Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  There is a sudden pop pop pop, and Toby’s hands fly to his face. Fireworks, he thinks, it’s just fireworks. They burst against the sky, whistle like mortars. He wants to be on the road again, never lingering anywhere for long, his memories left behind. But they always find him out; always needle their way in, whisper through the slats of his wagon.

  Coward. Coward. Coward.

  Port bursts like blood down Brunette’s dress. He holds his stomach. Just port. If Jasper were here, he’d soothe him. I was there too, he’d say. And I’m not haunted by visions of what I saw. And as for Dash – a pause. It’s done. It’s simply done. A man can’t be brought back to life.

  He remembers the day his steamer reached Balaklava, arriving in the aftermath of a storm. Guns boomed from the batteries, vessels with masts snapped like sticks. A harbour thick with debris. A log floating like a corpse. He looked closer, recoiled. It was a corpse. And then, he saw Jasper standing on the pontoon, arms tight at his sides, and Toby gave a little cry of recognition.

  ‘Here,’ Jasper said, and then saw his face and smiled. ‘This is war, what did you expect? Matins sung by flocks of choristers?’

  Jasper laughed, and Toby did too, but his chuckle snagged in his throat as if he had a fishbone trapped there. ‘I missed you,’ he said at last.

  But his words were lost; Jasper was waving at a man on the bank. ‘Dash!’ he called, and Toby tried to mask his disappointment. ‘Over here.’

  The man joined them, scarcely nodding at Toby. Dash walked ahead with Jasper. Toby caught only snippets of their conversation. They talked about men he did not know, scenes he had not witnessed. Toby opened his mouth but found he had nothing to say. A flare of anger darted through him, that Dash did not even try to involve him, that his brother seemed so distant from him. That, in just a few weeks, Toby’s place had been so easily assumed by another.

  ‘I’ll stay – I need to have the wagon brought in. My horse, my machine, you know,’ Toby said, expecting his brother to offer to wait with him.

  Jasper shrugged. ‘As you please.’

  They walked away and he heard Dash say, ‘That ambush – the Ruskies! Did you see the chap flung from his charger –?’

  As the mud sucked and pulled at his feet, as Toby floundered past desperate men with the look of starved dogs, he imagined riding a camel into a ring, Jasper beside him. Toby breathed through a handkerchief. Gangrene, half-buried skeletons, the stink of shit and vomit.

  Everywhere, evidence of the truth of Russell’s dispatches.

  On the second day, a general gave him orders to find a pair of healthy soldiers. He found Dash and Jasper, a little drunk. ‘Did you hear how the storm blew the regimental bass drum into Russian land?’ Dash said, and laughed.

  Toby felt detached from them, detached from it all. He could not understand how they could enjoy it here, how their spirits could remain so high. Perhaps it was Dash’s wealth, insulating them from the worst of it – their marquee was one of the largest, the sturdiest. Perhaps their regiment hadn’t participated in the bloodiest battles, and they were still green, sustained by the novelty of it. Or perhaps they just didn’t care about the gruesomeness of war; they liked the freedom of it, the thrill and closeness of fighting, a life so different from circling hot London drawing rooms. It was this which made Toby feel even more alone; that he and Jasper could feel so differently about the same situation.

  Jasper reached out and patted Dash’s shoulder, and Toby flinched. He had been separated from his brother for less than a month. How could Dash displace him so easily?

  ‘Is this right, Tommy?’ Dash called.

  Tommy? Toby was too surprised to say anything. While he’d lain awake thinking about the man, his jealousy darkening, he realized that he meant nothing at all to Dash. He did not even rouse enough feelings in the man to be irritating. He would have preferred Dash’s hatred.

  ‘Toby,’ Jasper corrected him, and grinned. ‘Your memory is utterly dreadful.’

