The Little Shadows (22 page)

‘Now I teach my children
,
Each melodious measure
.
Oft the tears are flowing
,
Oft they flow from my memory’s treasure.’

It was a sentimental song and therefore could not be sung sentimentally. Back in Helena, Mama would be washing dishes and cleaning tables, humming to herself to keep her cheer—but not this song, which always made her weep uncontrollably.

Aurora’s clear voice freed the audience to be sad, in their own hearts, or glad of their mothers, or perhaps to mourn for never having had one. But she herself only thought of Mama’s cracked red hands and empty purse, and that they’d better make some money very soon and double-quick.

At the back of the smoky room, she could see Mayhew’s head turned, watching them. He had a dramatic, upright bearing; an air that hesitated between distinguished and raffish, like she imagined Florenz Ziegfeld must look. He’d left off his beaver hat, so his silver-dusted hair showed, but his stiff collar kept him looking formal in this rough place.

The lines of the song ran out, after the same two verses repeated, and then there was no ending, as there is no ending to remembering, only fading a little and folding and refolding, and the violin wept one last short chord, and they were done.

Aurora curtsied, accepting with grateful modesty the applause of this difficult crowd, won over. She took Clover’s hand to pull her forward, and they curtsied together. Clover gave back the fiddle with a little bow. At the side of the platform the jagged dancers kissed them, the woman weeping quite openly. ‘Dvorak!’ she sobbed. The girls nodded, clasping their arms in return, and then the band started up again into a reeling Irish tune and two cloggers came out onto the stage, and Aurora and Clover could sit.

Clover had an empty stool beside her. Victor came out of the shadows to perch on it.

‘I did not know you played the fiddle too.’

She bent her head. ‘No, I’m out of practice, I believe I must give it up for good.’

‘I like your playing, so clean and warm. I am myself in need of a fiddler.’

Clover looked up into his face. ‘For my act,’ he said. ‘I work best without orchestra, only a ghostly fiddle in the wings. Will you consider playing for me?’

‘I have no violin,’ she said.

‘Let us go out of this oppressive room and figure out a way for you to find one.’ He stood and offered her his hand. ‘The woods are good for walking, here, and it is not too cold.’

Clover looked at Aurora.

‘May I take your sister for some air, dear miss?’ Victor asked.

Aurora considered him. Friend of their friend, gentle-seeming, and well-known to the vaudeville folk. His had been the best number she’d ever seen. And Clover’s face was shining, as she had not seen it shine since—for ages. She turned her own face away so Clover would not see that in her eyes.

‘Of course,’ she said coolly, engrossed again in the musicians.

Victor tucked Clover’s hand in his arm and led her through the maze of tables. Aurora turned her head and watched them as they went, lifting her chin in a bob to acknowledge Mayhew’s wave of appreciation as he caught her eye, and his kindly nod to Clover when she and Victor passed him at the door.

Penny-dreadful

Mayhew had watched the singer and her little sister, the two of them reminding him forcibly of the penny-dreadful play
The Two Orphans
: Henriette the orphan girl and her blind sister who sang in the streets of Paris and were, naturally, discovered to be aristocrats. Maybe the play could be adapted … His agile mind trotted the idea through its paces and discarded it. Unless he had a pretty pair of sisters, one a singer.

The singer’s face—open planes, flat eyelids over lustrous dark orbs, the pearly skin illumined even in this dark place, drawing the lantern-light—was as much a part of her charm as the abundant floss of golden hair. Delicate line of cheek and chin. He calculated her value.

But it was difficult to stick to the task; the heart kept attempting to fly out of his breast as he listened. A young swan, looking up to catch back bright tears; the odd, thin bird behind her playing a borrowed fiddle. Not the usual run of artiste at Leary’s roadhouse.

When the song was over the little sister left their table, going out with Victor Saborsky; that was interesting. Victor was famous for his reserve; held himself aloof, as Mayhew knew to his slight pain. For him to single out one of the sisters, that suggested a higher value than he’d tallied himself.

A space vacant beside the beauty. (The line of her neck taut as she looked towards the door; a little aloofness of her own in her bearing.) Mayhew made his way across the room, shedding his jolly party as he went, like drops of rain from an astrakhan collar.

