Fortune's Journey Read Free Page A

any close contact with him again. Except for the time the men spent in the saloons, Plunkett’s Players lived pretty much to themselves when they were on the road. It hadn’t occurred to her that the awkward young man would be their host here in Busted Heights. Mr. Patchett had been quite upset with her, too; he was anticipating enough trouble with their landlady as it was.
    Indeed, even as Jamie disappeared back into the kitchen, they could hear the shrill voice of Mrs. Halleck complaining to the hired girl. “I don’t know why I let those people in here. Actors? Tools of the devil is more like it. Frivolators, I call ’em—”
    Then the door was closed and they could hear no more. Yet it almost seemed it had been left open longer than necessary. Fortune wondered if Jamie had hesitated on purpose, just to make sure the troupe could hear his mother’s opinion of them.
    She shrugged. What difference did it make? She certainly didn’t care what Jamie Halleck or his mother thought of them.
    She bit her lip. The problem was, she did care, and she knew it. Try as she might, she could never convince herself that the people who looked down on actors didn’t matter.
    Fortune swatted the thought away. She had no time for such nonsense. They were going to rehearse after dinner, and she had to go over her lines. Muttering an “Excuse me,” she pulled away from the table and headed upstairs for the room she shared with Mrs. Watson.
    Closing the door to her room behind her, Fortune looked around and wondered again why her father had started them on this westward trek.
    When she was honest with herself, she knew why. John Plunkett had always been a restless man. When the discovery of gold in California had been announced in 1849, he had ached to head for the goldfields—not to mine ore, but to mine the audiences he knew were gathering there.
    Unfortunately for his wandering soul, Fortune’s mother, Laura, would have nothing of it. But in June of 1851 Laura Plunkett had been struck down swiftly and silently by one of the thousand diseases that made life in the mid-1800s chancy at best.
    With the loss of his wife John Plunkett had gone a little bit crazy. A year later, no longer tied down by Laura’s need for a regular home, he had packed up his daughter and the rest of his acting troupe to join the westward trek.
    Fortune had not argued; at the time she had been more than willing to leave Charleston, to flee the memories, happy and sad, that seemed to haunt her on those streets.
    Thus the troupe had become Plunkett’s Traveling Players, and Fortune Plunkett had become a virtual gypsy. And as they traveled from town to town, moving ever westward, she had discovered that despite the hardships her father was right about one thing: Wherever there were people, there was a need for entertainment.
    â€œThe whole country is growing westward,” he would tell Fortune. “And the ones who get there first are going to do the best.”
    These remarks were usually prompted by his reading some article about how San Francisco had become a booming city, eager for new experiences, for “culture” to come to its western wildness. When he read that the Chapman Family’s performances were sometimes rewarded by miners flinging bags of gold dust onto the stage, their course was fixed. The city beckoned to him like a distant dream.
    Fortune sighed. In the past her dreams and her father’s had been in conflict. But with his death she had had to make his dreams her own.
    She shook her head and forced herself out of her reverie. San Francisco might be a booming city, but right now she was in Busted Heights. She looked around again. The small room was clean enough, but that was about all that could be said for it. The walls were bare except for a cracked mirror hanging above a small stand that held a basin and pitcher for washing up. The lone bed, sagging in the middle, was