  It occurred to Toby, too, that Dash couldn’t remember his name because Jasper never spoke of him; even the lowest underling at Toby’s old office knew all about Jasper. He lowered his head and cleared the area for his first photograph. The sky was so blue it hurt to see it. He kicked away a broken cartouche and a human jawbone, handed his brother and Dash fresh boots. He ducked behind the cape and he saw the way Jasper was not looking at the machine, but at Dash. He gazed at him as if he could not believe they were friends. Toby knew that look; he knew it because it was the same way he himself had always seen Jasper. My brother, you know. A thought struck him like a kick between the ribs. Jasper would choose Dash as his brother.

  When he developed the image into a little square of card, he could almost believe the story they were telling. A small scene of contentment. Two merry lads, bonded by the sights they had shared. In less than a month, this photograph might be printed in a thousand newspapers, opened by gentlemen across the country. The situation was fine, they would conclude. Wasn’t that tent well cared for? Barely a scratch on those boots, egad! And was that hot whisky? What a jolly time they were having! Russell was the Prince of Humbug, a pedlar of lies, no better than a showman!

  Below him, telegraph lines stretched from Balaklava to Khutor, messages crackling under the earth. A thousand stories could be told and conveyed in seconds, a thousand ways of interpreting a single battle. This was a new war, a machine war, where journalists mingled with troops, where new inventions bore power. Toby’s photographs would tell a story in a way it had never been told before. Simpson could paint his watercolours, Russell could spin his words, but the public would trust a photograph most of all.

  ‘It just – I don’t know, it feels like a deceit,’ Toby said to Jasper a few days later. ‘A lie.’

  ‘All of history is fiction,’ Jasper said, dipping a cloth in oil and polishing the barrel of his rifle. ‘I’ve said this to you before. Everyone is a liar whether they know it or not. Bias, you know? You might describe life here as untenable and dismal, and I’d say there’s a thrill in fighting, and who’s to say which one of us is right? Or – I might say Dash is a jolly good fellow, and the wife of a soldier he shot might call him a monster. There are no simple answers.’

  ‘A monster,’ Dash said. ‘I’ll take that.’

  Jasper touched Toby’s arm, and said, ‘You think about things too much.’ And for a moment it was as it had been before – he remembered the circus they had planned together, the closeness that exists only between siblings. In a month, he was sure, their relationship would heal itself.

  That evening, in the wavering beam of his lamp, Toby looked again at the photograph he had taken. His gut twisted to see Jasper and Dash laughing like that, while he himself was hidden, invisible. He brushed Dash’s chest with his thumb and, for a second, he imagined a Russian bullet lodged in the man’s heart. He pictured himself stepping into that blank space beside his brother, filling it once more. He frowned, cast the image across the floor, appalled at himself.

  Every story is a lie.

  Dash was not a monster. Toby knew he was merely somebody he could not bring himself to like. He hated him because Jasper liked him too much.

  And the photograph was not a lie, no more than any other account might be. Dash and Jasper’s contentment was real. Toby was simply following orders. He revolved his shoulders, as if to lessen the weight that pressed on them.

  When Nell appears before him, he cannot read her expression. She is out of breath, her hair loose.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, putting down the tongs.

  ‘Come with me,’ she says, quietly.

  He looks around him for Jasper.

  ‘He’s in his wagon.’

  She realizes, then, that he wants to keep their closeness a secret from his brother. He feels a flaring of guilt inside him, not altogether unpleasant. Nobody is looking their way. The triplets are dancing in the middle of a circle as men clap and whistle. Peggy is offering camel rides to drunk soldiers for a s
hilling, her back turned.

  He follows Nell, blinking to adjust to the dark, tripping on a shorn piece of topiary. Blood crashes in his eardrums. He can do nothing but stumble after her, down the gravel path, past the iguanodon skeleton with its half-ruined bones. She walks to the edge of the pleasure gardens, to the narrow bower with the wooden benches and a single lamp.

  She stops, and he nearly walks into her. Her eyes glint in the moonlight. They are so close, just them and the faint sound of cheering. He wants to ask her why she has taken him here, but his heart is galloping, his tongue too big for his mouth. The ground is damp with dew and the moon is sliced in two.

  He tries to check if anyone is watching them. He has the quick thought that Jasper has put her up to this – that he is waiting in the shadows with a half-smile on his face, to see if Toby will betray him.

