Free The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott Page A

began, Nando came crashing into the seat beside Bella and filled her and Clover in on the plot: ‘She’s a wealthy society queen—that’s her portrait. He wants her to pose in the altogether, but she won’t do it. A good thing too, though she does keep her figure pretty well hitched in.’
    Bella thought Miss Masefield very beautiful. Massive eyes under arching, piteous brows, masses of dark hair heaped behind her head like a Gibson girl. Nando told them she was on loan from the legitimate theatre—like Ethel Barrymore, only older, or Sarah Bernhardt, only younger and not so famous. Another actress deigning to come around the vaudeville circuit with a play. The surprise for Bella and Clover was that the man in the play was Jimmy Battle. They’d thought him a singer, or a dancer, but here was where he had been hiding! He was lovely, Bella thought: wavy dark hair, dark eyes, and a look of sophisticated and desperate loneliness.
    The first part was waffle about her broken heart and the young artist’s empty bohemian life—his need for a woman who could teach him to love again, purely . He begged her to cast aside the shackles of society, and yield to him her soul. The words were racy, like those lyrics that Aurora’d sung yesterday, pretending to be chaste in order to be fast.
    ‘Hey, they cut the bit about him wanting to paint her in a state of nature!’ Nando whispered. ‘But they kept the sheer curtains on her. Need to for the plot, you’ll see.’ Bella clamped her hand on his arm tomake him hush. The woman was moving about the room in her trailing draperies, dark and passionate, practically writhing in the throes of some terrible dilemma. Finally she subsided onto a low couch, close to Jimmy.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I must be true or I am nothing, can’t you understand?
    Her great eyes stared up at his slim figure, his hand resting negligently on the pillar. Bella wondered if he really did love her; he looked so hurt that she wouldn’t be his own. He was a good dancer, and he liked Aurora, so maybe he didn’t care about Mrs. Farquhar.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I married him—that is sacred.
AUBREY: I understand. You do not love me enough to brave the world’s disdain.
MRS. FARQUHAR: It is not disdain I shrink from, but I would not have you smirched.
AUBREY: Oh, you—darling!
    Jimmy raised Eleanor Masefield up, and then drew her near. ‘They’ve cut the kiss,’ Nando said in Bella’s ear. ‘Couldn’t get it across Cleveland. The old girl was in a snit about that, said it’s played the toniest gigs from Boston to Topeka.’ But they nearly kissed, nearly . Jimmy the Bat’s long nose touched the actress’s long nose, and brushed along it until—she turned suddenly away. Her noble profile, the studied grace of her movements, made Bella’s stomach swoop. Eleanor Masefield walked away from Jimmy, holding out a white arm behind her, begging him to stop. She crumpled to her knees, then knelt, back straight, a white flame in a lonely chapel. How does she make herself look so holy all at once, Bella wondered—while busy believing it with all her heart.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I have a sacred duty to my husband, for he was the father of my little son—my son, passed on to heaven at three years old. That hallowed memory keeps me locked in my golden cage.
    She smiled, a soft, sad smile, and lifted a serenely grieving face heavenward.
    At that Bella’s fascination ended with a cool click in her mind. No. That is not how Mama looks when she talks about Harry.
    Bella pulled her arm out of Nando’s and decided not to watch any more. But then there was a tramping sound, and Aubrey and Mrs. Farquhar turned as one towards the door in dramatic attitudes of apprehension and alarm which, now the spell was broken, struck Bella as funny. It was her husband! They sprang apart. He picked up his palette and she clutched her negligee around her once more, and shrank back onto the platform as if to hide behind it—but the artist was a smarty, and