Romeo and Juliet were quietly munching their oats when Fortune slipped into the dimly lit stable. Motes of dust danced in the shafts of light that came through the cracks in the walls. The air was heavy with barn smells—horse sweat, manure, musty hay—all blending into an unlikely perfume that she found oddly pleasant.
Guess I’m just a country girl at heart, Fortune thought.
She snorted at her own foolishness. She wasn’t a country girl, and she knew it.
But what was she? John and Laura Plunkett’s orphan daughter. A child of the stage. Heir to an acting tradition that stretched back, her father claimed, over a hundred years. And now, by accident and tragedy, the leader of a band of traveling players following a possibly hopeless dream of building their own theater in the golden land of California.
What else was she?
Lonely.
The word popped into her head unbidden, surprising her. How could she be lonely, when she had the troupe?
But she was. Well, that was why she had come here—to talk to Romeo and Juliet, her sole confidantes. Romeo was the better listener, but Juliet gave better advice…at least in the dialogues that Fortune constructed for them.
She climbed onto the side of the stall, well aware of how horrified Mrs. Watson would be if she could see her sitting here in such an “unladylike” fashion.
Romeo lifted his head and poked his muzzle against her, looking for a treat.
“Sorry, friend, nothing today but a bit of affection.” She rubbed his nose, which was velvety soft except for an occasional bristle.
Juliet, instantly jealous, poked her head against Fortune, also.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked, addressing both horses.
Juliet whickered softly.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Fortune. “I haven’t told you the latest developments, have I?”
Romeo shook his head.
“Your timing is improving,” said Fortune. She grimaced. “Now there’s a perfect example of one part of the problem. I think about everything from a theatrical viewpoint. I don’t want to do that. I’d rather be normal sometimes!”
Juliet shook her head and blew air through her lips.
“What do you mean, it’s hopeless?” asked Fortune, her voice filled with mock indignation. “I can be normal if I try!”
She looked at the horse for a moment, then sighed. “I guess the idea is pretty far-fetched, isn’t it?”
Romeo neighed loudly.
“Well, you don’t have to be that way about it,” said Fortune. “I know it’s in my blood. I’m not denying my heritage. But it’s not all that I want out of life.” She sighed again. “The others all chose to be in the theater. Heck, Walter couldn’t live without it. But I never made that choice. No one asked me. It was just my luck that I was born into an acting family. Not that I don’t like it. I just wish it wasn’t the only thing I knew.”
She scratched Romeo behind his ears. “Anyway, that’s not what’s bothering me right now.” She glanced at the stable door, then relaxed. She had managed to train the others to leave her alone when she went off to be with the horses.
“It’s that Jamie Halleck,” she said. “Even though he’s just a big pain in the neck, I can’t get him out of my mind. I know Aaron is the man for me. But when I saw Jamie with Mrs. Watson out there—and just between us, you should have seen how gooey she was acting!—I felt something twist inside me. I know he’s only a bumpkin, but there’s something about him…something—”
“Dreadfully charming?” asked a husky voice behind her.
Fortune spun around so fast she nearly fell off the edge of the stall. Romeo, startled, reared back, pawing the air with his hooves.
“Whoa!” cried Jamie. “Easy, boy.”
At the same time his hands shot out to steady Fortune. With one hand behind her back and the other on her arm, he held her until she was secure again.
“You’d better watch it!” he said, leaving his hand against her back just an instant longer than was necessary. “This would be a terrible place to fall while you’re wearing such a pretty dress.”
Fortune smiled in spite of herself. Then she remembered his interruption. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. She followed the question immediately with another, more urgent one: “And how long have you been listening?” She tried to fight down the blush she felt creeping up her cheeks as she recalled the things she had said. The blush grew deeper when she realized that Jamie must have known she was talking to the horses.
Jamie gave her a crooked smile, and Fortune could see what her mother had often called “the look of the devil” in his eyes. Laura Plunkett had used the phrase to describe sophisticated young men of great charm and humor when they were feeling impish. Again, Fortune found herself confused. That look, which she found wildly attractive, was something she had never expected to find in a country boy.
“I came in just a second ago,” said Jamie, answering her question. “About the time you were saying ‘He’s only a bumpkin.’” He flashed her a rakish grin. “Of course, I knew at once you must be talking about me. Then I heard you say ‘There’s something about him…something…’ I wasn’t sure what was coming next, so I figured I’d better finish the sentence for you—before you could come up with something really dreadful!”
