The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,136

Verrall! Are you there?’ and received a muted shout in reply; she bustled out to ask when the run-through of the melodrama would be held.

In the men’s room East was lounging on the dressing table, flat on his back, cutting his fingernails with a jackknife. He looked up. ‘You’re here, are you? Thought you’d mosey along?’

‘The train was held up, snow—’

‘Oh, there’s always some excuse from women,’ East said. Unfairly, of course, but Bella did not need Verrall to scold East for it. She laughed and demanded to know why they were not going to do the golf sketch at the David.

‘Nobody golfs,’ Verrall said. ‘They don’t speak the language.’

Groaning, East rolled over and sat up. ‘Wouldn’t get a single laugh. Out, wenchling! I disrobe. And take that to your mama.’ His hand whipped out to toss a white paper bag of opera fudge. East always had something sweet about him, it was one way he acquired his lady friends. He did not usually waste it on them, though.

‘Sybil’s made her sad, the candy might cheer her up,’ he said, and Bella understood: he was sacrificing his bait for the good of the melodrama. Fair enough.

Her Beaux Yeux

Aurora inspected the dressing table, wiping it down so she could lay out, and polished the mirror. Reaching the edge of it she found a picture drawn in pencil on the wall: King of Whiskeys. She laughed, for the first time in a long while. So Jimmy had played here too. He had been so kind, campaigning for them, sending the money. Did it mean he was no longer associated with Eleanor Masefield? She had no one to ask, and had not liked to put such a bald question in her letter of thanks. She opened her dressing-box and took out the silver bracelet he had given her long ago.

The cast had rehearsed in Edmonton, but when the audition began that evening with the audience in place (breathing, sighing, emanating their anxiety for the innocent Miss Sylvia), Aurora found it different. Perhaps it was the deep golden warmth of the lit stage in darkness, or the costume slowing her movement. She had not worn the peau de soie for rehearsals—its heavy, luxurious skirt, trailing after her as she moved, gave greater gravity to the scene. She was brought to sudden attention by East’s line, which she had heard a thousand times:

MALVERLEY: (aside) She maddens me! But her beaux yeux will not make me marry her …

That hissing whisper seemed to ring in her ears, hanging in the empty atmosphere above the stage. If Sybil’s information about the San Francisco wife was true, then the line was true—Mayhew had not married her. The world ran still and cold. She turned, and the turning seemed to take an age.

SYLVIA: What’s that you say, Mr. Malverley?

The audience tensed and gasped at her hauteur—

MALVERLEY: (hastily) I say I long for your sake to marry you! To smooth life’s path, to heal the wounds that fate has dealt you, and your sainted mother.

SYLVIA: Sir! You deal with me, here, not my mother. Let us leave her out of our—negotiations. I believe I will have a glass of wine, if you will join me?

—and they were hers from that moment, as she worked to bring about Malverley’s ruin. As she sang the aria for him and drew him in, as she doctored his wine, as the plot worked its tortuous and silly way, she felt herself unfreezing and coming to a fine and useful heat. Use this, she thought, use this.

The Only Possible

Verrall watched the nonsensical Casting Couch from the wings, enthralled. Half believing it. Having drugged the wine, Aurora bent to frisk old East—who was as ticklish as the devil and always had to bite his cheek not to giggle as he was searched. Right then, in that ludicrous moment of melodrama, Verrall realized that he must love Aurora. The only woman, ever, the only possible. He saw it very clearly.

Sad, he told himself, drawing a slow breath. An odd stick of a thing like himself, and too old, besides; and then there was East. You couldn’t abandon a fellow.

But Aurora, the lovely girl. Everything about her fine and sweet; the vile stinking Mayhew ought to be bullwhipped or worse. Look at her, suffering there—ah, but she had the letter and was reading it, released from bondage, on fire with relief and joy. He found himself overcome, and had to turn aside to blow his nose, quietly but