  ‘Toby,’ she whispers.

  She grazes his wrist with her hand. She strokes his arm, tentative at first, and then with more pressure, as if she is tracing vines and patterns on his skin. She shuts her eyes. Perhaps she wants to pretend he is somebody else.

  The moment hangs, drawn by a thread. He is afraid to breathe, to speak, as if by doing so he will snap it. If he were Jasper or Dash, he would have her in his arms, would already have reached forwards and pulled her to him. But what if he has misunderstood and she were to push him away? What if he horrified her? And this is enough, somehow; this is all he needs. Her fingertips reach his chest and he concentrates on the sweep of her hands. Her warmth, which is now pressed against him. She smells sweet, of woodsmoke and cloves.

  No woman has ever come this close to him, though he visited a whorehouse with Jasper and Dash in the days before they knew Stella. He paid his fee because it would have been churlish to refuse, and he sat with the girl on a mud-raked floor, a small fire smoking in the corner. It was so cold. She was a timid black-haired scrap of a thing, and when she moved to pull off her shift, he shook his head. He found himself telling her nonsensical things, about the flowers he’d noticed in the fields. Dahlias and anemones, tatty in the closing autumn. Sweetbriar and whitethorn, wild parsley and mint, and how, when the infantry marched, they were crushed underfoot and the air filled with their scent. Of course, she didn’t understand what he was saying. He didn’t even know the name of her language. He could hear Jasper and Dash whooping at each other through the walls. ‘I snatches whatever I sees!’

  He is taken aback by the shock of Nell’s cheek against his. His gasp is almost noiseless, surprising to him. The warmth of her, the fear of it. She pulls him closer, their bodies pressed together, and he wants to kiss her but he is afraid he will do it wrong and she will laugh at him. He is so used to being at the edge of things, his head ducked beneath a black cape, a voyeur. He shuts his eyes. The haziness of it; unable to think, to concentrate, the urge to cry. She cannot possibly want him, not when she might have Jasper’s affection instead.

  He hears his name being called, cast through the arbour. His brother will be summoning him for a drink, or to tell him something new.

  He holds Nell tighter. What would Jasper do if he found him like this? It does not matter that Toby saw her first, that he often sees Jasper leaving Stella’s wagon late at night. His brother has protected him, and he must give him his life in return. It is a simple transaction.

  We’re brothers, linked together.

  ‘Stay,’ Nell whispers.

  She does not understand, cannot understand. He pulls away. He has to; he has no choice. A dark, glittering fear settles on him that if he stays a second longer, he will not be able to let her go. That he’ll always long for this, that years from now, he’ll find himself wanting her with a painful sharpness.

  As he hurries through the bowers, he feels her touch drawn onto his skin, as if her fingers were paintbrushes. It is a shock, in the light, to see that his arms are the same as ever – milk white and dull and scarcely freckled. He sees his brother ahead, and in that instant, he hates him. He wants to be alone. He needs to make sense of what has happened. The world has sanded him down, left him as frightened as a boy.

  ‘There you are!’ Jasper says, staggering over a log draped with manufactured moss.

  Toby takes a step back. There is panic in his brother’s eyes. He thinks, with quickening fear, He knows. He saw them together. And if he didn’t, the secret must be written all over his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Whatever for?’ Jasper walks closer to him, worrying the skin on his neck. ‘Someone’s killed one of the goats.’

  ‘How? Why?’

  ‘They slit its throat.’

  ‘Who? Winston?’

  ‘No,’ Jasper says. ‘I know who it was. I didn’t think he’d – damn it!’

  He follows Jasper to the animal. It lies on its side, thick ruff matted with blood, eyes already clouded. Flies and wasps gather on the wound. There is a coin clamped between its jaws.

  ‘Who did this?’ Toby asks.

  Jasper breathes out slowly. ‘The Jackal.’

  Nell

  Nell lies on her mattress, fizzing with what she has begun. She presses her fingers to her lips. His body against hers, the warmth and strength of him. She hears Stella, Brunette and Peggy returning from the pleasure gardens, their voices high and lilting. One of them is playing the harmonica. Often, they will tumble into her wagon and fall asleep on her bed, their limbs tangled together.