Fortune looked at him suspiciously.
“Cross my heart!” said Jamie, holding up his hand as if taking an oath. “That’s all I heard!”
She didn’t know whether to smile back or dump a handful of oats on his head.
“May I?” he asked while she was trying to make up her mind. He was gesturing toward the spot beside her on the stall wall. Without waiting for her answer, he climbed up and sat beside her. “You’re lucky,” he said, cutting off her objection. “Horses are sensible creatures to converse with…”
Fortune could feel herself flare. “Why, you—”
“Wait! I’m not finished. As I said, you’re lucky. Until I got Dolly, whenever I wanted someone to talk to, I had to go out in the backyard and bare my soul to the chickens!”
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. Fortune tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her smile.
“Do you know what it’s like to share your innermost feelings with a chicken?” he continued, a note of mock-tragedy in his voice. “Do you know what kind of advice you get? Ba-gawk ba-gawk ba-gawk!” Fortune began to smirk. Jamie’s raucous imitation of a chicken was breaking down the tension she had felt building within her. Suddenly she began to laugh.
Her reaction spurred him on. Springing down from the wall, he began to enact a conversation between himself and one of his mother’s hens.
“So, Matilda, what do you think I should do about my life? It’s not easy living with Madame Medusa, you know.”
Squatting down, he tucked his hands into his armpits and looked up at where he had been standing. “Ba-gawk,” he said, blinking and flapping his imaginary wings. “Ba-gawk-gawk-gawk.”
He jumped to his feet. “Oh, no, Matilda. I can’t step on mother’s eggs. Besides, she doesn’t lay any!”‘
He squatted down and began to squawk again, carrying on a dialogue so ridiculous and so hilarious that soon Fortune was laughing so hard she could scarcely breathe.
“Stop!” she gasped. “Stop!”
She pressed her hands to her stomach and as a result almost fell off the wall again. Jamie leaped up and put out a hand to steady her.
This time she didn’t flinch away.
“So you can see why I consider you lucky,” he concluded, as if he had never been imitating a chicken. “At least a horse is a sensible animal.” He let go of her, then jumped up to sit beside her on the wall again.
“All right,” said Fortune when she had caught her breath. “I’ll grant you that a horse is better than a hen for sharing your innermost feelings.” She paused and looked at him intently. “But people can be even better.”
“When you can trust them.”
“Are most people that untrustworthy?”
“There are different kinds of trust. Even if you can trust a person not to shout a secret to the world, it doesn’t mean you can trust him to understand what you’re talking about.”
The note of aching loneliness in his voice made Fortune want to reach out and comfort him. She beat down the thought. If he was going to be traveling with them, it was a good idea to get to know him. That didn’t mean acting like his mother!
Yet at the same time another part of her knew exactly how he felt. It was so damn lonely when there was no one to listen to your dreams, no one to share your secrets. She turned to him. “I…”
“Yes?”
The words froze in her throat as she realized that her fears were the same as his. What made her think she could trust him more than anyone else? Because he was lonely, too? Because he looked like a lost puppy when he had that expression in his eyes? Those things didn’t make someone safe.
“Never mind,” she said weakly.
Jamie turned away. “You think I’m pretty foolish, don’t you?”
“No! Not at all!”
He turned back. “You can’t trust someone unless you know they’re willing to tell you the truth. That wasn’t it.”
Fortune’s temper flared—partly because he had accused her of lying, partly because he was right. She was lying, and she didn’t like being caught.
“All right. I was trying to spare your feelings. But the truth is, you do seem pretty foolish to me—and I imagine to the rest of them as well.” Her voice took on a sarcastic tone as she added, “With the possible exception of Mrs. Watson.”
An odd expression crossed his face. Unable to interpret its meaning, Fortune rolled on. “If you want the truth, there it is. What kind of person would run off to join a troupe of actors—especially when that person has no acting experience himself? You have to be crazy!”
The expression on Jamie’s face was almost amused now. “That’s just the point. I am crazy. Aren’t you?”
“No! I didn’t go looking for this gypsy life. My parents were actors, and when they died I inherited the troupe. This is my living. It’s what I do.”
