“I should have known,” Mrs. Watson said mournfully to Fortune that night.
“How could you have?” asked Fortune gently. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding Mrs. Watson’s hand, the two of them united by their loss, their shared grief.
Mrs. Watson closed her eyes. “A mother should know. I did know, in a way. He had Julian’s eyes. And the first time he did ‘To be or not to be’ for us, it was as if it was Julian himself speaking the lines. But it was too impossible to believe. I thought he was dead.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Lola wants us to go back to Grass Valley with her,” said Fortune at last.
Mrs. Watson nodded. “You’re afraid to go, because you’re hoping he’ll come back, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?”
She sighed. “I know better, chicken. That damn male pride of his won’t allow it. We can leave a message at the front desk. They’ll tell him where we’ve gone. But the truth is, he can find us anytime he wants. There aren’t many people more public than actors.”
“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” asked Fortune, her voice quivering.
Mrs. Watson closed her eyes. “It’s not likely. But if I’ve learned a single lesson from my years in the theater, it’s that anything is possible.”
The trip from Mad Jack’s Gulch to Grass Valley took them through some of the most beautiful terrain they had ever seen. Yet Fortune and Mrs. Watson traveled through it as if they were blind.
“You’re thinking about your young man, aren’t you?” said Lola to Fortune late the second afternoon.
Fortune nodded.
“You must learn to forget him. Men! You cannot let yourself go to pieces over the loss of a man. I myself have loved many great men: the musician Liszt; the writer Dumas; even the king of Bavaria, who loved me back, but let me be exiled from his kingdom because he was weak. I have also had many husbands. Love comes, and it goes. I am sad, but I go on. It is the way of it for us, Fortune. We are theater people. Theater people go on.”
Theater people go on. How often had her father said that?
A few hours later they were actually in Grass Valley, riding along the planks that had been laid down to make the town’s main street. “In San Francisco’s streets the mud sometimes gets so deep they lose horses in it,” said Lola contemptuously. “Here, we are more civilized.”
Lola’s house was fairly simple, a large white structure undistinguished from the ones around it except for the profusion of flowers, the fascinating cactus garden, and the grizzly bear cub in the backyard.
“Oh, Minerva!” cried Mrs. Watson when she first saw the bear. “Is that thing safe?”
“His teeth are no sharper than a critic’s,” said Lola simply, after which Mrs. Watson seemed perfectly at ease with the beast.
The bear was the largest creature in Lola’s menagerie, but hardly the extent of it. In and around the house were also parrots, cats, dogs, a goat, and a lamb.
“Damnedest place I ever saw,” muttered Mr. Patchett.
At first Fortune feared the others would be jealous over the way Lola was treating her. But they seemed to take it as her due, as the daughter of John and Laura Plunkett.
The day after their arrival Lola found them a house not too far from hers and, against Fortune’s objections, paid the first month’s rent.
“You will pay me back,” said Lola, placing a finger over Fortune’s lips. “Right now you need a home. Soon you must go on the road; you must begin to act again. You will tour the mining camps for a while, make some money, get some experience. Then come back here to spend the winter with Lola! Those things they call roads in this crazy country are bad then, and it is hard to travel.”
Their days fell into an easy pattern now, as Lola made them welcome. She introduced the troupe to the players and artists who streamed through Grass Valley, coming to pay homage to her as if she were a patron saint. It was the strangest entourage Fortune had ever seen, a procession of the elegant and the scruffy, the great and the graceless, all of them with one thing in common: a love of the arts.
Among them were a poet Lola tended to encourage, and whom Fortune suspected of being more than slightly mad; an artist whose paintings of mining life were undeniably crude, yet seemed to blaze with an inner life of their own; and most intriguing of all, a strange little girl named Lotta Crabtree, who Lola was convinced was going to be a great star.
“Dance for Fortune,” Lola would say to the child, and Lotta would go into one of the jigs or schottisches that Lola had taught her. She sang maudlin Irish songs with a haunting air that belied her age, as if she had actually suffered the heartbreak she sang of. And, like Lola herself, she exuded an irresistible spark of vitality that drew people to her.
“Lola’s right, you know,” said Mr. Patchett one day, standing beside Fortune and watching. “That child’s going to be a star.” Indeed, Fortune found she could hardly take her eyes off Lotta. Unpolished as she was, something about her was utterly compelling.
At night Lola would tell them stories of her past adventures, of her travels in India and Europe, and her great love for King Louis I of Bavaria. Sometimes she would act out portions of her favorite play, Lola Montez in Bavaria, an outrageous concoction based on her own life story.
Once she even demonstrated her famous Spider Dance, shaking large cork spiders from her voluminous skirts, then whirling about the room and stomping on them in a frenzy of terror. It was as bizarre a performance as anything Fortune had ever seen, and though she was too much in awe of Lola to laugh herself, she understood how others might have, as the desk clerk in Mad Jack’s Gulch had claimed.
