Fates and Traitors Read Online Free PDF Page B

the brief career of the Tripple Alley Players was brought to an abrupt and ignominious end.
    The following morning, Edwin remained so humiliated and angry that he waited until his father left and his siblings went out to play before he trudged downstairs and slumped dejectedly at the breakfast table. “John shouldn’t have tattled,” he groused, digging into the plate of ham and eggs Mary Ann set before him.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have disobeyed your father,” she replied, “nor should you have cut up those lovely costumes I worked so hard to make for him.”
    Edwin’s remorse made her wish she could take the words back. “I’m sorry, Mother,” he said, stricken, his eyes welling up with tears. “King Richard needed armor, but I didn’t think—I didn’t mean—”
    She hastened to tell him she forgave him, before his sobs beckoned his curious younger siblings in from the garden and exposed her most sensitive child to more embarrassment. She almost wished John had not tattled, and she certainly wished she could tell Edwin that the Tripple Alley Players could continue, that she would make him his own King Richard costume, and that he need not become a cabinetmaker. But she could not contradict Junius, not with his behavior on tourswinging erratically from acclaimed performances in one city to frightening mad freaks in another.
    Junius had an artist’s temperament—and she adored him for it—but it required her to be steadfast and strong, to believe in him so fiercely that he would never question his ability to provide for her and their children. The profits she brought home from peddling produce at the Baltimore markets did not trouble him because he had a hand in everything grown at The Farm, and so the earnings were his as much as hers. But if the family came to depend upon Mary Ann’s sales too much, he would begin to doubt himself, and all would be lost. In dark moments Mary Ann sometimes felt herself adrift on a sea of willful self-deception, but she would not have traded her tumultuous life with her beloved Junius for anything, certainly not the dullness and dubious comfort of marriage to a lesser man.
    And yet worry constantly stalked her hope and happiness. Junius missed performances due to indisposition so frequently that some theatre managers refused to hire him, relenting only after indignant citizens circulated petitions demanding that he be invited to perform. One evening in St. Louis, after his character had died onstage, Junius had suddenly leapt to his feet and bowed deeply to the audience three times and lay down again, only to be resurrected a second time by the audience’s thunderous applause—and he likely would have continued to postpone his character’s demise had the stage manager not ordered the drop lowered. In New Orleans, wary managers drove him around in a carriage all day to keep him sober, refusing to stop or let him out until minutes before curtain so he could not break away from them and flee to a bar. Sometimes even when sober his villainous characters possessed him so ferociously that his fellow players shrank from him on the stage, the men refusing to engage in any swordplay with him lest he forget the choreography and run them through, the women fearing his Othello would truly strangle them before the scene ended. And yet interspersed between canceled engagements and others interrupted by drunken or erratic behavior were performances of such astonishing brilliance, such incomparable sublimity, that Junius continued to fill theatres, to inspire audiences to spontaneous ovations of thunderous applause. No one knew what the mad tragedian might do next, and that anticipation and uncertainty electrified the theatre the moment he stepped onstage.
    Mary Ann was thankful and relieved that Junius could still find work despite his habit of baffling audiences, annoying critics, and infuriating theatre owners. She