Memory's Embrace (7 page)

Patently depressed, Tess cleared away the cups, put the few teacakes that had not been consumed back into the tin breadbox, and went upstairs to her room. She had barely had time to hide away the cherished photograph of Joel Shiloh when a furious tapping sounded at her door.

“Tess!” cried Derora, from the hallway, “open this door!”

I wouldn’t have thought she’d miss a few teacakes, Tess marveled to herself as she obeyed. Derora looked outraged, but it was a studied sort of look, like Roderick Waltam’s smile.

“What’s going on between you and that peddler?!” her aunt demanded, waving an exact duplicate of the photograph Tess had just secreted away in her bureau drawer. “And where is he, anyway? I haven’t seen him since this morning!”

Confused, Tess resisted an urge to snatch the picture from Derora’s fingers, and said, “He’s gone.”

The color beneath Derora’s rouge seeped away, leaving the cosmetic to stand on its own. “Gone?” she echoed. “Gone where?”

“B-Back to his camp. He said it would be b-better if he left—”

Considering that she might well have been done out of a night’s room rent, an event she wouldn’t take lightly, Derora seemed strangely relieved. A fact which made her question that much more of a shock. “Have you been dallying with Joel Shiloh, Tess?”

“D-Dallying?”

“Don’t be coy, my dear. You know perfectly well what I mean. Did you allow that man to take liberties with your person?”

Coming from Derora, such a suggestion was indeed ironic, but Tess wouldn’t have dared to laugh. She wasn’t inclined to anyway; she was too insulted. “I most certainly did not,” she said, holding her chin high.

Derora further surprised her niece by giving a high, trilling burst of amusement. “I thought you might have taken that free love lecture seriously—don’t try to deny that you heard it, Tess, because I saw you sitting there with that Hamilton girl—and it’s obvious that you’re taken with Mr. Shiloh or there wouldn’t be a photograph like this one, would there?”

Tess reached tentatively for the picture, Derora withheld it.

“Oh, no. This is mine. Do you realize what a scandal this could have started, Tess? Why, if Mr. Hamilton hadn’t warned me—”

“A simple photograph?” Tess broke in, in angry wonder. “How could that start a scandal?”

“It implies improper familiarity, Tess!” snapped Derora, impatient now, red with conviction.

“You’re a fine one to talk about improper familiarity!” Tess burst out.

She was immediately and soundly slapped for her trouble. “I will not endure such insolence, Tess, not for one moment! If it hadn’t been for Mr. Beauchamp—may he fry in hell—and myself, you would have been alone in this world! Alone. May I remind you that we took you in, that we gave you a home after your dear, foolish mother lost her mind?”

Dear, foolish Mother. How Tess missed her, how she wished that they had never come to this place, hoping to make a new life. If they’d stayed in St. Louis ….

But they hadn’t. Mr. Asa Thatcher, Esquire, her mother’s lover, had grown tired of his mistress and turned her out of her gilded cage, along with Tess, his illegitimate child. It had all been handled by minions, of course, clerks from his law firm. Olivia Bishop had had no choice but to pawn what remained of her jewelry, garnered during the days of favor, and buy train tickets for herself and her daughter.

Olivia must have loved Asa Thatcher, dour curmudgeon that he was, for even in the West, where men were anxious to court so lovely a woman, even willing to overlook her past, she had not thrived. No, she had written long letters to Asa, Olivia had, and when there were no answers, she had sighed and shed tears and gradually faded away into a staring silence that excluded the rest of the world.

Tess shook away memories of her unconventional mother and swallowed hard. As a substitute parent, Derora had been cold and largely disinterested, but she had provided food and shelter for her sister’s love child. She had seen that her niece finished school, and after that she had given Tess work to do, there at the
boardinghouse, instead of marrying her off or simply turning her out. Furthermore, she had settled Olivia in a good hospital in Portland.

“I didn’t mean to be ungrateful, Aunt Derora,” Tess said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” came the clipped response, and Derora turned and swept away, skirts rustling, the photograph of Joel Shiloh still in her possession.

