Costumed mimicry—Flora, you was the best fancy dancer on any circuit from Ottawa to Corpus Christi. And you won a piano for dancing, in Minneapolis, just before you left us!’
‘I did, but it’s sold now, had to go. Left without a sou!’
That was not true. Aurora hated her for saying it, when Papa had tried so hard about money. It was just that the teacherage was not theirs and naturally they’d had to leave when the new man came, after Papa died—and everything cost so much—but they could always go to Qu’Appelle and stay with Papa’s brother, only Mama would not. No reason they couldn’t earn their way, she had said, and better. But she should not talk about Papa like that.
Aurora could feel her huge heart pounding, but half of her knew it was not for these small irritations, but for the terror of upstairs, and Mr. Cleveland, and getting the gig. And they wouldn’t be paid less than a hundred a week; Mama would have to hold the line.
‘Well, we’re on our uppers, but the girls are greatly talented and we’re going to make our way very-nicely-thank-you.’ Mama ruffled her skirts and gave Aurora a chin-up look. ‘You could be getting dressed, you girls: dodge behind the screen, nobody will mind.’
Clover was in a dream, so Aurora slipped into the space behind the cloth screen first, took off her long black skirt and hung it over a chair, fluffing out her shirtwaist into the baby-doll dress and pinafore of their costume. The stove-oil smell made her feel both comforted, because it was like the teacherage, and sick.
She mmmed and hummed and worked her mouth in their exercises. There was not more than twenty dollars left in Mama’s purse. One more night in the hotel here, then the fare back to Calgary. Or write to Uncle Chum in Qu’Appelle, begging for help.
Aurora breathed slowly. She stopped listening to everything else and became still.
Music of the Spheres
Out on the stairs, cold and cramped, Bella sat thinking of the dark staircase the Twelve Dancing Princesses travelled down when they went out to dance all night, dancing the soles right off their shoes. Her own feet felt pinched, but only Aurora had new boots. It was fair—Aurora was the eldest, after all, and maybe tight boots would keep one’s feet from growing too gigantic.
‘Have a bit of chocolate,’ Sybil was saying to Mama in the dressing room, and the prospect almost made Bella go back in. But she would have to share, and she disliked that very much, and her mouth still remembered the hotel stew. She stayed on the step. The magician’s patter that pittered down the stairwell sounded stilted. She could go watch from the wings. The other door at the bottom of the stairs, though, would be the tunnel under the seats to the lobby, like the one in the Prince Albert theatre. That would be better; she could pretend to be audience. She opened the wooden-slat door. Inside was a dirt-packed tunnel, a mine shaft. It was dark.
She stepped in, meaning to leave the door open, but it had a spring attached, like a front-porch door. Nothing to brace it with, so she would have to feel her way along the dirt wall. She stood inside the closed door to test if she could bear the dark. No, she could not—she opened the door. But the thought came to her that if she was brave enough, they would get the gig. So then she had to.
This cold-earth smell is what it will be like inside my grave, she thought. What it is like in Papa’s grave, and Harry’s. She saw Harry’s small cold face, and how greatly still he had been. The floor was uneven, spills of dirt and pieces of lumber lying along it. Her fingers moved slowly over the dirt wall, scraping sometimes on a rock, jamming up against a beam every six feet or so. To calm herself she thought the hall was perhaps sixty feet long, so that would mean ten of those beams. Or maybe it was a hundred feet, and she could not imagine what the arithmetic for that would be. She stopped. Pretty soon she would be dead too, and packed in earth. There was no sound down here, none. Her own breathing, and a swimming sound. Papa had said it was the Music of the Spheres: you could only hear it when you were quite alone, when all other noise