She knocks her head on the skeleton of something small – a mouse? A rat? – and jumps, steadies herself on a shelf. The creature swings like a convicted soul. All she can hear is her breath, the wet sound as she swallows. She thinks, for a second, that the crocodile is not dead but is about to rear out of the jar and tear out her throat. She puts her hands to her neck, backs away, trips down the steps. The men are gone.
She should return to the cottage and sugar more violets. She could have made a farthing in the time she has already been here. But there, at the back of the tent, she sees the canvas half-open. Nobody would notice if she peeped in. Nobody would care.
The fabric is heavy, waxy, and she pulls it to one side.
In a burning circle of light, she sees a tall man in a military suit, a gold cape at his shoulders, a three-foot topper planted on his head. It is the showman from the middle of the handbill, his mouth pulled into a grin. He is sitting on one of those grey creatures, an elephant. It is the largest thing she has ever seen, its skin painted with flowers. She bites her lip. His arms swirl, as if he is stirring a vast pot, whipping the crowd into hysteria.
‘We present a sight never witnessed before, a sight that will leave you reaching for your spectacles, that will make you question everything you have ever seen or known or heard before. You will not believe your own eyes –’
The scale of it; the sound; the light. This is louder than storms, than steam trains; brighter than the sun in water. There are hundreds of lamps around the ring, throwing out red and blue and green light. Tallow candles are mounted on hoops and chandeliers, pine knots blazing in brackets. Nell never imagined such a sight might be possible. It is horrifying, enchanting.
‘The newest, the best, the strangest.’ He intones each word, and the crowd shrieks louder, hungry for more. She tries to pick out Lenny’s red hair, but everyone blurs together. Someone throws a pot of liquid into the ring, another hurls a rotten cabbage where it bursts like a wound. She has known these people since she was born, Hector and Mary and Mrs Pawley, and yet they all move as one, a great laughing, snorting mass of bodies.
A crash of cymbals, a thundering of drums, and a loud smack as a woman soars across the tent, gripping a bar on a rope. ‘Stella the Songbird!’ Her legs are creamy and dimpled and her tiny crimson doublet flashes. Her ruff makes her look as if her face is being served on a platter. All the while, she twitters. She caws like a gull, chirrups like a blackbird. With every turn, she pushes higher, faster, until she is a flash of red, her body twisting like a fish. How must that feel – the rush of air, balancing on a slim bar by a hand alone, as if the rules of weight do not apply to her? And then, Nell sees it – a beard, falling over the edge of her ruff, blonde and thick.
She gapes, stares. Deep in her belly, she feels the slightest of recoils. It is as if she has seen something unexpected but stunning, like a dead kingfisher in the reeds. She knows, then, how others feel when they gaze at her.
Show us a handstand! Before the other wonders arrive.
Nell cannot stop looking, cannot draw herself away. She wishes her brother were here, that anyone were here with her, even her father. She watches as a tiny woman in an open coach is pulled into the ring by four poodles, a baby in her arms. A man begins to juggle, loose skin hanging from his shoulders like wings, his back painted like a red admiral. A monkey dressed as a soldier rides a horse, a hunchbacked woman cooks an oyster on hot coals in her mouth, and a giantess slicks beef fat on to a pole and hangs a piece of meat from the top of it. ‘Who can climb it for the prize?’ the showman shouts from his perch on the elephant, and she watches as villagers push themselves forwards, as they slip and slide on the grease.
There is Mary, caught in profile, laughing, pushing a boy forwards. He must be one of Mary’s brothers. But then they bow their heads together and Nell’s heart lurches. It is Charlie. Nell staggers back. As she hurries away, across the field, over the wall, into the cottage where her sugared blooms are laid out by the stove, she feels a shame so sharp it is as if someone is pressing her chest.
Her brother does not want to be around her. He pretended he didn’t want to go to the show, but it was a lie, a sham. He wanted to share it with Mary instead. He has already begun to craft his life without her in it.
She spies the violets on the table, candies she spent all afternoon making. She picks up the tray, and the flattened boxes too. A spike of fury stabs at her. She shovels them into the stove, watching as Bessie the cherub’s face catches and shrivels to ash.
