When the Curtain Rises Read online

  “Good morning, Chloe,” Kitty said as Chloe entered the dining room behind the housekeeper.

  Bess nodded from her place on the other side of the oval table.

  “How did you sleep? Is your room all right?” asked Kitty. “It used to be a larder, but we had it converted into a bedroom years ago, for when your father visited. We liked to keep him on the same floor with us when he was small. Our bedrooms are just down the hall. But you’re not a little girl—we could give you a room on one of the upper floors if you’d prefer more space or privacy.”

  “I slept well. I like the room,” Chloe said as she spread her napkin across her lap. “It’s cozy. And the view into the garden is nice.”

  Bess snorted. “Our gardener’s almost as old as we are. He can’t keep up with it—it’s a jungle.”

  Abigail emerged from the kitchen again, this time with a plate piled high with sausages.

  “I hope there’s something you like,” Kitty said.

  Chloe surveyed the full table. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

  “Follow my example then,” said Bess. The old woman filled her plate with one of everything: a fried egg, a sausage, a piece of bacon and a waffle. She finished it off with a scoop of strawberry sauce and a generous dollop of whipped cream.

  Chloe slid two waffles onto her own plate. “I’m not used to such big breakfasts. My mom is always counting carbs or grams of fat, and my dad has to watch his cholesterol.”

  Abigail took her place in the fourth chair at the table. “Your great-aunts are watching their cholesterol as well,” she confided. “This morning’s feast is in your honor.”

  “Abigail is watching our cholesterol,” Bess corrected.

  Kitty reached over to pat the housekeeper’s hand. “Not that we’re complaining. Abby takes good care of us. But this morning’s spread does make a nice change from porridge and dry toast!”

  As Chloe was accepting a cup of tea from Abigail, a large portrait on the far wall of the dining room caught her eye. Bess followed her gaze across the table. “What do you think?” she asked. “Quite an imposing figure, isn’t he?”

  “Who is it?” Chloe asked.

  “The lord of the manor himself. Our father, your great-grandfather.”

  Chloe studied her ancestor with interest. “He’s very handsome. There’s something almost—mysterious about him.”

  Kitty laughed. “He would have been very pleased to hear you say that. But I’m sure your father has told you all the old stories.”

  “He’s mentioned him,” said Chloe. “He was in a circus or something, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s all you know about the great Dante Magnus?” Kitty asked, looking distressed.

  Chloe shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t remember any more than that.”

  “Not much more than that to remember,” Bess said dryly. “Pass the syrup, please.”

  “Oh, no,” said Kitty. “There’s so much more! Your great-grandfather was an amazing man, one of the most talented magicians who ever lived. You can read Dante’s story for yourself if you’d like, Chloe. He wrote a memoir.”

  “Part of a memoir,” said Bess. “He disappeared before it was finished.”

  “Disappeared?” asked Chloe.

  Kitty nodded slowly, her eyes wide. “A few months after that painting was commissioned, the entire carnival our father was with vanished. The police found a few things at the site where the carnival was last seen, including the painting that hangs on the first-floor landing. But that was it; there were no other clues.”

  “Clues? But didn’t any of them ever show up again?”

  “None of them, ever,” said Kitty. “The police questioned people for months, for hundreds of miles in every direction. Our mother posted a large reward, but no one came forward. We never found out what happened. Some people say our father and his companions simply wandered north into the wilderness.” The old woman’s voice dropped as she leaned forward over her plate. “I think something more sinister happened to them.”

  “It’s pointless to stir that all up now,” said Bess, an edge to her voice. “It was almost a century ago. Dante would be long dead anyway.”

  “I’ll find Dante’s memoir for you,” Kitty said to Chloe, ignoring her sister. “You can read his story for yourself.”

  Bess clucked her tongue in annoyance. “Don’t force it on her, Kitty. I’m sure the last thing Chloe wants to do on her vacation is read a musty old memoir.”

