“I thought you might.” Her eyes mocked him briefly. “Anyway—some of this you’ll have known from my letters to Sarah, although I never told her about Mr. Savage’s leaving.”

“Go on, please.”

“We drifted up and down the East Coast. I played more and more often, and so in time became a regular member of the company. I learned how to apply cosmetics to my face to suit it to different roles. Were you quite disgusted, seeing me remove the evidence at the theatre?”

“Not in the least, although you are more lovely with your own skin.”

She smiled, accepting the compliment. “Two years after we were married we found ourselves giving performances in New Bedford, Massachusetts. My name, along with that of Douglas, appeared on the bills and broadsheets—mine listed merely as ‘Mrs. Douglas Savage.’ One evening when Douglas and I arrived at the theatre to prepare ourselves for the performance, there was a woman waiting beside the stage door with a female child of five or six years. She—the woman, I mean—threw herself upon Douglas and began to weep and accuse him of treachery and desertion. The child wept too, hysterically.” She frowned. “I do not like children very much, but I moved instinctively to comfort the little girl. Holding her in my arms I witnessed Douglas’s breaking away from the woman, who was loudly proclaiming herself his wife. He kept repeating furiously—and ridiculously, it seemed to me even then—‘But you live in Salem!’ And she answered him, ‘No longer, villain! I have tracked you down at last!’”

“What a dreadful thing to have happened to you,” Leon said.

Lauretta laughed. “Yes, I suppose. But I rather enjoyed it too, you know. Remember my romantic disposition, my insistence that life be constantly new and surprising! Well, it certainly was so on that day. To go back to the scene: Douglas freed himself of the overwrought woman and streaked out of the theatre like a scalded cat. The child wrenched herself from my arms and went to her mother, thereby engaging her attention until Douglas had sufficient time to make his escape—from all of us.”

“Do you mean to say you have not seen him since?”

“I mean that precisely!” She laughed.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, and laughed, and said, “I don’t know why I laugh.”

“Because it is funny,” she said. “Not amusing, mind. Funny! I managed to quiet the woman and the child after a quarter of an hour and walked them away from the theatre. The woman—I should call her Mrs. Savage, I suppose—took me to her lodging rooms and gave me tea, after showing me documents that proved beyond question that my Douglas—and hers too—had indeed married her and was the father of that terrible, squalling brat she had in tow!”

“Amazing. It is simply amazing,” Leon declared.