“Why then, we’ll make it another day, to be sure, there’s no need to suffer for me…” Peggy exclaimed, though her heart was sinking, for she’d been up half the night entreating all the saints for good weather.
“Nonsense!” Hannah snapped, deep into her role, but her head did ache, since she’d been up half the night praying for an early blizzard. “The fresh air will clear my head.”
And looking so unapproachable that Peggy didn’t dare dispute her, Hannah sailed from the room, promenaded down the hall, and descended the stair led by her uplifted nose, her head held so high she almost caught her foot in her skirt and tumbled the rest of the way down. Even that wouldn’t change her expression, she decided, placing a trembling hand more firmly on the stair rail, for it was her only protection. So, with a prayer of thanks for her upbringing in the theater, she marched into the lobby armed with the best pose to affect, trying to look like a grande dame fromA Lord’s Lady, never knowing that since her face was shaped for smiles and not icy disdain, she looked more like a mannequin than a haughty dowager.
She was angry with the jolt of unbidden pleasure she felt the moment she saw that familiar tall, bright-haired figure in the cluster of people waiting in the lobby. Then she forced herself to remember how swiftly he’d taken a yes from another after all her noes; how it hadn’t mattered to him which lady had said yes. Oh, Peggy would have her eyes opened today, she silently promised with grim spite that helped her pin an insincere smile on her compressed lips, vowing nothing would remove it short of a major disaster. Another major disaster, she corrected herself, her heart skipping as he stepped forward and smiled at her.
He was wearing proper casual clothes, checked trousers, and a tightly fitted Norfolk jacket, though the hat in his hands was a Stetson. But all she’d eyes for was his tanned face, so she averted her gaze and fussed with her gloves so she wouldn’t be forced to stare at those well-shaped, lying lips.
“I don’t blame you for being vexed, ma’am,” Gray said at once, with unmistakable laughter in his voice, “but I’m not a man to let my chance go by. The second I heard you were going to be chaperon today, I started polishing my best boots.”
She gasped and her eyes flew wide.
“How dare you!” she hissed in a heated whisper, after glancing back to see that Peggy had been halted in conversation with a tall, raw-boned fellow.
Gray’s eyebrow raised.
“I knew you didn’t want to walk out with me,” he said slowly, puzzlement and what looked very much like hurt growing in his clear blue eyes, “but I didn’t know you’d go into such a taking. My mistake, ma’am,” he said, putting on his hat. “But,” he added, all amusement fled from his voice and face now, “if you’d be so kind. I’d like to know just what I did to get you so angry—for another time, or another lady—if not just for my vanity’s sake, I guess.”
“Surely,” she whispered in an embarrassed rush, gesturing with a tilted head toward Peggy, “even you know that this is scarcely the time to discuss it. And since I doubt we’ll ever have another time, I can only suggest you think about it. Oh!” she said, stamping one foot at his look of complete confusion, “How could you? How can you? Even here in the West, surely there must be some glimmering of civilized behavior. To ask two ladies out with you, and accept the first one to agree, and then to appear delighted that you’ve got the other as well…and then, to top it all, to volunteer to disappoint one when the other is reluctant to go along with your nefarious schemings. You…you, sir,” she said, pulling herself up so that she addressed his cravat directly, “are beyond vile. You make Bluebeard seem constant!”
“Hannah,” Peggy said excitedly from somewhere near her shoulder, because Hannah suddenly found her vision narrowed to a thin tunnel of light sufficient only to show her the contents of the overloaded purse she was fumbling in for a handkerchief, “this is Mr. Royal Atkins, the gentleman I was speaking of.”
“Ma’am,” the tall, raw-boned fellow Hannah’s gaze flew to said in a deep smooth voice, “I thank you kindly for coming along today. No way Miss Peggy would’ve budged without you. Here’s my friend. Gray Dylan, he’d be pleased to come along, too, so’s you won’t feel out of place. I know him forever, ma’am,” Royal added anxiously, seeing Hannah’s arrested expression. “He’s my boss and my friend, and true as the day is long. I promise you. Honest.”
“?‘Beyond vile,’?” Gray mused half to himself. “Must be around the corner from atrocious and at the intersection of hideous, or in an even lower rent district. I’m afraid Miz Roberts wouldn’t want to be caught dead in a boneyard with me, Royal. Looks like you three will have to go on by yourselves.”
