Her cheek twitched as she recalled. “My devoted servant,” she said.
“I know I had some small place in your affections then,” he said, “but I was no James Caspar. Do you still believe I took him from you?”
She looked away, out toward the stage. “No,” she said. “I know exactly what I was to him. And what he would have done to me, had I given him the chance. It can make no difference now.”
“I’m here to tell you that you can return to the world. If you’ll choose it.”
“Believe me, Tom,” she said. “There is so much you cannot know.”
“You thought you would marry. He seduced you ahead of the wedding. You saw no wrong in it and felt no shame. But in the weeks after he died, you found yourself with child. Whitlock procured an abortion for you.”
She seemed about to deny it, but he said, “I saw you, Louise. I followed you that night. I saw you go into that doctor’s house, and if you pressed me I could tell you exactly what went on inside.”
She stared. “You’ve always known this?”
“What do you think I would do? Consider you spoiled, and turn away? Caspar set out to destroy you for his own amusement. Whitlock continued the work so you could serve a purpose of his own. But Louise, you are not destroyed. You think you’re cursed beyond forgiveness. I know all about the life you’ve led since. But if I can pick myself up from in front of a train and forgive you…If I can face the loss of my name and my reputation and forgive you…If I can live in dirt and love no other and still forgive you…You don’t have to love me, but will you not do me the sheer common courtesy of at least trying to forgive yourself?”
She opened her mouth to speak. But he could see that she was at a loss.
She looked away. Her hand flew to her lips. She tried to draw a breath but could not take one deep enough. Her color had become alarming.
When she started to sway, he quickly gathered her up, catching her as he had on that moving train so many years before. She was now a little more substantial, and he was a little less spry.
No matter. Looking to remove her from public view, he carried her into the narrow passageway that led all the way around the backs of the loges.
He pushed open a door and took her inside, settling her onto one of the four ornate chairs that he found there.
These boxes offered more privacy than most. Each was screened from the rest of the Dress Circle by a lattice. Total seclusion could be obtained by the release of a velvet curtain that was tied back with a tasseled silk rope.
When Louise began to revive after a minute or so, Sayers said, “No wonder you fainted. Forgive me, but I loosened your stays.”
“The dress is a size too small,” she admitted. “I rented it.”
“This suit is from Wardrobe,” Sayers said. “I got in as a waiter.”
“What a sorry pair of frauds we are.”
Then, after the thought had sunk in, she said, “You loosened my stays? There was a time when you were embarrassed to look me in the eye.”
“Life with the carnival can knock the innocence out of a man,” he said. “I pulled three drunk women naked out of a river one Christmas Eve.”
“What were they doing?”
“They called it frolicking. I call it drowning. Or freezing to death. Take your choice.”
“Did they thank you?”
“With abuse the like of which you have never heard. Two of them had husbands. We were chased out of town.”
She sighed and looked down. “You’d still have your old life if it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I wish I deserved you.”
“Old life, new life, it’s all one,” Sayers said. “Nothing stands still. Don’t you hear yourself? How does that square with the soulless thing you suppose yourself to be?”
Down below, the waltz ended and the orchestra struck up a patriotic song. Attention began turning toward the stage.
Louise said, “I kept the name of Mary D’Alroy because of a document I needed to use. I had some foolish notion that I might be able to stop moving around and find myself a new place in the world. That’s the kick in the Wanderer’s curse. It’s not the commitment you make in a moment of self-hatred. It’s when the moment has passed, and you realize that you’ve traveled too far down your chosen road to go back.”
“Suppose there were no such road. I have a friend who would argue that the Wanderer’s contract is only a construct of the human imagination. One by which we once lived, but whose day has now gone.”
“What use is that to us, Tom? We’re creatures of our time.”
“What time would that be? I’ve been living for tomorrow. You for yesterday. You’re right, Louise. We
The stage lighting came up on the first of the tableaux down below. The house applauded. Sayers barely gave it a glance. Something with ships and waves and Napoleon.
As the cheers rang out below, she said, “I think I knew that James Caspar was rotten when I fell for him. Then, when he died, I just continued to fall. I saw no way out. I came to consider myself a lost soul.”
“Lost to whom, Louise?” he said. “Never to me. In all these years, there has not been an hour in which I have not thought of you.”
“I’ve taken life.”
“With intent? I don’t think you have. Be honest, Louise. Name me one man that you’ve actively struck down.”
For a long time, she watched the stage. Her expression gave no indication of what was going through her mind, but he did not want to interrupt her. Down before the audience, the French army was on the march. Spain was involved in it, too, somewhere, and the Spirit of America under an enormous waving banner.
“I know how the games work,” he said. “I know how they die. No one seeks it. But sometimes it happens. The risk is the pleasure. And the risk is their own.”
“Tom,” she said. “I’ve told you I cannot love you. I believe that all possibility of love has died in me. But I do wish it were not so.”
She looked at him then. He understood that look.
While it was true that he had loved no other, his had not been a life entirely without female company and the occasional rehearsal.
“What are you saying?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if reaching deep into her memory, and said, “That there can be passions and appetites which are neither loathsome nor unnatural, but which celebrate God and the way that he meant us to be.”
Then she opened her eyes again.
“Here?” he said.
She looked around the box and said, “Why not?”
“No, Louise,” he said. “Not like this.”
“It’s not wrong.”
“It is if you feel nothing for me.”
“That’s my point. No other has loved me. I cannot say what I may feel.”
On the stage, the actor playing James Monroe was holding up a rolled parchment to represent the treaty. Louise stood up and unhooked the silk rope so that the box’s velvet curtain fell free. Then she drew the curtain all the way around and across, screening them not only from the Dress Circle but from the rest of the theater as well. That vast auditorium was suddenly reduced to one small and private space. Now they had no light other than that which spilled in from around the edges of the velvet, and the fan of yellow from under the door to the access passageway behind them.
She stood there, a shadow in shadows.
“Wait,” he said, and he got up and moved to the back of the box where he threw the latch on the door.
Then he turned to her and said, “Louise, you ought to know there is no way I can refuse you. But do not enter
