Overcome, Kay wrapped her arms around No? and embraced her. The puppet’s straw hair brushed against her cheek. They sat side by side, No? resting against Kay’s shoulder, and watched the diminuendo of the cast party. The Sisters had run through their Russian repertoire and were reduced to ballads of murder and wrongdoing and Irish folk songs filled with homesickness. The rest of the troupe gathered around the piano and joined in at the longing refrains.
It felt good to be touched by another being. Theo had loved her surely, and she had loved him in return, but it all seemed so long ago, a world away. She remembered he liked to sing in the car, whiling away the long hours of a road trip, searching the radio stations for recognizable tunes. His voice was sweet and lovely, cracking in the reeds of the upper register, and plaintive and silly when he attempted falsetto. Once in a while, she would join in, and he tried to harmonize while she carried the melody. In the dying of the night, she had briefly remembered his name, could hear his voice in her head, but why could she not picture his face?
A small octagonal window near the apex of the ceiling let in the first hint of day. Mr. Firkin called for places, and the party groaned to a halt. The puppets shuffled to the positions in which they had been left the night before. No? uncurled from beneath Kay’s arm and told her, “You must promise me to never forget who you are. And if you ever have the chance to run away, just go and don’t look back.”
In the darkened room an octagon of morning fell across the table, and from her spot, Kay followed the shaft of sunlight progress as the sun moved higher in the sky. It was not quite noon when the giants finally arrived. Four of them, in any case. Delacroix was gone, a temporary addition to their merry band. Finch and Stern busied themselves immediately, striking the set and lugging away the scenery and props. Back in the boxes went the puppets, segregated as before between the animate and the inanimate. Kay had been loaded into the bottom compartment as before and waited for the Three Sisters to be interred on top of her. She drank in the last of the light before the coming darkness.
“Thank God we finished when we did,” said the Deux Mains. “Delacroix was beginning to suspect.”
The Quatre Mains boomed out his answer immediately. “No, he was a clueless sprat.”
“I overheard him say something to Finch. He definitely noticed the difference among them, how easily the Sisters moved, how naturally the Dog behaved versus, say, the seagull.”
“That seagull is nearly impossible to get right. I really need to work on the wings. Perhaps another joint would make it fly more naturalistically.”
“I’m telling you, he was this close to understanding the secret of the puppets.” She held her index finger and thumb an inch apart. “You could read it on his face, see it in his hands. You can feel it in the motions of the sticks. Life of their own. Finch had to—”
“What?” Finch had reentered the room. She towered over the open box and smiled down upon the puppets. “My ears were burning, were you talking about me again?”
“Tell him,” the Deux Mains said. “Tell him your theory about Delacroix.”
Finch laid a finger against her pressed lips. “Mum’s the word. He had his suspicions, but what could he say without coming across as a complete loon? That some of these dolls are alive? Or were alive once upon a time? No, that would be plain crazy. The closest he came was expressing surprise at how they moved and talked and acted. Uncanny was the word. I said it was a case of superior craftsmanship.”
The Quatre Mains stepped beside her and laid a chummy hand against her back. “Craftsmanship. I like that. Good quality construction.”
“A touch of the artist.” The Deux Mains linked arms with Finch. The trinity lovingly gazed upon the puppets as if they were looking at little children asleep in their beds. And then they sorted the rest of them into the box and closed them for the next stage of their journey. For Kay, it was like dying and being buried all over again.
*
She blushed when Muybridge asked if she would be willing to take off her clothes and be photographed in the nude. Because he was kindly, because he reminded her of a grandfather, because he was distracted and earnest, she said yes. The readiness of her answer surprised her, but she needed the money from the modeling, and she was not ashamed of her body, not averse to shaking convention. “It is for science,” he said and bowed his head slightly and fumbled with his unkempt white beard. He reminded her of Walt Whitman and Nast’s illustrations of Santa Claus. “I am undertaking the greatest study ever made of the human form in motion.”
That afternoon he explained to her how the cameras worked, how they were timed to capture images in sequence that revealed subtle patterns when viewed as a whole. “You will be in good company,” he said, and then he showed her his invention to project the moving images. In a darkened studio, he played his favorites: a smiling boy crabwalking on his hands and feet, two boxers demonstrating a jab and feint, and a nattily dressed man with a straw hat taking a turn across the stage, swinging a cane, and pivoting on the point before jaunting off in the other direction.