Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  Someone is close behind her; she jumps, expecting Jasper, expecting a command, a rebuke. She puts her hand to her chest, but it still hammers. Her palms are hot.

  ‘You frightened me,’ she says.

  Toby does not speak, does not even smile, just looks at her in the way he did on that first day, as if he is committing her to memory.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, and the relief of knowing he wants her is enough to make her laugh, a tick-tock at the back of her throat. She runs a thumb over the flaking paint, the brush slippery in her hand.

  ‘He’ll see us,’ she says, her voice rising. ‘You should go –’

  He takes a step forwards. She almost moves back, her head filled with distant thoughts. The memory of his naked body, the thrill of her own daring. His hands move across her wrist, hold it. He must be able to feel her pulse, racketing there. She wants to speak, to break the silence, to quiet the stabbing in the basin of her belly. His thumb tests the soft skin between her fingers.

  ‘I keep making mistakes,’ he says. ‘I can’t think.’

  She is already hungry for more, for whispered promises like Abel passed to Brunette, for her own life to follow the pattern of the romances she has read.

  ‘I can hear him,’ she says more urgently, and Toby steps back.

  She breathes out, a slow gust.

  They look at each other for longer than is comfortable. His face is so soft and blunt, as if somebody has polished the edges from him. Jasper rounds the corner. Abruptly, she dips her brush in the paint. The shock of the red smear on the old window frame. She hears Toby move back. She finds she is shaking, the horizon unreal, like a glass tipped over.

  There is stew for lunch, a viscous gravy swimming with chunks of fat. Nell takes a bowl and brings it to her wagon. The little girl is asleep on the bed, her thumb in her mouth, white hair scattered across the pillow. She stirs at the noise, stares wildly about her.

  ‘Shh,’ Nell says, sitting down beside her. She strokes her hand and the child stills, the soughing of her breath like that of a small animal. It stirs something in Nell, something primal, an urge to protect. This fragile child, like a porcelain cup which is so easily broken. She thinks of herself at this age, her imaginary underwater kingdoms of pearls and shells, feasts and companions and dancing.

  ‘Will I have to wear my feathers soon?’ the girl asks.

  ‘You’re to stay in here for now,’ Nell says, and it occurs to her that she must keep the child away from Jasper, must hope he forgets her. ‘Or close by the wagon. I brought you these marbles.’ She holds out her hand and the child’s brow is furrowed with the effort of trying to see. Nell takes the girl’s palm and closes it over the smallest marble. Pearl laughs, passing the glass bead between her palms.

  ‘Marble,’ the girl whispers. ‘Marble.’

  Outside, she hears Jasper shouting. ‘I said to clean those lions, not dust them like damned knick-knacks!’ Nell wonders how long she has until he misses her, until he notices that Pearl is not amidst the troupe.

  Soon, the sun will set and Nell will be tied into her ropes, the harness reaching under her belly, thighs and shoulders. A thrill runs through her, the thought that soon it will be the Queen herself who casts her eye over her, who watches her flying across the sky. She longs, suddenly, for that blind moment in the air when her mind empties, as she flies, drunk on applause. The burn of a thousand faces turned towards her, a reassurance that she is worth something.

  ‘Do you like stories?’ Nell asks, and the child nods. She picks up the book of Fairy Tales, weighs it in her hand. She remembers Charlie’s wafting hands, trying to fix her, to make her ordinary. She puts it back, takes a breath. Instead, she tells Pearl about a mermaid with a blue-scaled tail. ‘Her tail was so beautiful,’ she whispers, ‘that if men caught her, they’d dry her out and place her behind a sheet of glass, and thousands of strangers would pay to see her.’ She tells her how the mermaid swam in the deep waters where nobody could find her. ‘A little like you in this wagon,’ she says. Pearl smiles, and Nell carries on, explains how a prince’s ship was blown off course and he fell in love with her. He longed for his own tail so much that he visited a witch who ripped his legs from his body and stitched on fish scales with a sharp needle.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ Pearl asks, wide-eyed.

  ‘Oh, very, very much,’ Nell says, and the child grins in delight.

