Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  He remembers the yearning in her gaze, that hunger. The scent of the match, as if she herself were that fire.

  ‘Nellie,’ he whispers, pressing his forehead to the wood.

  ‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’

  He touches the bolt, waits. If he let her go, Jasper would be furious. His brother protected him when another man would have thrown him to the dogs for what he did. And he scarcely knows this girl; perhaps she does not even remember him.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He clears his throat.

  ‘Who’s there?’ A pause, a thump against the door that makes him jump back. ‘Let me go.’

  He cannot do it; he can’t. He thinks of a hot day in Sevastopol, a city in ruins, a man falling from the battlements, horror written on his brother’s face. He runs, hands clasped to his ears as her cries grow more desperate. He falls beside the fire, throws on pine needles that crack and pop like gunfire.

  The flames form shapes.

  Coward.

  Coward.

  Hundreds, thousands of men died because of him. He was a professional trickster, a liar, creating photographs that did not tell the truth. Jasper told him to forget it ever happened. Killing was their business out there, the whole damned point of it. ‘You just took some photographs,’ his brother said, ‘as you were briefed to do. You were instructed by the government. And as for Dash—’ He broke off. ‘What’s done is done. You can’t bring a man back to life.’

  He rubs hard at his eyes. Tonight will pass. Perhaps sleep will come soon. He is so tired, has slept for no more than five hours every night of the season. In the morning, there will be work to be done – a whole day of raising the tent and setting out the benches and mucking out the animals. He will crack eggs and split out the whites to use in his photography, and villagers will pay a shilling for their likenesses.

  Nell is here, in their troupe.

  Dawn lifts in a thin red streak. As the circus’s morning symphony swells and the lioness growls, he can still hear the echo of her sobbing.

  Nell

  Nell wakes suddenly, her mouth dry. Her brother is singing in the yard outside.

  ‘This is the thief-taker,

  Shaven and shorn,

  That took up John Bull

  With his bugle horn.’

  The words make no sense. Nothing makes any sense. She blinks. Feathers overhead. No window. Strips of light. The scent of hot fat, of manure and horse-sweat.

  She remembers it now – the dance and the men and the wagon – and in an instant, she is up and shouldering the door. The wood groans but will not yield. She is alone, torn from her brother. She paces, grips her arms, imagines being paraded through a village. She has no skill except in the picking of flowers, and even then she is nothing but a cog. She cannot possibly perform. And if she cannot perform – she pictures a podium on wheels, dragged by horses. Hands jostling her, prodding her. Stumbling, dust on her knees. Jeers, browned apples breaking against her, the off-key lilt of the organ-grinder. Acrobats turning giddying circles, monkeys heckling, and the meat on its greased pole, foetid and rotten.

  Her father sold her.

  She has been bought like a cut violet.

  Rage boils in her chest and she claws at the door. Everything is fodder for her fingers, ripping, tearing, smashing. She splits cushions, and feathers explode like a pounced goose. She screams until her throat bruises. She rakes the birthmarks on her arms, itches them until her skin bleeds. Her hands wrench open drawers and three books fall out.

  Books.

  She has never owned one before. She has held only two books. Fairy Tales and Other Stories, its binding scarred and soft. And the Bible, the single volume in their church, as heavy as a stone slab. She learned to read from its tissue-thin paper. Stories of transformation, of genesis, of miracles. Green-stained leather, seams of gold, as precious as breath.

  And then her hands remember, and the books are mere grist for the machine of her rage, and she twists the spines, rips and crumples them in her fists until she is surrounded by little cannonballs of paper.

  I am here, she tells herself, her palms cut. I am real.

  Women’s voices, drawing closer.

  ‘Who’s in there?’

  ‘A small herd of elephants by the sound of it.’

  ‘A new wonder?’

  She pauses in her rampage, hair slicked to her face, arms scratched from the splintered dresser. A laugh. They move away, and she is alone once more.

  She presses her eye to a gap between the slats. The mist and woodsmoke sit low on the fields. The group of women have settled in a quiet circle, as if closing themselves off from the men who scuffle and shout and heave on ropes to lift the tent. The giant who dived through the knives is cutting red silk and threading a needle. The little woman who rode in the coach is cleaning a trumpet. The triplets chase each other, weave between the wagons, hands out. Caught you!

