Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  Perhaps, he thinks, he needs to expand his menagerie too; this is the bait which will lure her in. On a sour afternoon, he visits the vaults bordering the Thames where he first acquired Minnie. He is led into arch-roofed cells, the walls damp and dripping, where animals pace and scratch and whimper. He idles beside cages, strokes furs and feathers and scales.

  He reaches into his pocket and exchanges mere folds of paper for ten zebras, a giant tortoise, two sea lions, a tapir, four toucans, and a lion, larger than any beast he has seen before. Three hundred pounds for this tallow-coloured creature, its muscles wired with pent-up rage. He stares at it, eye to eye. It does not blink. Its eyes are as big and black as plums.

  ‘The king of the plains,’ he says, ‘in Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders.’

  But when he fetches a cage and pulls it across London with a flotilla of trumpeters, it can barely stand, its muscles quivering.

  And yet – and yet, even with all his money close to spent, he still finds himself visiting his agent, settling into that mangy armchair and asking if the man has a truly exceptional prodigy on his books. ‘I still have a little tin left, Tebbit,’ he says. ‘And I need another wonder as extraordinary as Nell.’

  ‘I’ve a giant and two living skeletons—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Jasper says. ‘It must be something the Queen hasn’t seen before. A true novelty.’

  ‘I see,’ Tebbit says, brushing the cat hairs from his stained suit. ‘In case you lose Nell to another showman?’

  Jasper is aghast. ‘No!’ He mops his forehead. ‘Heaven forbid. What straits I’d be in if she ever absconded.’ He strokes his neck and thinks of himself, throat slit like a hog, a shilling clamped between his teeth. The Jackal’s calling card, he’s heard, a swell killed only last week over five missed payments. But since the incident with the dead goat, Jasper has delivered his payments on time, including only yesterday. He has a week to make another thousand, and he’s sure he’ll make double that, perhaps even triple.

  The agent takes out an album crammed with cartes-de-visite of ‘performers all available, all ready, the finest in the trade’ – Jasper glimpses stunted limbs, shrunken skulls, human pincushions – and he snaps, ‘I’m not interested in any of them. I said I wanted true novelty. If I wanted an armless wonder I’d go to a Whitechapel shop.’

  ‘And find one of your old comrades?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Jasper says. The notion sickens him. That somebody close to him, that – he takes a breath – even he, had fate dealt him a different hand in the Crimea, might be stared at and ridiculed and plastered on these posters as a wonder –

  ‘A real marvel,’ Jasper repeats, picking up the familiar thread. ‘That’s all I’m looking for.’

  Tebbit pauses, palms grating on his stubble. There is a girl, he tells him, so newly on his books that he hasn’t yet calculated her market value. Her mother has recently begun to exhibit her in a gallery near Piccadilly.

  ‘And what’s novel about her?’

  ‘She’s an albino. A rare marvel. Exquisite. She’s the greatest little mortal that’s ever been exhibited, I’m told.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four! I don’t want to take on an infant.’

  ‘You can control a child. She’s yours. You can tell her you’re her father, if you like. Cleave her to you. Besides, Charles Stratton was the same age when Barnum hired him from his parents.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Think of it this way,’ the agent says, leaning closer. He rubs his hands as if rinsing them with invisible soap. ‘You don’t want to be outshone, do you? There’s an albino girl, Nellie Walker –’

  Jasper smarts at the name.

  ‘– in America. Nine years old. Exhibited with her brother as the Black and White Twins. Whether he’s really her brother – well, it hardly matters. My point is, novelty only lasts for so long. If Nellie’s toured here, then you’ve missed your chance. This is your opportunity to mop up the excitement.’ He makes a gesture of wiping a bread roll around a bowl.

  ‘And this girl on your books,’ he asks. ‘She’s genuine? There’s no hoax? No mother with a pot of chalk? I can’t afford to make a mis-step, not now when my show is growing, when my finances are still not assured –’

  The agent flicks to the back of the album and presses his thumb to a small image. ‘There she is. See for yourself. Her name’s Pearl.’

  Jasper adjusts his pince-nez. He tries to ignore the man’s choked breathing, the rasp of air through snot.

