Chapter Six #3
“Why, thanks,” Gray said with an air of amused calm that didn’t match the look in his eyes.
“And Lucy’s doing fine, thanks for asking.
The last time you saw her she was a blushing bride.
Now she’s got four kids, one smarter than the other.
Can you believe it? four. They sing and dance and herd dogs and ponies at their Long Island home, because nothing else but sea gulls roam there.
They live in New York City the other half of the year.
My sister-in-law used to be a star in Mr. Harper’s company,” he explained to Hannah.
Then he looked to Kyle and smiling, said, “I’ll tell Lucy you were asking after her when I write next time.
She’ll be so pleased. Why, I guess she thought you’d forgotten her entirely since you never wrote or called.
So you see,” he said, turning to Hannah again, as Kyle for once seemed bereft of an easy retort, “now you know my name, my family—Lord, ma’am, you’ve got a full reference—the only reason to refuse me now would be pure cruelty. ”
Or common sense, both Hannah and Kyle thought, as Kyle recovered and told Hannah quickly, “Oh, but I thought you and I and Frank would go over that bit of his and Lottie’s tonight,” before he fell still, instantly ashamed of himself for such a clumsy, awkward ruse.
But Hannah thought it protective and endearing of him.
And as she’d been searching for a reason to deny herself the exquisite pain-pleasure of a new acquaintance that could only lead to an old familiar pain, she said brightly, “Oh yes. I’d almost forgot.
Sorry, Mr. Dylan, but my previous promise comes first.”
“I understand,” Gray said, and a glance at his face showed he did, and more, as he added, “tomorrow light, then?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow—early, for Aspen,” Kyle said triumphantly.
“Why so am I!” Gray said with a wonderful display of pleased amazement.
“Via Central City,” Kyle said.
“My route exactly,” Gray said with pleasure.
“And Leadville, a most circuitous path, you will agree,” Kyle said.
“Most,” Gray agreed pleasantly. “Lucky thing I’ve business there, too.”
And before Kyle could ask where, or Hannah could give way to the laughter that was welling up in her, he added, “So I guess I’ll see you there, ma’am…Mr. Harper.”
And on that deliciously ambiguous note, touched his hand to his hat, turned, and strolled away, leaving Kyle to simmer with the knowledge that he’d just mouthed a perfect exit line.
Then, Kyle noted with chagrin, he made an even more dramatic exit because of the slight limp that had gone unnoticed before.
As she noted it now, Hannah’s laughter was quelled, although her expression held no pity at all.
No, Kyle thought gloomily, it held something far worse: interest.
Kyle hadn’t made a move toward Mrs. Hannah Darling-Roberts since she’d told him it would be unwelcome.
It wasn’t her words that discouraged him so much as all her unvoiced body language, the way she behaved when they were alone and working together the way she edged away from a seemingly accidental elbow touched to the side of her breast, the way she backed off from a conversation that grew too close the way she stepped aside when a whisper became too confidential.
A man who read faces and movements ai well as other men read books, Kyle hadn’t needed words to deter him.
But now, this look of longing when she looked after Graham Dylan…
Kyle hadn’t lost many women to other men.
It wasn’t because of his looks, he knew, and certainly not his money, no matter how he wished that could be the case.
Nor was it even his personality so much as it was how well he knew the women he wanted.
A man who wished to succeed in the theater had to know art and artifice and over all, human nature.
That, he did. Though a dreamer, he’d a strong streak of rationality, so he never set his sights higher than he knew he could achieve.
But he was only a mortal man. He’d miscalculated and misjudged sometimes, and so lost some women he’d tried to keep.
One, in particular, to that man’s brother.
He hadn’t loved her, but then he’d never loved any woman in the way that the plays he presented, presented that human emotion.
Nor had he regretted it; from what he could see, true love involved self-sacrifice and self-denial.
Very good subjects for theater, of course, but hideous in real life he had thought, and real life was a thing he avoided if he could.
That long lost young woman Graham Dylan had reminded Kyle of had been a professional more than a personal loss to him.
Because she’d been a stepping stone, one he’d badly needed to cross the abyss between obscurity and success.
Hannah was another such; he needed her now, and that need was a kind of love in itself.
And as for other kinds of love, why, she was certainly lovely enough for any man…
“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.