Chapter Ten #4
“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 is Shakespeare. 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 smile from 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’s A 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 they stood 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…”
And so, awakening, woke them all to reality again.
There was a confused stillness at first, when the actors all fell silent, before it became clear that the playlet had ended. And then the audience rose up, literally. They applauded, and when that didn’t seem tribute enough, cheered and whistled, stomped and shouted.
Titania took a dozen bows, and could have taken a dozen more, but fled the stage before some of the more impulsive and besotted members of the audience could surge up on it to give her more than the coins and bills and tom-up bits of paper they’d thrown in a vain attempt to show all their pleasure with her.
She passed Hannah and Gray in a rush, her draperies drifting past their noses as she did.
When they got to the dressing room in her wake, they found her slumped in a chair, her long legs bent apart, her elbows on the dressing table, her head on her hands, staring at herself in the mirror.
“Bar the damned door,” she said, and Peggy leaped to do it as they heard the sound of excited voices coming closer.
Titania’s eyes looked beyond her image and met Gray’s blue gaze in the mirror. It seemed her shoulders stiffened then, and her own dark, deep eyes grew cold. But all that could be seen in Gray’s clear gaze was honest admiration.
“There sure is a precedent,” Gray said, nodding, “but I’ll be damned if I ever saw an equal.”
Titania’s shoulders relaxed. She nodded, and then dragged off her flower-strewn wig, and ran long, sensitive fingers through the much shorter damp, dark hair that was beneath.
“Thank you, thank you,” Kyle said, as he continued to run his fingers over his itching, overheated scalp, “but I doubt Richard Burbage or Will Kemp ever had to worry about getting home unmolested after a performance. Some of the miners around here haven’t seen a woman in so long I think they might not mind even if they discovered who I am. ”
“Hold on. They haven’t been here that long,” Gray drawled.
“We’ve got some hard-looking females out here, true, and the wind does a job on their complexions, too.
But I never saw one with a blue beard showing under her powder and paint!
…Or at least, not such a dark one,” he amended, with just the right touch of doubt.
“Ah, but none of them have my figure…” Kyle said, but the laughter died on his painted lips when he saw the astonished look in Hannah’s eyes as she continued to stare at him. He sat up straighter.
“I choose to be a woman tonight because there was no way I could be a reputable man of the theater if I didn’t,” Kyle said, suddenly very conscious of both the cotton-wadding woman’s shape he still wore, and how successful his masquerade had been.
Meeting her dark gaze with his own, he added defiantly, “The show had to go on. That is precisely all.”
“No, it isn’t!” Hannah protested. “It was wonderful. I’ve never seen better. Oh, Kyle, if you could do a Shakespearean production with men playing all the parts, as they used to do, why, you’d make your fortune. I never realized it could be so wonderful.”
Again, Kyle’s eyes met Gray’s in the mirror, and they both grinned, one reluctantly and the other widely, as they realized she’d never understood what he’d been denying.
“I doubt it, child,” Kyle said, “times change. It would be like an all-girl Pinafore, interesting, but like Mr. Dylan’s bearded lady, a curiosity, rather than art.”
He smiled to himself as if at a memory, and at that memory, quickly glanced up at Hannah’s reflection again.
Only to see Gray Dylan doing the same thing with a look of longing on his face.
Before he in turn, as though feeling the force of Kyle’s stare, gazed back to surprise the same expression on Kyle’s dark face as he looked back to Hannah.
Kyle turned around and looked Gray full in the face. As the men stared at each other, each recognized the unspoken claim the other made on the woman that stood between them, and each acknowledged it by their silence.
But she, all unknowing, for if she had, she’d have suffered, since she knew better than both the futility of both their intentions, only laughed with sheer pleasure and said, “Ah, but this is certainly a night to remember!”