  ‘Well?’ Tebbit asks.

  The girl is squinting at the camera, her face set. Pale eyes and lashes. There is a ribbon tied around her forehead. She has a slight underbite, a dandelion clock of white hair. An angel. Acquiring her would be a risk – he’s down to his last hundred. It would only take a small fire, a sickness, a week of rain –

  There is something familiar about her. He’s sure he’s seen her before. That’s it! He clicks his fingers. A boy carried news of her after Jasper’s very first visit to the Jackal. ‘Extraordinary phenomenon! Pearl, the Girl as White as Snow. Now Exhibiting Alive at –’

  ‘She’s being displayed at Regent Gallery, isn’t she?’ Jasper asks.

  The agent nods. ‘Why don’t I arrange a meeting?’

  He pats the notes in his pocket. They sit beside the ring. Jasper pauses. ‘Don’t bother. Most of London will have seen her by now.’

  Toby

  ‘I think this is my favourite,’ Jasper says, picking up a small pipe bearing his face. He lights it, chuckles. ‘As if my topper’s on fire.’

  Toby watches him as he picks up the other trinkets. Smoke thickens in the wagon, his brother’s words and gestures sinking into mist. Toby lifts his glass to his mouth. His ears are pricked for sounds outside the caravan – for Nell’s voice, for the quick footsteps of her and Stella returning from the pleasure gardens. He hears her laughter, and it beats through him.

  After the night at the bower, he stood in front of the looking glass. He felt the trace of Nell’s hands on him, how she had drawn long vines across him, circled his navel like a pollinating bee. He lifted his shirt. His belly was wide but not loose, speckled with dark hair. The skin was pasty. Ordinary, he thought. He leafed through his book of performers, his finger pausing on his favourite images. Minnie, whose hide he had covered with flowers. The human painting from Winston’s show. He closed it carefully, turned the mirror to face the wall. He could not be enough for her. She was Nellie Moon. He had seen her soaring beneath the basket, heard the chants thrown from the grandstand, read the frothing articles about her in every broadsheet. All of London wanted her; who was he to have her? In the days that followed, Toby took a perverse pleasure in denying himself even a glance in her direction. Then, he thought, Dash’s death would have been for something; it would reverberate through his own unhappiness.

  ‘I just have the sense she’s hiding something. Could she have a lover, do you think?’

  Toby startles, a dart of fear in his chest. ‘Nell?’

  His brother looks at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Not Nell. I’m talking about Brunette.’

  Toby tries to force a smile. He has that feeling again, that his brother is reading him. He pulls his sleeves lower. ‘She seems just the same to me,’ he says, but his voice slurs. He has drunk too much. The candle casts patterned shadows like vines and creepers, an extraordinary rainforest crawling across the walls. He holds his arm up, imagines the shapes dancing over his body.

  ‘I can’t afford to lose her,’ Jasper says. ‘Not when matters are this precarious. Nell might be the main draw, but plenty of the audience come for Brunette too.’

  ‘Precarious? But you’re filling the stands, twice a night. The tin’s pouring in faster than we can catch it.’ A thought hits him. He leans forwards. ‘How much did you borrow, Jasper? Five thousand?’

  Jasper’s smile falls away. ‘Five thousand?’ he repeats with a light scoff.

  ‘Ho
w much?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Twenty thousand?’ Toby’s mouth falls open. ‘Twenty thousand pounds? From a backstreet lender?

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘They’re little more than butchers! They’ll skin you. They’ll kill you over the last penny. They’ll sink you.’ His heart is pounding. ‘How could you be so foolish?’

  ‘Foolish?’ Jasper demands, pulling himself to his feet.

  He should stop, but he can’t, his voice growing louder, more distressed. ‘When winter comes, what will you do then? There’s always a slowing of trade –’

  ‘I’ll hire a hippodrome.’

  ‘How? Where?’

  Jasper slams his fist on the table, his glass jumping. ‘Isn’t my show magnificent? Isn’t everyone talking about it? We’re filling the stands –’

  Toby stares at his brother, and he looks so small, suddenly, so vulnerable. The skin around his throat is pale, tight across his Adam’s apple. He thinks about when they were boys, when his brother sneaked into his room and held him. Two hearts, beating together. So close they felt like a doubled flower.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t know what it is to take a risk, how important this show makes me feel.’

