling; it was a surprise to feel how springy and hard his was.

She felt it jump under her hand and then he pulled her harder and hurt her wrist and at the same time he smeared her mouth with his flabby lip. She had not minded Nando kissing her, she had liked it very much, but this was a different thing. It—She wanted to stop.

‘Stop,’ she said, her voice too soft. She could not make it louder, the wind had gone out of her. She hated her own weakness.

After three thudding heartbeats she wrenched her face away, but he found it again and twisted it back to his mouth, thick fingers like a vise on her cheek. She still held the lantern, and if she dropped it, it would break and the wooden shelves would catch fire. The dirt wall behind her and the roof above them seemed to be moving, the earth closing in around them, and he was still pulling her, his rough jacket scratching her face and the button at the top digging into her neck painfully and all the time he was trying to tuck her hand into his pants, unbuttoning them with one hand and panting—that was maybe the worst of it, the snuffling noise he was making. She was pushed backwards into the shelves and the jars were going to shake together and the crocks on the bottom shelves would break, there would be beet juice and isinglass from the eggs all over her new boots, but she could not make her hands do anything but push vaguely at him. She had forgotten about breathing, even.

Then Verrall, outside in the clearing, called, ‘Bella? East?’

The Tussler was still, his mouth open and the bottom lip hanging purplish. She could not think why she had ever found him handsome.

‘Cunny-cunny f*cking cunny,’ he said in her ear. ‘That’s all you are.’ The air of him speaking was hot inside her head.

‘Bugger you,’ she said, and with her free hand slapped his face with all her strength. It made a mighty noise. Her hand stung and her forearm ached.

He slammed her back against the wall. She gasped at the pain, at the shock of it, how strong he was, and his fist came at her—she jerked her head and he almost missed, catching only her cheek instead of her nose and eyes.

She had never been hit before. Her whole skull tingled and rang. He ground her hand into the hard-packed earth-wall for good measure, and shoved out of the cellar past Verrall, cursing him on the way.

Bella took her one hand in the other and rubbed it. She did not want to touch her face and feel that pain from the outside. Her face felt broken.

‘He was bothering you?’ Verrall asked.

‘No, no,’ she said. She ought not to have come in here with him. She had taken him for a weak sister. That was stupid.

‘I could fetch Miss Aurora—let me—’

‘No! No, no, no,’ she said, shaking her head too many times, to stop him.

‘What were you doing out here anyway?’ East said roughly, coming behind Verrall. He held a fist-full of snow up to Bella’s cheek and pressed. The cold scorched her face. ‘You are like a bad kitten. You must learn to look after yourself better! And not to lead men on.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, more pitifully. ‘I did not—I only meant—’

‘Yes, yes, that’s the usual,’ East said, clearly disgusted. ‘You only meant to have some fun and next you found him excited.’

‘Let me get your sister,’ said Verrall, in some agitation. His delicate hands flapped.

‘Oh no, no!’ she cried, quite desperate. ‘You must not—she will be angry, she will say it is because I am too young. Please do not tell her.’

‘Well, you are only a little thing—how were you to know how he might be?’

East snorted. ‘She is a woman, ain’t she? Born to be one, born knowing.’

‘You are too hard on her, East. It’s only a baby still.’

‘I am not,’ Bella said stoutly. She brushed down her front and tried to sweep the dirt off the back of her skirt. ‘And I did not get beet juice on my boots, so you need not tell.’

‘Well, come with us,’ East said, long-suffering. ‘We will look after you. And no more going off into corners or you will get what comes to you.’

Bella opened her eyes wider and the tears welling there did not fall. She shut her teeth together and refused.


Joy of the Moment

Side by side with Mayhew, who had commandeered the stool next to hers, Aurora sat watching a dancer—the one Mayhew told them he’d come to see. He was looking for a bit of flash for his next venture, he said, and a quick man could find treasures in these dark woods that the slower-moving producers in Boston and New York might give their ears to book.

‘Elvira of the Regiment,’ the band captain called, and Elvira came prancing on, in a tight military jacket with a soldier’s cap, long plaited tails dangling down her back; her small worn boots had brass heels that clicked prettily to the music. Now she seemed only lazily beating time; now she rushed along as if seized by the joy of the moment. Those little brass heels! They gave a tantalizing syncopation to the dancing. Aurora looked round for her sisters. But Clover was still off with Victor Saborsky—and Bella? She could not crane her neck far enough to see Bella at the card tables.

