Mountain Laurel Read online

  “Why? Afraid that if your charge gets knocked over the head with a whiskey bottle, it will go on your record and tarnish your perfect image?”

  He looked at her for a long while. “If you were injured, I wouldn’t like it at all.”

  Again she looked away from him. “You can’t stop me. I’m going out there.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Maddie, don’t do this just to prove to me that you can do whatever you want to. Use your common sense. I can’t control a crowd that size and that mean. And this time you won’t be able to make them hear one single note.”

  She knew that he was telling her the truth, and if it were up to her alone, she’d leave right then, in the dark, and head back to Denver City, but her orders were to sing in six camps and in six camps she was going to sing. “I have to,” she whispered.

  He held her at arm’s length for a few moments, looking into her eyes. “I sure wish you’d tell me what is going on that makes you have to go on this trip in the first place. Both our lives would be a lot easier if you’d trust me.”

  If I trust you, she thought, maybe it would make our lives easier but it just might end the life of one little girl. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She moved out of his grasp. “I am going to bring a little culture to these poor men and—” She had to stop as a series of gunshots rang out.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” he said at last, then left the tent.

  Maddie stood still for a moment and looked after him. She wasn’t the fool she portrayed herself to be. It was one thing to impress men with her voice who were lonely and mostly sober, but she’d seen too many drunks not to know that many men who otherwise were respectfully nice often became violent when they drank.

  About a dozen shots rang out, making her jump, and when her heart stilled, she thought back over the years to other performances. She remembered all the roses thrown at her feet in Florence. In Venice she’d gone riding in a gondola with a tenor—what was his name? It was amazing how forgettable the names of other performers were—and they’d sung duets. All the other gondolas had stopped, and the people of Venice had opened the windows of their houses to listen. When she and the tenor had finished singing, the bravos had echoed through the canal. Now she was going to have to persuade a crowd of drunken, dirty miners to like her.

  “You look like you’re about to cry,” Edith said, coming into the tent.

  “Of course not.” Maddie smacked herself in the face with a powder puff.

  “If I had to face them men singin’ the songs you do and lookin’ the way you do, I’d be scared too.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Looking the way I do.’ ”

  “This is one of Harry’s towns. She’s this big redhead. Well, not really red, but close enough, and she heard you was comin’ and she don’t like it. She considers these men hers and she don’t wanta share ’em.”

  “I can assure you—and her—that I do not want any of these men. I merely want to, shall we say, borrow them for a while.”

  “Whatever, she don’t like it none. She’s talked against you so much, sayin’ that you’re a snob and a lady and that you’ll look down your nose at ’em that the men are preparin’ to hate you. She’s also told ’em that you’re an iceberg and that opera is for men with ice water in their veins.”

  “That’s ridiculous. All the opera stories are full of passion and love.”

  “But they’re in foreign languages and nobody can understand ’em, can they? And the way you stand there singin’ ’em” Edith straightened her spine, put her hands in a prayerful attitude, a proud, haughty look on her face, and pursed her mouth. “You don’t look like you’re singin’ a song about love when you’re up there.” Edith’s eyes turned sly. “I don’t think that Captain Montgomery thinks about you and love in the same breath either.”

  That did it. Maddie threw down the powder puff. “Edith, I want to borrow that red and black corset of yours, that really gaudy one.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Go and get it now. This minute.”

  “It ain’t gonna fit over that chest of yours.”

  “Good. I shall have to allow a great deal of it to hang out.”

  Edith’s eyes widened. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and scurried out of the tent. Maddie began to change out of her lovely, simple silk dress.

  Forty-five minutes later, Captain Montgomery came to the tent so that he could lead her onto the stage that Sam had put together. He’d planned to try one more time to persuade her not to sing, but he took one look at her set jaw and didn’t say a word. He walked in front of Maddie, and she wondered how he could move with the weight of all the weapons he was wearing. A serious-looking Toby followed her.

  Maddie did her best to hide her nervousness, both about the coming crowd and about what she planned to do. She wasn’t sure that she had the nerve.

  She walked onto the stage, and the noise of the men quieted to a dull roar. They weren’t going to welcome her; they were going to make her prove herself.

  She could see by their eyes that they thought she was just what this woman called Harry said she was. But perhaps her voice could change their minds.

  She took the stance that Madame Branchini had taught her, the stance that the rest of the world expected from an opera singer, and began to sing a beautiful aria from Don Giovanni.

  She hadn’t sung five minutes before they started booing. A couple of shots were fired and some of the men started muttering in loud tones.

  She glanced at Captain Montgomery, saw that his eyes were scanning the crowd, one hand on his pistol, the other on his sword, ready to draw them if need be.

  Maddie stopped singing. She turned and went to Frank. “Do you have the music from that new opera?”

  “Carmen?”

  She nodded. “Give me some of the overture and then play the ‘Habanera.’ Play it three times. Play it as though your life depended on it.”

  He looked out over the crowd with an uneasy eye. “In this place it might.”

  She tried to get the attention of the men to tell them the story of Carmen and about the song she was going to sing, but no one listened to her. She looked at Captain Montgomery and saw the worry on his face.

  I shall show them, she thought. I shall be Carmen, the lusty girl who works in a cigarette factory.

  Frank started playing some of the overture, and Maddie began to unbutton her blouse. What her singing couldn’t do her skin did. She had the attention of the first row now. And when she unpinned her hair, letting it flow down her back, she gained the attention of the next five rows.

  Carmen was a mezzo soprano’s role and Maddie’s voice didn’t have quite the necessary darkness, but she had the emotion. The first words to the “Habanera” were “Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and it’s all in vain to call it if it chooses to refuse.”

  As she sang the words about love being a Gypsy child, she acted them out. She swished her skirt so that her ankles in their black silk stockings were exposed. When she got to where she sang “L’amour” several times, she drew it out as seductively as she knew how.

  She’d never done anything like this in her life, but as she started to sing the song for the second time, Maddie began to regret that she had never before acted like this. She could feel the captain’s eyes on her. Yesterday she’d been forward with him and he’d told her no, but the wide eyes of the men in the audience told her that none of them would tell her no.

  She left the stage and went down among the men. Her blouse was open to her waist now and, as Edith had predicted, a great deal of her was coming up over the top of the bright, gaudy red satin corset. She leaned over men and sang, speaking of love, “You think you can hold it, it escapes you,” and as she did so she slid away from the men’s clutching hands.

  By the third rendition of the “Habanera,” she was practically slithering around the room, from table to table. She was the promiscuous, luscio