Fortune's Journey

by Bruce Coville

  Fortune laughed. “A Plunkett is always ready to go onstage.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the tree. “That’s our motto.”

  “You don’t sound like you mean it.”

  Fortune shifted uncomfortably. An owl flew overhead, then settled onto a branch three or four trees away. They heard a sudden patter of rain on the leaves, but just as they were ready to run for the camp, it stopped.

  “I don’t,” said Fortune.

  She closed her eyes. Against her will tears began to seep from beneath her lids, trickling down her cheek.

  Jamie reached over to brush them away. Fortune stiffened for a moment, then decided to relax and accept the gesture.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “You come from an acting family, and you’re tired of acting. I come from a plain-folks family, and I can’t get enough of you people. I want to talk about the theater all day long. Do you suppose we always want something different from what we have?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fortune. “That sure would make life complicated.”

  “It’s pretty complicated already,” said Jamie, an odd note in his voice. “I wonder if it’s even stranger than that. Sometimes I think we’re attracted to the people that are most different from us. Look at you…you’re smart and sophisticated. You’ve done all that traveling…”

  “Hush,” said Fortune.

  Jamie nodded. “I won’t say another word,” he promised. “As long as you promise to stay here beside me.”

  Fortune leaned back against the tree. “It’s a deal,” she whispered.

  It was early in July. They had scheduled the show to start at 7:30, to take advantage of the natural light as long as it lasted. Torches had been placed around the playing area, to be lit as necessary. The wagon, stripped of its covering, provided a platform for some of the action. The canvas itself provided a backdrop. Chairs had been borrowed to make thrones for Queen Gertrude and King Claudius.

  Everything was in readiness.

  Nearly the entire population of the wagon people had gathered to see the performance, bringing with them chairs, stools, and logs to sit on. A restless buzzing filled the air. It was interrupted when Walter pounded on the base of the wagon with a huge stick. (Normally he would have used a drum; unfortunately, it had been lost with the rest of their materials.) He was dressed as the ghost of Hamlet’s father; and in the gloom created by the evening shade, his flour-whitened face looked truly eerie.

  “Welcome, friends!” he intoned. “Welcome, lovers of the arts! Welcome to The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as written by one William Shakespeare, and performed by the illustrious Plunkett’s Players, late of Charleston and bound for California!”

  The words earned a burst of applause.

  “Oh, they’re ripe,” said Mrs. Watson gleefully. Standing next to her, behind a blanket they had strung between two poles, Fortune was uncharacteristically nervous. With a jolt she realized the cause: these were people they had lived with for over two months and would continue to live with for some time. Unlike the normal audience—never seen again, faceless, unknown—these were friends, acquaintances, partners on the road to adventure.

  I care what they think! she told herself uncomfortably. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way.

  Suddenly Jamie was standing beside her. He put his hands on her shoulders, turned her toward him, and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Be wonderful,” he whispered.

  To her amazement, she was. Not immediately. But from the moment she traded her first lines with Jamie, there was a fire between them that she had never experienced on the stage before. He was unbelievably good himself, his eyes tragic and haunted, his voice filled with pain and power.

  It brought out the best in her. Always before, when her father had acted the role, no matter how good he was, he was still her father.

  But Jamie was not Jamie. He was Hamlet. And in becoming that melancholy Dane, he transformed Fortune Plunkett, too. For the first time in more than a hundred performances, she became Ophelia, loved as Ophelia, ached as Ophelia, wept as Ophelia. It was wonderful. It was agony. She felt as if her heart was being torn in half.

  “Do you know what you’re doing out there?” hissed Mrs. Watson, grabbing her arm between scenes. “Do you have any idea what you are doing to that audience?”

  Fortune shook her head numbly.

  Mrs. Watson stared at her. “Good,” she said at last. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  And when Aaron, as Laertes, and Jamie, as Hamlet fought their final duel, she found herself behind the blanket sobbing as if her heart would break.

  In her heart she knew that something had happened. She had been touched by the spirit of her father, and acting would never be the same for her again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spurred on by their success, the troupe performed several more times during the journey; another Hamlet, done at the insistence of those who had missed it the first time and been told by the others in the wagon train how good it was; a remarkable Othello, with Walter and Mr. Patchett glowing in the roles of Othello and Iago; and of course their old standby, The Widow’s Daughter.

  A few of these performances were for their fellow travelers. The majority of them were for people in the isolated forts and tiny settlements along the way. Once they performed for a single family in return for the best hot meal they had had in three months.

  They took a curious pleasure in these performances. Their audiences were hungry to be entertained, and in response the troupe performed as it rarely had before.

  “It’s not just a hunger for entertainment,” said Mr. Patchett, when Fortune mentioned this one night. “They’re hungry for something for their souls. Get a roof over a man’s head, get him fed regular, and there’s another need that starts to grow, a need to think and feel that can gnaw at you just as sure as hunger gnaws your belly when you’ve been too long without a meal.”

  Even so, it struck Fortune more than once how ironic it was that the finest shows Plunkett’s Players had ever done should be not on the fancy stages of the East, but on the bare ground and makeshift platforms of a crude, unsettled land.

