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