He looked at her sadly. “I’m sorry about your parents. I know something about what that’s like.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Finally Jamie cleared his throat and said, “How did it happen?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right. What do you want to talk about?”
Fortune was silent for a moment. She didn’t want to talk at all. She just wanted to sit and be quiet. It was nice to be with someone else who was lonely, someone else who knew what it was to lose a parent. She sighed. Probably he would think she was stupid if she didn’t say something.
“Let’s talk about you. How did you end up so in love with ‘the theater’ that you were willing to run away from home for it?”
He made a face. “Wasn’t much of a home to run away from. Besides, I should be out on my own by now. A lot of people our age are already married and settled down.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. And how old are you?”
“Which question do you want me to answer?”
“Both.”
“I’m eighteen. And you’re right, I skirted your other question. It was my father. He loved the theater. I think in his secret heart he wanted to be an actor. Or maybe a playwright. Whatever it was he truly wanted to do, it wasn’t to be found in Busted Heights.”
“Then why was he there?”
“My mother,” said Jamie bitterly. “My stepmother, to be totally accurate, though she was all the mother I ever knew. My real mother was gone long before I can remember. Anyway, I don’t know a lot about what brought them out here, just bits and pieces of information my father dropped when we were talking. I wish I had asked him more, before he…” He stopped for a moment, to collect his emotions. “Funny thing. You always think you’ll have all the time in the world to ask those questions. Anyway, they lived back East when they were young. So did I, for that matter. I was born in Philadelphia.”
“That’s where I was born!”
Jamie smiled. “Obviously they know how to have children of the finest kind in that city. But whatever else Pa was doing besides having me, he wasn’t successful at it. So he and Ma headed west to try to make a go of things, settled in Busted Heights, and then just kind of withered and died.”
“But I thought your mother—your stepmother—was still alive. Wasn’t that her boardinghouse?”
“You can call that living if you want. I don’t. She’s a bitter, shrill old woman. Except she’s not really old; she just acts and thinks that way.” He paused, and when he continued his voice was cold. “I know I shouldn’t talk that way about the woman who raised me. But I can’t help it. She killed my father.”
Fortune sucked in her breath.
“Oh, not literally,” he said quickly. “But I believe Pa would still be alive if it weren’t for her forcing him to give up everything he loved.” He stopped to get control of his emotions. When he began again, he was calmer, as if he had hidden something away. “You asked about the theater. My father’s most precious possessions were his books of Shakespeare. They were the only things he owned that he really cared about. He used to read to me from them, starting when I was little. But once Ma started getting religion we couldn’t let her hear, on account of she thought any kind of playacting was the devil’s work. So we had to sneak off whenever we wanted to read together. We had a couple of secret places we liked to go.”
Fortune began to understand why Jamie loved his books so much. The expression on his face when he talked about them cut right to her heart. He looked just as her father used to when he got talking about the theater.
“Of course,” continued Jamie, “Ma would be furious whenever she caught Pa reading to me. That only happened in the winter, when we had to do it in the barn instead of outside. But despite all the screaming and shouting, neither of us was willing to give it up. We used to read the plays over and over, acting them out together. I know a lot of them by heart.”
“You don’t, either!”
“Try me.”
Rummaging through her mind, Fortune dragged up a line from Romeo and Juliet that she had always enjoyed for its wild romanticism. “All right, try this. It’s Romeo speaking. ‘I am no pilot; yet wert thou as far as that vast shore…’”
Jamie paused for a moment. Then he nodded, as if he had caught the thread. Jumping to the floor, he stared up at her, stared directly into her eyes. For one strange moment, sitting there on that rough stable wall, Fortune had the sense of being Juliet on her balcony—with the dearest man in all the world standing below her.
“‘I am no pilot,’” said Jamie, his voice deep and resonant, his brown eyes boring into hers. “‘Yet wert thou as far as that vast shore, wash’d with the farthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise.’”
Fortune turned her eyes away, astonished that he knew the line—and even more astonished by the truth in his voice when he delivered it.
Confused, and a little frightened, she cut short the conversation. “That’s very good. I’d like to hear you do more someday. But I have to go now. I…I promised Mr. Patchett I would help him try to figure out how to replace some of the properties we lost in the fire.”
Jamie nodded, and Fortune hurried from the stable, which had suddenly begun to feel as dangerous as a burning theater.