Chapter Four #3
They were snugged into companion seats in a darkened railway car; Kyle said berths weren’t available for short trips, and they’d been too weary to argue the point.
It was difficult to sleep, cramped and tired as they were.
Still, they were so close, they had a sort of privacy; they could whisper and not be heard by the others because of the constant noise of the train.
“What do I want?” Hannah mused. “The money, of course. Enough to pay my back rent and my front rent, so I can keep on going when I get back home. And you?”
“Oh,” Peggy said softly, and Hannah could almost see her hazel eyes shining with hope as she spoke. “Not just the money, surely. Not me. No, I want a trade, so I can take care of my own.”
“Don’t you want a husband to take care of you?” Hannah asked curiously, for she’d seen how Peggy sometimes stole glances at Nelson.
“Surely I do,” Peggy said sadly, and Hannah smiled, for though she was correcting Peggy’s speech, she could not bear to tutor the music from it.
“But I’m not fooling myself, not I. I’ve not got what to offer a fine gentleman, and I’m thinking I’d not settle for less.
Why, look at you…” And then she fell silent, fearing she’d said too much, for Hannah never spoke of plans for a future marriage, and not of her past one at all.
“But you’re only eighteen, my dear,” Hannah said, feeling it best to ignore what Peggy had said, and feeling her extra five years as five centuries as she did.
“Ah, but look at you,” Peggy repeated sleepily.
“You have everything, you do, but it’s sure you don’t need anyone but yer-yourself, you don’t.
Why, you’re so lovely, you make Miss Lottie want to spit, I seen—I’ve seen her looking at you, sometimes.
Ach, it’s turrible,” she said, giggling as she remembered the expression on Miss Lottie’s face whenever she saw the gentlemen looking at Hannah— rejoicing in it, if truth be told, because Miss Lottie was not only a difficult person to sew for, it was a variety of hell to have to work for her in any way.
“Terrible,” Hannah corrected her absently.
“That it is,” Peggy agreed, and then, with the freedom that the night gave her, thinking of Hannah’s trim figure and soft smoky black hair, white skin, and great dark eyes, she added, with an admiration so profound it was untouched by envy.
“You’re so much prettier—everyone says so,” she insisted, cutting off Hannah’s protests.
“Even Mr. Harper. Didn’t I hear him say, ‘Yes, our blonde catches the eye, but our dark lady holds it,’ the time Mr. Frank admired you when you was…
were, wearing that lovely blue dress of yours?
And the silver gown—the one I made for Miss Lottie for The Drunkard—you’d look finer in it.
Aye, and you’d act better in it, too, so everyone says.
Why don’t you try it? Just once?” Peggy wheedled, smiling at an even lovelier imagined vision of Miss Lottie burning with envy as Hannah tried her part—and then exploding, as Hannah took it over entirely.
“I’ve tried acting,” Hannah confessed, because she was unable to see Peggy clearly in the dim light, “and failed at it, miserably.”
“No, I cannot believe that,” Peggy said determinedly, “That I cannot. Who said it was a liar, that’s certain.”
“Who said it was my father,” Hannah answered before she knew she was going to. And then fell silent, shocked that she’d said it at all.
“Ah,” Peggy said on an indrawn breath, before she went on, “be that as it may. Being a father don’t make a man an expert on anything but one thing, or so my mother always said—when my father wasn’t around. If you’ll pardon me for so saying,” she added shyly.
Hannah grinned, but lost her smile as she answered gently, “But Peggy, my father knows one more thing than that thing, and that’s certain. He’s Blayne Darling. That was my name before I was married, you see.”
“Ah!” Peggy exclaimed, sitting up suddenly to whisper excitedly after Hannah hastily shushed her.
“Sure, and why didn’t I see it? Those eyes and lips.
He’s the most handsome thing, I seen his posters everywhere since I can remember…
but still and all…” She quieted and thought a moment before she said resolutely, “Aye, well, and he may be the greatest actor of the century, like all the posters says. That don’t mean he’s the greatest critic, though. ”
But he hadn’t said it critically, Hannah thought. Far worse, he’d said it with his famous half-skewed smile. Gently, charmingly, the way he said the worst things. And he’d smiled at Mother as he’d said it, and as ever, she’d smiled back at him.
