Chance kept his poker winnings in a soft-skin money belt beneath his shirt. He wondered briefly what his brother's reaction would be to his spending all their cash on Fancy, then dismissed the concern... Hart would understand he couldn't possibly stand by and let some fool win Fancy out from under their noses. He had more than four hundred dollars in his money belt—Bandana had more. In a pinch, he'd win the rest by whatever means were necessary.
"One hundred and fifty," he heard the deep voice of John Henderson, the town banker, boom.
"One hundred and seventy-five," Chance called out in retaliation.
"What you fixin' to do with her if you're the high bidder?" Bandana asked, tugging at Chance's elbow. The miner's voice sounded husky, troubled.
"What do you think I'll do with her?" Chance responded, without looking down.
Bandana searched Chance's face, then turned his gaze back onto the boisterous crowd.
"Two hundred is the bid, gentlemen," Jewel shouted above the din.
"Two-fifty," called an elegant-looking business-suited man at Chance's right.
"Three hundred dollars," Chance countered. A murmur ran through the room and a number of heads shook negatively. There would be fewer bidders in the running from this point on.
"Three hundred dollars for this gorgeous little missy," Jewel called out over the hushed crowd. "Gentlemen, just think of the indescribable pleasures awaiting you this very night if you are the lucky man to be the first to taste the nectar of this sweet virgin flower. Just think of all you could teach this little lady..."
"Three-fifty!" shouted Henderson, throwing a significant look in Chance's direction.
"Four hundred," Chance responded, returning Henderson's appraising stare.
"Five hundred dollars," said a scruffy-looking miner near the front of the room.
"Five-fifty," Henderson shouted hastily.
"Six hundred," called Chance, wondering how much money Bandana might be willing to contribute to the kitty.
The bid bounced back and forth across the room, tension rising with each escalation. At eight hundred dollars Henderson hesitated, then turned away from the bidding with a rueful smile.
"I hope you enjoy your investment," he said to Chance as he passed by him on his way to the door.
"Well, now," called Jewel, appraising the hesitancy on the faces of the other bidders and delighted by the prospect of Chance's being the winner. "It looks to me as if this handsome young gentleman has just bought hisself a virgin."
A murmur of excitement rose in the audience as she raised the gavel to strike it on the bar.
"Going once..." she called mirthfully. "Going twice..."'
"One thousand dollars!" McBain yelled out in a rock-hard voice.
Chance turned an astonished look on the little man at his side. "What in the hell are you doing?"
"Savin' you from doin' somethin' we'd all live to regret, you young fool," McBain snapped back.
Jewel dropped her hammer, yelled, "Sold! And the next drink is on the house!"
"Just a goddamned minute there!" Bandana shouted, in a tone that cut through the pandemonium. Faces all over the room followed him as he elbowed his way to the bar. Bandana pulled the leather poke from inside his shirt and laid the gold dust on the bar next to Jewel's hand with a flourish.
"Kindly convey my money and my good wishes to the young lady in question, Miz Jewel," he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by all, even if the room hadn't stilled so you could hear a heartbeat. "And tell her for me that her virtue is worth one hell of a lot more than a thousand dollars, and that an old pal of hers sends his love."
"If you could get it up, you could give her yer love yerself," called out a drunken voice at a front table.
"You shut your filthy mouth!" Jewel spat. She turned to say something to Bandana, but he and Chance were already halfway through the swinging doors.
Rufus slid a whiskey into Jewel's hand and poured one for himself with elaborate dignity.
"Mighty classy little bastard," said the black man before he downed his drink in a swallow.
Jewel nodded, too startled to speak. No matter how long she stayed in this business, every once in a while a man could still do something that surprised her.
Bandana had thought of asking to see Fancy—trying to find out the nature of her predicament. But she'd chosen to leave them and to keep her troubles to herself. He would respect her need for both privacy and escape; if she'd only asked him, he would have given her the money anyway.
He heard Chance hurrying after him, but Bandana had no desire to trade speculation with him just now—no desire to talk to anyone at all. A good stiff whiskey and a bed in the stable, alone with old Bessie, were all he wanted in the world tonight.
Bandana waved Chance away and kept on walking.
PART V: INTO THE HURRICANE
Fancy's Journey
"Nature is a mother." Bandana McBain
Chapter 38
Magda strode across the yard from where the wagon had deposited her, the supplies from town slung over her shoulder in a string-mesh bag she'd made for this purpose. The sunlight glinted off the distant mountains in a dazzling silver-white radiance that seemed to her the light of heaven. Never in Romania had she experienced this precise brilliance that could injure your eyes if you stared at it too long. She found it cleansing, healing, intensely spiritual.
Wes was better—infinitely better than might have been expected considering the extent of the consumption that had damaged his lungs. Only Magda knew how close to the Angel of Death Jarvis had come, for she had seen it in the cards, that desperate configuration that presages doom, unless a miracle intervenes.
Now the second crisis would have to be faced—that of a man who has lost his livelihood. Already, with his returning strength had come the irritability and the discontent.