Sham Pain

‘Champagne for my true friends,’ Mayhew told Julius, saluting him, ‘and true pain for my sham friends.’

Aurora laughed as her ear leaped to his joke. As if champagne were available at this out-of-the-way place. But a tray was coming, one of Mayhew’s minions balancing glasses and two bottles with foil-wrapped necks. Aurora had never yet had champagne.

‘Brought it out from Butte,’ Mayhew murmured in her ear, as the others exclaimed. He took the first bottle, ripped off the foil and untwisted a little metal trap, and very efficiently swirled the bottle while holding the cork—which promptly exploded out of the neck of the bottle, foam spilling in a rush over the table and onto Aurora’s dark skirt.

‘Damn it all!’ he cried. ‘You’ve shaken the bottle, Bert.’ He let champagne flow into glasses as he dabbed at Aurora’s skirt with the napkin from the bottle, until they were both generally damped, except for their spirits. The champagne was sharp, sweet; Aurora did not let herself gulp it.

It Is Spring

Victor and Clover walked in the winter woods, Clover thinking,
It is spring, it is spring
. Victor led her away from the buildings and noise, out along a deer path cut through a stand of pale birch, winding off into the darkness.

‘Is it true that your mother is a Fabian?’ Clover asked.

‘Everything I ever say is true,’ Victor answered. ‘Someday I will tell you all about her adventures with the movement, and about her teacher, Galichen the moon-mad.’

The white-paper bark of birch trees caught the moon as they went farther into the woods. It was a paler version of Victor’s empty forest backdrop.

She said, when he asked, that her father had taught her to play the violin.

‘My own father is dead,’ he told her. ‘A year ago. Long enough that I am resigned.’

‘My father, too,’ she said. ‘Two years ago. And my little brother, before that.’

‘Yes, Sybil told me. I am sorry.’

‘It set us off on our travels,’ she said. Without those deaths, they would still be in Paddockwood together, cozy in the teacherage but dreaming still, not yet awakened into the world. Papa reading to them in the evenings, Mama trying to keep cheerful in her long exile. Impossible to say that was better.

But Clover’s breath stuttered anyway at the thought of Harry walking beside her, as he always used to. ‘He did not talk much, my brother. We all understood him, so he had no need. I cannot remember his voice. I think it was … a little croaking.’ She remembered the feel of Harry’s small fingers, delicate on her closed eyelids in the morning, seeing if she was awake. ‘He was not yet four,’ Clover said to Victor, as if to apologize for sadness at such an ordinary death.

Victor took her hand. A plain handclasp, restful and ordinary. ‘There is no going back,’ he said. ‘So we keep our eyes open and go forward.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are a dear thing, Clover.’

She smiled, shielded by the dark.

‘I ought to tell you what I already know,’ he said. ‘That you are she, for me.’

She could not help but laugh.

‘You only saw me yesterday—how can you know?’

‘My eyes are open.’

There was no snow left under their feet. The leaves had faded,
winter-cured to a thick, soft carpet. Clover put out a hand to a young birch, to touch something, as if it were a lightning rod.

Perhaps a Dead Mouse

From the back of the room, Bella had stared after Clover walking out into the night with the tired-faced genius. Her arms goose-prickled again, thinking of his number. Aurora must have let Clover go out.

Humph!
They’d sung without her, and Bella had not decided yet whether to be cross or let it go. Very likely they’d only had a moment’s notice, and had not been able to see her. But she still hadn’t found a way to join the card game, and this was dull stuff, stuck watching all night long.

‘Need some air,’ the Tussler beside her said, suddenly. ‘Want a walk?’

Bella was surprised.

‘Or don’t you dare to walk in the darkness?’

Bella laughed. She was never frightened of the dark. And why not go for a walk? Clover could. So could she.

Black-velvet country darkness made the roadhouse clearing seem like the entrance to a fairy tale. The woods that swallow Snow White when she runs away, Bella thought. Clover and Victor had disappeared up a trail into the birch woods, so Bella made the Tussler walk the other way, towards the dark hill. She had not been told his name and it felt a bit foolish to ask.

