Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘It’s ours,’ Jasper whispers, and then he says it louder, a cry which is lost to the roaring of the guns. ‘Ours!’

  From afar, the walls looked so white and pristine, but the illusion is short-lived. It is a place of split churches, buildings pocked with shell holes, twisted green cupolas. No roofs; most of the walls destroyed. A city crushed like an insect. Bodies so broken they look like they’ve been crushed in a machine. The city is still burning, cloaked in black smoke. Torsos shattered like wine casks, faces flayed from skulls. When Jasper sees a dead man, he notices only the gold chain at his neck. He sees a watch in a pocket. Money, loot. His chest pounds as they race down the narrow streets, littered with fallen masonry. The Ruskies have fled or crept into holes where they will die like poisoned rats.

  ‘Sevastopol is ours!’ Dash cries, echoing his shout, and a smile cracks his face.

  ‘How disappointed Stella will be, to find you still alive. She needn’t search for a new husband after all.’

  ‘I feel quite the fool,’ Dash says, and laughs.

  There is so much to take, it is difficult to know where to begin. They see other officers carrying antique chairs, porcelain services, sabres, all of which they will send home. Someone bellows that they have found a supply of brandy. As the sun glazes the buildings and an old bell strikes ten, the ambulances and mule litters roll in, and he catches sight of Toby’s black photography wagon, the horses stumbling over shattered bricks.

  Jasper and Dash watch as he clambers down from his van, as he settles his machine in the ruins and ducks behind his cape. Jasper cranes to see what he is photographing. A dead soldier by the looks of it, crushed beneath masonry.

  ‘I can sense his sulk from here,’ Jasper says. ‘Let’s leave him alone.’

  They ride away from him, ignoring his calls, dismounting to pull crucifixes from sun-blackened necks. Beside a small ruined wall, Dash stops, stretches. Beside them is a small green garden, miraculously unscathed, its trees in full leaf.

  ‘Doesn’t he tire of it?’ Dash asks.

  ‘Doesn’t who tire of what?’

  ‘Your brother. Watching the whole battle through a small eye?’

  ‘Not being in the thick of it, you mean?’

  ‘Not being in the thick of anything at all.’ Dash twists his jacket. ‘I just – I wonder. Will he always follow us everywhere? To every battle, to every damned war?’

  Jasper looks at him, at his dark hair curling around his neck, his easy way of standing. ‘I had an idea,’ Jasper says, ‘that we would discharge ourselves now this is over. That we could own a show. You and me.’ His words are easy, smooth, revealing nothing of the uneasiness he feels. The betrayal of it, what Toby would say if he heard.

  ‘A show?’

  ‘A circus, you know. Horses and pantomimes. A menagerie. Stella was made for it.’

  Dash sets his mouth. ‘Because of her beard?’

  ‘No, no,’ Jasper says, though that is what he meant. ‘Because she’s a performer. A natural. You’ve seen how she entertains the men.’ He leans closer. ‘Think of it. Jasper and Dash’s Great Show.’

  ‘A circus.’

  ‘A circus, yes!’ He leans closer. ‘Do you know how much Barnum makes? Thousands each month. And Fanque too. It wouldn’t matter if you were disowned.’ He grins at Dash. ‘We’d be magnificent. We were born showmen.’

  Dash laughs. ‘I suppose my father has horses. He can sell us some, before I tell him about Stella.’

  ‘Easy.’

  ‘We could perform before the Queen.’

  ‘It will be the greatest show in the world!’ Jasper laughs, feeling like a child again, plotting his outlandish dreams – but this time it seems tangible, a thing they might really do.

  A pause, and Dash chews his lip. ‘What about Toby?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What on earth would he do? He’d suck the atmosphere from any tent. He’s a dullard.’

  ‘A dullard?’ Jasper echoes. He stiffens.

  ‘Come, you’ve said it yourself.’

