"I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, and smote him — thus."
Sam Trump impaled himself on the prop dagger, staggering this way, then the other, his hand clenched aloft to indicate mortal pain. Mr. Trueblood, playing Lodovico, cheated down in order to regain the stage and cried, "O bloody period!"
Almost over; four speeches more. Then the important part of the evening's drama would commence.
"... no way but this," Sam cried, and fell on Willa with unusual vigor. It knocked the breath out of her, hurt her ribs, and almost made her eyes fly open. She shifted under his sweaty weight, hissing through closed lips:
"Sam, your knee—"
"Killing myself, to die upon a kiss." His head and torso rose and slumped a second time. Sam did love to prolong his stage deaths.
She heard Lodovico corner the Spartan dog, Iago, and threaten him with torture for his plotting. "... Myself will straight abroad, and, to the state, this heavy act with heavy heart relate."
The interval before the curtain thumped down seemed endless. Sam inadvertently kneed Willa's stomach as he struggled to his feet, the blackface dripping from his chin. "Are you ill, my dear? It was not good tonight." He jumped away without waiting for her answer. "Places for the call. Places!"
She bowed from her spot in line, again glimpsing the house, scarcely a third full. Very poor, even for the month of January. The curtain fell. Sam looked hopefully toward the curtain puller, anticipating a second call, but the applause was already gone. The actors walked offstage without saying much to each other. Everyone knew they'd been down. Willa simply shook her head at Sam, admitting her guilt, and joined the exodus.
She'd been cross ever since arriving at the theater. Bad temper was an inevitable failing of hers on those rare occasions when illness struck. For three days she'd been suffering from a stomach complaint. She'd felt a chill all evening and a dull ache in her middle; it robbed her performance of energy and conviction.
Sam wiped his embroidered sleeve across his face and chased after her, "Willa, my dearest, we simply must inject more life into —"
'Tomorrow," she broke in, slumping in a dejected way. "I promise, Sam. I know I was bad tonight. I'm sorry. I want to go straight to the hotel. I still feel terrible. Good night."
The burly man with the spongy bulbous nose left the box, turning up the sealskin collar of his overcoat to help hide his face. Not that he knew any of these loud, rude provincials in the audience. Or anyone in the company except the person he'd come to find.
He walked unhurriedly down the stairs and paused for a moment by the gaslit board in the lobby. Photographs of the artists were tacked to it. He studied the one identified as Mrs. Parker. The name had reached him in New York, as a rumor, and he'd next seen it on a crumpled Trump's Playhouse handbill brought back at his request by a traveling acquaintance. He had taken a long rail journey to investigate. His effort had been rewarded.
He slipped away from the lighted lobby, turned the corner, and crossed the street. The severed muscle had left him permanently lamed. It showed in an awkward side-to-side list as he walked.
In a patch of shadow opposite the stage entrance, he settled down to wait. Street lamps paled and their light diffused in a mist rising from the river. A foghorn blared. Chilled, he drew on a pair of yellow-dyed gloves. Then he took a thin silver flask from an inner pocket and drank some brandy. The flask flashed, reflecting a street lamp. The light revealed large initials engraved in the metaclass="underline" C. W. Claudius Wood.
Willa tied her cape as she hurried out the door to Olive Street. She felt grimy and uncomfortable; she wanted to bathe and sleep. She tucked her hands into her fur muff and turned right, her heels tapping loudly on the planks, like staccato blows of a carpenter's hammer. Usually she waited for one of the actors to escort her. Tonight she was impatient. It had been a truly miserable performance, and a miserable Christmas season as well. Of course she'd joined in the caroling and gift-giving and the company's Yule feast, held on the stage. But whenever she smiled or chatted, she was acting; acting every minute.
President Andrew Johnson's Christmas gift to the nation had been unconditional amnesty for any Confederate still unpardoned. It was a landmark event, second only to the surrender, perhaps, but it had little meaning for her. There was no longer anyone close to her who was touched by the amnesty. Indeed, because it was such a potent reminder of Charles, the only emotion it generated was a bitter sadness.
At the first corner she stopped, having a distinct sense of some — some presence nearby. She turned and scanned the shadows across the way. Nothing.
She heard male and female voices as the troupe came out of the Playhouse a block behind her. If she lingered, Sam might catch her and lecture her again. So she hurried on, her breath trailing in a cool misty plume. She was feeling so low, she didn't want to see or speak to another human being.
Wood pursued her steadily, without noise, from a safe distance. When they reached the hotel block, Willa paused and glanced over her shoulder again. Wood held still beside the black rectangle of a bakery window.
As soon as she went on, he moved. He bobbed sideways at every step, a cripple robbed of the agility and panache a leading man needed. Well, the culprit, the thief, would soon be caught and subjected to a fitting justice. In his pocket, through the thin' glove leather, the pads of his fingertips indented under the sharp pressure of the filed heads of the horseshoe nails bent into rings.
Warmth, light, the familiar smells of dusty plush and spittoons. Willa was so tired she almost staggered. She crossed the lobby to the marble staircase. A sleepy clerk with an oily forelock like a question mark roused himself. He held up a finger. "Mrs. Parker, there's a gentleman —" Her skirt disappeared around the first landing. Her heels rang sharply on the marble. "— waiting," he finished in the silence.
Wood crossed the lobby with an air of confidence, holding the key to his own room in another hotel so it was visible to the clerk leaning on the marble counter. The clerk studied him, tried to place him, couldn't. A guest who'd signed the ledger before he came on duty? Certainly that must be it. He wouldn't forget a man with such a pronounced limp.
The clerk turned the book so that he could examine the page of flowery signatures. By that time Wood was on the empty stairs. Just above the landing, out of sight of the lobby, he began to climb two steps at a time, pulling himself along by grasping the rail. His limp didn't slow him; it was the engine that powered his rapid ascent through the half-dark.
She turned left down the gaslit corridor, fumbling for her key. She reached her door, inserted the key, and was startled to discover that it didn't turn.
She touched the door. Her blue eyes flew wide. Unlocked?
He slipped the horseshoe-nail rings over the index, middle, and ring fingers of his gloved right hand and adjusted them so the filed heads of the nails were outward. He remembered that he must rake and slash, not punch, because the heads could cut through the dyed leather as easily as they could shred her face.
He stepped from the landing, saw her at the door. Walking rapidly, he said, "Willa."
Willa turned and saw the man limping toward her through widely spaced pools of light cast by the hall fixtures, trimmed low in their frosted mantles. She recognized him, though he was different — heavier, and there was more scarlet in his spongy nose. He bobbed from side to side like some child's toy, something wrong with one leg.
Then it came in a rush. The New Knickerbocker. The Macbeth dagger. She hadn't put enough distance between them, and she'd given him a potent motive for hunting her: that limp, ruinous for a leading player. What stunned her most, knotting her aching stomach as he rushed at her with alarming speed, were his eyes. They were pitiless.