Chapter Four
The first thing Hannah heard was the silence.
The constant thrum and rattle, the vibration that had become so much a part of her head that it seemed natural for her very teeth to buzz with it day and night, was gone.
She’d woken to a blast of blissful silence, and a strange lack of motion.
They’d come to a stop. They rested at a stop. They’d arrived.
She poked her head from out of the covers and pulled back the window shade a crack. Then she hung her head down and spoke through the tangle of her unbound hair.
“Peggy! Look! We’re here!”
A groan was her answer, and then a quilted heap arose from the bed beneath hers, and a small hand pulled the shade back from the bottom.
“Faith! Yer right, Hannah dear. We’re here.
Quick!” Peggy cried as the quilt leaped to its feet.
“Get yerself dressed fast! No telling when they’ll be tossing us from the train so they can go on, don’t want any porters coming in here while we’re in our alltogeythers,…
altogethers,” she corrected herself hurriedly. “Do we now?”
Hannah stared down at the animated quilt that was rushing about the cramped space of their tiny compartment.
Even standing upright, it didn’t attain very much of a height.
The ginger crop of curls that topped it barely came up to the top bunk, Peggy had not much stature.
But she made up for that in energy, for the quilt was shifting and dancing as Peggy attempted to dress from beneath it, as she always did.
For though she said it was because of the chilly mornings, Hannah had observed how she undressed half in the cupboards in the evenings, and realized that Peggy found even semiprivate nudity embarrassing.
When Hannah had laughed and asked her if she averted her own eyes when she undressed all by herself, Peggy hadn’t so much as smiled.
She’d only stopped, considering the matter.
“I dinno, miz,” she’d answered wonderingly. “I’ve never been by meself that long, y’see.”
As it happened, Lottie hadn’t chosen anyone to share her bed with, after all.
She was too wise, Hannah thought, to tie herself up with an actor when she was about to meet all the gloriously wealthy gentlemen Kyle had gone on about.
But Hannah was delighted with her own move, she couldn’t have found a more dissimilar roommate from Lottie.
Peggy wasn’t an actress, nor had she any experience in the theater, or on her own.
She was a seamstress, at eighteen the oldest child of a large family, and considered herself lucky beyond belief at having been hired on by Kyle.
The traveling terrified her, those she worked with shocked her, and the work would have overwhelmed a lesser spirit.
But she’d been grindingly poor, had boundless ambition, and a natural talent with the needle.
Seamstresses were common enough, Peggy’s gift was that she had a truly creative imagination to apply to her work.
Hannah didn’t know how Kyle had discovered that, but she wasn’t surprised that he had.
She’d begun to understand that he’d a gift of his own: the ability to discover others’ talents. And weaknesses.
Peggy had a generous spirit as well, and far from resenting having to share the tiny space allotted her, already crowded with bits and pieces of the costumes she was responsible for, she was overjoyed at having Hannah move in with her.
Not only was she unused to solitude of any sort, but, as Hannah quickly discovered, she went in awe and admiration of her new roommate.
Three things accounted for this, two immediately told: Hannah was Peggy’s idea of a true lady—she approved of her dress, speech, and morals.
And she was not an actress. And, as Hannah had only just realized, she believed her to be courageous.
“Ye stand up to him, y’see,” Peggy explained in the safety of an anonymous late-night, before-bed chat.
There was really no need to explain who “he” was, much of their talk had been about their mutual employer.
It was in that same safe, comfortable darkness, that Peggy had dared to make her timid request. She vowed she’d sew for Miz Roberts till the end of her days, or until her fingers fell off, whichever came first, if only Miz Roberts would condescend to correct her speech now and then, when she had the time, that was to say.
When Hannah said, in all honesty, that she found the natural lilt of Peggy’s speech charming, Peggy had been dumbfounded.
“Ah no, Miz Roberts,” she’d sighed, “ ‘tis Irish. And that’s a sore trial these days. I want to get ahead, y’see. My family’s countin’ on me.”
Hannah discovered Peggy to be a quicker study than Lottie.
And she thought her more naturally pretty.