  ‘He’s my brother, Dash. I’m allowed to say it.’ He brushes a hair from his eye. ‘I don’t know. He’s always admired me. You never had brothers. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Dash throws a brick at a wall and watches it split open. ‘I know, but it’s just – the damned man never speaks! He doesn’t even look at me.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m not suggesting we just abandon him, but can’t you find a different occupation for him? A clerk, or something? A dullard’s profession.’ He must grasp Jasper’s expression because he adds, ‘If he had to, he could help us build the show, I suppose. Carrying, lifting, that sort of thing.’

  Jasper is silent. Now he has planted the idea, he cannot take it back. He thinks of Toby arriving on the steamer, the relief, the hope on Toby’s face when he saw him waiting for him on the jetty. As if Jasper could fix everything simply by being there.

  At the next house, Jasper peels away from Dash, says he’ll find him later. He blinks to adjust to the gloom of a cottage. Sunlight pours through the open ceiling. He begins rifling through drawers, emptying cupboards, cramming his pockets full. A slight movement in the corner of the room. His hand is on his pistol, then he laughs. It is just a canary in a cage, wings beating against the bars. Beside it, a music book with a woman’s name on it, a vase of flowers.

  He holds out his finger. The bird flies against it, whistling. He smiles, picks up the cage. He will keep it as a pet.

  As he moves to the door, he sees a man’s shoes, a man’s legs. One hand grips the canary and the other finds his bayonet.

  Outside, his face spattered with blood, Jasper tramps through the streets of the broken city, cobbles glittering with bullets and fragments of lead. Vultures, kites and buzzards circle. He sees Dash clambering over loose stonework, heading towards the battlements.

  ‘Dash!’ he calls, and the man turns.

  ‘There’ll be a magnificent view from up there. Perhaps we could salute Stella on Cathcart’s Hill.’

  They climb carefully, up a shattered staircase.

  ‘No show without Punch,’ Dash says, and Jasper turns and sees Toby following them, his head down, feet stumbling on torn masonry.

  ‘– when he led us into the drawing room and we saw the two machines –’

  He opens his eyes. He is in the Crimea, he thinks, his mouth parched; with Dash –

  It is Toby, his broad shape hazy, a glass of water in his hands.

  Jasper is back in the wagon, back in his show, his handbills flapping on the walls. His breath is loud and sore.

  ‘Jasper? You’re awake?’

  He cowers, grips his throat as if to find it slit, moves his hand to his lips. He is surprised to find no coin clamped between his teeth.

  ‘You’ve been asleep for so long.’

  Jasper blinks, and just before those skeins tighten about his lungs again, just before the aches seize his limbs, he thinks of the Jackal and how he will manage to pay him. His show is growing stale. Soon it will be winter, the crowds smaller. He is sure that his mind can only falter in the footsteps of those before him, that none of his thoughts can ever be original, that every story has already been told.

  He sinks back. Easier not to strive, to feel only the ratchet of tiny, dry breaths. He reaches out his hand, grips only air.

  Toby

  Toby squeezes the sponge over his brother’s forehead. Jasper mumbles, spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Shh,’ Toby says, dabbing his brow. ‘Shh.’

  Outside, he can hear Nell’s laughter, Pearl’s delighted scream. He left them playing in the drizzle, Nell swinging the child by her arms. Toby sleeps in her wagon each night now, the three of them tucked together as rain pounds the roof. In the green morning light, they read books, or crouch by the fire under a tarpaulin.

  ‘Look at our girl,’ Nell said as the sun rose that day, as Pearl chased after a marble, and it broke something in his chest. Our girl; he thought of all the
things he had ever wanted and could not have. Now he can put his arm around Nell, unafraid of anyone seeing, and it feels miraculous to see his hand there, resting in the dip between her shoulder blades. A small claiming of territory, a thrill that they are each other’s.

  It is not always easy – their days of rich meats and cheese are at an end, and they must thin out cheap butcher’s cuts with carrot and cabbage. The elephant shudders against the bars. Nobody has been paid in two weeks. The troupe is restless, on edge. But he is surprised, too, by the little pocket of quiet they have found together, as if the rain has slowed the whole world. He thinks of the cottage with a blue-painted door, wisteria clinging to its window frames. Sometimes, when he sees Nell looking at Pearl with that softness in her eyes, he thinks of telling her what Jasper said about selling her. But he bites his tongue, cannot bring himself to break this small piece of happiness.

