Stone Mad

by Elizabeth Bear

  Simple enough, once you work out all the gadgets and the sheer skill to make the audience look where you want and see what you want, and of course the sleight of hand. Which ain’t easy; I tried some of it, with my illusionist laughing at me.

  So here was Cager Horner’s signature trick: now do it with a cannonball.

  You can see a cannonball. And you sure as hell can’t palm one.

  * * *

  Mrs. Horner, since she was pretending not to be an illusionist and all—just presenting her dead husband’s tricks, as was proper for a widow—never touched that cannonball. She had four Beautiful Assistants, which was quite a step up; she told us that in previous engagements she’d done the catch herself, with an audience member acting as volunteer and her stagehand—who was also her valet, John—under the traps making the real magic happen. That was the role she used to play herself, she said, when her husband was alive, and after she got too plump to fit into the leotards and touch off the gun.

  Now she had Priya making the catch, me hauling the cannon, Hilaria handing the ball around the audience, and Hypatia touching off the blast. She’d gotten the other girls to play a role in all the other “demonstrations” as well, but since this was only one of two with the horse, and the idea of Priya in the path of even an empty cannon making me seasick—and maybe the idea that me and Priya weren’t as solid and fated as I’d thought making me even more seasick—I opted to take Gremlin back to the wings and feed him carrots and whisper my heartache into his deaf ears between his moments of glory.

  Hilaria handed around the cannonball. It was an old one, covered in a palimpsest of names and dates and cryptic symbols. Mrs. Horner said it was more convincing if you used the same one every night.

  I was starting to think Hilaria’s stage name, if it was a stage name, might have been a bit of a joke. She didn’t say a word the whole time she was managing the rubes. Her décolleté was probably distracting most of the men and half of the women from making a thorough inspection of the munitions, anyhow. Not that Hypatia and me weren’t doing our part.

  “So simple a mere girl can do it,” Mrs. Horner said, which made Priya bristle and me hide a laugh. “But so dangerous that grown men have died! You will be mystified!”

  I supposed it was better than claiming Priya was some disciple of the mystic arts of the Orient or something. Hypatia had floated the swami line, and Priya had offered, in that case, to turn her corset lacing into a snake. Those two was making me a little nervous, honestly. They was too much alike. Which was probably why I liked Hypatia slightly more than I honestly should have. But I was keeping that part to myself.

  Hilaria picked an audience member (who for some inexplicable reason was wearing his Rebel coat to the theatre fourteen years after the damned war ended) to mark the ball. She spoke, finally, breaking her silence only long enough to murmur, “You have the look of a man who knows artillery, sir.”

  She said it so sultry I don’t think he even noticed he’d been insulted. It made me like her. I got Negro friends, and no use for Democrats.

  I unhooked Gremlin from the cannon and moved him back behind it, then laced him into the reversed harness to brace the rebound. I made sure I was on the side away from the audience, though keeping my face businesslike, which I had some practice on. Hilaria brought the ball back and loaded it, with a powder charge. She winked at me as she slid the ramrod home. My heart did a trip-hammer in my chest. She was so smooth, I couldn’t see if she triggered the trap.

  God, Hilaria and Hypatia wouldn’t hurt Priya, would they? The Arcade sisters had no reason.

  . . . not unless they thought she was in line for a job with Mrs. Horner, and they wanted that job for themselves.

  I hid my face in the pony’s silken neck, which was probably good theatre, and kept me from shooting my dinner across the footlit boards. I heard the squeak of a felt-tipped fountain marking pen, and Mrs. Horner saying, “I’ll draw these two targets, here and here. One goes on this beautiful young woman’s back. The other, she will hold between her hands. No, right over the heart, dear. I hope you don’t mind a little blood. Hypatia, just roll that pane of glass into place please?”

  The audience laughed, a nervous titter. Mrs. Horner had her dotty grandmother impersonation precisely right.

  “Now face away from the cannon, dear.”

  I could not look. And I had to.

  I knew my paint was streaked when I pulled my face away from Gremlin’s neck, because I could see the rouge, lipstick, and mascara all over his silver hide. It was away from the audience, though, so it didn’t matter. I’d just keep my face behind him.

  As if he understood my thoughts, he tossed his head, making the bright-dyed ostrich feathers on his headstall shiver.

  I watched Priya turn her back on me. The crudely drawn paper target between her shoulders fluttered.

  Hypatia produced a bit of slow match from a pot she had been hiding in her décolletage for no good reason excepting showwomanship. I hoped it was well insulated. She held it high when the drumroll started, and with a flourish as the silence fell she lowered it to the touch hole. Gremlin, no fool, leaned back against the traces.

  There followed an enormous roar.

  Flame leaped from the bore and the cannon lunged back. The sugared glass shattered. I thought I saw—me, who was supposed to know how the trick worked now—the shadow of the cannonball.

  I might have screamed, but if I did it was lost in the roar.

  Gremlin took the blow; one step, and the spasm of flexed muscle along his haunches and loins. I soothed his neck automatically.

  Nothing could have soothed me.

  My Priya staggered, and my heart staggered with her.

