When the Curtain Rises Read Online Free Page A

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