The Ringmaster's Wife Read Online Free

floating over the keys. Armilda felt welcomed, but only as a guest. She was reminded at the same time that all of this was far beyond her grasp.
    She reached out, running her fingertips against the edge of the wood.
    Funny, but it felt like silk somehow.
    “Why, hello.” The pianist smiled at her as she rested her fingers on the keys, while the final notes echoed in the room. She tilted her head down, accepting the applause from the crowd in a congenial nod, then turned her attention back to Armilda.
    “I can see that you like music. Would you like to play?”
    Armilda shook her head. “No, ma’am,” she answered, the words more meek than she’d intended. “I don’t know how.”
    “But you appreciate music, which is a gift in itself. And the sound is beautiful, isn’t it? This is a Steinway piano—the best. Shipped all the way from New York.” Her eyes were kind but curious. “Is this your first trip to Cincinnati?”
    How did she know that?
    Armilda nodded. “I’ve never been anywhere.”
    “Chin up. Perhaps you’ll go to New York one day and see where the Steinways come from. Mmm? Don’t let that love of music leave your heart.”
    The pianist flipped the music sheets in front of her, moving on to another song.
    Of course Armilda didn’t travel. Not to New York or even Cincinnati until that day. And she didn’t play a piano—she doubted she ever would. They didn’t have such things at home. Not pianos with melodies like that.
    Music, fine table settings, and elegant tearooms were a world away from her quiet life in Moons. Hers was a plain farm dress and her expectations of life plain as well.
    She’d always believed it. At least, until now.
    S EVEN YEARS LATER
    M OONS , O HIO
    I T WAS A FAMILIAR MEMORY THAT GREETED A RMILDA WHEN SHE blinked awake.
    The piano faded away again, its song turning into the hum of crickets chirping in the fields. The view of rich taffeta gowns in her dream became the span of a blue-ink sky dotted with clouds out the open window, the velvet curtains the walls of the small bedroom she shared with her sisters. And she was no longer ten years old, but nearly seventeen—all grown up now and too old for childish dreams.
    She rolled out of bed and pulled a rust-colored knit shawl over her shoulders. The floorboards creaked as she knelt, as carefully as she could manage, and ran her hands along the aged wood floor under her bed, feeling for the cigar box she kept hidden there.
    Armilda tucked it under her elbow and with extra-careful tiptoed steps slipped down the stairs and out the front door. Safe on the porch, she melted down into one of the old wooden rockers. She’d be content to watch dawn escape, just as it always did, with a splash of orange painting the sky over the distant horizon. She cradled the prized O. L. Schwencke cigar box in her lap, absently running her fingertips over the raised lithography image of fashionable smiling women riding bicycles down a sunny lane.
    The rocker creaked in time with the crickets’ refrain.
    “Armilda?”
    She turned at her sister’s voice. “Dulcey—go back to bed. It’s early still.”
    “What are you doing out here, Mim?” Dulcey whispered the question, adding the nickname only the family called her.
    “Nothing. Just watching the world wake up.”
    Dulcey eased into the rocker opposite Armilda’s. She pulled her legs up and tucked them under the ends of the pinwheel quilt she’d dragged from her bed to wrap around her shoulders, then she turned her freckled face out to the span of dusky fields beyond their farmhouse. The sun peeked up between the porch spindles. “It’s cold out here. Whatever happened to summer?”
    Armilda glanced over at her sister and sighed. “I suppose it’s gone where it always does—tucked away somewhere until it’s needed for next year.”
    “Hmm. Next year,” Dulcey agreed. “Just as long as it stays cool, I’ll be happy. Last year we couldn’t think of anything but melting until