“One more thing, Fortune.”
“Yes?”
Mrs. Watson picked up her book. “Until you do know what you want, you’re a fool if you don’t have some fun finding out.” She paused, then added, “The thing about cats is, they can’t control themselves. Twitch something in front of them the right way and they’ll dive for it, whether they want it or not. It makes them a lot of fun to play with.”
She returned to Frankenstein. The talk was over.
Fortune started for the front of the wagon, then decided to climb through the back instead and walk for a while.
The prairie stretched into the distance. Though Fortune could see nothing that really qualified as a hill, certainly nothing that blocked the seemingly endless view of grass, the land was not as flat as she had been warned—as she could tell by the burning in her calves that came from walking up and down the rolling landscape.
After a while Jamie slid off Dolly, tied her to the back of the wagon, and fell into step beside Fortune. They walked in silence for several minutes. Finally he said, “That was some storm the other night.” Fortune looked at him suspiciously, wondering if he was aware of what had happened.
“I don’t like the wind,” she said at last. “It blows so hard out here.”
“Oh, that wind wasn’t much,” said Jamie. “Last year the wind blew so hard in Busted Heights that one day I watched one of our chickens lay the same egg four times.”
Fortune snorted.
“Her sister was smarter, though,” continued Jamie, as if he had not heard. “She just turned around and opened her mouth and—Pop! Pop! Pop!—laid five eggs in three minutes. Most amazing thing I ever saw.”
“Do you always talk such nonsense?” asked Fortune, trying not to show how amused she was.
He shrugged. “I can be serious if you want.” He waited a moment. Then, as if to prove the statement, he looked at her and said, “Are you in love with Aaron?”
Fortune let out a little gasp. She was not used to such a blunt approach.
Not as surprising, but more distressing, was the fact that she had no idea what the answer was. A week earlier she would have said yes without even thinking about it. Now she realized she could think about it all day and not be sure.
Jamie repeated the question. His voice was gentle, but insistent.
She looked at him closely. His brown eyes seemed larger than ever; they had a soft quality, a vulnerability, that reminded her of a child who has skinned a knee. Yet they held something else, too; something hidden. She had the sudden feeling she could know him for a lifetime yet never know everything about him.
“I don’t know,” she said. Then added, a little peevishly, “And it’s none of your business if I am anyway!”
He nodded. “That’s true. On the other hand, I’m glad you don’t know.”
Fortune wasn’t sure if she was being laughed at. Every time she talked to him, she realized how wrong she had been in her initial perception of him as “just” a small-town boy.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asked casually.
“Once or twice. Of course, there weren’t that many people to fall in love with in Busted Heights. I did have a dog I was crazy about once…
She let out a hearty laugh, half in amusement, half to break the tension. “You’re cracked.”
“I thought that was a requirement for anyone who wanted to be an actor.”
“It probably should be,” she said, half-seriously.
He bent and picked one of the purple flowers that Becky Hyatt had told her was called a shooting star. “A flower for milady!” he said triumphantly, holding it out to her.
Uncertain of what to say, Fortune took the blossom from his hand. Looking down at the flower, she caressed it with her fingertip. The petals were soft and smooth, their colors more shaded and varied than she had realized at first glance.
The wagon creaked and rumbled beside them. The sun was warm but gentle, the air sweet with new growth.
Jamie took the flower from her hand. She was still looking away as he threaded it through her hair, over one ear.
She turned to him and smiled. The sunlight burnished his chestnut hair, touching it with bronze and gold. She had an almost irresistible urge to touch it, to run her fingers through it.
Careful, Fortune Plunkett. Don’t let yourself get carried away!
“What happened to your father?” asked Jamie, as if sensing her discomfort, her need to change the subject.
“He died. Of pneumonia.”
“I’m sorry. Does it bother you to talk about it?”
“No. Yes.” She turned her face away again. “I don’t know.”
She had a sudden vision of her father, tall and handsome, standing on the stage, commanding an audience, overwhelming them with the power and beauty of his voice.
“Are you all right?” asked Jamie.
She took a deep breath, realized that she had stopped walking. “I think so.” She paused. “Do you want to know how it happened?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
She walked in silence for several minutes. She hadn’t spoken with anyone about her father’s death. It was too personal, too painful, too recent. And yet somehow she felt she could trust Jamie to listen without intruding. She felt a sudden need to empty herself of the memory.
“Last year, around Christmastime, we had a fantastically successful week—a new town every night, and a full house in each one of them. You don’t get a lot of weeks like that. We were staying in a place called Burke’s Crossing. A little river ran through the center of the town.”
She shivered. “On Friday night Papa, Walter, Aaron, and Mr. Patchett went to a tavern after the show, to celebrate our good luck.” She paused again. “Papa had too much to drink.”
Her voice had a defensive edge. “He didn’t do that very often, you know. It just happened that night.”
“I believe you.”
