A Midsummer's Day (4 page)

Sammie forced herself to take a deep breath.  Her chest muscles hurt with the effort.  Damned, blastable heat.  “Lead on, Master Puck.”

<>

Trees grew scarce the higher into the festival they climbed.

There was no shade.  No breeze.

No relief.

Actors playing both nobles and peasants smiled at Sammie and Vaughn.  They tried to start up conversations, but all Sammie could do was smile her perfect Court smile.  She had no air for small talk.

The upper level was more heavily populated than the lower.  People moved en masse from shop to game, from hand powered rides and stage shows to food and drynke stands.  Their numbers were unending.  Every time she had to step around a group of people on the path was a step away from her destination.  Every step stole more air from her.

She had to stop.  She had to stop before she passed out.  Before the tourists could hear her wheeze.  Before she became another attraction: the incredibly blue noble Lady.

The pillow fyte game provided a good distraction.  Two small children balanced precariously on a thick tree trunk, sunk lengthwise into the ground, as they beat each other over the head with pillows.  The game master told those watching that the winner would gain themselves a servant of the loser.  And from the looks of it, the little girl might be getting a servant out of her bigger brother.

Sammie smiled.  Her asthma was forgotten.

For a moment, at least.  Damnable heat.  She wiped a slick layer of sweat from her forehead.  Every breath was short.  Every breath was painful.  Apparently every breath was loud.  Tourists around her turned to look her way.

“You okay?”  Vaughn was right at her shoulder.

She shook her head.  No, she wasn’t all right.

He grabbed her elbow.  All pretense was gone, the act forgotten.  “Come on,” he whispered.  “Almost there.”

<>

Almost there meant a walk of another three hundred feet.

Everything conspired against Sammie to make the last few steps pure torture.  Her corset cut deep grooves into her skin.  Her Court gown, authentic in detail but made lighter for an American summer, felt like it weighed two hundred pounds.  The pins holding her glittering tiara to her complicated pinned up hairstyle stabbed her scalp in a different place with each breath.

There were… too many breaths.

To be one of the hundred people they passed who wore shorts…  Who wore shirts with short sleeves or no sleeves at all.  She longed to pull her hair into a high ponytail, and shield her eyes from the harsh sun with sunglasses.  The dripping bottles of water, fresh from buckets filled with ice, and overfilling plastic cups of bright red birch beer and other sodas that the tourists carried, set Sammie’s mouth to watering.

How easily the tourists could stay cool.

The actors didn’t have it so easy.  Save for the fans that only the women carried, they had to act like the heat had no bearing on them.  They had to act like the sun scorched neither their skin nor their eyes.  They ate and drank from the same stands as the tourists, but they could not take the same icy cold bottles or plastic cups.  They had to drink from metal mugs hanging from belts and garters.

There was a perk of being a mud beggar.  Vaughn and his fellow beggars didn’t have such cups to heat their drinks up faster than a kettle.  They got to break character, at least for meals, and drink frosty cold water from bottles if they wanted.

But Sammie had signed up for this fate.  She and Vaughn...  All of the actors, all of the food servers and artisans, chose to do what they did during the hottest part of the year.  For most of them, there was nothing else they would rather do.

Despite what the heat did to her, there was no better way Sammie could imagine spending her summers.

The sight of the shop gave her an extra burst of energy, and she practically ran to the building.  It was sanctuary.  The hidden door and the room secreted behind it was a most welcome thought.

She leaned her head against the rough, sun scorched wood.  Her hand rested on the hot doorknob.  Inside were chairs.  Fans.  Coolness.

But she couldn’t move.

“It’s all right,” Vaughn whispered.  He put his hand on her lower back to keep her steady.  “Try to take nice, slow breaths.”

He took the fan hanging from her garter and fanned her furiously.

What little cool air it produced was delicious.

Chapter 5

“What ho!”

Jameson marched upon the beggar, who stood so near his betrothed. Such a vile creature had no business being so near a person of nobility.  “Stand thee away from the Lady or I shouldst see thee in the stocks the whole of the day.”  He turned to Anne.  “Be thou well, my love?”