  Papa, I wish you were with us, she thought over and over as the troupe continued to jounce and rattle their way westward. I wish you could meet Jamie. He reminds me of you so much, the way you must have been when you were young. I think you’d like him.

  Crossing the mountains was the hardest thing any of them had ever done; and by the time the trip was nearing completion, they were worn to the point of exhaustion. They had pushed the wagon up steep slopes, even Mrs. Watson joining the effort. Sometimes going down the other side of a slope was even harder, and it took all the strength the troupe had to keep the wagon from barreling forward and running over the horses, even with its brakes set at their highest level.

  In one way their accident proved a blessing in disguise. While they had already been traveling with a lighter load than most of the pilgrims, the accident had left their wagon almost empty—which spared them the slow, painful peeling away of belongings that they watched the other families make as the trail grew tougher and their animals were worn to the point of exhaustion, or even death. The road to California was littered with castoff things that families had hoped to take across and been forced to abandon once they were nearly there. Fortune spent half a day walking with Becky Hyatt because the girl was so distraught over her father’s decision to cast off a beautiful wooden dresser that had belonged to her grandmother.

  “It was all we had of Nana,” Becky sobbed over and over, leaning against Fortune.

  She didn’t question that her father had made the right decision; two of their oxen had died already, and the rest of the team simply could not bear the load. But it had cut the girl to the heart.

  Despite the despair and exhaustion, the troupe also experienced a growing sense of anticipation. Every night they sat spinning out hopes and dreams about the shows they would put on in Califo
rnia, the theater they would build.

  Sometimes they would act out favorite scenes as they sat around their fire, Aaron and Jamie competing to give the best performance. Often other travelers would gather round, listening intently, not saying a word. Usually when this happened, Fortune would get out her guitar, Walter his fiddle, and they would begin to play and sing as they had that night in Independence.

  Five or six times there were impromptu dances, the weary men and women seeming to shed their exhaustion as they whirled each other about in the firelight.

  When Fortune wished to bring such evenings to a close, she would nod to Walter and he would put away his fiddle. Then she would play alone, singing a quiet song she had written herself, about being a stranger alone in a strange new world.

  “When I rise up

  And look around,

  My home I cannot see,

  For I have wandered

  Far away…

  What will become of me?”

  When she finished, the weary travelers would nod and sigh, and slip quietly into the night.

  Yet Fortune knew that many of them were not really far from home. They had their families, and home was in the ties that held them together. Though she liked that idea, it also gave her a strange sense of melancholy, stirring in her a sense of incompleteness she couldn’t quite explain, nor even willingly admit to.

  During this time Jamie and Aaron continued a strange, unspoken courtship of her, each paying her much attention, neither saying aloud what they were feeling.

  To her surprise, it was Edmund who finally mentioned it.

  “You ought to stop this game, you know,” he said one evening, coming up beside her unexpectedly as she gathered wood for the cooking fire.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, don’t play games with me, too,” he said curtly. “My personality may not thrill you, but you know I’m not stupid. You’d better make a choice, or you’ll lose them both.”

  When she remained stubbornly silent, he laughed and said, “The funny thing is, you’ve already made your choice. And everyone knows it except the three of you.”

  “Go away, Edmund.”

  “I will, when I’m finished. I know you don’t like me. I don’t even know why I’m bothering to tell you this, except that I liked you once, for a little while. That, and I hate seeing people act stupid.”

  “You have a wonderful way with words,” she said, savagely tearing a dead branch from a tree.

  “I know. Wins me friends everywhere I go. Look, Fortune—if you’re not careful…Oh, forget it. I don’t know why I bothered.”

  He turned and stalked away, his back rigid, a cloud of ice in the air behind him.

  “Wait. What did you mean everyone knows? Edmund? Edmund!”

  It was too late; he would never tell her now.

  Is it that obvious? How can it be, when I don’t know myself? She stamped her foot, feeling suddenly stubborn. Who said she wanted either one of them?

  Still fuming, she carried the armload of wood back to the wagon.

  “Jamie was looking for you,” said Mrs. Watson when she saw her.

  Fortune didn’t answer.

  “So was Aaron,” continued the older woman, smiling slyly. “Don’t think I ever saw two cats so intent on the same mouse.”

  “Don’t you start,” said Fortune sullenly.

  “What did I say?”

  “Nothing! Forget it!” She threw down the wood and stomped away from the wagon.

  “We’ve got to make a decision,” Mr. Patchett said to her that night.

  Fortune sighed. Sometimes it seemed that all she did was make decisions.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Whether to go straight to San Francisco or spend some time touring the mining camps before we go.”

  “Why would we do that?” asked Mrs. Watson indignantly. “I can’t wait to get to San Francisco!”

  “Alas, we won’t be able to do much when we get there,” said Mr. Patchett. “We’re flat broke. And it’s not as though we’ve got a booking waiting for us. I think we might be better off touring the camps. That way we may be able to build up a stake, not to mention a reputation.”