Elvira smiled as she danced, with predatory, evenly spaced teeth. Off came her jacket and cap, revealing a scrap of bodice and a loose-laced cummerbund. Off flew her jaunty skirt, and she was dancing in what appeared to be her underthings, a red-dyed rag-bag with a wild gypsy air. Tapping-mad, she reeled and stamped and flew. At the conclusion of the dance she swirled the skirt up to make herself an officer’s cape, then trotted along the edge of the platform in an orderly fashion and took leave of her public with a right military salute. As she wove through the crowd there was no doubt that she was making a series of appointments with various of the men.

Not that for us, Aurora thought. We don’t have to; we’re going to make money on our feet. And they had Mama, who knew the ropes and meant to keep them in the first flight, both in art and respectability.

Mayhew had risen to clap hands for the little military dancer, but he did not leave Aurora’s table entirely, only reaching across to give the dancer a pasteboard card and hold her in a moment’s conversation.

Mayhew’s acquaintance could not be wasted—Aurora knew she ought to sit with him, work the conversation round to their act, and invite him to see them at the Hippodrome. But while he was occupied with Elvira, she thought she’d run and check on Bella, whose absence was suddenly causing her a cramp of fright. She had forgotten how rough the men were, how green Bella was. She made her way among the tables.

But Bella was nowhere to be seen—no East or Verrall, either. Bella must have gone outside. The air was thick with smoke back here, and the stink stronger. Aurora stood still for a moment, thinking; then sidestepped back through the crowded tables to get her wraps. Too cold to do without, if she had to search for long.

She reached for Bella’s things on back of her chair, and told Sybil that she had to go. ‘Keep him entertained for me till we get back,’ she said, relying on Sybil’s good nature, Julius’s love of exalted company, and their pressing need to keep Mayhew’s interest aroused.


The Girl in the Other Bed

The door closed behind her and shut half the noise away with it. Aurora pulled on her wraps, and (after a pause to gather her courage) felt her way along the log wall, half blind in the darkness, heading like a moth for the glow of light from the wagon yard. She could hear strange noises, and felt someone pass a few feet from her as she rounded the corner of the roadhouse. There were the rails of the corral fence. She made her way along by touching the poles every few feet—but there were fearful shapes in the darkness. She was never easy without light.

A mound. What was that crumpled thing, lying there? Not Bella, it could not be …

Aurora stood still, uncertain whether she could bring herself to touch the bundle on the ground. A lantern—she was turning back to get one when she saw a bobbing light coming through the trees, and then another beside it.

‘Miss Avery? Aurora?’

It was Verrall, with Bella on his arm. Aurora ran stumbling over the packed snow to reach her sister quickly. ‘Are you—?’ She did not know what to ask.

Bella had a hand filled with snow pressed to her cheek. Tears shone in her eyes but she only sounded angry: ‘I ran into a tree branch in the dark, I am so stupid!’

‘It will leave a miserable bruise,’ Verrall said.

‘But you should see the other fella,’ East said, irrepressible. From within Aurora’s warm clasp Bella punched East’s coat-sleeve.

‘It is too cold to stand here,’ Aurora said. ‘I must find Clover, too.’

But then she remembered the bundle on the ground. Verrall was handing her his lantern already, courteous as always; she took it and went back to the corral fence, to the place where she had seen the fallen heap.

It was a woman lying there. Aurora set the lantern down beside her and gently took the woman’s shoulder. ‘Are you in difficulty?’ she asked, feeling the inadequacy of the words. ‘Can we help you?’

A shock-white face lolled towards them as Aurora turned the woman’s shoulder. Red hair like fox-fur springing from the girl’s forehead, blood coming from her nose. Her dress was torn, her skirt ripped away, and Aurora saw blood on the pallid, splaying legs.

‘How did you find out she was dead?’ East asked, after a little silence. Verrall groaned and turned away into the darkness, to be loudly sick.

Bella knelt by Aurora and lifted the girl’s bloody head to her lap. She still had a clump of snow in her hand, and with that she touched the broken cheek and eyelids. Aurora found the girl’s hands and chafed them.

The girl shifted, not moaning but making a small cat sound. She opened her eyes and stared at them, then looked away and tried to cover her skinny legs.

‘Mr. East?’ Aurora said into the darkness, where East had gone to help Verrall.

‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘Finish off, for the lord’s sake, Verrall! How much do you have in there?’

Then Mayhew came, full of authority. He bent and lifted the girl by the shoulders to help her sit up, and Bella and Aurora gave him room; he felt her head with practised fingers, then said, ‘Upsy-daisy,’ and lifted her right up to her feet.

She stood there swaying. Bella found the ripped end of the girl’s skirt and tucked it up so the girl was covered. Aurora pressed the girl’s limp hand. ‘Can you see?’ she asked. ‘Can you speak to me?’

The girl licked her broken lip. A purple mark showed faintly on her neck in the dim light. ‘My shawl …’ she said.

Bella searched for it and found it caught on a splinter of the fence-rail.

Aurora asked her, ‘Who hurt you?’

‘I—he—I—’ The girl touched her neck, and felt along her chest. ‘He took my—’

Mayhew still had hold of her back. ‘Best not to pry into it,’ he told the others, quietly. ‘It’s her livelihood, after all. You’d only get her sacked.’

Aurora felt so sorry for her. No bigger than Bella, and not much older, from her voice. Her matted red braid had come down. It lay like a rope around her neck. Her poor lip.

‘It’s nothing,’ the girl finally said. She shook her head, slowly, experimentally. ‘I’m lucky, this time.’ She had a strong accent—Irish, perhaps, mangled through her swollen mouth. She put up one hand and tucked a strand of hair back into order. ‘Let me go.’

Aurora fell back. There was nothing to be done.

‘You sang so nice,’ the girl said to her. She almost smiled, then put a hand to her mouth. She took her shawl from Bella and walked off, feet very careful, into the dark recess behind the roadhouse where the privy was.


Lamentations

Flora woke in the clutch of a sudden vision: fetching carrots from the Pioneer’s cellar, brushing the preserving sand off a bunch of dull orange fingers, feeling the cold depth of the sand with her own raw fingers. In the dream she knelt back on splintery planks over the packed-earth cellar floor and looked from the carrots upwards, to see Bella in trouble, pansy eyes shocked, necklace gone. Bella’s face, head shaking, no, no, no, don’t, don’t.

She woke sweating and afraid, but all was still and safe in her room. A cock must have crowed in the darkness, to wake her. She should not have sent the girls off alone.

Indian pudding and Boston brown bread, ladles of soup into bowls for the hungry boys—Flora got through lunch service and put in her hour helping to wash up. Then she folded her apron, put on her threadbare ulster, and walked to Gentry’s lodgings. She hesitated to intrude on his private life, but the dream of Bella’s eyes would not stop plaguing her.

Gentry Fox, Impresario, read the card in the brass slot of the building directory. He lived on the top floor in the flatiron-shaped Hannasyde building: monumental red stone, a good address. But as Flora climbed from floor to floor she saw how the grand staircases narrowed and the carpets grew less plush, down to bare drugget.

When he opened the door to her, Gentry grimaced, but waved her in.

His room was high-ceilinged for an attic, but narrow, cut from a larger chamber, and she was absurdly shocked to see how poor and cluttered and unclean it was. She somehow had not realized that he was straitened himself. Of course, of course he would have paid the girls properly, if he could have done so.

It was, then, impossible to make any demand of him. He had been her good friend here, to bring the girls onto the bill when he was in this case. Advancing a few feet into the room, she took hold of a chair-back to give herself some balance.

‘Gentry, I’m afraid I find you in a pickle, and I did not mean to inconvenience you.’

He waved his hands, taking in the whole sorry mess. ‘Not like old times, is it—best of everything, the finest suite at every hotel. Wouldn’t have demeaned myself in those days with a mere sixth-floor room.’

She did not know what to say to that.

‘What is the trouble, dear girl?’

‘Oh! You must not call me girl! I am—’

‘Forty-three.’

‘Well!’ She laughed. ‘Forty-nine, if we’re honest. I scrubbed a few years off the slate in the old days.’

‘They seem to fly, do they not? In the rough-and-tumble.’

His words made her gasp and remember her dream. ‘Oh, Gentry, I came because I need to follow after the girls. I ought not to have let them go alone, you were right. Aurora is wise—but the others are very young still. I’ve got to follow after, but I have no money. I came to ask you for a—for an advance, and I am very sorry to do it. Ten dollars would do me.’

