Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  He jumps to his feet and begins sketching on any paper to hand – a butter wrapper, a stub of wallpaper – and his mind clicks like the machine it is. He draws the pulleys they will need, the wings themselves. He puzzles out angles and trajectories. He has always had an intellect quick for design and engineering. Even as a boy, he drew horse engines and hydraulic pumps, forges and cranes. He knows which metals should fuse and at what temperatures, enjoys the riddle of fixing an engine. In the war, he built bridges using ropes, poles and meat barrels, was called upon to fix faults in paddle steamers. In the evenings, men brought shattered rifles to him, and he dismantled them and rebuilt them as easily as a woman might darn a cushion.

  As he draws semicircles and bolts, he thinks of all the men who have had great ideas before him. He wonders if this is how Victor Frankenstein felt, sketching his creature on fragments of paper, breaking into charnel houses and cemeteries for scraps of flesh and bone. Excitement fizzing in his fingertips, enraptured by the potential of it all. He thinks of the doctor’s needle, stitching the monster together; he thinks of Daedalus imprisoned in his tower, trapping larks and hawks, plucking feathers from pink bodies, the air perfumed with the aroma of melted beeswax candles. The assembly of two great inventions – wings for Daedalus, a monster for Frankenstein. Victor, seeing his creature finished, pride thrumming in his ears. Daedalus, poised on the edge, a spine-breaking fall below him, readying himself to make that leap, not knowing but hoping that the sky would lift around him and change his life. As schoolboys, they discussed the moral of both stories. Toby, forced by the master to speak, stammered that the tales were a warning not to overstretch yourself, not to fly too high. Jasper scoffed. To him, they were an exhortation to try, to build. Better to invent a remarkable monster than be imprisoned in a life of mediocrity. Better to fly and fall than to stay trapped in that tower.

  When his drawing is complete, Jasper hurries to his blacksmith. The man is gammon-faced with heat, and he puts aside the horseshoe he is hammering. Jasper stabs wildly at the paper, draws shapes in the air. Here are the joints to solder, the frame to cut, the spokes which will lever the machine outwards, causing those wings to hinge open and shut. They will be huge, yet as ornate as a thrush’s.

  Jasper shakes the diagram. ‘I want you to start now, Galem.’

  His blacksmith stares, wipes a meaty arm across his forehead. ‘It’s late –’ he begins. ‘It’s dark –’

  ‘Now!’ Jasper demands, idling his whip against the man’s shoes, and Galem takes the design from him. ‘I want it finished in two days. I don’t care if the horses are ill-shod, if the yokes are broken. I want you to make this.’

  At last, the man nods, the fire white-hot behind him. Jasper will be made in this forge too, built higher with Nell’s success. As he walks away, he remembers the moment of inspiration not as Toby’s tentative suggestion, but when he stared up at the sky and saw the stars arranged there. It was all his idea; all his own making. She takes form in his mind, a carefully constructed machine.

  He skips ahead, to a show in London, a murmuring crowd. It does not matter that it might take him a whole year until he can afford a pitch – the months will tick down and that time will arrive.

  We present, the Queen of the Moon and Stars – the sprite who pulls the show to its close, the day to its end – and tonight, she will fly, unlike any other marvel seen before –

  He imagines news spreading, the Queen requesting his company. The draw of his show enough to rekindle her love of circus and the freak show: lost, he has heard, since the death of Prince Albert. He will cheer her, ignite that childish sense of wonder. He can almost smell the halls of Buckingham Palace, where he is sure to be invited afterwards. The scents of silver polish and beeswax candles and old books. ‘What a marvel you are,’ the Queen will say to him. ‘What a show you’ve made.’

  His troupe is shuttered up. Apart from him and the blacksmith, the triplets are the only folk stirring, their little figures vanishing into the woods to check their traps for hares or pheasants.

  He walks to the wagon which is now Nell’s. He puts his eye between the slats and glimpses the shape of her hair against her pillow. He is glad not to see the sharp green of her irises, the accusation of her glare. In sleep, her features are so pretty and delicate, her puckered lip almost childish. His stomach cramps with desire, with the elation of what she will bring him.