Peggy looked frightened. Royal’s long face fell. And Gray Dylan, Hannah noted with a mixture of shame and chagrin, looked not half so unhappy as he sounded or she felt.
But floundering in embarrassment helped her find hidden resources. She discovered that she’d been raised to the occasion.
“A foolish mistake, a mere misapprehension of mine. Pray forgive me, Mr. Dylan,” she said, lifting her head, this time trying the Grand Duchess of Ruritania fromThe False Countand getting it exactly right. “And if it is not too late to change my mind, I should be delighted if you would accompany us.”
They all smiled; some in relief, some in relieved confusion, and one in genuine amusement, for she’d done it so perfectly, she’d even left in the heavy Baltic accent.
The trap Royal had rented for the occasion was a shining black surrey, scrupulously clean, with the scent of new leather still so strong, it even rose above the smell of the horses pulling it. It was a mild day, and the top was taken down so that the four passengers were covered by only a brilliantly clear Colorado blue sky. The ladies unfurled their parasols, and the surrey pulled away. Royal held the reins, Peggy sat stiffly erect on the seat beside him, and Gray and Hannah sat directly behind the pair. If it hadn’t been before, propriety was served with a vengeance now, for though never properly introduced by a third party when they’d first met, none of the parties within the coach could have so much as scratched their nose without a passerby seeing it now. Certainly no one could have guessed that the two ladies were from an acting company, and the gentlemen were two wealthy bachelors out on a spree. But even so, no one in the coach seemed able to forget it.
Hannah’s apology had been made and accepted. But she was even more warmly forgiven after she’d whispered, red-faced—the grand duchess having departed for parts unknown as Gray helped her to her high seat—“I didn’t realize…you see, Peggy kept telling me about a western gentleman who came backstage every night, asking her out…so you see…”
Still, Gray’s reply, made under a quirked mustache, “Lovely opinion you have of me,” didn’t make future conversation any easier, the more so when the only thing Hannah could think to answer was “But men who come backstage, after all…”
That made her rethink the wisdom of going out with men who come backstage after all, and Gray, for all his flippancy, couldn’t think of a way to deny that truth, and regretting his words, decided to wait it out until the conversation took a turn that truth needn’t follow.
Which was a good decision, except that as they began to pull out of the city and off into the long road that led toward the higher mountains, he realized that the conversation hadn’t just lapsed, it had, after a few weak comments about the weather, completely expired. Hannah was studying the roadside with theatrically rapt attention, which he could understand, in light of their last words together. But Royal was staring at the team he drove as if he’d never seen the like of such animals before this afternoon, and his little lady, Miss Peg, was sitting as if she’d been placed on tacks. But aside from the sliver of uncovered nape at the bottom of her upswept hair that was turning an increasingly bright shade of red, she showed no other signs of life that Gray could recognize.
Gray knew that if he spoke first, he’d have to explain he wasn’t the kind of man that lurked around stage doors, but since he was, he wished he were sitting in back of Royal instead of Peggy, so he could kick his friend into speech.
It was Hannah who finally broke the silence, despite all her inclinations not to, but only because she had to: silence was the most painful sound to any actor’s ear, and she’d inherited her parents’ fear of it.
“The mountains are magnificent,” she said, loathing herself as she did, because it was more than trite, and wasn’t something anyone would deny and served no purpose but to make noise. “We don’t have anything like this back East, do we, Peggy?” she asked a bit desperately, trying to get Peggy to say something, anything, other than the “yes” and “thank you” and “I see,” that had been her contribution to the afternoon so far.
Peggy made a muffled sound that might have been anything from agreement to a cough, and Hannah went on, almost defiantly, “Well, but I’m a child of the cities, and so I suppose we could have a mountain high as Ararat on the New York border, and I wouldn’t know of it.”
The biblical reference moved no one but Gray, who chuckled and said, “But you’ve got some Catskills I remember from my Washington Irving.”
“I do, too,” Hannah said, diverted. “But I’d forgotten they’re ours, and in any case, they’re not a patch on these,” she admitted, turning her great dark eyes to Gray before the interest in his caused her to look away again.
The sun calls up autumn in her eyes, there’s brown and russet there, he thought entranced, but her hair swallows up sunlight; it transmutes it to moonlight the way its edges shine like silver.