He pulled out his wallet at once, and extracted two five-dollar bills. ‘Flora, be easy. I’m certain you are wallowing in anti-nostalgic visions of the various hells in which you found yourself in your own youth, but consider: you had no mama to shepherd you in the wilderness. You were alone—and pretending to be older, rather than younger, in those days. How old were you, when you struck out on your own?’

‘Fourteen, when I left my aunt’s house.’

‘But these girls of yours are well-protected at the theatre, I promise you; those old days are done, when any ruffian could accost a girl backstage—and there are three of them! What harm could come to one with the other two hawklike in her defence?’

Impossible to tell him of the dream—the pain, and Bella’s eyes.

He waited, and then went on, ‘They are good girls, keen to get on, and—wait, I received the manager’s report from Butte yesterday: here, let me find it—’ He scrabbled in his papers and found a yellow telegraph form and read, scanning down the sheet, ‘Foster, Ventriloquist: Comedy rather talky and long drawn-out but holds the audience, secured a number of laughs; East & Verrall: Not a bad act though decidedly overpaid; Tusslers: All the bad features of the act were eliminated when the chandelier … Ah! Belle Auroras: Dancing is good and seems to please. All their numbers were applauded. They hold their own here. So! You see they are very well.’

She shook her head. ‘There’s something wrong, that’s all. I had a dream.’

‘Don’t tell me!’

‘I dreamt that—’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘Who am I to tell my nightmares to, Gentry?’

‘I’m sure you’ve been lonely, but you must have been enjoying your unaccustomed leisure while the girls are away,’ he said, to divert her.

She laughed, and then, remembering that he did not know of her waitress work, said, ‘Oh yes, twiddling my thumbs!’

Gentry stood by the door, but had not opened it.

‘To tell you the truth, Flora, I did wish to speak to you; to warn you of a—development. I am not in the very best of health. My medical man informs me that I ought to get my affairs in order.’

‘Gentry.’ She heard her own voice, low and tired.

‘He exaggerates, you know how those fellows are, but I’m going to ground.’

She could not bear how old he looked, how broken-down.

‘You’re a dear girl, Flora, and these daughters of yours will go far.’ He shrugged into his velvet evening jacket, one sleeve, then the other more slowly. ‘I can’t do anything for you now, and it pains me to say so.’

‘No, Gentry, don’t.’

‘I’ve spent everything I ever made. Or lost it other ways.’ He passed both hands over his large, mobile face. ‘We’ve staved off ruin, so far, but I think Drawbank will be out within the month, and I’m away before that happens.’

Flora felt hopelessness steal over her again and pushed it away. ‘I wish I had some money,’ she said.

‘Oh, I wish it too, fervently, but you couldn’t help me even if you did.’

‘At least I could help you to get home.’

‘Home! I won’t be going home, any more than you ever could. Madison has nothing for you. A few street names you’d know. A church, a school—you’d walk around the town and wear out your fragile memory in a day.’

She laughed, because it was true. She could not even conjure up a church. Perhaps Uncle Elmore’s dentistry office would still be there; Uncle Elmore himself, of course, was long dead.

‘And no more for me. London, a poem—’ He broke off.

‘It’s a long way to go.’

‘Without the means for travel, yes.’ He nodded, master of himself again. ‘No, no, I am for Montreal, where an elderly relative, washed up on that shore, will permit me to share his flat. We have our own Gerry Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Elders.’

‘Do you know him well?’

‘Oh yes, well enough to hate him; he is my brother.’

‘I did not know you had a brother! You will be glad to be with him.’

‘You don’t know my brother. He is observant; he will force me to synagogue, and will call me by my real name, or rather, refuse to call me by my real name, which has been Gentry Fox these forty years. He will serve me lamentations on my long life wasted, and I can tell you that I am not at all happy about this. But if I stay here I will die in a rented room, swollen and purple, and they will take me out feet-first to the paupers’ field and bury me unmarked, and somehow that does not seem comfortable.’

Flora would have liked to touch him, to put her arm around his shoulders, but he had never been one for physical contact, even in the old days when she was pretty.

‘Gentry, I cannot—what you have done with the girls—there’s no payment we can make.’

‘Our ledger is balanced: I gave them a first season, they gave me a last season. You will not mention any shadow of illness to them, if you please. I’d as soon they thought of me as hale.’

He was moving through the room now, putting objects in piles as if his packing had begun, his limp very marked. Flora felt her own legs twist and swell, every joint racked to match his. He was very old.