The circus was done, the animals gone except for her pet panther, which she refused to abandon in his old age, the people scattered to their individual destinies. Only Gitalis remained, faithful, cranky, dissatisfied genius that he was. He and she had come to terms with each other, through Wes' two years of illness, but by unspoken decree neither let on that anything had changed. She would have missed the verbal sparring and occasional sting— and without the little man, Jarvis would be in worse mental and emotional condition than he was.
As long as the dwarf lived with them, Jarvis had an entourage —he was still an impresario, never mind one temporarily without company. Minus Gitalis, he would be just another unemployed middle-aged actor, used up and with no certain future.
Magda welcomed the hour away from the sickroom; she needed time to think and to formulate a plan to galvanize Jarvis into action. There was nothing as debilitating for a man as unemployment, and he was not a creature to be kept caged and idle long. Within the month, Jarvis would be strong enough to be pushed from the nest, but first she must decide what to push him toward. Theatrical life was physically depleting. Even with the Rocky
Mountain air to heal them, Jarvis' lungs would never again be whole. But what else could a man of his special and copious gifts turn his hand to in these primitive mountains? There was no part he could not play, but it would be important to find one worthy of him, for a man employed beneath his level was an emasculated man, and her own future and Gitalis' were inextricably intertwined with his.
The crystal was blank about their future, and the cards mute. It happened sometimes, usually with her own physical depletion. All would change once April brought its life-renewing energies.
Magda straightened her body in an imitation of her usual litheness and sniffed the tingling air. Soon it would be spring.
Jarvis brooded, sitting in the small back bedroom, and pulling on his boots. "No one understands my suffering," he told Gitalis with exaggerated disgruntlement. "Everyone thinks my lot is easy."
"We all have enough strength to bear with the misfortunes of others," Gitalis replied.
Wes smiled, his bent-over posi
tion hiding his expression.
"I have been deserted by Destiny, my friend."
"You were born deserted, as were we all," said the dwarf with no sympathy whatsoever. "We make our own destiny."
"Magda would quarrel with that premise."
"Perhaps not," Gitalis responded enigmatically. Wes' mouth twitched into a secret smile—he knew the little man had come to like Magda more than he could let on and still save face.
" 'O God!" Wes cried suddenly, standing and addressing the dwarf as if he were an audience. " 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.' "
"They were not bad dreams, my liege," replied Gitalis with a derisive snort. "They were your life."
Jarvis laughed heartily at that, slapped his friend on the shoulder, and moved toward the door of the bedroom.
"I vote we show this tiny prison room a fair pair of heels, my friend. I feel the need of fresh air and sunshine and the company of others."
"You 'dare the vile contagion of the day'?"
"I do, and with unfeigned enthusiasm. It's time we go abroad, good sir, and try to set our sights on some gainful employment. I fear the treasury could bear some restocking."
"Nothing new in that," Gitalis said, but it was obvious, as he scurried about the room gathering his hat, coat, and walking stick, that he was elated at the prospect of going out.
Finding Magda was far more difficult than Fancy had imagined. She left Jewel and Oro behind the morning after the auction, with a tentative promise to come back in six months, although the fact that Bandana had learned of her predicament made her doubt she would ever return to the Gulch. At least not until she could do so in style and repay him his kindness.
Denver was a wild, open town in the early 1870s. Saloons and bawdy houses filled rutted streets. Cowboys, drovers, railroadmen shared the dusty thoroughfares with millionaires, made newly rich by railroads, commerce, gold or silver.
The iron tracks had reached the mile-high city in '70, and ever since then the town had burst into the extraordinary bustle of a boom in the making. Railroads had reconstructed everything to their own convenience—shops, houses, plants, breweries, and flour mills followed the tracks that provided for the business being brought into the newly constructed city.
A streetcar line had been laid, with tracks branching off in every direction to transport a potpourri of immigrants speaking languages as diverse as Babel: Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Poles, and Russians in one neighborhood, Germans in the next. The inevitable Irish, left over from the railroad gangs; even Chinese seeking a place of refuge from the persecution that had pursued them ever since they'd been imported as railroad workers and deposited willy-nilly wherever the work stopped. Of course, there were those who felt the exclusion of the Chinese was justified, for they had brought with them the curse of the poppy flower, opium. The temptation to experience its raptures had wrought havoc among miners whose lonely, desperate lives made them easy prey to opium's oblivion.
Fancy had scoured the theatre district and the offices of impresarios looking for her friends, for three weeks, to no avail. She had been to the newspaper offices and pored over back issues, in hopes of finding one of them mentioned in a players' notice. It was growing harder not to feel despair.
The small boardinghouse in which she'd secured a tiny room, inexpensive though it was, would eat up her money quickly if she didn't find them soon. She loathed sharing a bed with the toothless old granny who was the only other female boarder, but she could endure anything if only there was hope of finding Magda.
Fancy was walking dejectedly down Blake Street, after another futile effort in the theatre district, when she spotted the dwarf, a small, stalwart shape in court jester's motley, hawking tickets on a street corner.
