“That sort,” Kyle said comfortingly as he watched Graham Dylan fading into the shadows, “are found backstage, everywhere.”
“Oh, but I grew up in the theater,” Hannah said, and laughed, so that she couldn’t say what she thought next—that he was wrong, for since she had, she knew she’d never found that sort before, anywhere.
“He’ll find someone else before the moon sets,” Kyle said so confidently, she bit her lip and clenched her hands hard so that she wouldn’t hit him as she suddenly, and shockingly, longed to do.
But as it turned out, he didn’t find someone else. Or even look to. At least, that’s what he himself told her the next night. And the next, and the next and the next, and the one after that. After Friday’s show in Black Hawk, and Saturday’s, and Sunday afternoon at the hotel there, and then after Tuesday night’s show in Breckenridge. Each time before he asked her to walk out with him again. And she again, refused him.
The hotel in Central City, if not as fancy as the nearby Teller House, was clean and comfortable, and high on a street near to their theater. If that theater wasn’t the stately and elegant opera house, this time at least that was a fact they’d accepted before they’d come to town, and so a lamentable, but not unbearable one. And if the hotel was hard to reach without panting, it was because everyplace in town was. Hannah began to believe that every street went in only one direction—up. Although she knew that was impossible, her legs and lungs didn’t. They were high in the Rockies now, and the town had been cut into the side of one of them.
If it was hard to walk, it was harder to sleep, tired as the hotel’s occupants might be, because the hotel was in the center of the mountain-girt town, and the miners who lived there didn’t go to sleep after the show as Hannah and Peggy were trying to do. The miner’s night’s out were all-night affairs, and the ladies that accompanied them were no ladies at all. But the miners paid a good bit of the good money they’d just tom from the earth to see the troupe perform, and lack of breath and lack of sleep were small prices to pay for such success. So instead of sleeping at once, Hannah and Peggy had learned to chat above the distant sounds of laughter and singing until the hour was late enough, if not quiet enough, for them to drop off.
Tonight it was especially difficult. Not only were the miners in high spirits, and their female companions obviously well supplied with bottled ones, but a brilliant moon rode high, drenching the night with liquid silver and filling their small room with an uncanny light.
“Do draw the curtains,” Hannah said from the depths of her pillow, after she’d turned it over seeking a comfortable spot for the third time. “I can’t sleep with such a light, it feels like my bed’s onstage.”
“Oh, aye, it’s powerful. I’ll wager Mr. Harper wishes the theaters here had such a light as the nights do,” Peggy said on a laugh, rising to her knees to pull the curtain across the window over her bed. Then she gasped and cried, “…Why, look at that! Hannah, come look!”
Hannah clambered out of her bed onto Peggy’s, and knelt there, blinking as she stared out the window. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but even though the moon lit the streets below, it was a shallow, silvery light, making everything it touched shadowed and illusionary. All she could discern were the shapes of the revelers, and she didn’t recognize one of them.
“What is it?” she asked, turning to look at Peggy. And saw that she was staring upward at the sky.
“Ah Hannah, have you ever seen the like?” Peggy sighed. “So close you could touch it. And ‘tis a full one, too. Make a wish over your left shoulder, and it’ll come true.”
It was a blanched and startling moon that loomed over the town, so big it seemed to fill the sky, and it was as silver, round, and full of mysterious runes as the face of a foreign coin. Hannah shivered slightly at the beautiful but alien sight, and laughed to dispel the strangeness of it.
“You wish for me,” she said lightly, seeing Peggy’s round face grow solemn as she turned and peered at the moon from over her shoulder.
“Oh niver!” Peggy said, aghast. “You must do it yourself. Then niver tell a soul what it was you wished for, else it won’t come true. But it will, you’ll see. Oh do it, Hannah.”
“Very well,” Hannah said, for she was of the theater, and could never flout a good superstition. So she turned and gazed at the staring moon, and made the first wish she could think of: to be loved and love in return, like any normal woman, for now and ever after. And after that incandescent moment of hopeless dreaming that Peggy called a wish, she turned back to reality with the same resignation that she always did.
“Done. Now, I think you ought to close those curtains,” she said as she clambered back into her own bed, “or you’ll be wishing you did when you fall asleep at breakfast.”
