A flickering candle lit the haggard face of Jack Dorian, and it struck me that this was the night beforehisbig day too. These werehisdreams hanging in the balance as much as mine.
I gulped and my words rushed forth. “I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t do it. I can’t dance tomorrow. Can you possibly take the sylph part out of the ballet?”
His face was grim. With a quick puff, he blew out the stubby candle, grabbed his coat, and waved me along. “Come with me.” He jammed his feet into boots on the landing and draped his coat over the bedraggled white shirt and brown trousers he wore.
He took my hand and down the stairs and off we went, where we strode toward the gaslit streets with all the noises and smells of a city thick with people and their wares. I didn’t ask wherewe were going and he offered no hints. We moved through darkened streets and turned before a multi-wing brick building framed by budding gardens. “What is this place?”
“This is lesson number four.” He jumped up to the first step. “My lady, I welcome you to the great hall of Middle Temple.”
“Are we allowed here?”
He draped a protective arm about me without answering and hurried me up the stairs to a set of doors on the upper level. With a tug, they yawned open to a wide wooden indoor balcony overlooking unlit lights strung from every beam and hook. A cavernous, dark-wood room lay empty below us, but as my eyes focused, I saw something hanging from the rafters that both excited and terrified me—a trapeze.
“The circus is set to perform here for another two weeks. Lucky for us.”
“There will be an elephant in here? A tiger?”
“Partof the circus, at least. It’s to be a trapeze and high-wire act.”
I shivered at the wordhigh.“What arewedoing here?”
He pulled the trapeze bar over with a twiny rope and handed it to me. “Relearning how to fly.”
“It’s so dark.” I tried to blink away the inky blackness.
“All the better. You won’t be able to see anything below.”
I took hold of that bar and looked into his face that always held a welcome for me, even in the middle of the night. “Jack, how did you go from Seven Dials ... to the circus?”
He sighed, running fingers through his mussed hair. “I begged her to take me for years. My mother, that is. The great lady. Every time she snuck away to visit me in Seven Dials, I asked again. Finally she took me for my birthday, and it was more than I’d dreamed. Larger than life, every moment spectacular.”
“So you grew up and returned to it?”
He fumbled with the knot tying the trapeze up, allowing several long seconds to pass. “Yes. All on the same day I arrived.”
“How old—”
“Eight.”
“Oh.”
He bent to set a candle stub upright in a brass holder and flicked a match. “After the elephant act, she spotted a man she knew across the way. She couldn’t speak to him with me in tow, of course. It was our ‘special secret’ that we were related, and I thought that was truly something. She was so lovely and perfect. Lace and earbobs, little hats perched on blonde hair. ‘You’ll be good, won’t you, Jackie boy, and stay here while I speak to him?’ I promised, and there I sat, a dutiful man-child, willing to do anything for her—wrestle tigers, jump about to make her laugh, fetch a star from the sky. So I sat there waiting for her to come back.”
“And?”
He tugged the trapeze. “Still waiting.” That familiar face turned to me, and it suddenly occurred to me how very closed off the charmer actually was. “There’s no space made in this world for illegitimate children. They’ve got to carve out their own.”
I watched his masculine profile in the flickering glow, seeing him in light of his story.That boy lives as one abandoned every day of his life.Suddenly the friendship he’d always offered me, the endless help, seemed far more valuable than it had before.
He pulled the bar one last time and held it out for me. “Come, take hold.”
Shivering, I shed my cloak and gripped the bar. Then he disappeared in a whish of cool air. It looked as though he’dgrabbed another bar and swung into the air himself, but his voice sounded from somewhere in the dark emptiness below. “Now start flying.”
I climbed up on the rail and tugged on the bar he’d given me, testing its security. A dizzy fear took hold, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself. Then I pushed off the railing and sailed into the cool, open air with a whoosh. The trapeze arced down and up, my feet swimming in nothingness, then it sailed back, the air against my back. My heels struck the railing and I swung toward the openness again. I blinked looking down, then back. Lonely candle stubs now flickered on the opposite balcony where I’d stood, but I couldn’t see Jack in the glow. Panic fizzled in my chest. “How do I stop this thing? I can’t see to get hold of anything.”
Then his voice echoed off every wall and surface of the room, making it sound near yet distant. “Let go.” Wind whistled past my ears. “Don’t be afraid.”
Do not be afraid.That was in the Bible somewhere. Not in Psalms. My panicked mind grasped for the verse. But my eyes looked down. “What’s below?”