  He turns and gazes at everything, at all the individual things which amount to his own glittering spectacle. The wooden poles, the taut drum of the tent. Animals packed into wagons like herrings in a barrel. He knows the name of every performer, groom and labourer; even the name of the rented baby that they pass off as Peggy’s, his dwarf’s, illegitimate offspring. The show is a slickly oiled machine. As he surveys the horizon, he feels so elated that he might own the trees and the hills too, the ocean beyond it with its split shells and hundreds of mussels clinging to the rocks. He thinks of Astley’s Amphitheatre and P. T. Barnum’s Museum, burnt to ash; Pablo Fanque’s, collapsed; and he does not know how they could continue to live after such disasters. Bankrupts. Nobodies.

  He lifts his hand and runs his finger across his wrist. He wonders if everyone else feels as immortal as he does. He has too many thoughts, too many ideas, too many ambitions merely to die. When his uncle was buried in Highgate Cemetery, he walked through the Egyptian Avenue with its well-raked paths, its mausoleums with their pulleys and dark tombs, and he heard a man say quite brightly, ‘This graveyard will soon be filled with men who believed they were indispensable.’ And Jasper stood there, in the mid-afternoon sun, and could not move for a full minute.

  He rasps a hand over his chin. The moon gleams, and the world shifts fractionally on its axis. He lets himself into Stella’s wagon.

  ‘Shift over, my little greenhorn,’ he says, and she yawns and takes him in her arms. He manoeuvres her so that she is beneath him, and pulls off his trousers.

  When he enters her, he thinks of ink splashing from the pens of Fleet Street hacks, of his name passing from tongue to tongue. Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders. The great body of London heaving with his name, pulsing through streets and alleys, tunnelling its way into the ear of the Queen. Jasper Jupiter, Jasper Jupiter. Tin rattling into his topper.

  He pictures Nell swinging above the Queen’s head, metal wings beating on her back, arms flung wide. I designed it all, he’ll tell Victoria in her Palace. I created her. I built the wings, found the girl in a coastal village. It was all my doing.

  ‘Mmm,’ Stella murmurs, and he watches her, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy. He knows this expression, has seen her pull it for the punters when she strips off her clothes beneath a red-glassed lantern. Head thrown back, teeth biting her lip.

  He wonders if she couples with him because she too wants to feel the trace of Dash, a closeness that they have both lost.

  He shuts his eyes, moans, slumps forwards on to her.

  ‘Move over,’ she says, lighting a cigar and puffing on it. ‘I was thinking,’ she says, quite casually, as if just picking up the old thread of a conversation, ‘I might coax out your leopard girl.’

  ‘The Queen of the Moon and Stars.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s who she is. I’ve settled on it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Stella says, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth. She rolls over. ‘You dropped something.’

  He thinks she means money, because she peels notes from his purse every time he is finished and says Life’s a transaction, and I’d be a bigger clown than Will Kempe if I wasn’t recompensed for my labour. But she picks up something small and flashing. The ring. It must have rolled from his pocket. He snatches it back.

  ‘Is that Dash’s—’ she says, hand over her mouth.

  ‘It’s mine,’ he says, too quickly. ‘It was my father’s. It looks the same.’

  He pulls on his trousers and is out of the wagon before she can say anything more.

  Nell

  Two day
s later, the circus moves in the night. The tent is dismembered neatly, the fabric swept back and folded, the wooden poles gathered in stacks. Nell is aware of performers criss-crossing the grass in front of her wagon – Jasper snapping commands, a little man sanding the claws of a drowsy tiger, the tall woman laughing over a joke she cannot catch – but it is Charlie she listens for. Where is her brother? Why hasn’t he found her? It would not be difficult to saddle a horse – and the handbills must be plastered to trees for miles around.

  Perhaps—

  She stops herself.

  No, she tells herself, he could not be in on the money. He could not do that to her.

  She hears creaking, presses her eye to the gap between her wagon slats. The lioness’s cage is pulled beside her. It paces, growling gently. Up and down, up and down. She is barely an arm’s width from it, separated only by her wooden wall and the bars of its cage. Its black eyeball gleams, its teeth shining in the moonlight. She looks at the marks on her arms. She wonders where they caught the beast, how they wrestled it into its small cage.