This is what comes to us, she thought—lonely exile, a time with those who don’t know us, death. She could feel her heart beating; she could see, in a drift of snow, Arthur lying still.

‘My husband killed himself,’ she said.

Gentry came to her side, and took her hands.

‘Our life could not sustain him. Our girls. After Harry died, he was not himself any longer, and then he—’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘For him? Or me?’ She shook her head. No reason to have told poor Gentry this. Except to say that we all live in pain. ‘I’m sorry, Gentry. I only meant to say, everything is so sad.’

He held her hands, and there was some shred of comfort in that. He had known her when she was a girl.

But her errand was wasted. Gentry had no money to spare; she’d have to wait till her wages were paid, and the apostle spoons would have to go up the spout again. Fiddle, she thought. Arthur is dead after all and will not know. She set Gentry’s five-dollar bills on the table behind her and gathered herself to go, her natural buoyancy helping her to look cheerful despite consuming worry. She touched the back of his greyish hand, and then went out into bright sunshine, to do her duty at the Pioneer.


Bruise

The bruise on Bella’s face could be masked with an extra application of 5 and 9. Clover’s spidery fingers were gentler than Aurora’s on the swelling. Bella stared at herself as Clover dabbed: the puffing-out gave her the appearance of mumps on one side. Her cheek still hurt every time she opened her mouth to sing or chew.

She had managed to avoid the Tussler by remaining with her sisters in their dressing rooms; he and his brother did not board with Mrs. Seward, so she was not worried in the night, walking the halls to the bathroom. He hated her now, and in the theatre she could not entirely escape his baleful eye. At the end of their turn the Tusslers were always waiting in the wings to go on. Bella had twisted her steps in I Can’t Do the Sum in order never to look stage right; she was first off, now, and usually the first heading down the stairs. Aurora and Clover had not complained. They were being kind.

Bella could not stop thinking about the poor beaten girl, left in the snow in the darkness. But what could they do anyway? They could not bring her to live with them at Mrs. Seward’s. Bella indulged for a while in a continuing story where she rode a grey horse to the woods and found the red-haired girl, and brought her up behind the saddle and galloped off to a peaceful farm somewhere; but that was stupid and she did not even tell Clover, who had not seen the girl, because she’d been off in the darkness with Victor.

In the second show, Bella stayed for a moment offstage to watch the Tussler fall down the set of collapsing stairs (feeling almost avenged as he conked his head on the bottom). She did not think there had been time for the Tussler to do—whatever had been done to the poor girl. But someone had done it, and even if she was a dance-hall girl, nobody ought to do things like that.

The wealthy Mr. Mayhew, too: he’d been Johnny-on-the-spot. Perhaps it was he who’d done it. He’d been masterful that evening, liking his own authority and liking to throw money about, as if it was still a thrill for him to take charge of helpless females and solve everything. Under his silvering beard, Mayhew seemed young in an odd way. Not confident interiorly, as Gentry was, or Victor; only polished on the exterior with his fine clothes and motorcar. He had talked importantly about ‘the wrong kind of scandal’ and had impressed the need for discretion on East and Verrall (poor Verrall still very green from being so sick), and then, reassuming his silk hat and astrakhan-collared coat, had bundled them all into his car, a Pierce-Arrow saloon car more magnificent than anything Bella had ever seen, let alone been for a ride in. Every piece of it shone in the moonlight. The seats were like leather clouds, but she wished she could have stood on the running board instead, to feel the speed as they rushed through the night back to the city and pulled up in front of Mrs. Seward’s—as if Cinderella and her Beautiful Sisters had all come home together in the coach.

Then Mr. Mayhew had melted away, as perhaps impresarios always must, and they had not seen him again.


Adjustments

Arriving at the Butte train station late in the evening, Gentry found a porter and gave him a well-shined ten-cent piece to convey his one bag to Butte’s best hotel. No economy would save him now, might as well shoot the moon. He had stopped at the Pioneer to leave a note for Flora before leaving, explaining that he would make sure the girls were safe; through the French glass doors from the lobby he had been very much shocked to see her decked out in a full-length apron in the lunchroom, serving beans by the ladle to a rowdy table of bachelors who seemed only too familiar with her.

He’d taken care that Flora not catch sight of him, and had made his way to the train on slow pins, making some adjustments to his thinking.


