sing next,’ she hissed.
‘Oh, no,’ Aurora said, surprised. ‘They’ve got plenty here to entertain.’
‘Julius will work it. It’s your best chance for Fitz Mayhew. He’s got an eye for a pretty girl. You go ahead. You can’t say no!’
Aurora could not, of course. Julius had already lumbered up and was talking to the band captain, gesturing back at the table.
But what to sing? Not their Parthenon act; Mayhew might have caught the show. Something different for this crowd. They’ve been riotous, she thought, violent and loud, so we’ll be simple and sad. After the Ball? But it was long and didn’t make sense without all the verses, and she wasn’t sure she and Clover could get through to the last without losing the crowd. And the band didn’t know them, and they had no sides. Julius came back and escorted Clover up to the stage. Bella was nowhere to be seen, but Aurora dared not hesitate or they would lose this chance. She needed something to catch the heart, to catch the attention of this Mayhew. Aurora leaned across to the fiddler and asked him, with her most engaging smile and a small, apologetic, enlisting shrug—what is to be done?—if they could borrow the loan of his violin for just one song. He blushed and handed it over.
‘Songs My Mother,’ she whispered to Clover, who gave her a strange eye back but dutifully tuned the fiddle, plick-plick-plick, swung it under her chin, and with her thin hip, edged behind Aurora into better position for her bow arm to begin the intro. Obedient to the music, the crowd quietened to listen. Aurora sang alone, not too high but rising into alt at the end of each line.
‘Songs my mother taught me,
In the days long vanished;
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished …’
There was nothing to that song: just a little door opened to the mother that you missed so dreadfully, who had loved you as nobody else ever could; and now that she was dead, who would pray for you? As the verse ended Clover went soaring on the fiddle, a yellowy amateurish-looking thing that wept convincingly. Aurora sent the song streaming straight from her sadness, confusion stripped away and only one-bladed pain remaining. Missing you, missing you, the violin sang. Missing Papa’s violin too, which had been sold in the first batch of selling, because they could hope to get another someday. The piano had not gone for another six months. Clover’s bow pulled strongly down and rose sweetly up. Then Aurora, with the verses again, no embellishment:
‘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,