Tess hadn’t much spirit for attending a burlesque show, even if it was being performed on a riverboat. She wanted to rush to Joel Shiloh, like a wanton, and ask him to take her with him wherever he might travel. But she had promised Emma that she would go, and she intended to keep her word.

Roderick disliked sharing his quarters on the
Columbia Queen
with the likes of Johnny Baker, a common, pimply roustabout, but there was nothing for it. Work was work, and it was a rare enough quantity, for an actor at least. Nights like the one just past, spent in Derora Beauchamp’s bed, went a long way toward making life bearable, though he would have preferred to pass the time with the lady’s niece.

Tess. He smiled, mentally tasting the name, as he applied a blackface for the first performance. The roustabout stood behind him, watching the process with an avid sort of fascination.

“Last night must have been pretty good, huh?” leered the weasel. “I noticed you was gone.”

Roderick glued a bushy white eyebrow into place. “Nothing much gets by you, does it, Baker?” he asked, dismissing the man even as he spoke. He’d given Emma
Hamilton two tickets to tonight’s performance, an indulgence that had cost him dearly. Would the little chit have the sense to offer the .extra one to Tess?

He glued on a second eyebrow. “I’d like this room to myself tonight, if it’s all the same to you,” he said to the pockmarked face reflected beside his own.

Baker looked lewdly delighted. “You bringin’ a woman here?”

Roderick resisted a temptation to roll his eyes in overt disdain. It wouldn’t do to offend the weasel, not now. “Yes,” he said, affixing a false mustache to his upper lip. The greasepaint made it hard to keep the thing in place. “Maybe you’d like to spend the night in town or something.” Or anything, he added mentally. Just so long as you’re gone before I bring Tess Bishop below deck.

“I ain’t got no money,” complained Baker.

Roderick sighed. He’d half-expected this development. “There’s a five-dollar goldpiece in my other coat. Take that.”

Baker’s unfortunate complexion was mottled with pleasure. “Thanks,” he said adoringly. Sometimes Roderick wondered about him.

“Think nothing of it,” Roderick replied, in blithe tones. What an actor you are, he said to himself, as Baker plundered the pockets of his extra coat for the last cent he had.

After the roustabout left, he checked his makeup, made minor adjustments to his cutaway satin coat. Damn, but he was handsome, even with his face blackened with greasepaint!

Tess and Emma boarded the showboat among a throng of other people, trying to appear casual. It was unlikely that they would encounter Emma’s staid and steady parents in such a place, but they could run into Derora, and that would be almost as disastrous.

The show itself was to be held in the vessel’s gaudily decorated salon, where there was a stage framed with elaborate gilt curlicues and draped in red velvet curtains. Paintings of nudes covered the walls, and there were crystal chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling, where plump, painstakingly carved cherubs cavorted.

Rows of seats, upholstered in velvet to match the curtains, faced the stage, and Emma and Tess found themselves very close indeed—one good stretch and they could have touched the footlights!

“Front row seats!” whispered Emma, beaming. “Didn’t I tell you that Roderick likes me?”

Tess bit her lower lip. Even though Mr. Waltam had fixed her bicycle wheel—a kindly gesture indeed—there was still the fact that he had passed the night with Derora. That had to be borne in mind. “Emma, he’s an actor,” she retorted, hoping to dissuade her friend from further infatuation. “They are not reliable people, you know.”

“No, I don’t know!” snapped Emma, with spirit. “I’ve never met an actor before! Have you?”

The gas-powered chandeliers dimmed. “Yes,” she said tightly, after a moment of prideful hesitation. “My mother was an actress, in St. Louis.”

Emma was gaping at her, Tess knew that without
looking. “What?!” she hissed. “Tess Bishop, you never told me that before!”

“There are a lot of things I’ve never told you,” Tess responded evenly. “Now, hush up and watch the show!”

And what a show it was. It began with a colorful song and dance number, the music supplied by a small orchestra seated on a balcony at the back of the salon, with Roderick Waltam as the central performer. He sang and played a banjo quite creditably, his face painted black, while a bevy of women in similar makeup danced and sang all around him.