Her face was red and flushed.  “I can’t breathe,” she gasped, dropping the guise of Lady Anne that she normally lived by.

In an instant he was by her side.  “Is it your asthma?” he asked.  Jameson was gone.  He was back to his true self of Johnny. 

She crossed her eyes at him, saying “no duh” without speaking a word.

Johnny chuckled.  “I suppose I deserve that.”  Sam’s asthma had the nasty side effect of sucking all humor from her.  “Where’s your inhaler?”

Her cheeks turned even redder.  “Upstairs.”  A lifetime of asthma had taught her that she shouldn’t go anywhere without her inhaler.

But that didn’t mean that she didn’t constantly forget to take the thing with her.

“Let’s get you upstairs, love,” Vaughn said minus the cockney accent he used as a mud beggar.  He opened the door, and Johnny helped Sammie into the cool darkness.

<>

“So many steps.”

Twelve evil stairs rose like mountains in front of her.   At the top was sanctuary.  But climbing them...  Each of them was an air stealing monster.  Twelve monsters inside as opposed to one air stealing monster living in the heat outside.

“You’re wasting valuable oxygen,” Johnny chuckled.  He lifted her up each unending step.  Thank the Gods for this man.

The room was packed with chairs and sofas, well-worn with age and overuse but all the more comfortable for the fact.  Not every building in the festival was equipped with electricity, but this was one of them.  A dozen fans hummed in a frosty symphony that was better music than any playing outside.

This room was sanctuary.  Actors who needed a break from the heat, who didn’t feel well enough to take their meals outside with the tourists, could escape here for a brief respite.

The room was a blessing for Sammie on days when the delicious heat of summer and her asthma didn’t get along.  She and her boys used this room at least once a day.

Johnny sat her in an overstuffed chair in the icy vortex of three high blowing fans.  Vaughn handed her an icy cold bottle of water from a mini fridge.

“Where’s your inhaler, Sam?” Johnny asked.

She ignored him and opened the bottle.  She took a slow sip, resisting the urge to down the bottle in one fell swoop.  The cool wetness travelled through her, untangling the nerves in her lungs and freeing her airways from the heat’s vice-like grip.  She took another slow sip and relaxed.  Finally it didn't hurt to take even a small breath.

Johnny drummed his fingers on the back of her chair.  He still wanted an answer.  “Not sure,” she said slowly.  Where was the last place she'd seen the infernal thing?  “Maybe the table?”

A symphony of snack wrappers and cellophane echoed through the room.  “How anyone can find anything on this bleeding table is beyond me,” Vaughn said, weeding through a mountain of junk food wrappers.  Empty bottles clattered to the floor in a trio of harsh echoes.

Sammie closed her eyes.  Just because tourists didn’t come up here…  The actors didn’t have to be so bloody lazy.

“Eureka!  Found it.”  Johnny handed the blue and gray cylinder to her.  “You really should keep this on you.  It’s too long a walk from the Grotto Stage.  You haven’t been this bad in ages, Sam.”

Her fingers lingered over his.  Damned that smile of his that threatened to steal from her what little air she had left.  At last he turned and gave her a moment of relief from his devastatingly good looks.  She shook the inhaler.

“Why don’t you carry that with you?”  Vaughn sat across from her in a chair stained with as much mud as he was.  That was his chair.

“No pockets,” she gasped, and took two hits of medicine.  The inhaler and the water worked together to smooth out her breathing.  Her lungs would stay looser now.  Not perfect.  But looser.  She could live with that.

“Sammie’s not the only one getting slapped by the heat.”  Johnny cleared a week’s worth of snack wrappers into a bin.  It seemed that the Lord High Sheriff's desire to clean up the festival didn't end in private.  “It’s unbearable.  Medical teams all over the festival are saying even those in the best of health are having problems.”