  A thump against her wagon – she startles, leaps back. She sees a person knocked against it. It is Stella, a villager pressing himself against her, her beard in his fist. ‘Why don’t you cut it off, freak?’ the man hisses, and his fist swings back.

  Everywhere, there is noise – the clanking of yokes, shouted commands – and Nell knows nobody will hear her if she shouts. She looks about her for anything she can use as a weapon – a leg from the chair she broke? A drawer? – but then she hears a quick laugh. The man falls over, hands gripping between his legs. Stella plucks a cigar from her pocket. ‘And be in the slag heap with the rest of you rats, rather than up on this stage?’

  When the man has limped away, Stella turns and says, ‘Nobody’s locking you in there, you know. We’ve a bowl of punch if you want it.’

  Nell bites her cheek.

  ‘Please yourself.’

  She watches Stella’s swaying walk, her ease within her own body. Nell used to walk through her village as if on a tightrope, frightened to fall off. But this woman – she swings her arms, takes long strides. She stops to pick a buttercup and pokes it through her beard. How can she do that, Nell wonders; how can she bear to make a feature of her own difference, to stare the world in the eye?

  And Stella was right; she is not locked in. Stella, she is sure, would not stay hidden inside. It would not take much to go outside, just for an instant. She presses the door. It swings open. Her pulse is quick and heavy in her ears. She lowers herself on to the step, pulls her sleeves over her hands. The lioness paces and paces in its cage, yellow hide draped over narrow bones. A girl runs past with a barrel of cabbages. The strongman and the giantess pack cloth and pans into trunks, heave them into wagons. Nobody points and gawps. She thinks of what Jasper said about the little woman, the factories that did not want her, a person’s life discarded because they could not find a place for her. The thought had not occurred to Nell before. She was able to earn a living in the field, her body still seen as productive. She watches the tall woman leaning against a barrel, rubbing her head as if it is painful, and a curious feeling beats across Nell, something close to shame.

  Soon after Nell has returned inside, her wagon jolts forwards, the wheels clanking, hooves beating the earth. She lies on her mattress, watches the tall dark hedgerows through the slats. Her chest is tight. She imagines a taut rope linking one arm to home, the other to the circus. With each clip of hooves, her body is racked, bones torn from sockets, flesh split, her mind divided.

  When they stop at an inn for water, she hears the name of the village shouted. She has not heard of it. If she ran now, she is sure that she would never find her way home.

  Nell is woken by a knock on her door. She did not sleep until daybreak, and now it must be late afternoon. She leaps to her feet. It is Jasper, gripping a brown paper parcel in both hands. He surveys the small destruction she has still not tidied – the torn books, the split feathers – and Nell juts out her chin.

  He places the package on the desk. He grips the string. ‘Shall I?’

  He does not wait for an answer, but tugs, and the paper falls open. ‘For you to perform in,’ he says. ‘You can’t wear that old rag for ever.’

  Nell planned to say something biting, to defy him, to hurl the gift back at him. But when she sees that it is the green silk garment that the tall woman has been sewing so carefully, she pauses.

  ‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ he says. ‘And this is only half of it. You’re to dress in it now. My brother will photograph you. Every performer needs a carte-de-visite.’

  Only half of it, she wonders. He waits outside. She brushes the fabric with the back of her hand. It is the same colour as the sea in winter. There are shapes stitched on to the front – tiny stars, a great white moon, an echo of the shapes on her own face. She thinks of ripping those tiny stitches, but then she sees the pile of shredded books and a quick wave of sadness passes over her. She shakes out the cloth. Two garments: short pantaloons and a sleeveless doublet, just like Stella’s. Her legs and arms will be bare. She tugs off her dress, tight with the desire to cry, crouching as if to shield herself from unseen eyes. She spans her birthmarks with her hands. She has always been so careful to hide them, and now they are supposed to be the making of her.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Jasper says. ‘Before the sun turns in. We need light.’

  She swallows. She is tired of fighting; so tired. But there is curiosity beneath her obedience. What would she look like, dressed like this? Her grimed, patched gown puddles on the floor.

