Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  As she lies there, she can hear Toby and Jasper laughing in his wagon. Crystal clinks. Jealousy digs its claws into her. A tightening rage, a fury that has welled in her ever since her father sold her, that, now she thinks of it, she has kept tightly wrapped and buried for years. She peers through a gap in the slats. The moon is full, and she stares up at it. It looks like an eye, watching her, as benevolent as a mother.

  Her sadness passes and, as two weeks in London turn into three and then into four, she minds it less, accepts that Toby either does not want her or will always choose Jasper. She enjoys, too, the whoop of the spectators, the chants that rise each night. Nellie Moon, Nellie Moon. The feeling that she is admired, important. Her body aches, fired by the thrill of performing, until she stops noticing how tired she is.

  The figurines are delivered, handbills of her face plastered to the boards of omnibuses. A squat man in a gravy-stained suit brings a crate of matchboxes. She picks one up. She is painted on the box, mid-flight, toes pointed, metal wings stapled to her sides. She thinks of Bessie, the girl printed on the parcels of candied violets.

  ‘Twister’s Matches,’ she reads, and then below it:

  ‘Light Up the Room Like Nellie Moon.’

  She is about to strike a match when she is startled by a hand on her shoulder. She turns, and in that first instant she does not recognize him. She thinks he is someone from the audience: so ordinary, so plain, twisting his cap in his hands. His trousers fray at the hem like old potato skin.

  She drops the matchbox, a gasp rocking her. ‘Charlie?’ she says, and she should embrace him, but her feet will not move. ‘Charlie,’ she repeats. Even his name feels foreign, untested for so long. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We don’t have long.’ He taps a knife in his belt, and the gesture is so helpless that she almost laughs. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Charlie –’

  ‘Hurry, before Jasper sees.’ He looks around him. ‘Is anyone watching you? I told them I was here to repair a saddle.’

  She shakes her head. ‘But – but I don’t want to leave.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I like it here, Charlie. I’m happy.’

  He stares at her. There is a snag in his voice, as if he is struggling not to cry. ‘I spent everything,’ he says. ‘I spent everything, all the money I saved – I didn’t know where you’d gone.’ His eyes dart – at the wagons basking in the heat, at the poodles sniffing at the gingerbread stall. She realizes that he was expecting to find a prisoner. A girl in chains, locked in a tower.

  ‘If you were happy, you might have written to me! You might have let me know.’

  How can she tell him that she thought he was in on the money, that he’d sold her for a crossing to America? She bows her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I thought you might be dead.’

  She can’t look at him, can’t bring herself to imagine what he has endured. ‘How did you find me?’

  He laughs bitterly. ‘It wasn’t difficult. Pa said you’d run away, but then he told me the truth when he was drunk. The handbills were everywhere, so I followed them, and then they said Jasper’d hurried to London. Your face – I saw it on an omnibus.’ He scuffs his shoes. ‘And I came here, where the advertisement said you’d be.’

  ‘To take me home.’

  ‘To take you home.’

  He looks at her as if noticing her for the first time. Her red trousers, her shirt rolled up to her elbows. She remembers the heavy cotton dress that she wore in the fields every day, how it soaked to the thigh when it was wet.

  She forces a smile. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you the menagerie.’

  They walk among the caged creatures. The tiger shackled by the collar, the llama roped to a stake. They pause in front of the ‘Happy Families’ cage, and the wolf is whining, turning rapid circles. The hare sits low, ears flat.

  The animals give her something to talk about, and she speaks too fast, too long, finds herself staring at his soiled shirt. He smells of manufactured violet perfume, of the dirt and dust of the village. She thinks, I wish you hadn’t come, and she squeezes shut her eyes at her own cruelty.

  ‘This is my wagon,’ she says, and she can hardly mask her pride. ‘Nellie Moon’, it reads, in a looping script.

  ‘It’s all yours?’ he asks, but he does not sound impressed.

  Inside, he looks seasick. It is too much, she realizes now. Too gaudy. She wants to dull the shine of the hexagonal bottles, the little mirrors, the silk ribbons. Everywhere, her reflection is cast back at her.