‘Ought to be a still-room out here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Could find us a beer, you’d like that.’

She would not, she did not like beer. But a search for treasure was always to her taste. He took the lantern hanging above the chopping block, and she took one sitting by an empty wagon and lit it from his with a tuft of straw.

The straw flared up and almost singed his eyebrows, and he dodged backwards, making her laugh. He did not like that, she saw. She stopped.

They set off, the Tussler looking for some telltale smoke or a lit door, but there was none to be seen. The huge darkness of the night was shoved back by the light from the oil lanterns. They could not see the stars for the jangling, swinging light around them.

Bella caught a glimpse, a gleam of metal—there—it was a handle. A door cut into the hill. She pointed. ‘A root cellar!’

‘Might be good in there,’ he agreed.

He must think of nothing but his stomach. But sometimes neither did she. He was a gangly boy, and not very bright, she thought. His bottom lip hung sulky and loose. She’d almost rather be back inside watching the card-play with East and Verrall. But it would be good fun to explore the root cellar.

It was nothing but a cave dug into the hillside, a tiny wooden door making it look like a fairy house, where the moth-girls might live. The door stuck a little, then gave way, leather hinges letting it fall askew after she dragged it open over the snow.

Bella loved dark places—nothing to be afraid of in the darkness. It was people you had to fear. Shadows shifted around thin pillars, like inside a mine—perhaps there were jewels down there, or a dragon’s hoard of gold. The Tussler crowded behind her, so she stepped forward into the low space. Once her eyes had adjusted she saw straggling shelves lining the dirt walls, some with dull jars, some empty, furred with dust. Trays of carrots and apples in sand, jars of beets, pickles, jam, crocks of preserved eggs in isinglass. It was a treasure trove, but only of food.

‘We ought not to be in here,’ she said, sadly, and turned to go.

But he was in her way, blocking the passage to the door. He had set his lantern on a shelf and he fumbled with something she could not see beneath his coat. He took her hand and pulled it towards him, and she thought he was going to put something in it—an egg, or perhaps a dead mouse.

Instead he yanked her hand between his legs where he had something bulging. His manhood, she supposed. She had only seen down there in quite small boys, who went swimming in the slough behind
the schoolhouse in Paddockwood and jumped into the air, little front-tails waggling; it was a surprise to feel how springy and hard his was.

She felt it jump under her hand and then he pulled her harder and hurt her wrist and at the same time he smeared her mouth with his flabby lip. She had not minded Nando kissing her, she had liked it very much, but this was a different thing. It—She wanted to stop.

‘Stop,’ she said, her voice too soft. She could not make it louder, the wind had gone out of her. She hated her own weakness.

After three thudding heartbeats she wrenched her face away, but he found it again and twisted it back to his mouth, thick fingers like a vise on her cheek. She still held the lantern, and if she dropped it, it would break and the wooden shelves would catch fire. The dirt wall behind her and the roof above them seemed to be moving, the earth closing in around them, and he was still pulling her, his rough jacket scratching her face and the button at the top digging into her neck painfully and all the time he was trying to tuck her hand into his pants, unbuttoning them with one hand and panting—that was maybe the worst of it, the snuffling
noise
he was making. She was pushed backwards into the shelves and the jars were going to shake together and the crocks on the bottom shelves would break, there would be beet juice and isinglass from the eggs all over her new boots, but she could not make her hands do anything but push vaguely at him. She had forgotten about breathing, even.

Then Verrall, outside in the clearing, called, ‘Bella? East?’

The Tussler was still, his mouth open and the bottom lip hanging purplish. She could not think why she had ever found him handsome.

‘Cunny-cunny fucking cunny,’ he said in her ear. ‘That’s all you are.’ The air of him speaking was hot inside her head.

‘Bugger you,’ she said, and with her free hand slapped his face with all her strength. It made a mighty noise. Her hand stung and her forearm ached.

He slammed her back against the wall. She gasped at the pain, at the shock of it, how strong he was, and his fist came at her—she jerked her head and he almost missed, catching only her cheek instead of her nose and eyes.