  And then Mrs. Horner caught her elbow, and steadied her. She reached around Priya and made a peeling gesture, and I saw her turn to the audience and hold two paper targets high. They fluttered in the middles: holed through the center, each of them. And then Priya turned, too, in her enameled, glittering, rhinestone-encrusted stage dress of an armature. She extended her hands over her head.

  Between them, I saw the marked cannonball.

  I gave Gremlin his sugar, and I leaned against his neck to keep from fainting dead away.

  * * *

  Later, Mrs. Horner took me and Priya out to dinner—not at the Riverside, obviously, but at a perfectly nice little supper club for ladies across the way—and between us ordering and the food coming . . . well, you might have expected polite conversation, but that would be reckoning without Priya. She says what she thinks.

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to make friends with the Arcade sisters, after what they tried,” said Priya, softly. “Pardon me if I overstep.”

  Mrs. Horner inspected the polish on her silverware and found it satisfactory. “Young lady, the advantage of being young is that your life is not constrained and directed by the accumulated inertia of your own poor decisions.”

  Priya seemed at a loss as to how this answered her question but accepted the conversational redirect gracefully. “What’s the advantage of being old?”

  She grinned. “The advantage of being elderly is you don’t have to make the same stupid self-defeating decisions that same way a second time! At my age you learn not to take everything personally. Most of what people do has a whole lot more to do with the insides of their own heads than it does with anybody else. You find somebody in this world who thinks of you as more than a dressed set thirty percent of the time, you fight to hold on to that person.”

  She laughed, to show that she was kidding, but her tone was serious enough that Priya examined her quizzically. “Also, we aren’t friends exactly. But they’re young enough to be entitled to a few mistakes, and when you’re their age—well, I suppose you are their age. Let’s just say that when you’re old, a lot of things seem less worth being dramatic over.”

  She patted my hand. “Thirty years on,” she said, “this won’t feel like nothing. Now, I feel like I owe you girls a bit more than that
twenty dollars and a tuna salad plate fit for a nice young lady, all things considered.”

  I shook my head.

  “You know you’re both welcome to come on with me. I have never seen applause like last night’s.”

  I looked at Priya. She was looking at her hands. I said, “We’re square.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Then I said, “Only . . .”

  Mrs. Horner lifted her velvet chin and stared me right in the face with her iron eyes. She didn’t cut me no break.

  “I am curious about the password,” I said.

  She laid a finger aside her nose like a Charles Dickens character. “My husband was an illusionist,” she said. “He wouldn’t have picked anything anybody could guess. Or even, possibly, anything like a word at all.”

  Priya looked at me and I looked at Priya. “Oh,” Priya said, and laid her own finger alongside her own nose.

  Mrs. Horner nodded. “If you ever decide to go into the illusionist business, young lady, you look me up. But don’t put it off too long if you’re going to decide to. I’m not getting any younger.”

  * * *

  We rode home in aching quiet, in another night of heavy, cold rain. Neither of us said a word as we walked up the steps and in the front door. In silence I took off my coat and boots, and Priya decided that nothing would do for midnight in winter and foul weather but that she go out to the barn and make sure she’d gotten enough grease on the Singer.

  She was thinking about Mrs. Horner’s offer, and I didn’t need no medium to tell me so.

  In the kitchen I found the kettle and took it back out to the yard where I filled it from the handle pump. I let my hair and sleeves get wet, courting a cold, but I was in one of them low moods where catching your death seems like just the done thing. There was a banked fire left in the Franklin stove and it didn’t take much to get it roaring. Those things is well built, even if it was an old plain one and not one of the newfangled Franklin cookers, which got everything but an iron octopus attached to do your braising and your sautéing and your saucying for you. (Priya would say, “Ain’t neither one of us need nobody to do our saucying for us.”)

  I opened up an eye and set the kettle on it instead of putting it on the hook, because the hearth was cold and I didn’t feel like building up a separate fire. It was pretty near boiling by the time Priya walked in, drenched to the skin, and started shucking her gear. She hung it up near the stove, and the wool of her jacket started steaming immediately. Water made her shirt translucent, her body a smooth mystery behind it. I didn’t feel like I had the right to stare.

  I gave her a warm Indian blanket instead. She looked pointedly at my damp sleeves, but I was standing near enough the cookstove that I weren’t feeling no chill and to be honest the steam coming off ’em would leave ’em dry soon enough.

  She leaned one buttock against the table, the brown and red Indian blanket folded and draped over her shoulders like a shawl, and looked at me seriously.

  “We need to talk about your friend.”

  “I plain can’t stand it if the first thing that happens in our new house is a fight,” I said.

  “I dislike the idea as well, but . . . you went against my wishes, Karen.”

  I had and I knew it. “She ain’t my friend exactly. We just met.”

  “That makes it worse, love, not better.” She sighed. The kettle didn’t have a whistle, but the steam was standing out a mile from the spout, and I’d had plenty of time to get the tea things out on the sideboard while she was wrestling with the Singer. It gave me an excuse not to look at her while I busied myself, fixing her tea as she liked it. I’d always drunk coffee, but I was starting to come around. And it turned out the tea she got in Chinatown wasn’t anything like the boiled black tea I’d been . . . well, you can’t exactly say “used to” about something like that.