I Cast My Pearls

A note from Gentry arrived in the Hippodrome dressing room in the middle of the nine o’clock show, where the girls sat mending their stockings and keeping warm as the stove died, before joining the rest of the company to make their way through the windy streets to Mrs. Seward’s.

‘A lesson!’ Aurora was surprised. ‘First thing in the morning.’

Clover paled. ‘Do you think he has had a bad report of us?’

It seemed unlikely—Robson, the Hippodrome’s manager, had made a point of congratulating the girls on their performance at the early show. But Aurora passed a restless night, and sat by the window watching the milk wagon clopping up and down the street, impatient for the time to pass till they could go to the theatre.

Although they arrived early, there he was: short as life, impatiently awaiting them on the stage. One sleepy stagehand stayed close by to do his bidding; the rest of the theatre sat empty and lonely, as always in the pale mornings.

Gentry paced back and forth on the stage in front of the Belle Auroras, occupying one as they stood in two. He seemed possessed of an urgent demon, or Legion—ideas and advice teeming from his mind and heart. They had missed him.

First, a lecture on The Voice, which he delivered at a high declarative volume, glaring into each sister’s eye in turn: ‘The voice must be flexible, to reflect what you think and feel. Able to surprise, to make the audience remark what you make remarkable. Life in the voice springs from emotion—you must keep that emotion fresh, so that each time you sing the song is new. Technique supports you, but the work is never dulled, never the same.’

Earnest and intent that they should hold to these tenets he was giving them, he seemed terribly old and vulnerable.

‘Lehmann used to tell us, I cast my pearls, I cast my pearls before you—are you swine, or humans who can benefit from this teaching?’

Then Gentry abandoned philosophy and turned to technique, directing a series of exercises on the breath, breathing into the back ribs, opening out. He made them lie in a row at the edge of the stage.

They breathed obediently for an hour before he would let them up, never coming close to falling asleep because he continued to pace above them, snapping formidable fingers when they sagged in concentration. Then he put them through their repertoire, shouting or nodding his head as they pleased or displeased him. He was not unkind, even when correcting (mostly herself, and Aurora recognized that as an honour).

‘You must trust me when I tell you that the voice you hear inside that lovely head is not the one we hear outside it. Brilliance and carrying power you have, but without the true warm chest notes your soprano will always be light, disembodied, metallic—a little contrived. Your natural honesty demands better. You must reach down into yourself for that true voice, the one that is rooted at the core of your being.’

Aurora did not speak, but nodded, seeing the justice of his criticism.

‘Lyrics are specific and rarely subtle, yet their extravagance encourages you to do extravagant things which are not untrue. You use inflections which if they had been calculated would seem false, but which if they spring from the stimulation of a song are quite true. Rhythms, lengths of words, playing with suspending, overriding rhythm while the sense goes on—those tricks keep a song driving through the verse without rushing.’

Gentry waved an arm to the wings and the black-toothed crashbox man wheeled out their old I Can’t Do the Sums blackboard, covered with new lyrics. Aurora braced herself as Gentry grabbed the chalk and began to mark the board, muttering to himself, ‘The pipes, the pipes, are ca-all-ling …’ He turned, whirling in an excess of driving energy, cracking chalk in dagger lines above the words. ‘Sense-stress and metre-stress go against each other; you can stretch or shorten words as you sing—syncopate them, or linger on a syllable, a phrase, to enliven meaning.’

White lines dashed on the board: Aurora thought of Papa, teaching them dactyl and spondee, feet and metre, flashing white text, with accents slashed in above. The stage blackboard merged with the blackboard in the schoolroom in Paddockwood—

And without any idea that she was about to do it, Aurora fainted.


Chicken Sandwiches

Bella and Clover crouched on the stage beside Aurora’s slumped body. ‘Well! Now what’s to do?’ asked Gentry, blankly. ‘Is it her corset again?’

‘She is hungry,’ Bella said, angry.

Aurora’s hand twitched under hers, and gripped to make her stop.

‘Did you not eat this morning?’ Gentry demanded. ‘You are always to eat before practice, I have said so.’

‘We had no money left,’ Clover said, speaking too gently for Bella’s liking. ‘But we will be paid tomorrow.’

Aurora sat up. ‘No, no, not—I was thinking of—I am very well, please.’

Gentry walked to where his snow-damped coat lay, and pulled out a paper bag.

