by Megan Chance
I tried to roll away; it was useless, and he was a madman, and as he hit me again, I thought it was truly over; I could not escape him. He screamed, “I shall send you straight to hell!”
The door bounced open; someone came racing into the room, someone grabbing Nathan, pulling him off me. I heard him crash into the dresser; I heard him scream. I saw Bonnie hovering in the doorway, “I let them in, sir. They said—” Her gasp when she saw me. “Mrs. Langley?”
And then there was a face above mine—Bea’s face, her dark eyes large and worried.
“Damn him,” she said, and then her arm was behind my head, helping me sit up. “Are you all right, Ginny? Christ, why did you do such a stupid thing? Are you all right?”
I nodded, wiping the blood from my nose with a shaking hand.
“I told you he would kill you,” she whispered, and she pulled me hard into her side.
There was Sebastian DeWitt standing beyond—the one who had dispatched Nathan—and now he strode over, as concerned as she was. “Thank God we got here as quickly as we did.”
None of us were watching him. I should have known to watch him. He’d been clever all his life. My head was throbbing. I tasted blood. My left eye would not quite focus. When I saw a movement beyond DeWitt I thought it was the curtain blowing from the open window; it took me a moment to see that it wasn’t that at all, but the white of Nathan’s nightshirt, and by then it was too late. I heard the slide of the dresser drawer and Bonnie’s scream. DeWitt spun around and went stock-still.
Nathan stood unsteadily, the gun he kept in that desk drawer in his hand, wavering from DeWitt to Bea, who knelt on the bed beside me, her arm around my shoulders, to me. He was full of laudanum; I wonder if he even knew who he meant to shoot.
He pointed the gun at me, smiling, skull-like, his lips drawn back over his teeth, feral. “Which is Ginny?” Singsong, and then pointed the gun at her. “Which one Bea? Or are you both spirits come to take me to hell?”
“Langley,” DeWitt warned.
“You don’t want to do this, Nathan,” Bea said steadily, her voice reverberating against my cheek. “We’ve come to help you—”
“To help me straight to hell,” he said.
“No,” she insisted. “Please, Nathan. Put the gun down.”
“Which are you? Ginny? Bea? Or am I seeing double?” Nathan laughed; once again, he pointed the gun at me.
DeWitt stepped toward him slowly, hands outstretched. “She’s right. You don’t want to do this. Give me the gun, Langley—”
I heard the blast; I saw the flare of the gunpowder, blinding—it seared into my brain along with the pain, exploding through my shoulder, slamming me back into the bed.
I heard Bea’s scream as if from far away. Then she was bending over me, pressing her hand to my shoulder, her hands red with blood—they should not be so red, should they?
My vision blurred, but I saw Nathan with a sharp clarity as he lifted the gun again, aiming at her. I opened my mouth, trying to warn her. So fast, too fast. And then a blur of movement, blocking my view of my husband, at the same time I heard the second shot, so loud it echoed in my ears.
Bea gasped and jerked.
Beyond her, Sebastian DeWitt sagged to his knees, swayed, and thudded to the floor.
Bea screamed, “Bastian! No!” and let go of me, flinging herself at him. He struggled to get to his elbows—still alive, thank God. Still alive. But … there was so much blood. His shirt … it had been so white and now … there shouldn’t be so much blood, should there?
His hand went to his chest. “He … shot me,” he said, this wondering voice. He brought his hand away again, fingers covered with blood, and stared at it, and then he said, “Bea?” and then he crumpled.
Bea cried out in anguish. She tore at his shirt, pressing on the wound, screaming at Bonnie, “Get a doctor! Send for a goddamned doctor!” Then, pleading, desperate, “Bastian, no. No, don’t die. You can’t. Bastian, please. Please, I love you. Don’t leave me—”
“Dear God.” Nathan’s voice now. He was pale as death. His eyes were blank. His hands shook. “He shouldn’t have stepped in the way! He shouldn’t have!” And then, “What have I done? Ginny?”