In fact, it did not take Fortune long to learn the truth about Lola Montez: Her fame was based not on her ability as an actress, which was actually quite minimal, but on her great personality, which was astonishing. She drew people the way a flame draws moths, and divided them more sharply and significantly than a battle over religious doctrine.
The other thing Fortune learned from Lola was how good she was herself.
“Come, Fortune,” Lola would say. “Let us try that scene from Othello. I want to see you do Desdemona.” Then they would act out one of Lola’s favorite scenes from the play.
Though Lola was hopeless, something in her knew how to bring out the best in Fortune. “No, no, no!” she would cry. “Not like that. Like this!” Then she would deliver the line in question in a way that was totally wrong, yet contained in it the exact hint Fortune needed to do it correctly.
It was a revelation for Fortune. She had thought her work in Hamlet opposite Jamie had been spectacular only because of the spark she caught from him. Now she knew that was not true. She was a fine actress. And she had it in her to be great.
That was small compensation for the loss of Jamie. Yet somehow it made her feel closer to him, for acting was all she had left of him, of his dreams. Her own brief dream of a life with him had been shattered. Believing that there could never be anyone else in the world for her, she clung to her craft as to a life raft. It was what kept her sane.
You’d be so proud, Papa, she’d think when she gave a particularly adept reading, or found a new way to express an emotion. I wish you could see me.
That thought did not bother her. She had accepted the loss of her father. It was the wish that Jamie could see what she was learning, how she was growing, that really gnawed at her.
At night she would take out his letter, crumpled and tear-stained from that first day, now lovingly preserved, and read it over before she went to sleep.
Come back! she would think sometimes as she sat in Lola’s home and stared out at the wilderness. Come back to the one who loves you.
Then she would lift the chain that hung about her neck, and stare at the heart-shaped golden nugget that she always carried with her.
Walter, too, was grieving over the loss of Jamie. He was sure, somehow, that he was the cause of it—without ever knowing exactly what had happened. For Fortune and Mrs. Watson, in the way of women, had closed ranks. Jamie’s letter, and the real reason he had left, had never been revealed to the men of the troupe. Even so, the big man would not look Fortune in the eye.
In mid-October Fortune and Mr. Patchett decided it was time to take the troupe on the road again. They packed their wagon, filling it with props, costumes, and sets they had made, or that Lola had given them, and headed for the mining camps.
“And a good thing it is we’re going,” said Mr. Patchett to her on the morning of their departure. “Aaron and Edmund were getting restless. Another day or so and they probably would have been getting into trouble.”
As it was they were too busy for much trouble. They played a night or two in each town they came to, sometimes filling the house, when there was a house to fill (they were surprised at the number of towns that had real theaters), sometimes playing in the open, to a handful or a crowd—it didn’t seem to matter as long as someone wanted to see their shows.
What Fortune both loved and hated was that many of the men came to the plays simply because she and Mrs. Watson were in them. The great shortage of women in the mining camps made them shining attractions no matter how good (or bad) their plays were. It was nice to be the center of so much attention, but she would have preferred it if it had been for the quality of their art.
At every camp they came to Fortune asked about Jamie, at every performance searched the crowd for his familiar face.
It was never there.
She knew Mrs. Watson was watching the crowds as well. In their shared grief they had grown close in a way Fortune would never have thought possible even a month earlier. Often they spoke late into the night.
It was strange to realize that Mrs. Watson had once felt the same fears and longings that she experienced now, had had her own heart broken, perhaps even more deeply, by the loss of not only a husband but a child as well—a child she had now lost a second time.
One day there was a coldness in the air, and they knew without saying a word to one another that it was time to return to Grass Valley.
They passed the winter there in relative quiet, practicing new ideas, repairing costumes and sets, and dreaming of San Francisco. Word had come that a single concert ticket had recently been auctioned off for twelve hundred dollars there. And it was well known that, depending on how they liked the show, the audience was apt to throw anything from tomatoes and eggs to roses and gold dust.
Not that the troupe had done badly as it toured the mines. They had collected a tidy amount, much of it in the form of small pouches of gold dust thrown in enthusiastic response to the appearance of Fortune and Mrs. Watson.
Their old dream of building a theater was beginning to burn within them once more. They were once again close to that goal, no longer impoverished players but a prosperous troupe ready to head for San Francisco and theatrical gold.
And, of course, they listened to Lola as she told them story after story—how she had challenged an entire audience in Sacramento to a duel, crying, “Give me your pants and take my petticoats. You’re not fit to be called men!” Or about her stormy love affair with the great composer Franz Liszt, or how she had been exiled by King Louis when he lost courage and gave in to the demands of the rabble.
And the world continued turning, and spring returned to gold country, and in time Plunkett’s Players took to the road again, landing, eventually, in a place called Centipede Hollow, where they were to play out the final, tragic act of their westward journey.