‘Come, sit, you girls,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten the lunch.’

Four wrapped bundles in the bag. It made Bella’s mouth water just to see them. Chicken, on white rolls! ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and bit ferociously down.

Clover stayed by Aurora’s side, so Gentry took the bag to them, where their skirts lay pooled on the boards, their thin torsos upright in their white shirtwaists.

‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Eat. You do not have very good voices, but you sing much better than you did.’

Even Bella could not be anything but grateful for this, especially as she ate.

‘You are not singers—’ he said, with what Bella knew he must think of as enveloping kindness in his tone. ‘But you are delightful performers. Worry less about the singing, now. Take care over your dancing steps, and enjoy yourselves, as the darlings you are—make some art, give the rubes some pleasure.’ He rubbed his hands over his face, and smearing up into his eyebrows and hair and on up to the heavens—a theatrical gesture, but not untrue.

‘Aurora, I have a gift for you. A new song—lyrics by a lawyer in England with song-writing aspirations. His sister-in-law showed me the song, and I have fitted it to the Londonderry Air. It will do well for you, here amongst the Irish miners.’

They read the words and Aurora nodded quickly, as if she already knew them.

‘It is possible,’ Gentry said, ‘that I have misdirected you against sentiment. Much as it fails to please my own tastes, there is no denying that for a large part of our audience a tug on the heartstrings is part of the pleasure of vaudeville, and who am I to disparage them? But when embracing sentiment, guard against the sentimental.’

They were certainly words to tug the heart.

And if you come, when all the flowers are dying

And I am dead, as dead I well may be

You’ll come and find the place where I am lying

And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

‘A lazy, fat-headed singer lards a song with emotion, signals what she is supposed to be feeling. The tremolo is a villain. In a song with great depth of feeling, when the voice is allowed to become romantic, you tell the audience that you feel, but you do not convince them of the reason for that feeling: they do not, therefore, believe you. Or a suffering quality appears which is tedious. Whatever you are feeling, work against it—that pull of contradiction entices the listener. When you find yourself about to weep in life, you try not to! So you must in song. Also, tears clog the voice.’

Bella disliked tears very much. She would rather scream than cry. She watched Gentry walk around the stage, unburdening himself of ideas and principles as if his life depended on it, on their understanding him. ‘It is the same as pushing. One pushes at the audience, blasts them with noise and energy, but when the listener feels these emotions being pushed at him he steps back, because exhibited reaction makes people recoil. In real life when someone is over-anxious to tell you something you are irritated and want to get away.’

And that was true, Bella thought.

‘In comedy as well,’ Gentry continued, ‘a song which is witty and extravagant is not made funny by telling the audience with a wink and a nudge and an eye-roll that it is funny. Humour comes from necessity, from the belief of the singers in what they are singing. If we tinge this with smug understanding of why it is funny, the gag does not work. You must come down to the simplicity and logic of those words—as in I Can’t Do the Sum, where the important thing is the attempt to solve those impossible puzzles.’

That was how it was when the song was working; Bella shivered because she could see that he was exactly right. When her bit in the hotel sketch worked best, it was because she was trying to help, not trying to be funny. You could see the force of it in Victor’s act, how his absurdly concentrated discipline drew people in with him. Aurora simply listened, chicken roll in hand—how could she forget to eat? Bella wondered.

The practice pianist arrived, a tidy, nun-like man who seemed out of place in Butte, and in the theatre. He opened the sides that Gentry had left on the piano and played it through for them, the mountainside tune going up and down. When he added embellishments the next time through, Gentry spoke quietly to him, and he returned to the plainest rendering possible, barely an accompaniment at all. Bella watched Clover finger the notes on an imaginary violin.

Aurora tried the words under her breath, as if to see how they would wind through the highlands. ‘And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be … For you will kneel and tell me that you love me …’ and then down again into peaceful sleep.

Then she stood and went to the piano and sang it for Gentry, once through.

Bella was both sad and satisfied to see that he wept without shame.


And Say an Ave There for Me

Gentry stood in the open door of the Hippodrome—how had he embroiled himself in this, after all? A loving glance from Flora’s brown velvet eyes, long ago, perhaps that had been it. However extravagant in other ways, a manager could never afford affection.

Before driving back to the train station, Gentry visited the Hippodrome manager’s office and corrected the Drawbank–Parthenon company pay schedule to read, Belle Auroras, sister act: $100 per week.