  He lifts up her plaster figurine, turns it over in his hand. Its face is daubed with a single sweep of the paintbrush.

  ‘They sell them after the shows.’ She is speaking too fast. ‘You can have it. If you want.’ She stops, realizes she has asked him nothing about himself. ‘And how is Piggott? And Mary? And the village?’

  ‘The village,’ he repeats.

  They never called it that. They called it home.

  ‘How’s Mary? Oh, I already asked that –’

  ‘We’re married now. Her belly’s showing. The baby will come in about four months, they say.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good.’

  An aching pause.

  ‘And the flowers – how are the fields?’

  ‘As they always are.’

  There is disdain in his expression, she thinks, a look which is a little too wide-eyed. She wants to remind him that he was the one who dreamed of escape, that he has no right to judge her. It was him who pointed at steamers carving across the bay and said, New York, or Boston, I’d say, and he did not look away until they were nothing but white specks. America. How they talked about the farmstead he longed for with its field of wheat, the wooden veranda, just like in a photograph he once saw. Corn just waiting for your fingers to pick it.

  Perhaps he wants to contain her in the village, where she is safe in his shadow.

  When he looks at her, she finds she has nothing left to say.

  After that night’s show, Violante takes out the fiddle and Huffen Black plays the drums. Stella is the first to dance, standing by the fire and spinning until she stumbles. Nell reaches for Charlie’s hand, but he shakes his head. She lets the music wash over her. Above them, candles glimmer in trees, and the folly is lit by gas jets. She watches the other women – Peggy, fidgeting with a white hen she has caught; Brunette, smoking a cigar. Nell’s eyes snag on Toby. All day, her body hungers for him, as if desire exists outside of her, as primal as the need for food and rest.

  ‘Please dance,’ she says again to Charlie.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You were always the first to dance. At home.’ She pulls her knees to her chin.

  ‘This is different,’ he says.

  Charlie was always at the centre of their village, strutting through it with a quick word for anyone. But here, it is he who is the outsider, he who does not seem to fit. Peggy kicks her legs in beat with the drum, feet tap-tapping, and Brunette puts her arms around Stella in a rough waltz.

  ‘How can you bear it?’ Charlie asks.

  ‘What?’

  He gestures at her doublet and short pantaloons. ‘Everyone seeing you like that. Being turned into a spectacle.’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ she says. ‘Everyone saw me as different before. Here, at least, they admire me. And I’m not ashamed of how I look. Not any more.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were different.’

  She rips up a daisy. ‘You noticed my birthmarks, even more than I did. You thought you could protect me.’

  ‘That was just Lenny –’

  ‘I think he mocked me because he liked me. I only realized it afterwards.’

  ‘Liked you?’

  ‘He touched me once. Just ran his hand over my arm, when we were alone.’

  ‘I don’t think so –’

  She stares ahead, and the fury is back, working its way under her scalp. What is there to say, when he denies her version of event
s, what she knows to be true?

  ‘I want you to come back with me,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t like it here. I don’t like it at all. It feels –’ He twists a piece of grass. ‘It just makes me nervous. Something – I’ve got this feeling.’ He takes her hand, and it is the first time they have touched. ‘I’ve got this feeling that something will happen to you if you stay. The way Jasper Jupiter looks at you – there’s just, there’s something about it which isn’t right.’

  She laughs, but it is uneasy. She knows where this is leading, and she wants to cut him off, for him not to say things she cannot forget. ‘You could stay and run seances.’

  ‘Stop it.’ His finger bones cut into her palm. His mouth curls in disgust. ‘Please? It’s them –’

  Across the way, Stella is laughing, her mouth hinged open as Brunette pours a steady stream of punch into it. Nell feels a stab of love, of protection. Her fingers rake the marks on her wrist. All those years, being set apart by the villagers. Her brother would have turned his back on her too, if she had not been his sister.

  ‘These people are my family,’ Nell says, coldly. ‘Don’t ask me again.’

  That evening, when her brother sleeps on the floor, she can still hear the drumbeat shuddering in her ears.

