A Midsummer's Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled.  Her asthma was forgotten.
    For a moment, at least.  Damnable heat.  She wiped a slick layer of sweat from her forehead.  Every breath was short.  Every breath was painful.  Apparently every breath was loud.  Tourists around her turned to look her way.
    “You okay?”  Vaughn was right at her shoulder.
    She shook her head.  No, she wasn’t all right.
    He grabbed her elbow.  All pretense was gone, the act forgotten.  “Come on,” he whispered.  “Almost there.”
    <>
    Almost there meant a walk of another three hundred feet.
    Everything conspired against Sammie to make the last few steps pure torture.  Her corset cut deep grooves into her skin.  Her Court gown, authentic in detail but made lighter for an American summer, felt like it weighed two hundred pounds.  The pins holding her glittering tiara to her complicated pinned up hairstyle stabbed her scalp in a different place with each breath.
    There were… too many breaths.
    To be one of the hundred people they passed who wore shorts…  Who wore shirts with short sleeves or no sleeves at all.  She longed to pull her hair into a high ponytail, and shield her eyes from the harsh sun with sunglasses.  The dripping bottles of water, fresh from buckets filled with ice, and overfilling plastic cups of bright red birch beer and other sodas that the tourists carried, set Sammie’s mouth to watering.
    How easily the tourists could stay cool.
    The actors didn’t have it so easy.  Save for the fans that only the women carried, they had to act like the heat had no bearing on them.  They had to act like the sun scorched neither their skin nor their eyes.  They ate and drank from the same stands as the tourists, but they could not take the same icy cold bottles or plastic cups.  They had to drink from metal mugs hanging from belts and garters.
    There was a perk of being a mud beggar.  Vaughn and his fellow beggars didn’t have such cups to heat their drinks up faster than a kettle.  They got to break character, at least for meals, and drink frosty cold water from bottles if they wanted.
    But Sammie had signed up for this fate.  She and Vaughn...  All of the actors, all of the food servers and artisans, chose to do what they did during the hottest part of the year.  For most of them, there was nothing else they would rather do.
    Despite what the heat did to her, there was no better way Sammie could imagine spending her summers.
    The sight of the shop gave her an extra burst of energy, and she practically ran to the building.  It was sanctuary.  The hidden door and the room secreted behind it was a most welcome thought.
    She leaned her head against the rough, sun scorched wood.  Her hand rested on the hot doorknob.  Inside were chairs.  Fans.  Coolness.
    But she couldn’t move.
    “It’s all right,” Vaughn whispered.  He put his hand on her lower back to keep her steady.  “Try to take nice, slow breaths.”
    He took the fan hanging from her garter and fanned her furiously.
    What little cool air it produced was delicious.

 
    Chapter 5
     
     
    “What ho!”
    Jameson marched upon the beggar, who stood so near his betrothed. Such a vile creature had no business being so near a person of nobility.  “Stand thee away from the Lady or I shouldst see thee in the stocks the whole of the day.”  He turned to Anne.  “Be thou well, my love?”
    Her face was red and flushed.  “I can’t breathe,” she gasped, dropping the guise of Lady Anne that she normally lived by.
    In an instant he was by her side.  “Is it your asthma?” he asked.  Jameson was gone.  He was back to his true self of Johnny. 
    She crossed her eyes at him, saying “no duh” without speaking a word.
    Johnny chuckled.  “I suppose I deserve that.”  Sam’s asthma had the nasty side effect of sucking all humor from her.  “Where’s your inhaler?”
    Her cheeks turned even redder.  “Upstairs.”  A lifetime of asthma had taught her that she