  Toby bows his head. A sharp pain, as if the nave of his ribs is cracking open. The shadow of the candle patterns his arms, and he knows his brother is right.

  Jasper

  After Toby has left, Jasper cannot sleep. He should be happy, content with his show’s expansion, its new performers and animals. But his brother’s fear weighs on him; he stares at his ledger, at the outward trickle of pounds and guineas that he had not accounted for. Additional animal food, repaired wagons, wage rises – small expenses which rapidly mount. Something seems unfastened, undone; he imagines his wolf’s cage unbolted, his creature slinking across London.

  He pulls on his boots and hurries to the menagerie, nodding at the grooms who guard it through the night. Vertigo seizes him, as if a gully yawns beneath his feet, the bulk of all he has built stacked behind him. He has a small and absurd desire for his old show, when he knew the names of everyone in it, when he had so little to lose.

  He walks on, past the lions, past the pacing leopards and the sea lions shimmying in their metal tanks. He lifts the curtain covering the cage of his favourite animals, fumbles for the bolt. It is fastened tight. He exhales his relief. Happy Families, he reads, written in lilting script. In the sudden lamplight, the hare and the wolf lift their heads, eyes narrowed to slits. He watches the hare rearrange its limbs, shuffling against the wolf. It exposes its white belly. He has a quick longing for the wolf to pounce, to exercise its true nature. All those years of pent-up cravings. It is fat because he must not let it grow hungry.

  Who’s the wolf and who’s the hare? he asked Toby, as if there was any doubt.

  And then, with a dart of clarity, he realizes what is troubling him. His show is assured. His finances will recover, and soon. It is Toby; that is the piece out of place.

  He nears his brother’s wagon, its black paint peeling, the familiar scent of chemicals that linger on his brother’s clothes. He thinks of Toby, hunched forwards, unable to meet his eye. The sadness in his voice. His brother is keeping something from him. But Jasper will prise it out of him, watch him more closely if he needs to. The last time he forgot Toby, his whole world was split in two.

  Jasper takes out the gold ring and twists it. E. W. D. Edward William Dashwood. He remembers the argument he and Toby had, that cold night when Dash first met Stella.

  Word had spread of Stella’s soirées, debauched affairs where men woke dressed in women’s bloomers, or with their mustachios shaved. Everyone had an incredulous tale about her – ‘The woman who launched a thousand fibs,’ Dash quipped. ‘Thomas told me she wears chap’s britches, and her horse died because she fed it too much champagne. Someone even told me she has a beard.’

  ‘A beard,’ Jasper said. ‘It’s not possible!’

  ‘I’d rather like to meet this firecracker and see for myself,’ Dash said.

  Jasper expected rumour had distorted her beyond recognition, when really she was just another ordinary soldier’s wife with a taste for depravity. The Crimea was full of women, after all, some with wilder reputations than others. Lady tourists, exhausted nurses with pink-poached hands, sutlers and washerwomen, French cantinières in their neat red trousers. Camp followers who’d drawn the white pebble from a bag of black stones and were allowed to join their husbands on the march. Some of the officers’ wives sat on the steamers drinking champagne, beating the air with silken fans; others scorned such a way of living and dressed in suits of leather. They had favourites: men that they particularly enjoyed watching in battle.

  Sometimes, as Jasper cajoled his men into the fray, he glanced sideways at Dash, and it was as if his own face was reflected back at him – another showman, plunging into those grassed valleys.

  Together, they slew Ruskies with exaggerated gestures, slashing and cutting and scything, as if men were hayfields to be cropped. They could feel the eyes of the spectators on them, watching, admiring, and it turned the whole business of killing into little more than a game. If there was no audience, he wondered if he would have seen war differently, as a real thing – if the screams would have echoed afterwards, if the bodies would have reared up in his nightmares.

  ‘She’s holding a salon tonight,’ Dash said.

  He was eager and puppyish as they ducked into Stella’s tent. Toby trailed them, and it delighted Jasper to see how easily he could make his brother smile, just by linking his arm through his.