She searched his face. Satisfied with what she saw, she went on. “Anyway, they were coming back to the boarding house—it was a lot like your mother’s place, actually—and when they stepped onto the bridge it reminded Papa of a stage. So he decided to make a speech—one of the big monologues from Hamlet. After he got rolling, he climbed up onto the railing.”
She smiled ruefully. “Papa was always very dramatic when he was drunk. Anyway, he finished the speech with a flourish, took a bow…and fell into the river.”
The day seemed to have lost its warmth. She rubbed her hands together nervously. “They fished him out before he could drown. But he caught pneumonia. That was what killed him.” Suddenly Jamie seemed far away, and she was back in the little room where her father lay dying. She could see the weak sunlight filtering through a dirty window, smell again the closed, moist sickroom odor. Mr. Patchett was standing at the foot of the bed. Walter was in the corner, filling it with his presence, staring down at her mournfully as if it were all his fault for not somehow preventing the tragedy.
Her father took her hand. He started to speak, but his voice was weak, and she had to lean close to hear.
“I’m not going to make it, sweetheart.”
Her throat knotted. Unable to speak, she squeezed his fingers tightly. Though she wanted to deny it, she knew he was right.
“Don’t give up the dream,” he said fiercely. “Take the troupe to California. Keep them together. Build our theater.” He coughed, his body racked by the spasms. After a moment the spell subsided. “Don’t let Plunkett’s Players fall apart, Fortune. This journey that we’ve started on is the right one, darling. Promise me that you will finish it.”
And though the trip had been his dream and not hers, she had bent close, kissed his forehead, and said, “I will.”
“Those were the last words he ever spoke to me,” she whispered. “He died in his sleep that night. I was sitting beside him…but I was asleep, too.”
“Pardon me?” said Jamie.
She shook herself out of her reverie. “N
othing.” She looked toward the hills looming in the distance. “I was talking to myself.”
Chapter Twelve
The journey continued. As they traveled farther west, away from all that Fortune had known, she began to feel both lonely and more free. Though she missed the world she had grown up in, at the same time she—and, she could sense, many other females in the train as well—began to shed some of the strictures that tied women down back East, the things that said, “This a woman must do; this she must not.”
Not that she had paid as much attention to those rules as most women anyway; a life in the theater had already set her on the outskirts of polite society. But on a trip like this, survival came before “must” and “must not,” and she felt the other women in the train begin to accept her and Mrs. Watson in a way she was not used to.
Some days the train made fifteen or twenty miles. Others they spent from sunrise to sunset simply trying to get all the wagons across a river.
Twice they had to cross long stretches that held no water at all. These were dangerous passages, and many of the animals did not survive the second one. Fortune herself was nearly delirious with thirst by the time they reached the shallow river they had been aiming for. They had to filter the dark, muddy water through a cloth before they could drink it. Brown and slightly acrid, it was still the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.
Though their fellow travelers had seemed somewhat wary of the actors when the journey started, shared adversity began to break down those barriers. The troupe made friends with others in the train, Becky Hyatt’s family in particular.
Fortune even came to have a grudging respect for Abner Simpson—not only for his knowledge of the trail, but also for his ability to spin out tall tales, a skill that made him in some ways like a one-man theater.
By the time they had crossed the prairie and entered the mountains, two of the women in the wagon train had given birth. Alas, one of the babies had died after less than a day. Its grave joined the hundreds of others that lined the trail, and the parents said nothing more about it.
Some days they had passed as many as fifteen or twenty such graves, most of them marked by simple wooden crosses. The majority of them, according to Mr. Hyatt, were victims of cholera, which occasionally swept through a wagon train with terrible suddenness, wiping out travelers by the dozen.
Fortune heard much talk of the disease—more than she cared to, really—and by the time they came upon a lone child whose family had been cut down by it, she knew that the cholera’s onset was swift and vicious; that vomiting and diarrhea robbed the body of fluid, making dehydration a great danger; that of those who contracted it, far more died than recovered.
The child, a little girl of about six, was half dead with weeping herself. She was taken in by the family that had lost their boy in the wagon accident near the beginning of the journey.
Amidst these life-and-death struggles, Fortune sometimes saw her own problems as small indeed. Yet they were vexing still, for she had never been so confused in her life. After his apology for his behavior on the night of the storm, Aaron seemed to relax toward her, acting almost as if he now assumed that they were a couple. This both surprised and distressed her, for she was no longer as certain as she had once been of her own feelings about him.
Yet, as had always been the way with them, they never discussed the matter. Fortune wondered why it was that she could so easily speak other people’s lines on the stage, but found it so difficult to say what was in her own heart.
Jamie’s presence only complicated things, since she suspected that part of Aaron’s new warmth was in response to what he saw as competition. Part of her was amused by this, another part of her was angry. She felt that it should have happened before, without the spur of Jamie’s presence.
“Well, you never know what you have until you’re in danger of losing it,” explained Mrs. Watson, during one of what had become their daily conversations in the wagon. “Besides, Jamie is only part of the change.”