  There is no rustle of drums, no showman telling her how strange and novel these women are. No crowds cheering. Here, they are ordinary, just like the women from her village who sat around the cooking pot or folded narcissi into boxes. Nell presses the bruise on her cheek, pulls her knees under her chin.

  Her father sold her.

  She thinks of the sea and longs to swim in it, to feel its overbearing power. She remembers the man who watched her swimming, and wonders where he might be and if he could help her. There was a gentleness to him, she recalls, a nervousness.

  But, she is sure, she will have no need for him; soon Charlie will come. He will have shaken the truth from their father, will have borrowed a horse from Piggott. He will be following the trail they left – spangles falling like breadcrumbs, dried mounds of elephant dung lighting the lanes they took. He will fight them if he needs to, wrestle to free her. A maiden trapped in a tower. A man’s quest to bring her home.

  On the floor next to her, she sees a drawing on one of the ripped-up pages. She picks it up. A stooped creature made of stitched body parts. She squints to read the text beneath it.

  ‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.’

  Her father –

  He sold her.

  She will not think of him.

  She will not think of him.

  She balls her fists. She will run, and soon.

  The morning passes loudly. Fired commands, a clanging of hammered stakes, the great tent mushrooming into the sky. Through the gap between the wagon’s slats, Nell watches the little woman, how she carries a crook which she uses to open wagon doors, to bring bridles to her own height, snapping at anyone who tries to help her. You’ll be hankering to wipe my arse too, will you? It kindles something familiar in Nell: a refusal to be pitied, a defiance, and she sets her mouth, almost smiles.

  When the tent is up, she smells cooked meat, the smoke thick and greasy. Her stomach growls, and she touches it with her hand as if to silence it. If they bring her food, she will not eat it. She will take nothing from them.

  She jumps at the rattle of the door. It is the showman, shouldering his way inside, bearing a plate with two shivering yolks and steak cut into pieces as small as chicken hearts. Steak. She can see the fat is crisp and blackened, the meat pink. A fly buzzes around the chop, settles on it and begins fidgeting its legs.

  He is a tall man, his chin clean-shaven, with a face some might call handsome. His tailcoat is stitched with red sequins, his velvet britches the same pale blue as his irises. His boots gleam like wet stones. He stands in the solid pose of a statue, feet placed widely apart.

  ‘Food,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she replies, though her belly cramps with it. She turns away from him so he can’t see the mark on her cheek. She doesn’t want his eyes on her, assessing her worth, like a farmer sizing up a prize heifer. She can feel the breeze of the open door, and she calculates, Could I run, how fast?

  ‘You can be a success here,’ he says. ‘If you allow yourself to be.’

  She makes a noi
se in her throat, but he ignores her. The fly knocks against the side of the wagon.

  ‘I’ll pay you ten pounds a week, when you’re ready to perform. I treat my troupe fairly.’ He leans casually against the wall, as though these sums mean nothing to him.

  Ten pounds. She wraps a noose of hair around her finger and pulls it. Perform?

  ‘I don’t want your money.’

  He laughs, the tips of his moustache rising. ‘I’ll wager you barely made that in a year. And here, you’ll have food, board, friends and, I expect, fame. Success. Perhaps soon.’

  He speaks as if this is a speech he knows by heart, as if he assumes fame is something she has dreamed of. He does not understand how hard she has worked to stay hidden.

  ‘My dwarf couldn’t even reach the bobbins at the factories where her brothers worked. She was discarded, thrown to one side. Here, I’ve transformed her into somebody important.’ He puts the food on the floor. ‘I can make you brilliant. We can be the making of each other.’

  His look is distant, as if he is looking past her and at someone else altogether. He speaks with such conviction, the sharp intonation of a man who knows what he is about, his surety almost comforting. Every movement is deliberate.

  I’m just a girl, she wants to tell him, just Nell. You’re wrong about me. Put me back where I belong.