  When she was cradling a mug in her hands, she said, “What did she mean when she said you’d said I’d come around?”

  “I told her I could talk you into something, I suppose. And I’m sorry I did it, if it matters.” It didn’t. I knew that. It didn’t stop me being sorry, though.

  “So you . . . conspired against me with her. And you nearly got yourself killed.”

  No mention of the danger I’d put her in, of course. Because this was Priya.

  “I didn’t love you any less,” I said. Which was laggard as a three-foot mule, but also the truth, and I didn’t know how to reconcile both things.

  “How am I supposed to trust you now?”

  That brought me up. Because I weren’t the first person to lie to her, and I knew that. Lies was how she wound up in America, whoring in a crib for no more pay than mealy rice and fewer beatings than she would have got if she’d said otherwise.

  “I guess I have to earn it back.” I swished my own tea around in my mouth until it was cool enough to swallow, waiting for her to do something other than study my expression.

  “I guess . . . you do.”

  Maybe all that swishing washed some words loose of my own. Because when I swallowed, I had found out what I needed to tell her. “I got something to say, too, Pree. And I don’t want you to think it’s just tit for tat, and you got a bone to pick with me so I got to have a beef with you.”

  “You’re nearly always fair,” she said, though warily, in the gap where I was getting my thoughts organized. There was some humor in the “nearly” and I rolled my eyes at her over my mug.

  I took a breath so deep I felt it in those ribs I’d bruised on my corset, and imagined what Hypatia would sound like if she was actually channeling my da, who had the least Irish temper of any Irishman you ever met, or maybe he learned to keep a rein on it.

  I said, as evenly as anybody could have, “I don’t like you telling me what to do, because I’m your wife, like that means I need your say-so for everything.”

  “But I am your wife also!” There was heat in it, and my back went up like a mad cat’s. And then she stopped, and frowned, and thought for a minute with her finger raised like a schoolmarm. I just about held on to my temper by the scruff while it thrashed and spat, and kept myself from interrupting her.

  “Karen honey,” Priya said, and it punched me right through the heart because she sounded just like Miss Francina and I guess I never thought before where she picked it up, and I was thinking about how disappointed in me Miss Francina would have been right about then, “you know the problem is that you are too used to being on your own.”

  I must have looked at her funny, because she reached out her free hand and pushed a dark curl off my forehead. ”Where I come from, we can never forget that when we make a decision, it affects the whole family. That we bring honor or shame, comfort or discomfort, safety or peril, on everyone. But here, it is easy. It is easy to think I could just not answer my father, because he is shamed by my life and abuses me for it. But I have a duty to consider him. Even if I choose something different, something against his wishes, I must acknowledge that he does have those wishes. They might be wrong for me, but they are his.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are fearless,” she said, with perfect love. “You are like the horse, yes, who has no idea that it can be harmed by the jump, or the fall. You know only that the obstacle is before you. When you see something that you think needs doing, you do not stop to consider consequences, and nothing has ever turned you back. You are the bravest person I have ever known. And I cannot complain too much about these traits of your character, because I am here, alive, and my sister is home, alive, because you saw me in need of protection and you stepped between me and some very bad men. You did not think. You did not hesitate. You merely acted. Fearlessly.”

  I thought about telling her I’d been almost wet through my bloomers, but she was on a roll, and honestly I liked seeing her talking about me and happy, rather than talking about me and mad.

  She set her mug down. It was empty already. You should se
e that woman go through hot drinks. ”So you cannot see something that looks unfair happening without stepping in. But when you rush forward like a tiger”—she made claws of her hands and pawed the air, and we both smiled easy at each other for the first time in I don’t even know how long it might have been—“you make that decision for all of your friends, too, and everyone around you. And you do not take the time to consider that your decisions can affect me, and also other people. Can harm me, and also harm other people. And that we should be consulted before you make decisions and get into fights that might, for example, end in your death.”

  “It’s my life,” I said, a little sulkily.

  “And you are my wife,” she answered, smooth and calm. “So if you go to jail or lose your life, what happens to me? Where do I go? How do I run a ranch? How do I live without you, Karen Memery?”

  That stuck me like a porcupine spine. Because I knew just what she meant, having thought it myself once or twice. I’d die for her, and she knowed it was so. But I’d die for her in part because it would be better than living without her, and . . .

  . . . and if I thought any deeper than that, my eyes stung like there was smoke in ’em and you know I weren’t so fearless after all.

  “And your actions, your choices, reflect on me. If it is seen by others that we are not a team that can pull in harness, yes, then I am humiliated because I am seen not to have your regard. What is a lover who cannot hold the regard of her beloved?”

  I knew that feeling in my belly, and I hated it. It was shame. And I wanted to put it aside and think about something else, or maybe get mad at Priya, but she didn’t deserve me getting mad at her. I was ashamed because she was right.

  “You’re saying my actions have consequences for other people,” I said, so she’d know—I hoped—that I understood. “And that I’ve got some little responsibility for those consequences.”