"Donovan's Burlesque!" Gitalis shouted in a diction meant for Shakespeare. "Gaudy girls and minstrel melodies. The last of the red-hot, wide-open burlesque palaces, where real-life pleasures and voluptuous ladies fascinate the heart as well as other parts of the anatomy. Where beauty, song, and dance combine to scintillate and educate. All for two bits, ladies and gentlemen. A paltry price to pay for such enticement." Then he began it all again.
Oh, my poor dear Gitalis, what ill fortune can have brought you to this? she wondered. Fancy forced the joy of finding him to push all lesser thoughts away. "Gitalis!" she shouted, and the dwarf whirled toward the sound. Then, without moving from the spot he stood in, he opened his arms wide to her and she saw as she ran toward him the tears running down his painted cheeks.
Fancy and Gitalis hugged and danced each other around in a circle. Where have you been? You look wonderful! You're so thin! Where is Wes? Where is my Magda? I thought I'd never find you all!
Gitalis shrugged off the painted sandwich board that imprisoned him.
"I'll take you home this instant! Jarvis and Magda will be beside themselves that you are found."
"But don't you work all day?"
"They expect me to prostitute myself until dark, my blossom, or until the tickets are gone, whichever delightful happenstance comes first, but they must learn that life is sometimes filled with disappointment."
Fancy laughed at his irreverence.
"But then they won't pay you."
"A depressing truth, but a truth nonetheless."
"Then we mustn't leave, Gitalis. Give me a handful of tickets and I'll take them to another corner. How can they object to having two salesmen instead of one?"
Gitalis considered the offer gravely.
"A woman wise as she is fair," he said at last, and taking off his ribboned hat with a flourish, he bowed elaborately, but peeked up at her, challenge in his eye.
"What poem do I call to mind, my pretty?"
Fancy thought a moment, then responded, gleeful that she'd remembered.
"The jester doffed his cap and bells," she said in her best theatre voice, "And stood the mocking court before; They could not see the bitter smile Beneath the painted grin he wore."
Gitalis, proud of his pupil, supplied the next verse:
"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool That did his will; but Thou, O Lord. Be merciful to me, a fool!"
Passersby, who had ignored the dwarf or laughed at him, now paused to wonder if perhaps Donovan's Burlesque had more to offer than they'd imagined. Before the hour was out, Fancy and Gitalis had performed a one-act play, seven soliloquies, and countless poetry recitations. The tickets were gone and they were walking arm in arm toward the wagon that would take them to the little house where Wes and Magda waited supper, unsuspecting that there would soon be another mouth to feed.
Chapter 39
Fancy didn't prosper in her pregnancy despite Magda's ministrations. The baby felt cranky and restless; Fancy wondered if, in its unborn state, the child knew of its own doubtful origin and fought against its fate.
Nausea persisted long into the sixth month, and a debilitating fatigue dogged her heavy footsteps. Magda watched and doctored —when Fancy awoke with swollen fingers and ankles, she mixed a diuretic of herbs and fed her dried pears and asparagus that she'd put up months before. When Fancy's melancholia sent her teetering into bed, to sob out her loneliness and fears, Magda sat and rubbed the girl's aching back and crooned to her strange lullabies in foreign tongues or told her fairy tales she could someday tell her child.
When she wasn't sick, Fancy was more than content with her life with her circus friends, for she felt loved and safe despite their poverty. She laughed with Gitalis and read aloud to Wes; she reveled in learning again, and in having a chance to use her knowledge. But it was Magda who kept her sane.
"The child will be a female," the Gypsy pronounced with satisfaction. Fancy lay on her back on the floor. Despite her thinness, the girl's belly was so mountainous, she couldn't see her own feet. Magda stood above her, a crystal pendulum swinging counter clockwise in her hand. She had sung an incantation, prayed, and waited until th
e small glittering piece of quartz had begun to quiver and finally swing in a rhythmic circle over the protruding belly.
"I'll probably never be able to get up off the floor to find out if you're right," Fancy said, struggling upward.
"Of course Magda is right. Such things as this are child's play."
"If it's such child's play, why won't you ever tell me anything about my baby?" she asked, delighted Magda had finally relented and told her the gender of the child she carried. The ache in her heart for Chance would be worsened by a son, but a girl could be her friend and companion.
Magda watched Fancy closely before replying. The girl was taking her plight bravely enough, more cheerful than not in the face of a hard pregnancy, no father for the child and no certain plan for the future. Magda had plumbed her own heart for answers; she'd consulted the cards and the stars and the crystals, for Magda knew the means to return the small life that Fancy carried to the Universal Life-force whence it had sprung. But she also knew the karmic consequences of such an act, and would not presume to advise Fancy about her course of action, for that choice, and its consequences for many lifetimes, must be Fancy's own.
"Some knowledge is best left to the future to unravel," Magda said, not ungently. "I wish to place no psychic bees in your bonnet, child." She smiled at Fancy and, seeing her consternation, relented a little.
"I will give you the gift of her name if you wish, now that you know her sex."
"Her name? How can you possibly know her name when I haven't yet had a moment to think of what I want to call her?"
"Foolish child. Your daughter's name was written long ago in the Akashic Record. Have I not told you that the future and the past go on, even as we speak—and all has been written for aeons in the mind of God?"
"Tell me, then. What will she be called?"
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