Peggy giggled and drew the curtains closed. Hannah heard her settle into bed, and heard the miners laughing again as well, and knew it would be awhile until they got to sleep this night, moonlight or not.
“They’re in full voice tonight,” Hannah said on a yawn. “Speaking of which…did you hear Sally try to hit that high note tonight? Oh my, three breaths to get out oneC, no wonder mountaineers yodel—they must have to,” she said, stretching in the dark, hearing the covers rustle in the most comforting way. “I don’t know why Kyle just doesn’t stay with recitatives until we get used to the height and air here.”
“Mr. Claxton says it’s a treat the way one beer acts like three here, because of it. He says a man can save a fortune getting drunk. And that he’d stay forever if he could just figger out a way to pay for that one beer, if he did,” Peggy said, giggling.
“?‘Figure’ out,” Hannah corrected her absently, “and he ought not to even have that one, you know.”
“Oh, I know, none better than I know,” Peggy agreed softly, all laughter fled. “My father’s that fond of the bottle, too. Well, at first it was because he couldn’t get work, and then it was he couldn’t get work because of it. Now he’s took…taken off, and who knows where…which is why I work for Mr. Harper, you see.”
Hannah had guessed it, because Peggy had said as much, if never so precisely before. Their previous talks in the long, dark western nights had brought their lives out clear as either wished the other to see. Some things, after all, couldn’t be said to any other living one, even if their relationship was increasingly becoming a big and little sister one, with Hannah in the role of the wise elder. Only a few years actually separated them, but Hannah had a life in the theater to guide Peggy by, as well as a considerable, if limited, education in the classics. Even more importantly, she’d been a married woman. That gave her seniority no years could equal. But in spite of their differences, they’d an underlying equality of gender and innocence, and more of one of temperament and morality than either did with any of the other members of the troupe.
Peggy was as grateful for Hannah’s friendship as Hannah was glad for hers. The other women in the troupe were performers and tended to disregard Peggy. But they looked at Hannah with awe, or suspicion, or else, and worst of all, treated her with false friendliness because of what they thought her influence might be withKyle. Knowing actors, the men, of course, even the most charming of them, Hannah did not trust at all. As for Kyle…it seemed he might actually be trying to be a friend, too, but knowing the theater as well as she did, even if she didn’t know men as well, Hannah couldn’t quite trust him either.
But Peggy had no ambitions for anything but security, and and no motive for friendship but the need of a friend. Although Hannah could wish she’d more education so that they could share more, living with Peggy showed her clearly as what she was: kind, gentle, and yet with a streak of practicality that astonished Hannah, and sometimes even tilted their relationship so that it was Peggy who was the wiser. Stage born and bred, Hannah had never encountered the like before. Reality was, after all, antipathetic to the very idea of theater, and to find common sense in it was as rare as finding a humble leading man.
“My father never drinks before a performance, for fear he’ll slur his words or his makeup,” Hannah said softly in reply to Peggy’s confession. “So he almost never drinks at all. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer him getting tipsy now and then so I could see what he might be like when he’s not onstage. But then, he always is,” she sighed.
“No, no,” Peggy said emphatically, “you never mean that, Hannah, that you never do. I can tell you that. You wouldn’t want to see the drinking—nor when it takes effect—when the crockery gets tossed about as freely as hateful words do— and his eaten dinner, too, in it’s own due time,” she added sourly.
Hannah had to smile and was glad that Peggy couldn’t see it. She was sure the girl was sincere, and that it was true. But still, the thought of her own father raging as anything but King Lear on the heath was amusing. He claimed to have gotten blind drunk a few times to know the way of it, but even his “Drunkard” was a mannerly, charming fellow—a “sublime and sympathetic sot” as one of the papers had written, which was why the matinee ladies, even those of the Temperance set, loved him so.
“No, a man who’s a boozer’s no good to himself or his loved ones—and a woman who’s one? Faugh!” Peggy spat. “They don’t bear speaking of, they don’t.”
“Ah, but,” Hannah said in a dark, wheedling voice, “a drop of fine French champagne, my dear, can never do a girl a bit of harm.”