  He sits back, blinking at a sudden spear of sunlight. He turns his head away from Jasper. He realizes he can no longer hear rain drumming the roof. An eerie quiet. He peers through the window. Children emerge from wagons, holding out their hands as if they cannot believe it. Nell is carrying Pearl on her back and the child is pink with laughter as Nell pretends to jog her off, careering this way and that. Huffen Black has let out two zebras and is beginning to exercise them in the ring. Toby watches them cantering in circles. They might have a show tonight if this weather holds, and bring in a little money; but then Jasper shifts in his sleep, and Toby puts the thought from his mind.

  Toby’s sleeves are rolled up, revealing a blackbird just below his elbow. He remembers Dash’s taunt. Dullard. And yet, his brother will not let him have the life of a performer either, cannot allow him to encroach on his territory.

  What if they hadn’t grown like two linked boys? What if they had grown like two plants in a vivarium, Jasper taking all the nutrients, all the light, Toby wilting beneath him?

  What would happen, Toby wonders, if Jasper were to die? He would commission a mason to carve a lavish headstone, arrange a funeral with black-boxed advertisement in the papers. But once the fanfare was over, there might be a way for Jasper Jupiter to live on, just as shops and businesses pass through several hands and keep the names of their original owners. Jasper has turned himself into a construct, a patchwork quilt stitched from a thousand different stories.

  Toby reaches for the cushion to raise his brother’s head. Jasper’s breath snags, stops. Toby waits. It begins again, choked. Goose feathers prickle his palms, the pillow so soft. Vines strangle Toby’s arms, as if pulling his hands down against his will. He rests the cushion against Jasper’s nose. A thought crackles, lightning-fast. You could –

  Toby lifts the back of Jasper’s head gently, tucks the pillow behind it.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘Now you can breathe more easily.’

  But the thought was there, and he cannot forget it.

  Nell

  Nell watches Toby leave Jasper’s wagon. He raises his hand in greeting, and yet there is something unsettled about him, something enlivened too. The sun is piercing, exposing, like a match struck in a darkened room.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he asks, but it is him who bites his fingernails, who cannot stop glancing at Jasper’s wagon.

  ‘It’s just this.’ She gestures about her. The owner of the pleasure gardens is unrolling tarpaulins from the chairs, readying to open the grounds again that evening. ‘How long can we sit here and wait?’

  Peggy and Violante must have overheard her, because they put down the basket of wet laundry and join them. ‘Do you think we could?’

  ‘Could what?’ Toby asks.

  Peggy pauses. ‘Put on the show again. Tonight, perhaps.’

  Nell looks skywards. She wishes, almost, that they were back in those endless days of rain, when there were no possible answers to the questions of hunger, of quiet, of no shows, when doing nothing was the best they could manage.

  ‘There’s no showman,’ Violante says.

  Toby holds his chin a little higher.

  ‘Stella could,’ Peggy says. ‘There’s nobody else.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do it to Jasper,’ Violante says.

  ‘How long are we supposed to wait? With no money to feed the animals, no money for us, time passing since the Queen visited –’

  Toby coughs, gently, and they look at him, then away. They all fall silent, contrite at having voiced the idea. She sees Violante glance at Jasper’s wagon, its curtains drawn, its paned window observing them like a narrowed eye.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be well again soon,’ Nell says, with a warmth she does not feel.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Toby says. He scuffs a mound of dirt with his shoe, and she wonders if he is about to cry.

  Later, Pearl is grizzly, and they put her to bed early, blankets heaped around her. She and Stella trapped a mouse in the afternoon, and she insists on keeping its cage on the floor. It unsettles Nell to hear its panicked scrabbling, the quick flurry of feet from one wall to the other.