  ‘But when the mermaid saw him, flailing through the water with his silly mackerel tail, she laughed at him and swam away.’

  Pearl giggles, a tentative exhalation. She looks at Nell as if to check whether this is allowed, that this is the right response. For the first time, Nell understands what was taken away from her when her mother died, what she didn’t know she’d lost.

  This child, Nell knows, can never be safe. Jasper bought her. To him, she is nothing more than a novelty to be traded. And yet, Nell realizes, the same could be said of her.

  ‘And now, we bring you Nellie Moon, the eighth wonder of the world, a marvellous sight who will soon be soaring before the eyes of the Queen herself –’

  There is that jolt, her legs a little too high, a struggle to find balance. Her belly stirs as she swings. She can smell the burnt sugar of toffee apples, the reek of animals kept too close together.

  Nell hears the racket of applause as she is lifted. The approval of the crowds pulls on her, as strong as opium. But tonight, something shifts; perhaps it is the thought of the child sitting in the wagon with her little glass marbles, of Toby’s hand on hers, of Brunette, hiding in the countryside. A blueness settles over her. She can no longer spy faces in the roiling mass. The crowd roars as one, its thousand limbs flailing, eyes devouring her. She imagines them with glinting cutlery, carefully filleting her, sucking her bones until there is nothing left.

  What if she slips before the Queen? What if she cannot find that steady balance, if her ropes tangle? What if she falls that night? She pictures it with the clarity of prophecy. All it would take is one bad knot, for the bags of ballast to shift. The sudden rush of air, the iron clatter of her wings, the Queen watching with her hand over her mouth. And her name, blazoned on newspapers, whispered across firesides, savoured and turned over like sweetmeats.

  Did you hear how she died –

  Did you hear, Nellie Moon –

  Did you hear –

  Did you hear –

  Did you hear –

  To steady herself, she looks up at Toby, leaning over the basket. Love hits her with the buzz of performance, a longing to carve out a small space with this man, a place which is theirs. A child; Pearl with them too. She sees the curve of Jasper’s nose in his, the likeness of their too-close eyes. It only excites her. Jasper took her from her own brother, and now she is doing the same to him.

  Toby

  On the day before the Queen’s visit, Toby is woken at eight o’clock in the morning. The fakements shine like wet rain. Newly painted wagons. Buffed pathways. Jasper no longer sends the performers to lunches in private apartments, but holds everybody back, allowing only Toby to leave to deliver the Jackal his late sum. As soon as he returns, there is more to be done, more orders given.

  Toby does as his brother commands, and yet he finds his aches are gone as he lifts and saws and ferries. The Queen’s arrival means little to him; she will not see him perform. Instead, Nell occupies his thoughts so absolutely that he wonders if he has any life left of his own. Each night, she sneaks into his wagon, fingers tiptoeing across his skin. They read together, a candle balanced on Nell’s chest, pages shuffling like feathers. Their love is sometimes quiet, sometimes furious; sometimes he nurses a bleeding lip, a scratch down his back. In the books they read, love recurs again and again. On the pages it seems amplified, predictable. But what he feels exists outside language. He senses a kinship in each story but a distance too, as if his own experience is unique and he is the first person ever to feel this way. When he wakes up and finds that Nell has returned to Pearl in her own wagon, he
stares at himself in the mirror. Writhing vines, yellow snapdragons, a striped snake twisting up his arm.

  Small things move him. A flower, half-trodden. The way the light falls on a chipped teacup. A pristine imperfection he never noticed before. When he lies on his mattress and wavers between sleep and waking, he imagines a thatched cottage with a blue door. It is surrounded by forest, strawberries in wild beds, chickens in the yard. Nell stands by the hearth, children tripping about his feet. ‘Lift us, Papa,’ they beg, and he spins them round and round until they cry out.

  But sometimes, his joy curdles. As her lips linger on his cheek, he imagines her discovering what he has done, and his breath catches in his chest. He finds himself unable to look at Stella, an understanding dawning on him of what Dash’s loss might have meant to her, what he himself might have caused.