  Fortune let the others talk for a while. She had learned that if she listened carefully to what they had to say—and made sure that they knew she was listening—when she made her decision she would have fewer complaints from those who were not happy with it.

  In this case it was only Mrs. Watson who thought they should go straight to San Francisco. “I can’t live like this anymore,” she moaned. “I need some civilization.”

  “Civilization requires money,” said Fortune.

  Which was how the matter was decided.

  Two days later—following directions provided by Abner Simpson (who seemed both amazed that they had made it this far and somewhat disappointed that they were leaving)—they separated from the wagon train and headed for a mining town.

  Becky Hyatt walked a half a mile or so with them, and for a little while Fortune thought she was going to ask to come along. In the end she hugged them all, then threw her arms around Aaron, kissed him on the lips, burst into tears, and ran back toward her family’s wagon.

  Aaron stood looking after her in astonishment, until Mr. Patchett clapped him on the shoulder and asked him to get the wagon moving again.

  They had made it to California. Now it was time to start digging for gold, the Plunkett’s Players way.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nothing, not all they had read, all they had heard, all they had imagined, had truly prepared them for what they found when they rolled into Mad Jack’s Gulch. The town was a rowdy, roaring collection of bustling saloons, seedy hotels, makeshift cabins, and a lonely whitewashed church. The streets were filled with the wildest collection of folk they had ever seen—the fabled forty-niners, dressed in everything from flannel and blue jeans to silk and top hats. Music tinkled from behind the barroom doors. A beautiful woman leaned down from a second-story window in one of the hotels, calling out to the men in language that made Fortune blush.

  And rooms were ten dollars a night.

  “Ten dollars!” exploded Fortune. “What is this, a hotel or a palace?”

  “This is gold country,” replied the clerk. “Take it or leave it.”

  She went into a hurried conference with Mr. Patchett. After a series of negotiations, some of them carried out at the top of her lungs, she managed to rent two rooms for twenty dollars, a victory for the clerk—with the addition of extra mattresses for the men’s room at no extra charge, a victory for Fortune.

  About that time Walter came into the lobby, his face ashen.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Fortune.

  “I found a building.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” she persisted, feeling like a prompter.

  “The owner wants a hundred dollars for one night.”

  “He wants what?”

  “A hundred dollars,” repeated Walter glumly.

  “Come on,” said Fortune, grabbing him by the arm. “The rest of you get our things into the rooms. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  The owner of the building was a tall Irishman named Jack Burns. “Look, lady,” he said, when Fortune complained about his price, “it ain’t worth it to me to let you use the building for less than that. You’ll probably burn it down anyway, using candles or lanterns or something so people can see your show.”

  “We will not!” said Fortune, blushing at the memory of the fire in Busted Heights. “Now look. I can’t possibly pay you a hundred dollars to use your building for one night. You can let it sit empty, and make nothing, or you can give me a reasonable price and we’ll both be happy.”

  Forty-five minutes later she and Walter headed back toward the hotel, having hammered out a deal where they would pay Burns fifty dollars in advance and another hundred after the show—a deal that had somehow seemed less painful after Burns told Fortune they could charge ten dollars a
seat for the first four rows and still fill them.

  “We eat what we came with till after tomorrow night,” she told the group when they had assembled in the room she was sharing with Mrs. Watson. Once the groans had died down, she added, “Then we’ll know whether coming west was the best thing we ever did—or the craziest.”

  She didn’t add that at the moment she herself had decided it was the craziest.

  By the next night Fortune was beginning to think maybe they weren’t so crazy after all. Walter had spent the day putting up signs to advertise the show. Edmund and Mr. Patchett had stationed themselves in the hotel lobby, selling advance tickets. And—at the advice of Jack Burns—she, Jamie, Aaron, and Mrs. Watson had spent some time practicing their scenes on the front porch of the hotel. As Burns had predicted, this attracted a crowd that then dispersed to spread the word a show was in town.

  “I don’t know how well you’re going to do,” the clerk had said gloomily that morning. “We had a troupe through here just two weeks ago. Had one of what they call them ‘Fairy Stars’ with ’em—little girl, maybe eight, nine years old. She sang, acted…everything. Even did scenes from Hamlet, all dressed up like a prince!”

  “Wait till they see our Hamlet,” said Fortune confidently.

  “I saw that Lola Montez a few months ago,” continued the clerk, ignoring Fortune’s comment and apparently feeling she should be made aware of his broad experience with the stage. “Down in San Francisco. She did that Spider Dance of hers. Funniest thing I ever saw. She didn’t take it too kindly when folks laughed at her, though.” He shook his head. “Gotta have a sense of humor if you want to stay alive out here.”

  The clerk’s words had stuck in Fortune’s mind, and she recalled them that evening as she looked out at an audience composed of rough-and-ready mining men, elegant dandies, and a scattering of women who ranged from a severely dressed minister’s wife to a gaudy creature Mrs. Watson referred to as a “painted strumpet.”

  “My, doesn’t he look ripsniptious,” said Mrs. Watson, pointing out an elegant-looking man seated in the center of the audience.