  Her tent was built like a Turkish marquee. Cocoa mats lined the floor. Benches teemed with silver bowls of hothouse plums and greengages, vases of flowers crafted from tissue paper. They sat and sipped champagne from marmalade pots. Everyone watched Stella, a beard growing at her jowls. She began to sing like a bird.

  ‘Sing like a robin,’ someone cried, and she performed the perfect warble.

  ‘A nightingale,’ Jasper shouted.

  Stella turned her expression haughty. ‘Brandy is the ruination of many a good nurse.’ She seized a lantern from the table. ‘Now leave me to haunt the wards with my blasted lamp. Nurse! Nurse! Stop your chattering with that wounded soldier or he’ll have his fingers stuffed up your cunny before I can say the Lord’s prayer.’

  ‘Florence, Florence, Florence,’ the men began to chant, slamming their glasses against the tables.

  It was only here that Jasper realized that the war had begun to wear him down: the winter an ache in his sockets, surrounded always by the reek of choleric men. How badly he needed an evening like this to restore his spirits! Jasper turned to share a laugh with Dash, but he was gazing at Stella. Even when Jasper nudged him, he wouldn’t look away. And then he saw that she too was looking at Dash, sneaking small glances between her cartwheels and chirruped melodies.

  ‘One day Toby and I’ll own a troupe, and she’ll be in the centre of it,’ Jasper said, and at that his brother brightened.

  ‘We’ll ride in on camels,’ Toby added. ‘In red capes.’

  ‘I’ll build Stella a swing or a tightrope,’ Jasper said.

  ‘Not if I marry her first,’ Dash said, biting hard into a bottled plum, wounding the soft red flesh.

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Jasper said, and laughed. ‘Marry her!’

  He broke off when Stella walked towards them. Jasper reached out his hand, but she ducked away, settled herself under Dash’s arm as if she belonged there. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. It was a gesture of such tenderness that Jasper had to look away.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were already acquainted,’ Jasper said. ‘You sly old dog!’

  ‘We aren’t,’ Dash replied.

  She’d seen him on Cathcart Hill, she told them, Dash on his white horse. She liked how he fought. She wished she could fight too, but she had to content herself with watching through a telescope.

&n
bsp; ‘And me? Did you see me?’ Jasper asked, but she didn’t seem to have heard him.

  Stella and Dash talked for so long that the men began to grumble that they’d been promised a show and wanted to see the end of it. Stella took a slug of wine and snapped that they should find a starved rat in a cellar who’d do them for a penny, because she wasn’t a monkey on a hot plate, there to dance to their tune. Jasper kept trying to catch Dash’s eye as Stella bowed her forehead to his; a lark, he thought – it must be.

  At last he gave up. He turned to speak to Toby instead and there was a look on his brother’s face he could not read, his expression turned in on itself. It frightened him, a little. He shook his arm, said, ‘Toby?’ and his brother blinked as if suddenly awoken. He began to talk about the photographs, the lies they were telling – Jasper yawned; it seemed Toby could speak of nothing else – and so he tried to listen in on Stella and Dash’s conversation.

  ‘I suppose you want to be alone,’ Jasper said, expecting his friend would contradict him. But he didn’t, and Jasper and Toby walked back to their tent without Dash, drowsy and champagne-sodden. It was cold, frost crisping the ground, and men shivered under thin tents.

  ‘It looks like you’re lumped with me now,’ Toby said, and Jasper saw him hide a smile.

  ‘What?’ He chuckled. ‘Oh, Dash will just be fooling. He’ll laugh himself senseless tomorrow. A bearded woman?’

  But there was something about Toby’s possessiveness which irked him, that Toby could be pleased at the idea of Dash dropping him. The drink had oiled Jasper’s tongue, and he found the words came easily, sharper than he expected. ‘You’re always so damned silent, aren’t you? So damned watchful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you think about, when you haunt us each night? You just sit there like a stupid bear, not saying a thing.’ Toby’s blank expression only goaded him, and he picked up a stick and threw it at a tree. ‘It’s like you’re this great lumbering –’ he spread out his arms, searching for the word – ‘shadow. Empty! Nothing there.’