  ‘Can you tell me a story?’ the girl asks.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About me. Where I came from.’

  Nell pauses. ‘I can’t tell you that story. Only you can.’

  A look of fear passes over the child’s face. She wants a new history, Nell realizes; she wants to wipe away what has passed before.

  ‘You were born in a walnut shell,’ Toby begins, ‘in a land where they ate nothing but—’

  ‘Cream,’ Pearl supplies. ‘And there were baby mice everywhere. Hundreds of mice. Mice, mice, mice.’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby says.

  ‘Mice like Benedict.’ She adds, ‘That’s his name. Stella told me.’

  ‘Very well,’ he says.

  She listens to Toby’s story, knows it by heart. The cottage with the blue door. The hens pecking. Newly laid eggs breaking in a skillet. Her chest stirs with a fretful longing, a sudden desire for him. The heat of him. How each day she learns his body, as if he is a country to be mapped, a continent to be spanned with her fingers.

  ‘She’s asleep,’ Toby whispers.

  The talk of stories makes Nell want to read. She lies against Toby, hungering to tip it into something more, but aware of the child too, and content just to be held by him. They turn the pages of Fairy Tales. Pearl’s breath is quiet, her mouse sleeping in its cage. Her girl is safe. They are safe. There will be a show soon, she tells herself; they will find a way. Only briefly does she remember the shock of Jasper’s hands on her wrists, and she places her head in the crook of Toby’s shoulder. He turns the page of ‘The Little Mermaid’, and there is a woodcut with a line beneath it. ‘I know what you want,’ said the sea witch. ‘It is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess.’

  She rests her head on his chest. ‘Who would you choose?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me or Jasper.’

  He stares at the ceiling, then whispers something so quietly she can scarcely catch it.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asks.

  He takes her hand, grips it. There is fight in his eyes. ‘I said, would you leave? Now? The three of us?’

  She pictures packing a bag and walking through the gates, Pearl clinging to her back. A cottage in the trees, years slipping away quietly, just like before. Leaving Stella and Peggy. A life like the one her brother wanted for her, ostracized in small ways. Her body, hidden away like a secret. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I need this. I need to perform.’

  Toby grips her hand more urgently. ‘One day, we’ll have that cottage, won’t we?’

  They rest their foreheads against each other, noses touching. ‘Perhaps,’ she says.

  As he begins to drift into sleep, she looks at her birthmarks, each telling a story, her own story. And yet it is Jasper who has crafted tales and histories about her. She unhooks Toby’s arm from around her and sits on the floor, bare legs pulled into her chest. Pearl’s mouse
shivers, makes itself small. She opens the cage door. She remembers that day by the sea, hurling the squid back into the water, her relief as it pulsed away. The mouse moves forwards, nose twitching, but then scurries into the furthest corner.

  Go, she wills it, giving the cage a little shake. But the mouse will not move, whether out of fear or choice, she is not sure.

  Jasper

  The world shifts in and out of focus. In some moments, Jasper can see clearly – a glass catching the light, his brother’s hands rinsing a sponge. Other times, it clouds and fogs, and he is back in Sevastopol, back on those streets. Once, he opens his eyes and Stella is sitting there. ‘Stella,’ he says. He blinks. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘What do I need to forgive you for?’ Her voice, chilled.

  A tear slides across his cheek, pools in his ear.

  ‘They say you’re dying,’ she says. ‘They say you won’t live.’

  He is surprised by how little this news surprises him, how little he minds. ‘Are you glad?’

  She sits there, biting on her lip. ‘I want to know what happened to Dash.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do. You have his ring!’

  ‘It isn’t that easy.’

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she says, again.

  And he tries, falteringly, because words are elusive and swim in the air before he can grasp them. He tells her about the birdcage, and wiping clean the end of his bayonet. A smell of rising rot, flies in angry clouds, clambering over the battlements with Dash, because his friend wanted to salute her on the distant hill. He tries to articulate all this, but perhaps he only murmurs nonsense, because she says, ‘Did you – did you do something to him? Did you hurt him?’