Charlie returns an hour later, stinking of beef fat, his eyes bright with all he has seen.
Nell says nothing. She cleans grit from the carrots and slices them into boiling water. She is nineteen, she tells herself, and her brother is twenty. There is no reason why he can’t go somewhere without her. Soon, she will have to grow used to it.
‘How was it?’ she asks at last.
‘It was just me in the fields. Everyone else was at the show.’
‘Oh,’ she says.
‘I don’t think we missed anything. I heard their squeals, though, like a sty of badly butchered pigs.’ He looks around him. ‘Where’s Pa?’
‘Trying to sell some old glass and a broken wheel.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ She forces herself to smile.
But all through dinner, she cannot look at him. Their father doesn’t return and she ladles his portion to one side. It cools quickly, fat whitening the surface. The carrots are so soft they dissolve between her teeth. The broth is gritty and tastes of earth. Charlie fiddles with his sleeve, his knee hopping as if in memory of a circus tune.
‘What is it?’ he asks at last. ‘Tell me.’
She puts down her spoon. ‘I don’t mind, you know.’
‘Don’t mind what?’
‘If you want to go to places without me –’ Her voice catches, sounds too high. ‘Just please – please don’t lie to me.’
He puts his head in his hands. ‘I was going to the fields, but I saw the tent and Mary told me to come and – and I couldn’t resist it.’
‘Why didn’t you fetch me?’
‘I – I thought it would upset you.’
A thought occurs to her, and she bows her head as if he has hit her.
‘You think that I’m like them. You think I’m a – a living curiosity. A wonder.’
He says nothing, and she keeps talking, louder and louder. ‘You think Lenny was right, don’t you? That was why you hit him. Because you saw the truth in it.’
‘What?’ he says, hand over his mouth. ‘How can you think that? You know I see you as just the same as the rest of us.’
‘The rest of us,’ she echoes.
Charlie holds up his hands. ‘I was just trying to protect you –’
‘Protect me? I could have a husband and my own children by now.’
The truth hangs, unspoken. She can see it, shimmering between them. But nobody will have you.
‘You’re frightened, aren’t you, that other people will see me like you do? As a – a – a –’ she can barely say it – ‘a freak of nature?’
Her own words land like kicks. She wants to tear them away, to pack them back down her throat. She wants him to say, You’re wrong. You’re wrong, Nellie. But she has made these thoughts real, and when he reaches for her arm, she flinches as if he has burnt her.
‘Nellie,’ he tries.
She cannot bear it. She wants to scrunch her fists and bawl; she wants to upend the table and hurl the bowls against the wall. But she can’t; she never can. Only once has she lost her temper, only once has she given voice to the rage she has seen others express so carelessly. It was a small thing, a girl who stole the smooth stones she had gathered, and claimed they were her own. She remembers the minister’s cool voice, the way he said so calmly, And why would she want to take what belongs to you? The way he lingered on that final word, as if she had nothing worth having. It all boiled over, slights real and imagined, and she pic
ked up the stones and started to throw them into the fields, her back aching, a roar coming from within – but when she turned around, everyone had paused, more horrified than she had ever seen them. A child began to cry. The girl was aghast, the minister too, as though they did not understand that they had driven her to it. She realized that she had frightened them, her monstrous fury matching the person they believed she was. Ever since, she has tried harder to be good, to be liked, always to appease, to defy their expectations of her.
When she stands – as calmly and slowly as she can manage – Charlie does not try to stop her. She opens the door, and he is still sitting there, hands covering his face.
Outside, she is alone. Her feet are quick, hurrying through the main street, down the coastal path, her tears blurring the hedgerows. Buttercups are flowering, and the last dregs of sun light the yellow buds like candles. A deep puddle gleams, the moon’s reflection drowning in it. She raises her skirts and kicks the moon and slices it into a thousand shards, water dampening her legs. She stubs her toe and suppresses a small scream of fury.
She presses on to the cliffs, her breath fast and hard. There is a light bobbing on the ocean: a paddle steamer carving west. Hundreds of people will be tucked inside, embarking on new beginnings, fresh lives unfurling. She picks at the cut on her ankle where the rock sliced her, enjoys the sharp pain of it. Words ricochet – the rest of us, trying to protect you – and blood runs down her foot.
