Fortune's Journey (17 page)

Fortune read the letter over and over again.

On Friday it began to rain, a slow, steady drizzle that seemed somehow appropriate.

Throwing on her cloak, Fortune went out to walk under the weeping sky.

The streets were deserted. Fortune clutched Jamie's letter in her hand, holding it carefully beneath her cloak to protect it from the rain. She wandered aimlessly along the muddy byways. Music tinkled from the saloons, mingling with laughter, shouts of anger, even an occasional gunshot.

Yet she felt as if she were a million miles from anyone, more alone and lost than she had ever dreamed possible.

What do I do now? How do you go on when you finally figure out what you want, and have it snatched away before…before…

She began to sob. Jamie, you should have waited. You should have trusted me!

She stopped, leaned her head against a rough wooden wall. The rain beat against her insistently, whispering, “Fool, fool. What was to trust? The flirt who played one man against the other while she made up her mind? How could he trust you when you toyed with him and Aaron for a hundred days, a thousand miles?”

She moaned and pushed her fists against the wall. But I did do it. I made up my mind. Oh, Jamie, heart of my heart, I made up my mind!

With a low moan she started to slide toward the ground.

“There you are!” said an unfamiliar voice. “I've been looking for you!”

Fortune found herself looking into the most remarkable pair of eyes she had ever seen. Broad, dark and deep set, they peered out at her from the depths of a thick riding cloak that had been pulled up to protect its wearer from the slashing rain.

“Who are you?” she asked warily.

The stranger chose to ignore the question. Extending a slender white hand, she said, “Get up, child. This behavior is not suited to one of your stature.” Her voice was marked with a mild accent that Fortune found hard to place.

“Who are you?” repeated Fortune, taking the woman's hand. Then, “What do you mean? What stature do I have?”

“You are an actress. Not merely an actress, but a Plunkett, the last of one of the great acting families of our time.”

Fortune felt her head begin to reel. What was going on here? She stared at the stranger through the rain. She appeared to be quite beautiful, though it was hard to tell for certain. “Who are you?” she asked a third time, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“My name is Lola Montez,” said the woman. “Though I am sometimes known as the Countess of Landsfeld, or,” and this last was said with a hint of wicked amusement, “the Witch of Bavaria.”

Fortune barely restrained herself from making a curtsy. “What do you want with me?” she whispered.

Lola smiled. “I've come to take you home,” she said, tightening her grip on Fortune's hand.

When they returned to the hotel, Lola insisted on sneaking in to avoid attracting attention. They went to the second floor. Fortune didn't have to call the others together; they were already clustered in one room—to talk about her, she suspected. Leading Lola into the room, she said, “Mrs. Watson, gentlemen of the troupe, I give you…Lola Montez!”

She could see the skepticism on Mr. Patchett's face. But Mrs. Watson had studied Lola's exploits long enough and carefully enough to recognize her on sight. She immediately dropped to a curtsy. Lola laughed and pulled her to her feet.

“But what has brought you to us?” asked Mrs. Watson, when she had recovered herself. She had taken a seat on the bed and was fanning herself in astonishment.

“Fortune's father asked me to look out for you.”

The unexpected statement caused Fortune's knees to buckle. “What do you mean?”

Lola smiled at her tenderly. “Your dear Papa, when he was dying, wrote letters to many of his friends, asking us to keep an eye out for you, to help you if we could.”

“You were a friend of my father's?” asked Fortune in astonishment.

“I met him many years ago in Europe, when he was touring with a company of Shakespearians. He was a fine player your father, one of the great Hamlets of our time.”

Fortune felt her heart twist a little when Lola said that. It reminded her not only of her father, but of the stunning night when she and Jamie had first performed the play.

“Papa never even told me he knew you,” she whispered.