  “No,” Chloe protested. “I’d like to see it, really. I didn’t know I had such an interesting ancestor.”

  Chloe helped Abigail carry the dishes into the kitchen after breakfast. When she returned to the dining room, her great-aunts were just sweeping the last crumbs off the tablecloth. “I was wondering,” she began hesitantly. “I mean, my father said—would you mind if I explored the house after I got dressed?”

  “Of course not. Explore to your heart’s content,” said Kitty.

  “Thanks,” said Chloe. “Also, I’ve been meaning to ask about the little key you sent with your invitation.”

  The two old women looked perplexed. “Key?” Kitty said.

  “Yes, this one.” Chloe unfastened the chain that hung around her neck and passed the tiny key to her great-aunt.

  Kitty turned the key over in her hand. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it before. Bess?”

  “You say it was in the letter we sent you?” Bess asked.

  “Yes. It fell out of the envelope.”

  Bess shook her head. “It didn’t come from me. Why would I go to the trouble of mailing you a key? It wouldn’t have been much use to you if you hadn’t accepted our invitation. And if you accepted, why send a key when we were going to see you face-to-face?”

  Abigail was still in the kitchen, wiping down the counters. “I posted the letter,” the housekeeper admitted, “but it was sealed when I got it.”

  “The key fell out of the envelope,” Chloe insisted. “Someone must have put it there.”

  Abigail nodded. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first mystery this house has seen. Strange things happen here sometimes,” she said, lowering her voice. “But then, it is a magician’s house, after all.”

  “What do you mean, ‘strange things’?”

  Abigail paused, her dishrag suspended in the air. “Most of the time it’s just a feeling I get—” She fell silent as the door from the dining room swung open and Bess entered the kitchen with an empty cup and saucer.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Bess asked.

  Abigail’s plump face had gone a little pinker than usual. “Just telling Chloe what a pleasure it is to work here.”

  Chloe waited until her great-aunt was gone again before pressing Abigail to continue. But the housekeeper had changed her mind. “I really shouldn’t be filling your head with ideas. Next thing you know you’ll be seeing ghosts everywhere.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Now look what I’ve started!”

  “But—”

  “No,” said Abigail, shaking her head. “My lips are sealed.”

  Feeling a little unsettled, Chloe left the kitchen to have a shower and get dressed. She was on her way to the staircase at the center of the house when she passed the doorway to the sitting room. She peered inside. It was a cozy room, filled with polished wood furniture. A chintz-covered love seat and two upholstered armchairs faced a large stone fireplace, and there was an upright piano tucked in the far corner. Chloe hesitated for only a second before crossing the room.

  The lid of the piano folded back without any resistance. Chloe’s heart was pounding in her chest as she looked down at the keys. She wiped her damp palms on her shorts and lifted her hands into the air. “A few scales, that’s all. No one’s listening.” But half a minute passed and then half a minute more, and her fingers remained suspended just above the keys.

  “Any luck tracing the source of your mystery key?” Bess asked from the doorway.

  Chloe turned, startled. “N
o—not yet,” she stammered.

  “I didn’t mean to alarm you,” said her great-aunt. “I see you found our old piano. Your father said it would be like a magnet to you.”

  “He told you about the recital, didn’t he?” Chloe said, fighting an unexpected wave of anger. “That’s why you invited me here.”

  Bess’s voice was gentle. “We wanted to see you, Chloe. We’re not getting any younger, Kitty and I. But it is true that your parents are very concerned about you. Your father didn’t tell us any of the details and we didn’t pry, but we gather you had a rough experience at a performance recently.”

  “I haven’t played in front of anyone for almost two months,” Chloe said, chewing her lower lip. “I want to, but I just can’t. Not even for my piano teacher. It’s stupid.”

  “Not so stupid. Don’t worry, it will happen when you’re ready. You won’t get any pressure from anyone in this house. As it happens, Kitty and I know a thing or two about stage fright.”

  “Thanks,” said Chloe.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Bess said with a nod.

