Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  He shakes his head. ‘Me?’ His voice, so small. ‘Hurt him? How could you think –’ He tries to grasp her hand but she pulls it away. ‘You have to believe me. He was my friend. I’d never have –’

  She pulls at the skin of her hand like it is a piece of cloth, her nails leaving ugly marks in the flesh. ‘If you won’t tell me what happened to him, what am I supposed to think? Tell me, Jasper. Tell me!’

  There is a pulling sensation in his skull, as if an insect is gnawing his brain. He opens his mouth and a spit bubble forms. He wants to tell her the truth, to tell her everything, but it isn’t his story.

  We’re brothers, linked together.

  He tells her all he can bear to impart. That Dash was balancing on the edge of the battlements and he slipped and lurched forwards, and it happened so quickly that he could not grab him. How Jasper heard the sound of him hit the ground before he had even understood he had fallen. He does not tell her that Toby was there, too, that there was a strange beauty to it – the sun low and slanting, glancing off the broken rifles and cartouches and epaulettes of dead men. That for a minute, neither of them could move. His breath is rasping and short.

  Stella is crying quietly, teeth working the tender skin of her bottom lip.

  ‘I thought –’ she takes a breath. ‘When I saw the ring, and you wouldn’t tell me what happened, I thought perhaps –’

  ‘No,’ Jasper says, and it is a relief that he does not need to lie. ‘How could I? He was the dearest friend I ever had.’

  He keeps talking, tells her how he stumbled down the slopes and found him, still and crumpled, how he was surrounded by a thousand other men. He heard the steady rumbling of cacolets, the mule litters which ferried the injured and dying to the hospitals, but Dash was gone, and what could he do? He could not bring a dead man back to camp. He dragged Dash to a cave blown into the walls by a mortar, and he placed him inside, out of the day’s heat.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you hide what happened to him?’ She leans forwards. ‘I could have returned for him, buried him. I could have known and grieved him then.’

  Sobs roll from him. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I was ashamed of what I’d done. I robbed him, Stella. I robbed a dead man. Robbed my friend. I wanted to forget it. I couldn’t bear it.’ He tries to sit up, but his head reels. ‘I wanted the ring. I wanted it so much.’ He looks at her, says almost angrily, ‘He was my friend too.’

  Dash’s hand was puffed and swollen, the metal sparkling. Jasper spat on the ring to oil it, but the thick gold band wouldn’t move, wouldn’t even slide to the knuckle. He moved as if freed of thought, his body deciding for him. He reached into his pocket and the knife chilled his hand. He began to hack through flesh and sinew and bone. He told himself that he was taking it to give to Stella.

  Did he keep it because he wanted to remember his friend too? Or because he saw only gold, a thing to be possessed? The canary twittered in its cage. He slipped the ring into his pocket, and he could not bear to stay there a moment longer, could not bring himself to dig a hole and lift that broken body into it, to acknowledge that Dash’s life had played itself out. He ran, cage bouncing against his legs, Toby lumbering after him.

  ‘I could have buried him,’ Stella says again, head bowed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jasper whispers, and his throat is dry and aching.

  They returned to camp and Jasper cooked the canary like a songbird, drowning it in a vat of brandy then roasting it over hot coals. ‘Where’s Dash?’ Stella asked, but he calmed her, said he had left him carousing in the village. He could not meet her eye, and beside him Toby trembled.

  The canary was tiny, scarcely bigger than his thumb. He cracked its little ribcage against his teeth. As he swallowed the last sharp piece of it, he felt a rush of horror, a dawning awareness of his own monstrosity.

  ‘Take it,’ he says, the handbills in his wagon dimpling in a sudden breeze. He reaches into his pocket. ‘It’s yours, isn’t it? He’d want you to have it.’ He holds her gaze. ‘But I didn’t touch him. I swear it.’

  She accepts the ring, fingertips running into the little grooves she once carved. E. W. D.

  The door shuts behind her, and fatigue overwhelms him. He shivers, sinks into a tunnel as black as pitch, its walls cold and slippery. He allows himself to fall. Light recedes to star-pricks.

  When he stirs, he finds himself in the Crimea again, rifles discharging all around him, ladies and journalists cheering from their vantage points on the hillsides. The crash of steel, mortars thundering, the scream of horses, the beat of drum, fife and trumpet. A lion roars –

  He blinks.

  Applause, shattering.

  He rubs his cheek.

  A lion? There were no lions there.

  It roars, louder this time.

  He opens his eyes. His face shimmers back at him, a thousand times over. Powders and glass jars sparkle into view. His bureau, his cabinet of gin and curaçao. A tin of brandy snaps. But still, the sounds of war continue. The martial beat, the bright fife, the trumpet –

  His insides turn.