Footsteps behind her; she cowers, makes herself small, but it is only her brother.
‘Another steamer,’ he says. ‘To Boston? Or New York?’
He looks so sad that her anger dissolves. ‘New York, I think.’
It is their way of making up with each other: this indulgence in a dream Nell pretends to share with him. America. Charlie talks about it constantly. The farmstead they’ll own, the fat harvests just waiting for them to pluck down. It is a harmless fantasy because she knows it will never happen, that they will never be able to save enough money for it. She is safe in this village, with people who know her.
He rests his head on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need,’ she says, and he pulls her towards him, so suddenly that she almost stumbles. It is as reassuring as when they were children and slept against each other like piled kittens. Now they have their own mattresses, but sometimes she’ll wake in the night and she will scarcely be able to resist reaching out and touching his cheek.
‘The old swing’s still there,’ he says, pointing at the oak tree which grows a little inland. Even in the dark, she can see the tattered rope hanging from its bough.
‘I know.’
Charlie runs towards it and grasps the rope. ‘I’ll go first,’ he says.
It was their favourite game as children, but as they’ve aged, they’ve forgotten about it.
‘I’m Stella the Songbird!’ he shouts, and he looks awkward as he clings on, too big. He yelps as he swings over the dip.
‘My turn,’ she says. She takes the rope from him and flies far further than he did, back and forth, the air in her cheeks and hair. Her heart scuds. She is filled with that familiar feeling, an inchoate longing to be someone else.
‘I’m alive!’ she cries. ‘Alive!’
‘Don’t go so high,’ he says, but she doesn’t care. She lives for that punch of fear, as heady as gin. She imagines Lenny seeing her, marvelling at how she swings further than he would dare.
She links her arm through Charlie’s when they walk home, and he chatters about America. ‘If we work every evening, we’ll have saved enough in five years, and then – think of it – us leaning off the back of the steamer, the shores of America coming into view –’ She wants to bottle this moment, as if it has already passed. Just the two of them, laughing and kicking stones down the lane.
Soon he will have a baby and a wife, she thinks. Soon everyone in the village will pair up.
Villagers are spilling out of the inn. Someone is standing on a chair and hurling out a ballad. ‘Let’s join them,’ Charlie says. ‘There’s Mary.’
‘Come!’ Lenny cries, beckoning them over. ‘Piggott says we’re to have a dance tomorrow.’
Nell stops, heart thudding. She touches her arm where Lenny once ran his hand. Then she notices a man, hunched beside the oak tree. She recognizes the rickety turn of his legs.
‘What’s Pa doing?’ she asks.
‘Looking at the handbill.’
He is tilted forwards, stroking the advertisement as if it is a lapdog.
‘The circus’s over, you dodo,’ she says, trying to pull him away. He has been drinking, she realizes, and no longer carries his box of trinkets.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he growls, wrestling free.
‘He doesn’t mean it,’ Charlie says, too fast.
But he does; she knows it.
His eyes do not move from the bright illustrations. The dwarf in her carriage. The crocodile in the jar. Butterfly man and strongman, the identical triplets and Stella the flying songbird.
‘I had a lobster,’ he murmurs.
‘Come, Pa,’ Charlie says, reaching out his hand.
He swats at him, then starts to run, staggering towards the circus. Lanterns dangle from trees like dead moles from a fence.
‘Let him go,’ Charlie says. ‘He’s a fool.’
‘Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders’, she reads, and Charlie puts his arm around her shoulder and pulls her away.
Jasper
Jasper is feeding his wolf scraps of red meat through the bars of its cage. It snaps them from his silver tongs, its teeth blunted and yellow. The hare is curled around the wolf’s feet, scratching its ear. They are his favourite creatures; occasionally, as he has done now, he will order a labourer to carry their crate from the menagerie into his own wagon.
‘There, girl,’ he says, picking at a paint blister on the ‘Happy Families’ sign.