  When Bess was gone again, Chloe closed the piano lid and left the sitting room. She continued down the hallway to the huge oak staircase that rose up through the center of the house. On the landing between the first and second floors, she paused to study a painting that hung beside an ornate grandfather clock. “The carnival painting,” Chloe murmured, remembering her great-aunts’ story at breakfast. The painting showed a cluster of brightly colored tents arranged in a half-circle against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. At the center of the tents there was a low stage with the name Carnival des Grands Lacs painted in elegant script at its base. There were several small figures in the picture: a tall man with a serpent around his neck, a dark man juggling half a dozen golden balls, and a tiny woman doing a handstand balanced on the raised arms of her equally short partner. Chloe looked for her great-grandfather and found him holding up a fiery ball in the shadows on the left-hand side of the stage. There was no sign of his wife or of any children.

  The longer Chloe studied the painting, the more details she noticed: the horses grazing off in the distance, the snakes curled up in cages in the shadow of one of the tents, the cases of bottles on display to the left of the stage. It was all oddly compelling. Chloe ran her fingertips over the painted scene. When the grandfather clock beside her began to strike the hour, she forced her eyes away from the picture and continued up the stairs.

  The long hallway at the top of the first flight of stairs was dimly lit by two small windows, one at either end. Chloe made her way to the nearest door, which opened into a bright room with pale yellow walls.

  It was clear from the child-size furnishings and the many toys that filled the generous space that the room had once been a nursery. There was a table with three chairs in the far corner of the room, set with tiny china cups and saucers. A large open chest overflowing with porcelain dolls and ancient teddy bears sat in another corner of the room. A magnificent rocking horse in the center of the nursery caught Chloe’s attention. She ran her fingers over the polished wooden head, the smooth leather saddle. The horse was so lifelike that Chloe half-expected to hear it give a soft whinny.

  Chloe examined a few more of the antique toys, and then she turned her attention to the bookshelves that lined two walls of the room. She was immersed in an old mystery when Abigail came up to tell her that lunch was ready.

  Chloe checked her watch in surprise. She’d been reading for hours. “Wow. I totally lost track of the time,” she said as she rose and followed Abigail down the hall to the stairs. When she reached the landing, Chloe paused for another quick look at the painting next to the grandfather clock. “That’s odd,” she said, leaning in to study the picture more closely.

  Abigail looked back over her shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “This painting. It’s different. I’m almost positive that the sun is higher in the sky now, and I think the ponies have moved slightly too. And the performers are in different places.” Chloe blinked and squinted at the picture again. “My eyes must be playing tricks on me.”

  “Or the house is,” Abigail said knowingly.

  Chloe looked up from the painting. “What?”

  But the housekeeper just shook her head and carried on down the stairs.

  Kitty was eager to hear about Chloe’s explorations. Between mouthfuls of soup, Chloe described all the old books and toys she’d found in the nursery.

  “We spent a good deal of our childhood playing in that room with our brother Henry, your grandfather,” Kitty said.

  “Found the secret passageway yet?” Bess asked.

  “Secret passageway?”

  “Don’t give her any hints, Bess,” Kitty chided. “Let her discover the house’s secrets on her own. It’s much more fun that way. Speaking of secrets, I found Dante’s memoir.” She stood up to get a book from the sideboard and placed it on the table next to Chloe’s bowl.

  Chloe wiped her hands carefully on her napkin before picking up the antique volume and opening it to the first page. “The Memoirs of Dante Magnus,” she read aloud. The words were handwritten in an elegant old-fashioned script. “Thank you,” said Chloe. “I’ll be very careful with it, I promise.”

  “Take it out into the back garden,” Kitty suggested. “It’s quiet and shady there.”

  “Just don’t get lost in that jungle,” Bess warned. “We don’t want to have to send a search party after you.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Chloe repeated, not sure how seriously to take her great-aunt.

