The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen by Geraldine McCaughrean Page A

his misgivings about playing a girl and shamelessly worked up his part. He added in lines. He slipped in a joke or two. He was supposed to venture only a short way out onto the plank before Benet arrived but pushed his luck further and further until one night he actually fell in. It fetched such uproar and excitements from the audience on the bank that he made a regular thing of it. And Everett could not resist rewriting the end to include it. When Kookie fell in, pregnant lover, bold Cousin Benet, and a repentant father rushed to the offshore rails of the deckhouse roof and peered distractedly into the water. Was Nancy . . . ? Had Nancy . . . ? Were they too late to save Nancy from a watery death? They threw down a rope. They all hauled on it . . .
    And up came Nancy! Back from the brink of death, and plucky to the last!
    Being wardrobe master, Curly hated the change of script. “And how am I supposed to get the costume clean and dry twixt shows? Don’t blame me if it shrinks away to a dishrag!” But the audience loved it, and so did Kookie, because it meant he stole the play’s climax from Benet and Miss Loucien.
    â€œThis shift is falling into holes,” muttered Curly, struggling to thread a sewing needle. Cissy had never seen him tetchy before. She went and threaded the needle for him and sat with him, trying to be helpful. She missed the old Curly with his big smile and endless quotations. “What’s the trouble, Mr. Curly, sir?”
    The trouble was Miss May March. As for the people on the riverbank, theater was a novelty to her. She had never seen it before. So she could not quite see the join between Real and Pretend. Watching Curly (who played Nancy’s father) nightly selling his own daughter into slavery, she found she could not forgive him. So she had stopped speaking to him.
    Before they were even in sight of the landing at Woodpile, the Dixie Quartet was dancing up a storm on the stateroom roof.
    â€œSave your energy, why don’t yuh?” called Elijah from his own perch on the wheelhouse.
    â€œBut this is Music Land, man!” called Benet. “We’s like to be reunited with the tunemakers on Hardup Hill. Just wait till you hear us pluck them chickens!”
    The three other people on the pilothouse roof—Kookie, Tibbie, and Cissy—mulled this over for a while. They never bothered to try and understand the Dog Woman’s odd Boston accent, because she only ever talked to her dogs. But with the quartet it was generally worth the effort. Kookie was usually first to work it out, but Tibs was a little in love with Benet, thanks to the play, and this time she got there ahead of him. “They say they can afford to get their banjos out of hock,” she said. “This is where they pawned them.” She slapped a mosquito that was just then supping on her blood, but Kookie had to pull the dead body out of the crook of her arm: Tibbie did not like touching bugs.
    The pawnshop in Woodpile was an Aladdin’s cave of other people’s belongings. Cissy did not like it. She could remember back to a time—before the Sunshine Queen —even before her parents had begun a new life on the Oklahoma prairie. She could remember seeing precious belongings slide across a pawnbroker’s counter—her father’s chess set, her mother’s christening spoon, a portrait of Queen Victoria—in return for a miserable crackle of bank notes. The money had been exchanged for even smaller tags of paper: rail tickets to Oklahoma. Unlike the quartet’s banjos, Poppy’s chess set would never be redeemed from the pawnshop in Arkansas; Queen Victoria would never again scowl down at Cissy from the living room wall, her eyes speaking of thrones and dominions.
    So Cissy waited outside the pawnshop, watching Benet, Boisenberry, Sweeting, and Oskar retune their beloved banjos.
    But Curly was in clover. He scoured the pawnshop shelves for new stage props: a