Following that was a Parisian number—surely these were different players, for there had not been time for them to change their costumes and remove their greasepaint—and then a skinny little man in a plaid suit and a bowler hat comically like Joel Shiloh’s came out onto the stage and told stories that made the women titter and the men guffaw.

And after the jokester came a woman dressed in glowing velvet and wearing pearls in her hair. She was Anne Boleyn, locked in the Tower of London, facing her imminent execution with a bemused sort of valor that brought tears to Emma’s eyes, and to Tess’s.

The doomed queen received three curtain calls, along with several coarse proposals from the back of the salon, and the audience did not like parting with her. They were of a somewhat grudging mind when a perfectly groomed Roderick reappeared, without his greasepaint and cotton eyebrows, to sing a series of touching Irish ballads.

His voice was a clear, heart-wrenching tenor, and one look at Emma told Tess that if this showboat didn’t
chug away down the Columbia soon, there would be trouble of a serious nature.

As the lights came up, indicating that the show was over, the applause was thunderous. Tess clapped halfheartedly, watching Emma instead of the players taking their bows. She had decided to enlighten her friend, with regards to Roderick Waltam, and was just opening her mouth to do so, when a heavy hand fell upon her shoulder.

Tess turned, startled, and looked up into the face of Mr. Wilcox, the millworker who boarded at Derora’s.

“Miss Bishop,” he began, drawing his hand back at the sudden realization that he’d taken an improper liberty. “Miss Bishop, I brought a message for you, from Juniper. She says come home, right away quick, because Mrs. Beauchamp’s done hurt herself and she’s askin’ for you.”

Tess swallowed hard, bolted to her feet. “How badly is my aunt hurt, Mr. Wilcox? What happened to her?”

Sympathy moved in Mr. Wilcox’s face, gentling his coarse features somewhat. “I don’t think it’s real bad, Miss Bishop—there’s a lot of carrying on, though, that’s for sure. Near as I could tell, Mrs. Beauchamp fell down some stairs and twisted one ankle.”

For all the quiet antipathy that kept Tess and her aunt at an emotional distance from each other, Tess was frightened and worried. “Come on,” she said to Emma, impatiently. “We have to go.”

Emma chose then, of all times, to be stubborn. “Not me. I’m staying.”

“Emma Hamilton, I have no time to argue with you! You come with me or I swear I’ll send word to your papa that you’re here!”

Emma folded her arms. “Do your worst, Tess Bishop. I’m seventeen years old and I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. If you tell my papa, just don’t expect to call yourself my friend ever again.”

Tess had no time, or patience, to stand there arguing with Emma, and no desire to lose the only real friend she had. “Promise me that you’ll stay away from that actor!” she pleaded, and then she rushed out of the salon, Mr. Wilcox clearing the way through the crowd ahead of her. She hadn’t been able to extract a vow from Emma; she would just have to trust the fates to watch over the little idiot.

Derora was pale and pinched, her swollen ankle propped up on a stack of pillows. At the sight of Tess, she ordered the fluttering Juniper out of her chambers.

“Are you all right?” Tess asked, standing beside the bed where her aunt was ensconced like an ailing queen. “What on earth happened?”

“I tripped on the stairs and fell,” was Derora’s composed, if slightly hushed, reply. “And, my dear, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time!”

As far as Tess was concerned, there was no such thing as a good time to fall down a flight of stairs, but she sensed from her aunt’s manner that it would be unwise to express that opinion or any other. “How can I help you?” she asked softly.

Derora smiled, reached out to clasp Tess’s hand and squeezed it between both her own. “Dear child. Sometimes I’m too harsh with you, I know. I don’t mean to be.”

Tess simply waited, making no attempt to withdraw her hand from Derora’s. Had there been word from the
hospital, in Portland? Was Derora preparing her for bad news about her mother?

Derora let go of her hand and took up a folded newspaper from the bedclothes. “I have no choice but to enlist your help, Tess. There is five thousand dollars at stake, and time is of the essence—I’m sure it’s only a matter of days or even hours before someone else sees this.”