Bea’s sobs echoed. But Nathan wasn’t looking at her or Sebastian DeWitt as he lifted the gun. He was looking at me.
The third blast reverberated through the room.
I felt the splatter against my face, warm and wet. Bonnie screamed, “Mr. Langley!”
But Nathan was already past hearing.
Chapter Thirty-nine
He’d been trying to save her, trying to save both of us. The scene played out in my mind like the worst nightmare, a tragedy in three acts, and my eyes were blurry with tears when I opened them. I hoped she would be there to tell me it wasn’t true, that he had somehow survived.
But it wasn’t Bea who met my gaze. It was my father.
I felt groggy and sick with pain, the aftertaste of laudanum heavy on my tongue, but even so, Papa looked aged almost beyond recognition, exhausted, shadowed circles beneath his eyes, worry lining his face, along with the ravages of grief. When he saw I was awake, he grabbed my uninjured hand, but the movement jostled the bandage and sling on my other arm, and I moaned.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing my hand again quickly. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry. Would you like more laudanum?”
“You’re here,” I said. And I knew it was something I should have been worried about, but I wasn’t. I didn’t care about him just now. “Where’s Bea?”
My father frowned. “Bea? Do you mean that actress?”
“Where is she?”
“Gone home, I imagine. She was here, but some friends of hers arrived to take her away. She was quite exhausted. Apparently she’d been watching over you until I arrived last night.”
“And … is he all right? Tell me he’s all right.”
My father’s expression contorted. “I’m sorry to tell you that Nathan’s dead, my dear. In the end, I don’t think he knew what he was about. Or perhaps he did and that was why … well, he’s gone. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean him. I meant … Mr. DeWitt.”
Another frown. “That playwright? Oh yes. He’s gone as well, regrettably. I’m told he got in the way. What was he doing here, Ginny?”
I was too tired, too hurt. I could not keep the tears from rolling down my cheeks. I looked away from my father, toward the windows with their chintz curtains. My longing swelled to tighten my throat. “He was our … future,” I managed.
“My dear … I think you should have more laudanum.” He reached for the bottle on the bedside table.
I raised my good hand to stop him. “I don’t want that. I want Bea.”
He frowned. “You’re overset. Here now … take the medicine.”
“I’m not overset. You don’t know … you don’t know anything.”
“There’s no need to explain now.” His voice was soothing, cajoling, as if he spoke to a child, and I fought the fog of grief and pain and said the lie Bea and I had agreed upon. I could explain away questions later.
“I hit my head in the fire,” I said dully. “I didn’t remember … anything. And then … Nathan thought I was … a ghost.”
“He meant to kill you, she said. That actress said he tried to kill the both of you.”
“Yes. I don’t remember very much. It was all very … confusing.” Again, I turned away.
Papa sighed. Then he said, “There’s time enough to sort it out. The police want to speak to you, but I’ve told them they must wait. In the meantime, I’ve made arrangements to take you home.”
“Home?”
“Back to Chicago,” he said gently. “I’ve been very worried about you, Geneva, but thankfully you seem … well, better than I’d been led to believe. Nathan thought … he implied …”
I met my father’s gaze. “I wasn’t going mad. It was Nathan.”
Papa said grimly, “Yes, I see that now.
I hear he made quite a stir these last few weeks. But it’s all over now, Ginny. The doctor says you should be ready to travel within the week.”
My resentment flooded back through my pain, the thing he’d been willing to do, the way he’d trusted my husband. And I knew what it would be like if I let him take me back to Chicago. I would be the widowed daughter, my behavior circumscribed, my every move scrutinized. Because there had been the possibility of commitment before, even without Nathan’s lies, and that could not be undone. It would forever be the shadow between us.
No, it was time to become what I’d meant to become. Otherwise, Sebastian DeWitt’s death meant nothing. And that was something I could not allow.
“I’m staying here,” I said. “In Seattle.”
“That’s the laudanum talking,” Papa said. “We’ll speak of such things later. Now you should rest.”
“It’s not the laudanum. And I won’t change my mind. I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay.”