  I’ve got this feeling that something will happen to you if you stay.

  She thinks of the sketch of the leopard on the leash, Jasper’s gaze measuring her, assessing her. The cuts across her shoulders from the folding wings.

  Charlie clicks his tongue in his sleep.

  Her anger fades. She regrets the slice of her words, his face when she called them her family. What did that make him? he must have wondered. Displaced, nothing, all his savings spent to find his sister so transformed.

  In the morning, Charlie wolfs down the pork chop and mops up the eggs with his fingers. She remembers the hunger that squatted in their bellies like a stone, years of it, no meat, raw limpets sucked from their shells, sour apples that made them shit. There is a pair of gold-buckled shoes on her floor. A bonnet flung across the dresser. Books. She rubs her eyes. She almost forgot all this, everything she has amassed in little more than a month.

  Before she can change her mind, she reaches into her pillowcase and rips the seams. Notes spill out: three weeks of earnings that she has barely dented. When the London shows began, Jasper increased her wages to twenty pounds a week, a sum so large she could hardly believe it. ‘There’s almost sixty pounds here,’ she says, cramming it into a cloth bag. ‘For America, when Mary’s had her baby. Enough for the steamer, and you can put the rest towards a bit of land.’

  His eyes are wide, horrified. ‘Where did you get this money?’

  ‘I’m paid, here. I’m paid well.’

  ‘But this much –’

  ‘Please. Take it. I’ll earn more soon.’

  He nods, slips the pouch into his vest. ‘You know, don’t you, that we wanted you to live with us? With me and Mary? I know you didn’t believe us.’

  She takes his hand and clasps it, because she can’t bear to deny it, not when he is leaving, not when she may never see him again.

  She watches him go. His bandaged pack slung across his shoulder. His cap, tipped forwards, dark hair straggling from underneath it. At the entrance of the pleasure gardens, he looks around him as if he has lost his bearings, a child alone in the world.

  Back in her wagon, the plaster figurine is missing. Perhaps he will display it in his new house in America. She wonders if he will be proud of her, if he will tell people she is his sister.

  We wanted you to live with us.

  She ponders this all morning. She wonders if it is true. There is so much she could say, about how he kept her apart from the other villagers without even realizing it, how he fought her battles so furiously that everyone was uneasy around her. Or did she draw herself apart, did she imagine a distance and then it became real? Lenny, not mocking her because she appalled him, but mocking her to draw her attention. Or was Charlie right – did Lenny actually fear and hate her because of her difference? She could put a new slant on everything, have her whole history recast. But it feels as though she is looking back on the life of somebody else, and it is no longer important.

  Jasper

  Jasper watches Nell’s brother as he turns the corner and crosses the street, small bag flung over his shoulder. He was right to let him in, not to have him thrown out by the labourers. Jasper knew she would want to stay, that she would choose him. It is little surprise after all he has done for her. He has made her, built her from a rural peasant into Nellie Moon, and now gold streams into his coffers. Five hundred pounds a night, sometimes more.

  He lets himself into his newest caravan, where he stores his branded trinkets.

  The shelves are stacked with jewellery boxes, cushions, gloves, all bearing his face. It is painted on to dishes and snuffboxes. His name is inked on to tortoiseshell combs, cameos, the wrappers of cigars. He sifts his hands through them, laughing a little. He would emblazon his name on turf, tree, rock, flower if he could. He heard Huffen Black joking that only the birds in the sky were free from his advertisements, and the next day Jasper daubed ‘J. J.’ on to three startled pigeons. He tied them to a leash and pulled them into the ring, and the crowd cheered to see them strutting like a pair of strumpets in heeled shoes.

  After the evening show, he fills a barrow with a pile of his trinkets and wheels them through the pleasure gardens, hawking them to drunken revellers.

  ‘Do you have any cushions of Nellie Moon?’ an old drudge asks, fingering a tasselled pillow, his embroidered face peering out from behind her hand.

  ‘Ah, but I am the showman.’ He plumps the cushion. ‘How delightful this would look, propped—’

  The woman tosses it back, pouts. ‘It’s Nell I want.’

