The Little Shadows - By Marina Endicott Page 0,169

back, and we let nobody bother you.’

‘The matinee,’ Aurora said.

Tatiana laughed. ‘You are true vaudeville, my dear.’

Bella was the first to see, running up after the rehearsal. She gasped in mingled horror, for the bloody cloths still heaped against the wall, and adoration, for the tiny squeeze-faced lump that Aurora held so lightly. ‘It is real! It has come, then!’

Aurora laughed, a whisper of a laugh, at least. ‘Real, oh yes—look at his hand.’

Bella leaned close to study the furled fist and the furled eyelashes, the perfection of the blistered lip. ‘What kind is it?’ she asked.

‘It is a boy, it is my boy.’ Tears welled out of Aurora’s eyes and Bella seemed more shocked at that than at the blood.

Then Clover was at the door, with Mama. Who took in the scene and looked around for help, or air, and crumpled without sound into an untidy faint.

New

Everybody in the company came round to see the baby, the news having zipped through the backstage like a quick fuse. Madame Tatiana and Clover had tidied the room remarkably well, Aurora found when she looked up from staring at the darling creature. She had not expected to like it so much—it was new, to see the thing that had been growing for so long inside her, but not frightening, because he was so instantly a person. He was not a stranger, but she did not know his name yet, and when East prodded her for one she only laughed and shrugged.

‘Not George East, at any rate,’ Verrall told him severely.

Julius bent to peer at the red thing and announced a solid likeness to Fitzjohn Mayhew, which was undeniable, but no one else was rude enough to bring it up again.

Clover and Bella did the matinee without her, but Aurora insisted on doing the moon number in the evening show. ‘All I have to do is sit,’ she said. ‘I am not wounded, only a little shocked.’

Turned inside out was more like it, but able to sing. Eager to sing.

Mama had recovered from her faint and turned to frenzied cleaning, the one anchor she could hold to. She saw a likeness to Harry (so frequently that Aurora found herself superstitiously unable to use Harry even as the boy’s second name), and drove herself into a frenzy watching over the baby—all with an eldritch air of stability, entirely invented.

The worst of it was that Mama had conceived a ferocious jealousy of Madame Tatiana and seemed to feel that Aurora had preferred to have another woman help her with the birth. Aurora felt guilty enough already for not having told her of the secret, but on the other hand, here was an excellent illustration of why she had chosen to keep silent.

For two days she watched as Mama cleaned, murmured to herself of lists and tasks, and smiled perpetually—showing off her new tooth, though she said she found its unaccustomed presence odd in her mouth. The only respite was when she held the still-unnamed baby. Then she fell quiet, seeming to be in a relapse of mourning Harry. She suffered frequent palpitations, needing to sit, just for a moment, begging their understanding. Aurora was no longer merely impatient with her: it was difficult to manage the baby with Mama bleating and getting in the way. She suffered bouts of unstoppable hiccups—her embarrassment heaping more fire on Aurora’s head.

Nobody slept much, with the new one in the bed between Aurora and Clover (a less thrashy sleeper than Bella), and the necessity for keeping him quiet to placate Mrs. Jewett, who although reminded vehemently by Mama of Aurora’s married state, had not bargained for an infant and said as much, twice.

Pole-axed

A week later, worn out from long days and nights of fretting, Flora sank for a moment onto the dressing-room couch before the evening show, wishing she could wake the baby to have an excuse to lie and hold him. But then Madame Tatiana came snooping about, and how could she lie down when that woman was there, thinking her neglectful no doubt for not realizing that her own daughter, her own—

The anxiousness became so extreme that Flora had to rise, and bustle to the drying rack to fluff out the girls’—what?—sleeves. The other fly-bite was that she had been forgetting words, quite simple words like sleeves. She smoothed her blue linen, and pinned up her hair in the mirror. Mouth sagging, no prettiness left in her. She could kill Hattie Walker for remembering her, and even