  ‘Still alive in there?’ Stella calls, hammering on her wagon.

  ‘All well,’ Nell calls back. Their laughter fades, and Nell pulls the blankets over her head. She wonders what they would say about Toby, if they knew. If they would stop her. If they would believe he could desire her – if, even, she can believe it herself.

  She barely sleeps, her mind swinging back to the moment in the trees, her daring. Soon, she hopes, there will be more, bigger memories to replace it. In the morning, they will see each other again. Her heart scurries at the thought. She pictures herself, sitting by the fire, frying bacon, how he will come up to her and take her hand. The book they will read in the evening, the space between them shrinking. The electricity of his hands on her.

  But in the bright dawn light, she finds herself frightened, unsure. She stares at the speckles across her legs and arms, then pulls on her trousers. In these new, fresh clothes she finds her marks itch less, her body less hot than before. Outside, the pleasure gardens are quiet. Nobody else is awake, not even the grooms. She knows it is not safe to be alone, that a girl was attacked by a group of drunk militia only two nights ago, but it feels so serene. She strolls up and down the bower – littered now with old bottles and wrappers and a fish skeleton – as if to touch the ghosts of her and Toby, to remind her it was real. She will not seek him out; she will wait for him to find her.

  The day passes in fits of hope, of swift misery. She watches the queue outside his photography wagon, all the city folk waiting for him to capture their likeness. Is she imagining it, or are there more girls than usual, nudging each other, laughing? She burns to think of him watching them through the lens, taking in their soft pale cheeks, their bright hair, their unblemished arms.

  His eyes slide past her at the show, as he climbs into the basket and she swings beneath him, and she feels wrung out, wretched.

  ‘Nellie Moon,’ they chant. ‘Nellie Moon.’

  After the show is over, Jasper shows her a newspaper. He points to a sketch in the far corner, a girl’s head on a leopard’s body, Jasper pulling the creature on a leash. It has a simple, docile grin. ‘Jasper Jupiter’s Newest Exhibit’, it states. ‘A Charming Creature in an Age of Monsters.’

  ‘There,’ he says, stabbing the paper. ‘There I am!’

  He shows her more articles, spreads out Punch before her. ‘The reviews aren’t all positive,’ he says. ‘But the point is they’re talking about us.’

  She lifts the periodical to the light.

  ‘In Nellie Moon, the taste for the Monstrous seems, at last, to have re
ached its climax. She joins a bustling Hall of Ugliness –’

  The words blur.

  ‘We cannot understand the cause of the now prevailing taste for deformity, which seems to grow by what it feeds upon.’

  She stares at her hand, flexes her fingers.

  Monstrous? She is just a girl. A coil of rage tightens around her throat.

  ‘That will bring in the crowds,’ Jasper says, cutting out the article.

  She says nothing, ignores Stella’s shouts that she should drink with them, and retreats instead to her wagon. She waits for Toby to visit and read with her, but an hour passes, two, and he does not come. To distract herself, she flicks through the volume of Fairy Tales. Girls are rewarded with kingdoms; deformities are given as punishments. The greedy hunchback is cursed with a second hump on the front of his chest; a spiteful sister is punished by being given a second nose. She remembers that day in the market with her brother and father, the way some people shielded themselves from her, as though she were something to be feared. Could they have thought her marks were a punishment for some evil that lurked inside her? She was a child, she thinks, scarcely four. What power could she have wielded, what harm could she possibly have done them? On she reads. Hans, shucking his spines. The Beast, transformed to a perfect man. The maiden’s hands growing back from the stumps on her wrists. Harmony restored, as if being ordinary is the best way to exist in the world, their reward for their goodness. Charlie, waving to magic away her birthmarks. Is she wrong for no longer wanting her skin to be pale and plain, for being glad of her marks? She thinks of all the things she did not do, all the dances she shied away from, because everybody else made her ashamed. Stella’s words echo in her head. You can spend a lifetime with a family that both adores you and sees you as different. She slams shut the book.