  ‘My brother will come,’ she says. ‘He’ll bring me home.’

  He laughs, his epaulettes winking. ‘I’ll be sure to expect him. Unless, that is, he wanted a share of the money.’

  ‘No,’ she says, standing. ‘He’ll come. You’ll see.’

  But her words sound like the objections of a child, and he merely shrugs as if he knows something she doesn’t.

  America. Perhaps Charlie could afford tickets for the steamer now. The farmstead he dreamed of, the house with pillars. Mary with her rising belly, pushing out the space Nell once occupied.

  No, she tells herself, it is impossible; but the poison of this thought begins to spread, to infect all of her memories of him.

  ‘I saw you dancing,’ Jasper says, ‘and I knew. I knew, then, how dazzling you could be.’

  He takes a step towards her, and she moves back. Another step. She has nowhere to go. The walls shrink. The dresser presses into her back. The wagon is so small, so dark and hot, littered with crumpled books and feathers whose shafts she cracked. He licks his lips, as if readying himself to kiss her. A kicking in her belly, a queasiness. He could overpower her, and easily. All her life, she has grown attuned to the scent of male violence, how to diffuse it, how to make herself small. A look from Piggott which could turn into a beating. A smile from a traveller which could turn into a forcing. Reckonings have shaped her life in subtle ways. Where not to go, the busier paths to take, always home by nightfall. Her brother at her side.

  He couldn’t want me, she tells herself, but fear cloys her mouth.

  The fly crawls through the slats and is gone.

  Run, she thinks. Now.

  She lunges for the door. He doesn’t even have a chance to grab her. She is across the threshold, flinging herself down the wagon steps, past the group of women, Stella the Songbird and the little woman with her crook. Shouts, whistling. The elephant pauses, trunk halfway to its mouth. Out, towards the woodlands. Hot breath, her lungs on fire, propelled by her own daring. She is flying, her footfalls sure. Starlings alight from the branches.

  A crack behind her, a shout, the fast pummelling of feet.

  ‘Stop her!’

  She swerves to the left, to the right. She is in the woods now, vaulting over fallen logs. To hide in a bush or keep running? They have horses, dozens of them – she dashes on – he is too close. Throat burning, a blazing in her legs. Free. Free!

  The branches have cut the sky into a thousand shards and her arm bleeds when she scores it on a bramble. On she races, faster and faster. The gap is widening, his footsteps quietening. She is outstripping him easily. She starts to smile. The bloom of heat. The spray from the ocean. Down a narrow path by the shore, flatter here, no cliffs. The sea is brown and glittering. She will be back in her cottage soon, with the crates marked ‘London Paddington’, a place so distant it might as well be the moon. Back with Charlie –

  – Her father –

  No, she thinks. No.

  Does she trip on purpose? She saw the tree stump and yet she did not jump or swerve. The pain is quick, grass rising to meet her. As she topples, she recalls his words. I can make you brilliant. A sharpness, a twisting in her leg, shoulder jarred by packed earth. He is there, above her. She pulls up runners of ragwort and wild garlic and flings them at the sky.

  ‘Get up,’ he says, and he seizes her by the arm.

  The whip is in his hands. She flinches, readying herself for its quick crack. She can feel the heat of his breath on her cheek.

  ‘Only a fool would prefer that village. Only a fool would throw away what you have.’

  On and on, the sea pounds the beach.

  ‘I said, get up,’ he says.

  She raises her head. He isn’t going to hurt her.

  She tripped by mistake, she tells herself. But when she sees the first splash of colour in the field and it widens – painted wooden caravans, the children stretching their legs and practising their tumbling acts – something close to relief stirs in her.

  There is the photography wagon, set a little apart from the rest. The elephant, a string around its foot. Like breaking horses. The scent of frying onions and gingerbread.

  The horizon that she knew so well is different here. It is wider, somehow, broken with unknown hills, and everything is new.

  Jasper

  Jasper drops the iron bar of Nell’s wagon.

  ‘I haven’t locked it,’ he tells her, but she doesn’t reply. He cricks open the door an inch and strolls away. She won’t escape again; he knows that the magic of this world has already dug its fingers into her.

