Free Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney

Beaufort that Mr. Olcott had gone elsewhere with his actors to shoot some scenes for the production under way. Mr. Olcott’s chief assistant, “a girl named Mae,” said Sarah, “with blond bangs reaching down into her eyes, and lips tight and red as a new rose, wrote out very carefully, in very large handwriting, the directions.”
    Mr. Olcott was “most anxious,” Mae said, to meet his new leading lady.
    The jarvey didn’t even look at the piece of paper. “They’re out at Moll’s Gap,” he said, and cracked his long whip. The horse, he said, knew the way.
    Whatever the ancient feelings coursing through her, Sarah looked every inch an American: prosperous, helpful, charming. She enchanted all she met, including the jarvey.
    She asked him to repeat the names of the places through which they passed, and while telling me she rolled them on her tongue. Tullig; Kilgobnet; Suanavalla; Coolcummisk; Dunloe; and finally Gortacollopa, where they found Mr. Olcott. Wearing a white peaked cap and check knickerbockers, he was standing in the middle of the road beckoning to somebody. And then they saw two people, obviously his actors, walk swiftly across a field to a gate, which they climbed, and upon which they sat and batted heavy eyelids at each other.
    In the fashion that would become iconic, Mr. Olcott shouted, “Cut!” He turned to greet Sarah, kissed her hands, and offered her an engagement that would last, on and off, for as long as he stayed in Ireland.
    She went to work on the following Monday, in a film called
Rosaleen’s Return
, about an Irish emigrant girl who comes home to her birthplace and restores her family cottage. From a ruined hovel with the thatched roof falling in, she makes a white-painted haven with picket fence and rambling rose. A “sow’s ear to silk purse” plot—how could she lose?
    Sarah, with very few lines to mouth, gleamed and soared. The camera loved her, full-face and profiles, which Mr. Olcott pronounced “very unique.” Those eyelashes, that rosebud mouth, that sloping nose—he lost part of his heart to her, and then lost most of the rest to her daughter.
    “What is your name?” said Mr. Olcott, to the child swinging her legs from the garden gate.
    “Venetia Kelly, and my profession is that of actor. And you, sir?”
    He professed himself “swoony for that kid” and that night wrote a film for her. He called it
The Courage of Esmeralda
.

I n Killarney the last bolt of this Kelly family preamble slides home—because a major character now appears, brought there in a cardboard box by King Kelly. A man who made every room turbulent upon his entrance, whenever King Kelly held out his arms, it became a race between Sarah and Venetia. That day Sarah won, as she would for the rest of her father’s life. Venetia wrapped her arms around his beef of a leg and held on, until he prized her away and lifted her up to be kissed.
    He had no luggage; he said it would arrive later, and that the railway company had lost it. Who could ever believe him? Sarah had to go out and buy him clothes. Out of his copious pockets, however, he began to pull things—sticks of barley sugar, a chocolate bear, a tiny bottle of scent, a lace handkerchief. On the floor beside him he had already deposited a large box.
    “Tell me a story, tell me a story,” Venetia cried, and King Kelly, with the child still in his arms, found the sofa and sat down.
    “What kind of a story would you like?” he said. “You know that for the whole year you’re eleven years old you can have any story in the world because eleven is a magic number.”
    “You said that too when I was ten,” said Venetia. “And when I was nine. And eight, and seven. What’s in the box? Is it for me?”
    “Venetia, honey,” said her mother, but the warning of good manners faded in the gale of laughter.
    “I’ll tell you the story first,” said King Kelly, “and then I’ll open the box and you’ll see why I told you the story.”
    With