The Triumph of Katie Byrne
A riveting novel that begins with a murder in an old Connecticut barn and reaches its climax on Broadway.We first meet Katie Byrne at seventeen. A tall beauty with reddish-gold hair, she has always wanted to be an actress. Her two best friends share her passion for the theatre, and the three girls have spent much of their childhood rehearsing plays in an old barn in Connecticut. Leaving early one day to help her mother prepare dinner, Katie realizes she has left her schoolbooks at the barn and she and her older brother return to retrieve them. When they arrive, they find the barn, the setting of so many happy dreams, has become the scene of a nightmare: one of Katie's friends has been raped and murdered, and the other lies unconscious.Ten years later, Katie, a struggling actress in New York, is still haunted by the tragedy. Her friend Carly remains in a coma, and Katie desperately wants to achieve success and stardom not only for herself but also for her two old friends. Her big chance comes when she is discovered and wins a major role in a Broadway play. A promising love affair adds to the excitement of working on Broadway; but Katie must face the demons of the past before she can embrace the possibilities of the future.
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The Triumph Of Katie Byrne
Barbara Taylor Bradford
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Beaji Enterprises, Inc 2001
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007330645
Version: 2017-11-16
This book is for my husband, Bob, with my love and thanks for making everything always so special.
Table of Contents
Connecticut, 1989
‘…break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away.’
JOHN DONNE
‘The coward does it with a kiss.’
OSCAR WILDE
The girl sat on a narrow bench, centre stage, her body bent forward, one elbow on her knee, a hand supporting her head. The thinker, deeply thinking, her body language seemed to convey.
She was dressed very simply, boyishly, in a loose, grey, knitted tunic cinched by a black leather belt, worn with black tights and ballet slippers. Her long, reddish-gold hair was plaited, the plaits wound tightly around her head, so that the finished effect was like a burnished-copper cap gleaming under the pin-spot shining down. The girl’s name was Katie Byrne and she was seventeen: acting was her entire life.
She was about to act for her favourite audience – an audience of two: her best friends, Carly Smith and Denise Matthews. They sat on straight-backed wooden chairs in front of the makeshift stage in the old barn which belonged to Ted Matthews, Denise’s uncle. Both girls were the same age as Katie, and had been friends since childhood; all three were members of the amateur acting group at the high school in the rural Connecticut area where they all lived.
Katie had chosen to perform a speech from one of Shakespeare’s plays at the school’s upcoming Christmas concert. It was only two months away, and she had recently begun to rehearse the piece; Carly and Denise were also perfecting their chosen speeches for the same concert, rehearsing with her in the barn almost every day.
Now, at last, Katie lifted her head, stared out into space, and focused her blue eyes on the back wall of the barn, as if she saw something visible only to herself. Taking a deep breath, she began.
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. To die –’
Abruptly, Katie stopped.
She jumped up off the bench, walked to the edge of the stage, looked down at her friends. Shaking her head, she seemed unexpectedly uncertain of herself, she who normally had such confidence and self-possession.
‘I’m not getting it right,’ Katie wailed.
‘Yes, you are, and you’re wonderful!’ Carly cried, rising, stepping closer to the stage, the stage on which they had started to act when they were children. ‘Nobody does Shakespeare the way you do it. You’re the best, Katie.’
‘Carly’s right,’ Denise agreed as she went to join Carly near the stage. ‘It’s the way you act the words, say them. You make sense out of them, and there’s never been a Hamlet like you.’
Katie burst out laughing. ‘Thanks for your compliment, Denny, but there were a few others before me…Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, to name a couple of them…they were the greatest classical actors on the English-speaking stage, just as Christopher Plummer is the greatest classical actor today. And listen, I keep telling you, it’s all to do with understanding the