He looked so shocked I might have laughed any other time. “Ginny, you can’t be serious.”
“I’m very serious,” I said, and I thought of Sebastian DeWitt, the flash of his white shirt as he took Nathan’s bullet, the way he’d died in her arms. The pain in her voice as she’d called out his name. “There’s … something I have to do.”
“Something you have to do? What could that possibly be?”
I met his gaze evenly. “I have to make a star.”
Chapter Forty
Beatrice
Now that it was over, it seemed inevitable that it would turn out as it had—like every damn tragedy I’d ever acted, where, had any one thing not happened, the whole thing could have been avoided. Romeo hesitating just a bit longer so that Friar Laurence’s letter could get to him, Oedipus agreeing that Laius had the damn right of way at the crossroads, Penelope Justis deciding to get some sleep instead of sneaking through the dead of night to show the spirit to Barnabus one last time.
“I mean for it to be a tragedy,” he’d said. And he had made it so. As brilliantly as he’d done everything else.
Ginny’s father stayed until the day after Nathan’s funeral, and the two of them seemed reconciled enough—at least he agreed to restore her funds. They buried Nathan Langley in a plot here in Seattle because Ginny meant for people to see the act of her grieving. She paid a fortune for an elaborate headstone and cried and beat her breast, and the fact that she was half-dead herself with pain and loss of blood only helped people to believe it—or at least, no one said otherwise in my hearing. There were plenty of tales going around about it. No one cared for the truth as she told it: how she’d hit her head in the fire and woke with no memory of who she was until that night, and how she’d enlisted Sebastian’s help to take her to the house and Nathan had been so crazy he’d shot her and Sebastian both before he committed suicide. It was a good story, but people found the others better. There was the rumor about how she’d gone to San Francisco the morning of the fire and Nathan had known all about it and pretended she was dead so he could be rid of her. Or the one of how she’d fled Nathan’s growing insanity and come back with Sebastian to find the two of us in bed together, and Sebastian had got in the way. A third about Nathan and Sebastian fighting a duel over me when Ginny returned unexpectedly.
All equally good. It would settle down to some truth sooner or later, but in the meantime, she and I were infamous, and I could see by the way Ginny’s eyes sparkled that she liked that, and there were times when I didn’t mind it either.
We all live with illusions, I guess. Even I had, though I’d never suspected it until we buried Sebastian. Lucius took all the receipts from that night and asked if anyone minded if he used it to buy a headstone for “our sadly lost genius,” and though I expected most of the company to object, no one did, and they all came to the funeral. Aloys spoke some very nice words about beautiful fallen angels and Shakespeare’s spirit taking Sebastian to his breast, and I could not keep from remembering the words I’d said that didn’t help, the I love you that couldn’t save him, and Aloys put his arm around me and let me cry into his shoulder and whispered in a rough voice, “You must let us comfort you, my dear. We are your family,” and it was a shock to realize he meant it.
The others were the same. For weeks after, I felt as if I moved in a fog, and Jack hovered about me like a damn nurse, his eyes dark with worry, vying with Brody to see which of them could make me laugh. Mrs. Chace brought me a bag of hard candy because she said she knew I loved it and “sometimes little comforts help.” Their obvious affection surprised me. I think it was even what saved me.
And then … Ginny. She was the only one who really knew what had happened, who knew what we’d done, though we never spoke of it, and sometimes it was hard to look at her and see myself in her eyes, and sometimes I couldn’t look away, and the connection to her was so strong it felt as if we’d somehow been woven together, and I was surprised that it wasn’t a feeling I wanted to go away.
Strange, isn’t it, how things come back to haunt you? The little ironies God or whoever keeps in store to abuse you with when you least expect it? Because I hadn’t liked her and she hadn’t liked me and yet here we were, and it was because of her that I had everything I’d wished for.
Well … didn’t I?