Lola's face darkened. “Men often do not speak of me to their families. I am too much the scandal, you know? But your father wrote me, and to other friends as well, to ask us to watch out for you. Those of us who live upon the stage must stick together, you see? Our community is small, and we must help each other. So I have been waiting for word of you. So have many others. But you came to where I am; you came to California!” She smiled. “It did not take long for word of your last battle—excuse me, your last
performance
—to reach me. Juicy news travels fast. My people got it to me quickly. So I came to look for you.”

“Your people?”

Lola laughed. “I have eyes everywhere. Sooner or later everyone in California who is in the theater comes to Grass Valley to see Lola. And then they tell me what is happening. It is a funny place, Grass Valley. They do not know what to think of me yet. But they know I have made it special. Before I came, all they had was gold. Now? Now they have Lola!”

Her proclamation made it seem like a great victory for Grass Valley.

“Now, Fortune, you must tell me, for I am dying of curiosity—did you accomplish your mission in that strange little town, Flat Busted?”

“You mean Busted Heights?” asked Fortune eagerly. “Do you know what my father wanted us to do there?”

“It appears that you have already done it,” said Lola, gazing at Aaron and Edmund. “Which of you was it?”

“Which of who was what?” asked Aaron, expressing everyone's confusion.

“Which of you is the son of Julian Beck?”

Mrs. Watson cried out in horror, then fell to the floor in a dead faint.

When they had propped her up in bed and shooed the men out of the room, Mrs. Watson told Fortune and Lola her story.

“Julian Beck was my first husband. I married him when I was sixteen. He was nine years older than me.” She sighed. “Twenty-five seemed very old and wise to me back then.”

“I have known many men,” said Lola. “Few of them were wise, no matter what their age.”

Mrs. Watson continued, telling her story directly to Fortune. “Julian and I had to marry in secret, because my father did not approve of the match.” She reached out and took Fortune's hand. “You don't know how lucky you were, child, to have a father such as yours. He would have understood, whether he approved or not. My father did not understand. When he found out our secret while Julian was on tour, he sent me into hiding.”

“To keep you away from Julian?”

“Partly. But mostly because I was going to have Julian's baby.”

“Men!” said Lola. She spit on the floor, then lit herself a cigarette, which caused Fortune to blink in astonishment. She had never seen a woman smoke before.

Mrs. Watson's tears were flowing freely now, streaming down her cheeks. “When my baby was born, they took him away from me. They told me he was dead.”

“They lied,” said Lola. She moved to sit next to Mrs. Watson. “It was not that way at all. Julian's best friend—your father, Fortune—found out the rest of the story much later. Here is what happened: When Julian discovered where the child had been taken he stole it—” She laughed bitterly. “Stole his own son, what a crime! Then Julian changed his name and fled west, all the way to Missouri, which at that time was like going to the uttermost ends of the earth.”

Mrs. Watson was trembling. “When I could, I fled, too—fled my home and became an actress. I did it partly to spite my father. I did it partly because I was already such a fallen woman that it made no difference to me what people thought of me. But I did it mostly so that I could be near Julian's friends, John and Laura Plunkett.” She reached out to Lola, took her hand. “But I never knew my baby had lived. Why didn't John tell me?”

“At first he didn't know,” said Lola. “He spent years trying to find out what had happened to his best friend. He told me as much of the story as he knew when I met him in Europe. At that time he had learned the first part of the story—and learned as well that Julian was dead. But he did not yet know whether the child still lived. Nor did he know what it would mean to the boy to have you appear from the past if he did. It was his plan to go to Flat Busted—Busted Heights!—and find out what had happened. If all was well, the discovery was to be a gift to you, a surprise.”

Closing her eyes, Mrs. Watson whispered, “What did Julian change his name to?”

Fortune already knew the answer. Taking Jamie's letter from her pocket, she unfolded it and spread it on her lap. On the back of the second page, in the upper corner, in faded ink, was the name of the man who had given the book it was torn from to Jamie. His father—Julian Beck.

Chapter Eighteen

“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.