Some of the cookware rattled as the wagon started up a steep hill, and Mrs. Watson paused to adjust the way she was sitting. “The thing is, Fortune, you’ve started to blossom—sort of like a caterpillar,” she added, blithely mixing her metaphors.
“What do you mean?”
“Aaron is a very sophisticated young man, chicken. When he first met you, I daresay you were a bit of a tomboy for the likes of him. Certainly you were too young for him.”
Fortune started to protest, but Mrs. Watson spoke on over the girl’s words. “When you took over the troupe last December you started to change—to grow up.” She looked at Fortune appraisingly. “By a lucky chance that seems to have coincided with what your body was ready to do.”
Fortune knew this was true. She had been pleasantly aware of how her body was rounding out, the way her breasts had begun to swell, her waist to taper. The problem was she had had so much to do since responsibility for the troupe fell on her shoulders that she had not had time to really understand these changes.
Thinking about that now gave her a sharp pang of longing for her mother. She was about to speak again when the wagon slid to the right. Fortune and Mrs. Watson grabbed at the sides to keep from being thrown to the floor. They could hear Aaron yelling. The wagon rolled forward, and with a jolt they were level again.
“Is that ‘blossoming’ so important to a man?” asked Fortune, once they had recovered from being jounced around.
Mrs. Watson laughed. “Let’s just say it doesn’t hurt, ducky.”
Fortune laughed too. It felt good. The last weeks had been difficult, and there hadn’t been enough reason to laugh. In addition to everything else, the constant tension between Jamie and Aaron had begun to fray her nerves.
Yet at the same time she had enjoyed flirting with them, watching the way they reacted to each other, and to her.
She had sensed a feeling of disapproval from Mr. Patchett. But that was only natural. As her father’s best friend, he probably wanted her to stay a little girl forever. She had begun to realize that in his heart her father had felt that way.
She didn’t really blame him. She figured if she ever had a baby, she would want to keep it with her forever. She wondered if it bothered Mrs. Watson not to have any children.
The next afternoon Fortune was walking beside Mr. Patchett, who was telling her a long story about a time when he was a little boy and had been introduced to Thomas Jefferson. They were nearing the crest of a trail section that led over a low mountain. The trail hugged the side of the mountain as tightly as possible with a drop to the left so severe it was frightening.
“I tell you, Jefferson should have been an actor!” concluded Mr. Patchett triumphantly. “With his height and looks, his command of language, he would have been a real star!”
Fortune was wondering if Mr. Patchett would be insulted if she suggested that what Jefferson had done was probably more important than acting when she heard a shout from Aaron. It was followed by a series of terrified whinnies from the horses. Looking ahead, she saw that the wagon had moved too close to the edge of the trail and one wheel had gone over. Now the whole wagon was tipped precariously over the steep drop.
“Mrs. Watson is in there!” cried Fortune, grabbing Mr. Patchett by the arm.
They ran for the wagon, as did Edmund and Walter, who had been walking behind them. Aaron remained in place, shouting at the horses, trying to get them to pull the wagon back on to the trail.
Stationing themselves at the sides of the wagon, the players tried to roll the rear wheel back up over the edge of the drop. It wouldn’t budge. Indeed, the whole wagon seemed to be tipping farther over.
“What’s happening?” cried Mrs. Watson, her voice tinged with hysteria. “What is going on out there?”
“We’ve got a problem with the wagon!” shouted Fortune. “You’d better get out.”
“Oh, Minerva,” moaned Mrs. Watson. Fortune could hear her start to move to the front of the wagon. At the sam
e time Aaron urged the horses into another attempt to pull the wheel back over the lip of the cliff. His efforts only caused the wagon to tip farther sideways. Walter clutched the side of the wagon, roaring at it as if he could keep it on the trail by sheer rage. Mrs. Watson’s scream was nearly drowned in a clatter of falling objects.
“Are you all right?” shouted Fortune.
No answer.
“Mrs. Watson, are you all right?”
When there was still no answer Fortune said, “I’m going in after her.”
“You can’t do that!” cried Mr. Patchett. He grabbed her arm to hold her back. “Fortune, that wagon could go over at any minute.”
“All the more reason to get Mrs. Watson out now!” snapped Fortune.
The disagreement was interrupted by the arrival of Jamie, who had been riding ahead of the group. He sprang from his saddle and hurried to the wagon. Other travelers were approaching as well, the ones who had been following them on the trail, and Becky Hyatt’s father, Frank, who had been traveling just ahead of them.
“Don’t look good,” said Mr. Hyatt glumly.
Fortune bit back a sharp comment. “What can we do?” she asked.
Jamie went to the edge of the trail. Dropping to his hands and knees, he studied the terrain. “Nowhere down there for us to stand to try to push it back up. Might be best if we put a man at the head of each horse and try to pull it up slowly.”
As he spoke Aaron tried yet again to get the horses to pull the wagon over the lip of the trail. The only result was that the wagon tipped even farther to its side.
“Stop!” cried Jamie. “You’re going to lose it altogether if you’re not careful!”
Aaron threw him a black look, but did not try to lash the horses forward again.
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