  He must be mistaken. A crowd is roaring. Music spins. He looks down at himself, dressed in his linen nightshirt, rimed with sweat. His sheets are damp and yellowed. And yet, he can hear himself in the tent, the pitch of those words he knows so well.

  And now, ladies and gentlemen, I present the final feast for the eyes – a sight never before witnessed –

  He swallows. When they were boys, Jasper once walked into his bedroom and caught Toby wearing his blue velvet britches, his eye pressed to the microscope. He sneaked up on him, meaning to surprise him, but in the moment before Toby could arrange his face, his brother’s mouth was a snarl. It was a look of thwarted desire, of bitter ambition.

  It is the greatest act you will ever see. The most wondrous, the most dazzling. Nellie Moon will eclipse the heavens themselves –

  Jasper picks up a tumbler and hurls it at his dresser.

  He stares around his wagon and he sees her, arcing across the latest handbill he has plastered to the wall. He made her. He created her. And now she and Toby have eclipsed him, have gorged themselves on his fame, on the show he has spent a lifetime building.

  He runs a thumb over the advertisement, over that body which bucked underneath him, that threw him off. The knee which punched between his legs. He tears her from the wall. The paper quivers in his hand. He reaches for his lucifers. She is even on the matchbox.

  The edge of the handbill flares. He watches her legs, her arms, her face, curl and blacken. He drops the paper and scuffs it with his slipper. All that is left is white ash.

  The crowd applauds, roars, whistles.

  It is enough to rouse him, to draw him to his desk. He touches his brow, overcome by giddiness. He is ravenous and his hands shake as he sketches out rudimentary plans.

  In this age of wonder, epiphanies are born in the ecstasies of dreams and fevers. Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein. Alfred Russel Wallace conceived the theory of natural selection while raving with fever. Keats and Coleridge birthed their greatest works in the throes of opium. And now, he, Jasper Jupiter, has settled on the invention which will immortalize him. He will tell this story for years to come, the tinderbox moment when the idea struck him.

  He has the answer; he knows he has it. This is what will set him apart. This is what will make him. He dips his quill into a brimming inkpot and his vision sharpens.

  Toby

  The crowd is in a frenzy. A thousand limbs lift and sway. A thousand mouths hinge open in laughter. Do they laugh harder than they did for Jasper? Do they thunder their feet more loudly than any audience before? Toby can turn gasps to jeers, jeers to sighs. He draws back his shoulders, stands taller than he has ever done before. He clicks his cane, and poodles dance on their hind legs, their pink bonnets bobbing. A smile splits his cheeks. When he catches his reflection in the glass-paned tank, he startles. He thought, for a second, that he was his brother.

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nbsp; While Nell flies, he hides behind the curtain and takes off his boots, his shirt, strips down to a pair of blue trunks. He strolls back into the ring, his cape wrapped tightly around him. As the balloon is lowered and Nell lands on the ground, he feels the audience’s attention turn back to him. The oil lamps hiss and flicker. Time stretches. The crowd waits. He must act before boredom settles.

  He fumbles for the ribbon fastening the cape, pulls it away.

  A gasp goes up, fingers pointing. His body is richly patterned, a riot of colour and shapes.

  ‘And that,’ he shouts, ‘was the greatest show on earth, Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders.’

  His voice rises, louder and louder, until he might even be Jasper. He looks down at his painted skin and he feels alive. Important. He has assumed his brother’s life with the ease of stepping into a pair of varnished boots. He has strengthened while his brother has waned. Two hearts pounding in a vivarium, and the weaker organ has begun to suck back its half of the blood. He wishes his brother could see him, could realize the spark he has buried for more than thirty years.

  ‘I am Jasper Jupiter, and this is my circus!’ Toby bellows, and even he believes it. He raises his arms and the audience screams.

  When the crowds have departed, Toby sits on a bench and flicks his whip in the dust. The fronds of the pine tree look illuminated, each leaf pristine. He could do anything, be anyone. He could live in a cottage with Nell and Pearl. He could run this show for ever.

  A murmuring; he sees Stella and Peggy glancing at him, nudging Nell. They cross the grass and sit beside him.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ Stella says, giving his shirt a small tug.

  He shows them the vines on his arms, the blackbirds and pomegranates, the adder inching across his chest. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ he asks, but Peggy’s lip is curled in an expression close to disdain.

  ‘Magnificent to have a choice,’ Stella says. ‘To look like this when you could have done something else.’