  ‘What is it?’ Nell asks, the night before the Queen’s arrival, and he merely shakes his head. She is weary from the show, her shoulder blades cut from the wings. He kisses them, inhales the meaty scent of ointment.

  ‘Something’s the matter,’ she says.

  He wants to tell her about the cottage, the future he hopes will be theirs. But he is afraid she will find him possessive, that he will realize his affection is stronger than hers. ‘I just had a foolish idea,’ he says.

  ‘Oh?’

  Falteringly, he tells her about the blue door, the brick hearth, a forest where nobody could find them. She does not speak for a while.

  ‘It sounds like a fairy tale. A girl shut away.’

  ‘You won’t be shut away,’ he says.

  ‘And what about Pearl?’

  He pauses, thinks of the girl that they keep out of Jasper’s sight. He likes her, of course he does. But he knows, as Nell must too, that with no purpose in the show, Jasper will sell her on. How can he tell her, without sounding callous, that she must not grow too attached to the child, that it is cruel, too, to allow the girl to depend on her?

  ‘Pearl,’ he repeats.

  ‘She’d have to be there too. In our forest prison.’

  He forces a laugh. ‘If not the cottage, how do you want the story –’ he cannot bring himself to say us – ‘to end?’

  ‘Stella might want me in her troupe.’

  She is making light of it. He turns into the pillow to hide his disappointment, his shame at wanting too much. She wraps her arms around him, tells him she’s sorry, and for a moment he feels moored. Her hands map his back, the vines that are no longer raised and swollen, the bird on his shoulder. Excitement stirs in him, and he reaches for her, astonished by his power to please, to give pleasure. A momentum builds in him, an unsettling thought that he could not be without her, that his life meant nothing before she arrived in it. He shuts his eyes to close it off; hates her for how cleanly she has undone him.

  As they lie there, he thinks of the city, spread out around them. Tens of thousands of lives being eked out. Mudlarkers on the riverbank, stumbling across a gold ring once shaped in a Roman smithy. Old men breathing their last, girls frying silver herrings on the hearth. Nell turns a kiss to a bite, and he pushes himself deeper into her. A city teeming with pain, with joy, with dark and light. Lives burning themselves out.

  Soon, Nell will be gone, back to the little girl, a child she fills with stories in which girls like her are heroines; where children with pale skin or hunchbacks or birthmarks are not to be feared or transformed.

  And then they hear it; Jasper calling his name. They still, and he puts his finger to her lips. He does not know what his brother might do if he found them together. A few weeks ago, he is certain his brother would have read it on his face. Now, he brims with secrets his brother has not discerned. Nell’s love; his painted skin. Either Toby has found a way to make himself opaque to Jasper, or his brother’s grip is loosening.

  ‘I’ll be a moment,’ Toby calls to Jasper.

  He does not wait to see Nell’s expression, to understand if she minds. He pulls on his shirt and trousers, leaves Nell lying on the mattress, her face in the pillow.

  ‘I’m in need of a drink,’ Jasper says, when he sees him.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Toby begins, but Jasper is already leading him towards his wagon, and Toby trots to keep up with him. Toby sees how intently the grooms watch his brother as he passes them, bodies curled forwards like question marks, how eagerly they want his approval. How must it feel, to hold people spellbound like that? Toby shifts his sleeve just a little. The pink edge of a flower. He imagines it is him who feels the attention of the troupe, him who surveys a world that he alone has built. Many think it is easy to grow a business, that you need only capital. They do not understand, as he and Jasper do, the difficulty of managing an operation of this scale. The careful planning, the risk, the fear every day of disaster. Stands toppling like those which killed Pablo Fanque’s own wife. Rampaging fires that turn a lifetime’s work to ash. Performers slipping and plummeting to their deaths.

  ‘Two fingers of gin?’ Jasper asks, and Toby nods, settling into the chair in the corner of Jasper’s caravan. They clink glasses. ‘I won’t be able to sleep tonight. I know I won’t.’ He fans himself. ‘It’s hot. It reminds me of that humid weather before the bombardment. That anticipation.’ He sits back, lights a cigar.