“My dear, oh my dear,” he’d said to his daughter, his eyes meeting her mother’s over her shoulder, “I don’t think so.
Oh no. Not with the name ‘Darling’ on the bill, at least. It will never do.
Perhaps—with a bit more…practice? Or…Well, whatever, we can but try.
Should you like our help? Not now, of course. Perhaps after this run?”
It was only a little part, no more than ten lines and fifteen minutes of stage time.
But it had been her first and last time on the stage.
He’d never mentioned the matter again, nor had her mother.
Just thinking about it now made Hannah’s face flush hot, her stomach grow cold, and her heart beat faster—giving her all the symptoms of stage fright she’d not had on the stage that one time she’d tried so hard, and failed.
It was all right for her mother to take small parts so that she might be able to eternally play her most important role—that of priestess to the religion of Blayne Darling—but she herself had more ambitious visions.
Enduring amused sympathy had not been one of them.
That was why she’d been so glad to have been everything to John Roberts, she supposed.
And why it hurt so badly that she’d not been able to be anything to him, either.
As if, she thought with remembered sorrow she was usually able to stave off, it hadn’t hurt enough as it had been.
Hannah closed her eyes, remembering exactly how it had been.
Although she sat as close to Peggy as her elbow, she felt very alone in the wide dark night.
She always did when she remembered that for all the embarrassment and suffering she experienced whenever her husband had tried to make her his wife, even then, in the beginning, it had been wonderful to be held in another person’s arms. She could hardly remember his face now, but she’d never forget his arms. Or wanted to.
There were things she could never have, but if she thought of them all the time, she’d not be able to go on.
And so, it was astonishing, even to herself, that she seemed to have such a buoyant spirit that she could go on.
Some carefully staged kinds of dreaming helped.
Although she never spoke of men, not even to Peggy, she thought of them frequently.
It would surprise them all to know it, she thought, smiling to herself at her secret in the dark, but she found Nelson as handsome as any woman in the audience did, and thought Kyle exciting, Frank charming, and there was a baritone with the loveliest smile…
And all of them, she reminded herself, as she always did when such thoughts raised needs too complex to deal with, were companions only fit for the dark of her dreams.
“Be that as it may,” Peggy was saying sleepily, “you can be anything you want to be, that’s certain sure.”
The tears had finally stopped stealing down Hannah’s cheeks by the time she was able to answer belatedly, “No. I can’t be what I most wish to be: an actress, or a wife, or a lover. Only a teacher of one of those things, perhaps, and a dreamer.”
But by then Peggy was asleep. It may have been that Hannah was, too.
Because that was the sort of thing she only always dreamed she admitted, even to herself.
Half-awake now, she wondered at what she’d said, if she had.
And then dreamed of what she never had, what she almost had, and what she’d never have; and instead of weeping, resolved herself once more.
Because she didn’t know what to do but go on.
And so she sighed, and turned to her side to rest her head, and let the train bear her off to Denver and the on- rushing future, however limited it had to be.
“Have you been laying there, frowning and thinking, all this time? It’s way past midnight,” Gray said to Royal as he strolled into the room from the adjoining one he’d just returned to minutes earlier.
“And I don’t think it’s because you had such a terrible night,” he added as he loosened his cravat.
“You looked happy enough when I left you with the lady. But no woman ever made you that gloomy,” Gray mused as he struggled out of his tight dinner jacket.
“Nope, I know what’s ailing you. Damn it, Royal, but the ranch can run without you.
I don’t mean that I’d want it to, fact is, I don’t know what I’d do without you.
But if you’re laying there fretting about what’s happening back home, I’m not.
Mack and Lucky are competent men, young Red’s coming along fine, and anyway, we put the place to bed for the winter before we left. Now, will you relax and have some fun?”
“Well, that’s just it,” Royal said slowly. “It ain’t much fun for me.” He lay on his bed, with his hands laced beneath his head, and so didn’t see Gray wince at his words.