  He smiles, too tightly, and sells a pack of ‘Jasper Jupiter’ playing cards to a swell.

  Even he cannot deny Nell’s magnetism. It pleases him; of course it does. But faintly, too, it irritates him. He always knew that she would be popular, but he never expected this. More to the point, he finds himself unable to explain why; what quality she possesses, the trick behind her success. The crowds still when she begins to soar, chestnuts paused halfway to mouths. It is true that there is a freedom in her movements, as if she is unmooring herself from something, as if she has left her body behind. Her eyes are always closed and he wonders if she knows that she has an audience at all. Perhaps this is where her magic lies, in her absolute lack of deceit. She is natural, real. But success this sudden, he knows, is unlikely to last; he must diversify his troupe, find a new act to rival her. Perhaps that, too, is why they love her. She flies like Icarus, and they are waiting for her to fall.

  That night, after selling a few parasols bearing his face and his entire supply of Nell’s figurine, he dreams of her. She is transformed into a black spider. She lays eggs around the ring. A thousand fragile bodies hatch and unloose themselves. Miniature aerialists, rope walkers, trapeze artists. Her babies throw down webs. She begins to wrap flies, to paralyse and suck. Sparrows land in her nets. Hawks. A writhing monkey. Jasper raises his hands for the grand finale, but she twitches down to him, fastens his arms to his sides with silken bandages. She clicks her fangs and the whole tent applauds.

  He wakes, rigid, a thread of saliva linking his lips to the pillow. He walks to her wagon and watches her sleeping, her golden hair spread across the covers. He cannot understand her. If he puts his arm around her, as he might Peggy or Brunette, she wriggles away. Her shyness disarms him. He cannot think how to bring her in to heel.

  The next morning, July breaks, filthy and hot. He knows he must not rely solely on Nell to draw in the crowds; he must build a troupe around her. He opens his ledger, its columns swollen with fat numbers. His hands tremble when he reads them, his heart skipping with possibilities. Profits of two thousand pounds a week, double what he owes the Jackal. He has been cautious, held
money back, but now is not the moment for complacency – he must seize the chance, launch himself even higher.

  Over the next fortnight, he meets agents, traders, performers. He hires so many interesting curiosities that he must buy new wagons to house them. He is a magpie, snatching anything that sparkles. He auditions Hogina Fartelli, a woman who can fart the ‘Marseillaise’ and extinguish a candle from a metre away. He hires more dwarves, two mystics, an extraordinary hermit who secluded himself in an ice house in Dalkeith for ten years, a fantoccini man with marionettes who has performed before Baroness Rothschild, a lobster girl who has travelled all over Russia, America and France. He places her in a tank and heats it with oil lamps. The audience is in a frenzy, whistling, feet thundering. His circus is pitched to stranger, to greater heights.

  He builds histories for each new wonder, the fabulous shot through with the scientific. In doing so, he invents them, manufactures them, creates them. The lion woman’s mother was attacked by a wild cat during her confinement. The lobster girl’s mother fainted at a large catch of the day.

  His press stunts grow famous. He rides a rowing boat down the Thames, sitting opposite his tame leopard with its toothless jaws. He saddles a zebra and canters down the Row, and one show-goer later tells him it’s all that the swells and ladies talked about for days.

  He designs an intricate scheme of gas lights – footlights, border lights, strip lights. He builds a control system with a regulator, branch mains, piping, and secondary regulators and valves. He can brighten or dull all the lamps around the stage with a dial alone, and he dismisses the snuffing boys.

  Every week, he writes letters to the Queen, mentioning every connection he can muster – that Toby was a ‘famed Crimean photographer’ and took the likeness of Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, in Varna at her request. He tells her that he charged Sevastopol, that he built this circus from the carcass of war, that some of the horses are still branded with the mark of their Russian regiment. He tells her that his show is crammed with living wonders, with spectacles she has never seen before, and he begs her to visit. Other showmen say she will not be coaxed out; that she has draped herself in black crêpe and sealed herself away, but he does not believe it.