Vaughn nodded.  “If they hadn’t roofed the seating area at the Pits, we would have had people fainting left and right.  There are no trees at our stage.”  He rubbed his arms, but the mud had baked to his skin.

“Oh boo hoo hoo.”  Johnny rubbed his eyes.  “Mud’s practically water.  At least you’re not dressed in nothing but black.”  He tore off his knee length jacket and threw it over the back of a chair.  Black was a nasty color in summer, no matter how lightly his costume was made.

“Sammie’s got the worst of it,” Vaughn said.

“You’re barking.”  Sammie said.  What on earth was he talking about?  She had no reason to complain.  Her costume was far lighter than the gowns worn in Tudor England.  Melinda, the woman who played Queen Elizabeth, wore more layers than any of the Court Ladies and a heavy wig, too.  She had a reason to complain.  Not Sammie.

Johnny stuffed himself into the chair next to Sammie and pulled her onto his lap.  “With your asthma, you should be spending your summers at the beach, wearing shorts and those sexy little strappy sandal things I love so much.”  He nuzzled at her neck as he strung a leather pouch over her head.  When had he been shopping at the leather vender?  He took the inhaler from her and put it in a snack sized zipper bag.  He put that into the pouch and pulled it closed.   “Now you have constant access.”  He tucked the pouch into the crevice of her cleavage.

Sammie smacked his fingers away.  She didn’t need Vaughn to watch as her fiancé groped her.  She might have flirted endlessly with Vaughn when they were playing their parts out on the grounds.  But he was her best friend.  The closest thing she had to a brother.

It was Johnny who owned every atom of her heart.

It didn’t feel like two years since they’d been introduced at spring rehearsals, and assigned to be a pair of Courtly lovers.  It felt like only yesterday that the Courtly lovers became real lovers, and then real roommates, and then really engaged.

The last day of this year’s festival was going to be as magical as that first day, so long ago.  She and Johnny would be married after closing ceremonies, in the festival’s own Chapel Parr.

She ran her fingers through Johnny’s charcoal hair.  “I knew that gypsy didn’t know what she was talking about,” she whispered, nuzzling his neck.  How could this gorgeous, wonderful, miraculous man not be the love of her life?

“What gypsy?” Johnny asked.

“Our Lady Halloway wished to have her fortune read this morning,” Vaughn laughed.  “Some young blond girl said that Sammie hadn’t found true love yet.”

“A load of hogwash, if you ask me,” Sammie said.  She straddled Johnny’s lap.  Screw it.  If Vaughn got uncomfortable, he was more than free to go back outside.

Johnny pushed her away from him so they were eye to eye.  Cruel, cruel man.  “You went into Gypsy Way?”  His voice was serious, but his icy green eyes smiled.  He could never pull of the harsh act with her, especially in private.

“You’re not really the Lord High Sheriff, you know,” she picked.

“But Lady Anne still has to follow her Lord High Sheriff’s decrees.”  Johnny nipped at her ear.

“Dude…  Has Jameson Kent ever met Anne Halloway?” Vaughn asked, rolling his eyes.

Sammie giggled.  She loved the personality she’d given her character.  Anne was a flirt.  Rebellious.  Unbroken by the standards set upon women in the Tudor Age.  “Anne will always follow her heart.”

“And that’s why she gets dunked every day.”  Johnny’s fingers roamed the length of the lace ruff around her neck, sending shivers down her spine.

“And I look forward to it,” Sammie said.  “The pond works better than my inhaler any day.”

“When are the Players going to make you a faer
y
, Sam?” Vaughn asked.

The Players was the acting group that filled the festival with all of its stage acts, members of the Royal Court, and the population of Nottinghamshire.  It even hired and trained the food servers and ticket vendors.  The Players created the flight of singing, dancing, pranking fae
ry
that Sammie adored.

“Soon, I hope,” she said.  “One of the faer
y
is pregnant, so she won’t be here all summer.  Whenever it is, it won’t be too soon for my taste.”  The faerys’ costumes looked infinitely lighter than her own Court gown, and she often saw them sitting in the shade.