But even before he’d known that, he’d come at once when the page boy had summoned him from his seat, where he’d gone when he’d given up the effort to see her backstage. His breath had caught when Peggy told him Hannah needed him as she’d met him halfway: he hadn’t known he could run so fast without breathing. Nor had he realized how long it had been since he’d last breathed until he let out an amazingly long sigh of relief when he’d found her whole and healthy and incredibly lovely. But just now, at his words, she’d gone white as her gauze gown. He’d wanted to see her for days, but hadn’t realized exactly why. Now, ashe discovered how badly her distress hurt him, he knew. This was a whole new game, he thought with bewilderment, one he’d never played. Because he began to understand it was no game.
“My father, here? Where?” she said, and without waiting for an answer, she pulled back a section of curtain to see him where she might have seen him before, front and center—if she hadn’t been looking so hard for another man’s face instead. Blayne Darling had likely never been so overlooked before. Certainly, he was not now. He sat in a cluster of well-groomed men and women, leading their laughter, smiling and shouting encouragement to Lester, while all the while holding court, as he always did. She let the curtain fall.
I cannot. I must. I shall, I will not—she hardly knew what she was thinking as she stared at Gray, unseeing.
Lester shot a glance to Kyle, and then, finishing the song, and with no new hat in his hand, he spun around on one foot and hopped off the stage. The spotlight staggered, trying to discover him, and when it did, he’d plucked a great feathered slouch hat from the head of a boisterously laughing female who was no lady, and clapped it on his own head. He went dancing back to the stage to the uproarious laughter of the audience, and leaping up onto it, sang the lyrics once more:
“Now, how I came to get this hat,
‘tis very strange and funny.
Grandfather died and left to me
his property and money.
And when the will it was read out,
they told me straight and flat:
If I would have his money,
I must always wear his hat…Oh…”
“…Where did you get that hat?” thundered the audience, delirious with mirth.
“Hannah. Hannah,” Gray said, trying to get her attention, for though he held her icy hand, she seemed oblivious to him. “Hannah, it’s not bravery to damn near kill yourself trying to prove yourself. There are other kinds of scars a person can get from that kind of folly than the ones I’ve got. Worse ones. On the soul.Hannah,” he pleaded as sense returned to her eyes. “Remember what we talked about? What other people believe doesn’t count. It’s what you think—and if you really feel you have to make a point, you ought to be able to choose your own time and place, when you’re ready. You don’t have to go out there tonight to prove anything to anyone. Does she?” he asked Kyle with a look in his ice-blue eyes that made them glitter like frost in the shadowed light.
“No, no, of course not,” Kyle said distractedly, as the audience surged with laughter as some other lady pitched her hat on the stage, and they again shouted: “Oh, where did you get that hat?”
Hannah took a deep breath. And suddenly smiled a natural smile. “No, I don’t. I know that. And I feel it as well as know it now,” she assured Gray, “but I’ll do it anyhow. I will,” she said to Kyle. “I’m fine now. I will.”
She was as determined as she was frightened, but she was resolved. Let her father mock her, or rue her, it was all the same to her now. She knew what she had to do. And so she was shocked when Kyle looked down at her as though he saw right through her and said, “No. You won’t.
“You may want to,” he added thoughtfully, “and you might do a credible job of it, too. But it would not be a good job. It would be done as a sacrifice, or a dare. No one should use the stage for making a point of their courage. It is not made for that,” he added loftily. “Unless, of course, it’s someone acting without a limb,” he said consideringly, struck by the novelty of the idea, “or some other interesting sort of thing like that. That would bring them in…
“But the stage is no ‘wild horse,’?” he said, drawing himself up. “No, my dear Hannah, this night is not a propitious one for your debut; that must be another time, I think. Fear defies reason and takes one unaware. An actor must be, above all things, aware. Soldiers need bravery. But actors need desire. This is not just some melodrama, however foreshortened, this isShakespeare. Shakespeare. There is a tradition,” he murmured, half to himself, “there is a precedent.”
Kyle snapped his fingers, “Acting must be an act of love,” he said, “or it is just posturing. If you will, my dear, come with me now and take off those clothes.”
Kyle exchanged a long look with Gray before he turned on his heel and strode away. At that, Gray relaxed. Hannah began to unhook her costume with numbed fingers. “Are you coming?” Kyle demanded, looking back. After a reassuring smilefrom Gray, she followed Kyle back to the dressing room as Gray murmured just loud enough for her to hear as she did, “Lord! If I’d known how easy it would be with the right words…”
By the time the signal was finally given for Lester to be done, the stage was littered with hats. It had rained hats—it had poured hats, and the audience was weak from laughter. Kyle absently reminded himself to keep that number in from now on as applause filled the theater, swelling when Lester took his many bows, and then ebbing, at last, along with the laughter. After the hats had been picked up and the last of the merriment had subsided to occasional wheezy chuckles, the orchestra struck up again. This time they played the overture to Mendelssohn’sA Midsummer Night’s Dream, and if anyone in the audience was too dense to get that, the stage light went violet, and the first of the fairies came wafting out onstage.
The audience sat in desultory fashion, their coughing and shifting in their seats a sure sign that Lester had been right: “Where Did You Get That Hat” wasn’t a good prelude to Shakespeare. The preface Kyle had written to the drastically abridged playlet was read fairly enough, but the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ elicited soft moans and occasional sighs from the restless audience. Not even Lester, tiptoeing out in costume as Bottom, drew their pleased attention for more than a moment. Soon the worst sound—aside from the dreaded cry of “Fire!”—that can be heard in a theater after the curtain rises, came clear: light murmurous conversation. It began to hum throughout the house—until Titania drifted out with a cloud of her gauze- draped, light-footed court.
Then the crowd fell still. Until she spoke, and then they drew in their breath as one.
She was tall and graceful, full-figured and yet lithesome. Pale and dark and glittering with stardust, her every motion was a symphony of languor and eroticism. Her voice, when she spoke, was deep and dark and heavy with the memory of unspeakable pleasures. Her long black hair was meshed with fireflies, or so it seemed. And when she closed her eyes, her jeweled lids struck witch fire in the spotlight. The brilliant flowers on her crown were no less showy and fragile than she; she glowed dark as a midnight sun, and she dazzled the audience.
Gray stood with Hannah in the wings, and they watched, as astonished and enchanted as anyone else in the theater. By the playlet, and by themselves. For theystood side by side, fascinated by what unfolded before them and within themselves. She could scarcely see him in the dim light, only an occasional flash of teeth or the glow of his flaxen hair, and he could only scent the light floral scent that was Hannah, and see the glow of her skin radiant in the twilight of reflected stage light. But neither ever forgot the other was there, they didn’t have to look to each other more than once, or twice, to reassure themselves of it. And so, aware of the warm, companionable link they shared, they stood close as one, yet one by one, and at peace for the moment, together in the darkened light, absorbed in the fiction before them. Until Titania roused herself at last, and blinking her stunning eyes, said,
“Come, my Lord, and in your flight,
Tell me how it came this night,
That I sleeping here was found,
With these mortals on the ground…”