  It is a long day, too hot in the tent, and the crowds are in a fighting temper, quick to spoil an act with jeering and hurled fruit. Eventually, Violante is forced to bloody a boy’s nose to subdue the audience. All day, Jasper’s eyes slide to Nell’s wagon and he thinks, There she is. He slices off the choicest meat from the zebra they are roasting and instructs Stella to leave it on the top step of her caravan. A minute later, a hand pulls the plate inside. As dragonflies dip in stagnant puddles, he remembers her dancing among that bunch of ragtag peasants. Hair bobbing, limbs neatly turned, the electricity of her.

  He knows he might frighten her if he visits her again too soon, so when the evening show is over and the horses are packed in their stalls, he lies on the grass beside Toby and Stella. The labourers have built a bonfire, the establishment cutpurses are tipping their takings into a cap. Brunette is stitching a new headdress for Minnie, and when she sees him looking, her fingers quicken.

  He turns to Toby. ‘Put your big paw on the ground.’

  His brother does it without complaining, bearish hand spread wide.

  Jasper darts the tip of his knife between Toby’s fingers, faster and faster. There is a tiny silver scar on Toby’s thumb from where he missed once before. It is a game of trust. Every day, he plays a similar game with his audience but they don’t realize it. Performers catapult over their heads, daggers are hurled, pistols fired, a lion let loose. But the crowds sit there, sucking their toffee apples, because they believe it is all illusion.

  ‘Do you trust me?’ Jasper asks, turning to Stella.

  She pulls her hand away. ‘Not a chance. I’d cross you for the price of a bonbon.’

  ‘That wasn’t always the way with you, when you had Dash,’ Jasper says, hurling the knife into a tuft of grass.

  He sees Toby flinch, the name souring the air. Dash. Stella looks at the ground and rips up a patch of dandelions.

  ‘Do you remember when we were boys,’ Jasper says, ‘and father called us the Brothers Grimm? The stories we’d make up. The ideas we had.’ He toys with one of Stella�
�s curls. ‘I could make up any story about her. I could turn her into anything. A leopard girl.’

  ‘Who?’ Stella asks.

  He points at Nell’s wagon.

  ‘Ah, so that’s what she is? Where did you find her?’

  ‘Under a rock. Hatched from an egg. Carried by a bird. I haven’t decided.’

  ‘Where did you really find her?’

  ‘That last village. She’ll be my star act. I could buy a pelt, fasten it to her. Brunette could stitch me some fronds for a headpiece.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stella says. ‘Leopard girls are ten-a-penny. Make her different.’

  ‘I could sell a bloater as a whale.’

  ‘But not if every other showman was doing the same.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Jasper picks up the knife again, presses the tip against his finger. ‘She has poise, but little skill.’ He tries to think of other spotted creatures. Hens and dogs, giraffes. Hyenas.

  ‘You could – you could make her fly,’ Toby suggests, blushing. ‘Or jump. Like a – a fairy.’

  ‘A fairy!’ he scoffs. ‘Every girl wants to be a fairy.’

  But that night, as the moon rises against the springtime sky and the chill sets in, he finds himself pondering it, the curious marks which shadow her face. He sits on the steps of his wagon, watching as the stars prick the horizon, as silver clouds drift in front of the moon and eclipse it. A sparrow darts in a sharpened V. He sucks on his lip, clicks his fingers.

  He can already picture the shifting in the crowds, the murmuring, how the air will snap as he struts out from behind the curtain. Silence, just the crunching of sawdust under his spurred boots. He thinks of the words he will summon, the guises in which he can dress her. I present – what does he present?

  Toby suggested a fairy. His brother’s ideas are often good, but he ventures them so uncertainly that it is easy to dismiss them. A fairy, flying. Jasper inspects the idea, as if it is an object he can hold to the light. He taps his fingers against his knee.

  A Fairy Queen – no – the Queen of the Moon and Stars, her marks like a thousand constellations. She could swing, fly, across the ring, wings on her back. She could soar ten feet high, with a rope tied around her waist. If only his tent was not so low – she could sweep across a whole field!