  Chapter Three

  Chloe stepped outside with Dante’s book tucked under her arm and immediately found herself beneath a dense floral canopy. Roses, camellias and other bushes that she couldn’t identify competed for sun in the space closest to the house. Rhododendrons and huge ferns grew in the shadow of the high stone walls that enclosed the yard on two sides. The back of the garden was hidden from sight behind a thick screen of overgrown trees and shrubs.

  She forced her way along a worn stone path that was really more a leafy tunnel than a trail, burrowing deeper and deeper into the garden. The tunnel curved and curved again before opening into a small mossy clearing. There was a tiny pond in the center, with a fountain in the shape of a leaping fish. Two crumbling stone benches, one in the sun and one in the shade, faced each other across the pond. Chloe stretched out along the sunny bench.

  With her head propped up on one arm, Chloe thumbed through the first few pages of Dante’s book. It didn’t look like an easy read. The handwritten script was faded in places, and the phrases that jumped out at her seemed painfully formal and old-fashioned. But Chloe was curious enough about her great-grandfather’s story to turn back to the first page and begin to read.

  I was born in 1866, in a windswept corner of County Antrim, on the north coast of Ireland. I was the third of eight children, christened Daniel McBride by my Catholic parents. We were little more than peasants. We did not own the small field where our donkey grazed, nor the yard where our chickens scratched, nor even the patch of dirt where we grew cabbages and carrots and potatoes. Neither did we own our home, a two-room thatched cottage with an earthen floor and an open hearth.

  When I was eleven I left school to attend my first hiring fair. We gathered in the center of town, boys and girls alike, nervously clutching our small bundles as we waited to be inspected. Wealthy farmers came from the glens and townships for miles around in search of cheap labor. Most of the men merely looked me over as they passed; a few squeezed the muscles of my arms and checked my teeth as if I were a horse or some other beast of burden. I was hired by a farmer for the standard term of six months. For six months I labored from first light until nightfall, tending the cows and pigs, carrying water, plowing and tilling the stubbled fields. I endured my master’s stick when he was drunk and the rough side of his tongue when he was sober. At night I slept on a wide ledge above the cattle in the byre.

  It was the
practice at the end of each term to pay the mother of the child laborer the few coins that were due, but as I grew older I demanded my fee directly. I surrendered most of it to help feed my younger siblings, but I also kept a little back. By the spring of 1883, the year that I turned seventeen, I had saved enough to pay for passage to England and on to the Americas.

  I secured passage from Belfast to Liverpool on a small steamship. From Liverpool it was my intention to sail directly to New York, but the quickest passage available to North America was on a ship bound for Montreal in Canada. It was fate. If I had taken any other ship, I would not have met the great American magician who introduced me to my vocation.

  As Chloe grew more absorbed in her great-grandfather’s story, Dante’s formal language became less of a distraction. It was as if his words were dissolving into moving images, the story coming to life on the pages in front of her. She could almost smell the salt in the air and feel the deck move under her feet as Dante’s ship steamed westward past the south coast of Ireland.

  I was getting some air up on deck on the second day of my voyage when a tall, sandy-haired man approached from the opposite direction. After we had chatted for a few moments, my new acquaintance invited me to a show he was putting on that evening in the first-class lounge. I took a seat in an empty corner at the back of the lounge just before eight o’clock. As the oil lamps were dimmed, a man in a tuxedo stepped forward at the front of the room. “It is my great honor,” he announced, “to introduce to this distinguished audience a man famous on five continents, a man who has performed in front of Queen Victoria herself—the great American magician, Mr. Harry Kellar!”

  The room went black. When the lights came up again, the man who had introduced himself to me on deck stood on a raised platform at the front of the lounge. I watched, spellbound, as he performed one trick after another. He tossed a birdcage with a live dove inside it into the air, and the bird and cage both disappeared. He put tiny plants inside hollow tubes and withdrew mature rose bushes. Beneath the magician’s skillful fingers, the roses disappeared, reappeared and changed color.