Chapter Forty-one
Geneva
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE, MARCH 1890
I could not take my eyes from her. Such pure perfection she was; such restrained sorrow and rage as she trod the boards of the rebuilt Phoenix, as she raised her dark eyes to the heavens and swore vengeance for her sister’s death. Every gaze in the house was fixed upon her, rapt, captivated, there was hardly a breath that could be heard. Even the gallery gods were so quiet one barely remembered they were there, and someone hushed the lozenge boy before he could say the first words of his sales patter.
The audiences had been this way every night since Penelope Justis, or Revenge of the Spirit had opened, and I had not missed a single performance. I had helped her sew the deep blue gown she wore—the finest velvet we could find—and she had laughed at the gold embroidery I’d paid a dressmaker to embellish it with and said it was fit for a queen rather than the baker’s daughter that was Penelope Justis. But she’d worn it, and I’d seen the lilt of pride that came into her face and was glad to have put it there.
The crowds came because of the notoriety; as they took their seats, I never failed to hear someone comment how closely the play was said to mirror reality, though of course they could not know how deep the resemblance truly went. They came for that, but they stayed because of her. Because she brought Penelope alive, and there was no one still caring about Nathan Langley when it was over, and I took as much satisfaction from that as she did.
I remembered the first time I’d seen her, playing Pure Polly’s sister in Black Jack, the Bandit King of the Border. It was the night that had started all the others; the night Nathan had seen her and realized how she could be of use to him. But more than that, it was the night that I recognized her, the night I somehow knew to mark her, and that was what I could not forget. A year ago now, but it seemed a hundred years since I’d known her. I hardly remembered a time when she was not in my life, or when I did not spend the afternoons after rehearsal with her in quiet companionship, or watch her sparkle as she circulated among the friends who came nightly to our house—the company, of course, and whatever artist or writer or actor happened to be in town and one or two members of society—the Readings, of course, and, to my surprise, Mrs. Orion Denny, who’d been drawn by the genius of Sebastian DeWitt’s play and turned out to be rather a kindred spirit. But these were not salons. What need had I of salons, when I had friends to talk and laugh with? When I had Bea?
Tonight, as always, when Barnabus shot Penelope and then himself—and Aloysius Metairie had never met a death scene he didn’t love—the audience exploded in a riot of applause and Bravos, leaping to their feet, requiring curtain call after curtain ca
ll. I left my seat then, pushing past those still standing, making my way past the salon and down the steps and out into a night heavy with the smell of construction—dirt and brick and stone—even through the rain. I dodged in through the backstage door, pressing myself against the wall to stay out of the way of the stagehands, most of whom gave me a quick smile. I heard the applause still, reverberating to backstage, but there came Susan down the stairs, and then Brody, both sweating but looking supremely satisfied, and Mrs. Chace red-faced and waddling, and Mr. Galloway with his perpetual limp from the damage done to his back by the fire. Then Aloys, who stopped and smiled at me, raising a dark brow in question, and I said,
“More perfect than any night before. You do know how to die, sir.”
“Did you like the twitch at the end? Or did you think it too much?”
“It could not have been better.”
“You are the perfect patron, Ginny.” He took my hand, bending over it with a deep bow. “Always complimentary.”
“And never stinting on the money,” I teased.
“For God’s sake, move out of the way, Aloys,” came Jack’s voice. “You’ve garnered enough compliments. Now it’s time for mine.” And then he was pushing past Aloysius, swooping me into his arms. “Well, Ginny? Was I not perfection itself?”
“Your head’s too big for me to get around, Jack,” Bea said wryly from behind him. “Will you move or do I have to deflate it?”
He let me go with a smile. “Careful, Bea. You’ll spoil our patroness’s good opinion of me.”
“You needn’t worry over that, Jack, as she has no good opinion to spoil,” she retorted.
I laughed. “We’ll argue about it over absinthe. Where’s Lucius?”
“In his office, I believe, going over receipts,” Jack said.
“Tell him to come tonight, would you please? I’d like to discuss a set change with him.”
The others went off, and Bea came to stand beside me, leaning against the wall. She went quiet, a little too thoughtful, that thoughtfulness I couldn’t bear.