  I can make you brilliant.

  She pulls on the silk, fiddles with its hooks and buttons, then pushes open the door before she can change her mind. Breeze on her bare skin. Soothing, her birthmarks less itchy than before. She steps into the yellow light of the day.

  ‘Yes,’ Jasper says, drinking her in. ‘This is just how I pictured it.’ He beheads a dandelion clock with his cane. ‘Come.’

  Dew is already settling on the grass, and she sees the troupe from the corner of her eye. Children are emptying sacks of sawdust on the ground, patching placards all bearing Jasper’s face. A stable boy is dicing up dead bullocks with an axe, slinging chunks into the lioness’s cage. The beast pounces, tears apart heads and shins and hearts.

  ‘Come along,’ Jasper says, and she hurries, half-running beside Jasper. He stops at a black wagon and pounds the wall. ‘Toby, shift your hide,’ he shouts.

  She reads the looping script. ‘Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fades. Tobias Brown, Crimean Photographist’.

  ‘Toby!’ Jasper says with sudden warmth when the door opens. It is the bear-like man she saw on the beach. And he is Jasper’s brother, Nell thinks with a start – though she begins to see the resemblance in their plump lips, their sloe-coloured eyes. He is younger than she remembered him – little more than thirty. He looks at her as he did before, with that long, sad gaze, and she finds herself surprisingly nervous, her face hot.

  ‘Wait until you see this, Nell,’ Jasper says, hands resting on a cloth. ‘The second part of your costume.’ He pulls back the fabric with a flourish.

  At first, Nell thinks it is a machine to trap animals – foxes, perhaps – jaws built to mince soft flesh. It is a frame made of dull metal with spokes and cogs, strung with white feathers. Three leather straps hang from it. It is as big as she is, a mess of solder and ironmongery.

  ‘You’re to wear them,’ he says, holding them up. He pulls a small lever and the metal creaks, two segments beating back and forth. ‘Wings.’

  ‘What are they for?’

  ‘For?’ Jasper repeats. ‘Why, you’re to be my queen. A queen who pulls the moon across the heavens.’

  She stares at him. He might as well have told her that the sky is green. ‘Me?’ she asks. ‘How?’

  ‘Here,’ he says. He smiles, laughs, and she glimpses a childishness in him, as if he has forgotten his place for an instant. ‘Lift your arms.
There. Yes. Yes.’

  His fingers graze her back and she tries not to recoil. He tightens the straps across her belly and under her arms, and she stoops under the weight of the metal. The wings jut out behind her like a butterfly’s, the tips sharp and gleaming, four perfect segments. She wishes she could catch her reflection in a puddle, but perhaps she would not even recognize herself.

  ‘Magnificent,’ he says, breathing evenly. ‘Magnificent. A wonder. Don’t you think, Toby? A wonder. The ropes will feed through here, and you’ll be lifted skywards. You’re going to fly, Nell. We’re going to make you fly.’

  She wishes he would talk slower, to give her time to filter the meaning from his words. Fly. Nell. Queen. She steadies herself on the wagon, remembers how she used to stand on the furthest tip of the cliffs and watch the sea sucking the rocks below her. Charlie would plead with her to step back, not to be so foolish. She kicked earth over the edge and watched it tumble down, until the urge to fall was almost greater than the urge to stand still.

  ‘What do you say, Toby?’ Jasper says.

  ‘Very good,’ Toby says, but he doesn’t look up.

  ‘Just bring the photograph to me when you’re finished.’ Jasper claps his hands, roars across the fields, ‘Round up that zebra or I’ll smash your skull in with a spike!’ and he is off, half-running.

  It is simple, being told what to do. Toby tells her how to stand and how long for, and still he doesn’t look at her. The wings are heavy. Her arms and legs are so bare. Not even Piggott could afford to have his image taken, and here she is, the box staring at her, the backdrop unscrolled behind her. She has a sudden image of the villagers seeing her – of her clanking into town dressed like this, jangling her wings open and shut. Would they be horrified, amazed? Perhaps they wouldn’t believe it was her.