  Is Jasper toying with him, reminding him of what he did? Toby takes a long gulp of gin. ‘Yes,’ Toby agrees. ‘Too hot to sleep.’

  ‘I lived for those days, you know,’ Jasper says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sometimes I miss the fields. We were supposed to have been miserable there, but I wasn’t.’ He squares an invisible rifle to his shoulder, aims it at Toby and pretends to fire. ‘I knew I was fighting for each man beside me. It felt good. Important. You liked it too, I remember.’

  Toby cannot bring himself to agree. There are times when he wonders if his brother lived through a different war, if he had a different childhood too. Jasper has retold everything, obscured small betrayals, taken snippets of their lives and sewn the wrong flesh together. It has made Toby question whether his own memory can be trusted, if his way of seeing the world is faulty. Perhaps it is easier this way, pretending that life is rosier than it is, that theirs has always been a relationship of contented equality, that Toby was happy. But still, it makes him feel as if he is being silenced, overwritten – what happened to our circus, he wants to ask, the show we would own together? But he cannot admit one truth without admitting all of them. The microscope shattered. Dash, his body broken.

  All of history is fiction, Toby thinks.

  His brother reaches for his hand and squeezes it. His nails cut in. ‘The show will be a triumph, won’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Toby says. ‘You always are.’

  ‘There’ll be no rampaging lionesses.’

  ‘Not a single one.’

  Jasper smiles at him.

  Toby could unbutton his shirt now and show him his body. He could stand before him, a living garden. But what would Jasper say? Would he shout at him, throw him from the wagon? Would he smile, clap his hands? He pulls his sleeves over his thumbs, touches his collar to check it is high enough.

  ‘I was thinking about the girl,’ Jasper says.

  ‘Nell?’

  A cloud passes across Jasper’s face. ‘No. Not Nell. Pearl.’

  Toby’s heart scuds. ‘You aren’t thinking of selling her?’

  ‘I’ll wait until my success is assured. Maybe in a few weeks. By then, I’ll be so renowned, I could risk selling her to Winston.’

  ‘She can’t stay?’

  Jasper laughs. ‘Don’t be absurd. She cost me a thousand pounds.’

  Toby’s mouth falls open. ‘What?’

  ‘I know. I know.’ Jasper takes a drink. ‘It was an impetuous decision. But soon, I hope to scrape it back. Winston wants her, after all.’

  Toby nods. He bites the inside of his cheek. The reek of gin makes him queasy.

  ‘Drink up,’ Jasper says, but his own drink is untouched and his
hand trembles.

  ‘Tomorrow will run like clockwork.’

  Jasper pulls a face. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It will. It always does.’

  They sit there, and the silence is warming. Eventually, Toby stretches and says he needs to sleep. He walks to the menagerie to check the animals are shuttered up for the night. When he reaches the cage in the corner, he finds the wolf whining.

  Happy Families.

  The hare must be hiding in the straw. But when the wolf stalks to the back of the cage, its yellow eyes narrowing in the lamplight, he sees the white curve of bone. A tiny skull, picked clean.

  Jasper

  Jasper wakes early, surprised that he managed to sleep at all. He reaches for his camel-skin boots and begins polishing them. He dusts his cap, inspects his glittering red tail coat for any loose buttons. He is certain that the Queen will summon him to Buckingham Palace afterwards. As his hand glides over each pin, he practises quips he might deploy. ‘Of course, I am sure my performing poodles make far fewer messes than yours –’ A wink at her lords-in-waiting. He mouths the words in front of his mirror, then crumples his face.

  Weak.

  Or, perhaps, with a wry little look, ‘All my acts are genuine, unlike Winston who’d put a smoked herring in his waistcoat and call himself a mermaid.’

  He frowns. Something will come to him in the moment. He buckles his shoes and imagines strolling the same corridors trodden by pinheaded people, by Aztecs and giants and dwarves, and all of their showmen. He has read so much about the Queen’s Picture Gallery that he has already imagined himself inside it. The murals, the silk-covered divans, and her spaniel against whom Charles Stratton drew his sword and pretended to duel. When he moves to put on his shirt, he finds a rash on the insides of his elbows.