It was true no man would stare after her hungrily when she walked down the street, it wasn’t that sort of beauty.
But she’d a round little face, an impudent nose, and great hazel eyes beneath long sandy lashes.
She might scorn her freckles and her round chin, but Hannah thought her charming and said so.
And won not only her awe and admiration, but her undying devotion by so saying, since no one, evidently, ever had before.
Peggy might think her addled or only kind, but as she explained, she did appreciate the thought—as well as Hannah’s nightly company and daily friendship.
For though she knew she was doing the right thing by improving herself and making enough money to send home, she confided that now and again, when she was alone, she suffered fiercely from the homesickness.
Hannah sympathized, she’d known the aching, throat-stopping longing of homesickness, even if it had always been for the home she’d never known.
And as she’d not had a friend since the days of her childhood, and then only fleetingly, before the other girl had to move on with her own theatrical family, she appreciated Peggy, as well.
The sun was just up, the hour was early enough for optimism.
Peggy flashed her a grin as she gathered up all Hannah’s belongings and helped her by packing them into her bags.
It might not be such a terrible tour, after all, Hannah decided, as she hurried into her own clothes and prepared to step out and face Colorado.
She wanted to see it firsthand, and first, before the others were up and moving out.
She’d seen mountains from the train windows before.
Her heart had raced faster, but the porters had told her that was because of the altitudes they were climbing to and the thinner air there, not only her reaction to such astonishing scenery.
The towering mountains had looked so near, so unreal in their reality, so very like the painted backdrops for Evangeline or Davey Crockett, that she couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
She had to see it without even the distorting glass of a window.
But now as she stood on the platform, she could scarcely see past the depot, much less to the mountains.
It wasn’t a cloudy day, for now and again the wind blew the gray aside.
When it didn’t, it didn’t take long to realize that no heaven-born cloud had ever smelled like that. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“That’s money you smell,” Kyle said from behind her, somehow managing to take in a deep breath of the noxious stuff as he went on, on an exhalation, “pure distillation of cash, my dear. This is a mining town. Each fire they stoke up to refine the stuff, stokes up the economy. It’s silver or copper or some other precious ore.
Only gold smells like clear running water, or so I’d think.
This precious stuff smells like high finance. ”
Hannah didn’t even honor his remark with a sniff, and not just because she couldn’t bear to deliberately breathe in. It smelled like man’s greed and nature’s disaster to her. Her face said everything her lips closed down on.
“Anyway,” Kyle said, taking her arms and turning so that he could escort her back to the train for their last paid-for breakfast there, “you won’t smell it at night, because that’s when the fires go out. And so do the miners—for entertainment.”
But it was hard for Kyle’s troupe to accept what he kept reassuring them one by one as they left the train, stunned.
And though certainly no one wished to take in too much of the atmosphere, there were nevertheless many jaws dropped and mouths gaping wide as they trailed off the platform and down the dismal main avenue into town.
The depot was at the head of town, the mines and the smelter’s smokestacks at the foot, and in between, there was a vast grim, gray huddle of shanties and shacks.
The town itself was a long, wide street of saloons and supply stores.
And two more of cribs and saloons, for the hardest-working people in town: the prostitutes.
As the troupe paused in front of the hastily erected wooden hovel they were afraid was the hotel, for once Lottie spoke for a multitude—or at least all of them—when she opened her mouth and yowled.
“Ay! Whassis? This ain’t no town!”
It was wonderful, Hannah thought with sincere admiration, how much contempt Lottie got into that one-syllable word before she went on.
“Thisisa damn sewah! It stinks. It’s durdier than New Yowk.
And where’s the goddamn theayter, hah? Where’s the ‘Gem of the New West’?
” she demanded in perfectly mimicked accents.
“Doan try’n tell me they got the Tabor Opera House hid someware, puleaze. ”
“If,” Kyle said with icy majesty, before he had to bellow louder than Lottie to make himself heard, “if you all would be so kind as to step in, and discuss the matter with me in private—or at least, in semiprivate, I should be glad to explain. Well?”