These animals were his own initiative, a ruse he saw first in a street seller. The best part is there’s no trick. He’ll take a predator and its prey, and thrust them together when they’re babies, scarcely weaned. It amazes him that he can suppress nature and instinct in this way. Only occasionally will the owl exercise its power and eat the mice. The wolf and the hare are as close as if they were the same species.
He looks at his brother, hunched over in the velvet chair. They have always been so different, but here they are, nestled together. Inseparable.
‘Who’s the wolf and who’s the hare?’ he asks, barking out his laugh.
‘Sorry?’
‘Me and you.’
‘You can be the wolf. You’re older.’
‘You would say that.’ Jasper bares his fingers like claws, then chuckles. ‘Do you remember when we found a bag of sheep’s wool and made ourselves moustaches? I must have been about ten.’
And with that, he is away, shuffling through childhood memories. When he was given a microscope and Toby was given a photography machine. The first time they saw a leopard. When their father took them to see Tom Thumb perform in Hop o’ My Thumb at the Lyceum Theatre.
He still remembers it so vividly: that humid, velvety room. Patrons murmured around them, their father pointing out Charles Dickens, the artist Landseer, the actor Macready, all sitting in the audience. The curtain lifted, the candles were snuffed. Jasper’s heart raced. They watched as the eight-year-old dwarf Charles Stratton rode a miniature horse, was baked into a pie and fought his way through a lid of pastry with a little broadsword. But Jasper’s eyes were only partly on the stage. It was the crowd he watched. Rage, delight, fear. The whole room shrieked with laughter when the little boy declared, ‘Though a mite, I am mighty!’ How would it feel, to hold a thousand people in your grip?
Later, in Lambeth, they watched fifty horses charge around the ring of Astley’s Amphitheatre, rifles pop-popping. When Wombwell’s menagerie wintered in Bartholomew Fair, they sauntered between cages of lions, ocelots, rhinoceroses and kangaroos. Jasper began to seek
out handbills for these shows, and Toby tagged along. They stood on the bank of the Thames when Signor Duvalla tiptoed across the river on a rope. Fireworks crackled in Jasper’s ears, his brain fizzing with possibilities. At school, he sold trick cards, firecrackers and magical hats, all of which he constructed himself, and he spent his time sketching machines and elaborate gewgaws. His purse grew fat. The world was an iced bun, his for the taking. One day, he said, he would have his own troupe, and it would be the greatest show in the country. It was Toby who took him seriously; Toby who said he would own it with him. Toby and Jasper Brown’s Great Show, Toby suggested, and Jasper pulled a face. Brown? They would have a new name: Zeus or Achilles or – he grinned – Jupiter. The Jupiter Brothers.
Their father smiled benevolently at this, convinced that the circus was a schoolboy whim Jasper was bound to outgrow. What Jasper needed was sturdiness, boundaries, he said. His own finances as a merchant were precarious and he did not wish his child to suffer from the same limitations. When several of his ships sank off Siam and they were forced to move to a smaller house in Clapham, he scraped and borrowed to buy Jasper a commission in an unfashionable rural regiment. Jasper was twenty, he said, more than old enough to abandon foolish notions about performing seals and a hundred rampaging horses.
Jasper’s disappointment lifted within days. To his surprise, he found that the military was filled with tricks and showmen, even in the wretched plains of the Crimea. He charged down the hillsides in his uniform with its fringed epaulettes and gleaming badges, Dash beside him. The parades, the bugles and brass bands, the shells like fireworks, the sense of belonging – it was circus. Circus was life, desire, amplified. When spring bloomed, ladies watched the battles from hills as they might a play, opera glasses pressed to their brows, a trousered Stella at the front of their petticoated pack. One morning, in those uncertain days before they stormed Sevastopol, he heard one woman say, quite coolly, ‘The way they flew through the sky when the mortars bore down, they might have been dying birds.’ Tourist steamers cruised the waters to spectate on naval combats, applauded as shells fell into the sea like fountains. It was said that when the attack at Alma closed in, a host of Russian ladies fled their picnic in carriages, leaving lorgnettes, a half-eaten chicken, champagne bottles and a parasol. Killing was a show, and sometimes as Jasper speared a Cossack with his bayonet, he expected the man to leap up and take a bow, for an audience to applaud.
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