  He laughs, thinking she might be joking, and at least there is no malice in her voice. She flicks a bird with her fingernail. She could cut off her beard if she wanted, he thinks, but then he notices Nell itching a birthmark on her arm. She does not look at him. Peggy leans on the crook she uses to dislodge high buckets, to open doors with high handles.

  ‘We’ve got to make this life work, don’t we, Peg?’ Stella says, with a smile.

  ‘I’m going to marry a man like Charles Stratton,’ Peggy says, but her voice has a glazed, rehearsed, edge to it.

  ‘I should see Jasper,’ he says, wrapping the shirt around him. ‘See if he’s well.’

  As he crosses the grass, he sees a boy pointing. ‘It’s him! Look, look,’ the child shouts, and there it is again – that new, fluffed pride. He casts Stella’s words from his mind. Remarkable; that’s what he is. Important.

  He forces himself to hope that Jasper is alive, though he is already imagining touching his forehead and finding it cold and damp, picturing himself informing press agents and cemeteries. A great plot at Highgate; a funeral cortège with ostrich-plumed zebras.

  Outside Jasper’s wagon, Pearl is playing with her mouse. He stops and plucks a daisy and hands it to her. She squints, cannot see what it is. ‘A flower,’ he says, ‘for Benedict the mouse.’ She accepts it carefully, tucks it between the bars of the little cage.

  ‘There, mister,’ she whispers to the little creature. ‘For you to wear like a bonnet.’

  Toby smiles at her. Peggy and Stella are still looking at him. He swallows, then pushes open his brother’s door without bothering to knock. Jasper is hunched at his desk, his spine as prominent as a row of pebbles.

  ‘Jasper?’ he says, taking a step back. ‘Are – are you well?’

  There are ashes on the floor, a wound on the wall where a handbill used to hang.

  ‘It doesn’t suit you,’ Jasper says, without looking up.

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘Me. You always wanted what was mine.’

  Toby fidgets with the hem of the cape. ‘I didn’t.’

  Jasper says nothing, but his pen creaks across the page and spritzes little mists of ink into the air.

  ‘You’re – you’re better?’ Toby asks.

  Jasper doesn’t give any indication he has heard him.

  ‘I – I – I –’ He stops, curses the stutter he hasn’t had for more than a week. ‘The pleasure gardens were closed, you understand. The rain – it almost ruined them. It almost ruined us too.’ He tries to sound authoritative, as if he has done nothing wrong. ‘I paid the grocer. The chandler. But the rent and the Jackal – I didn’t know what the arrangement was. Tonight and yesterday, you see, the rains lifted – it made sense – we filled almost every seat.’ The words jar. If only Jasper would speak. ‘Wasn’t that the right decision? To make some money for the – the – the debts? And with you so ill, and dying even, we thought –’

  Jasper keeps writing.

  The cape is limp on Toby’s shoulders. He feels as small as he did when he stood in the ruins of Sevastopol and heard Jasper and Dash talking about him. He’d gone to find them, and there they were. A dullard, Dash called him.

  They were planning the show without him even playing a part in it, with him, at best, as a mere mule. Perhaps if he’d heard their plans back in London, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. But there, on those scarred plains, when his brother was all he had, when the circus had been the strings holding him together –

  Can’t you find a different occupation for him? A clerk, or something?

  That soulless new house in Clapham, identical to all the others on the terrace. His hand wearing a groove in the banister. It was all he was good for. And in the place he’d once thought was his would be Dash, standing on the saddle of a camel. Dash the Crimean hero, the brother he was sure Jasper would have chosen. He was tired, so tired, of wanting and not being wanted back. He drove his fist into the wall. The pain only sharpened his rage.

  Jasper’s pen scratches the page.

  ‘What are you drawing?’ Toby asks.

  His brother’s wrist clicks as he works. His cheeks are hollowed. This man, scribbling furiously, feels little more than a stranger. Outside, Toby hears the stable boys exercising the animals, the benches being put away. New roads, new fields, new audiences.

  He walks closer. ‘What are you drawing?’

  But Jasper shields the page with his arms. When he looks up at him, Toby backs away, frightened by the hatred he finds there.

  Nell

  In the shadow of the rose bower, Nell and Pearl scoop Benedict a palace out of dirt. She hands the child oyster, mussel and scallop shells, discarded from the nights when great silver trays were ferried through these paths. The child turns them over, feels their edges, presses them to her ear. Benedict is asleep in his cage.

  ‘You should be careful,’ Stella said to her the evening before. ‘She isn’t yours to have.’

  But Stella is wrong, Nell thinks, as Pearl plants a shell on the top of the mound with a smile, as she steps back and claps. She is Nellie Moon, isn’t she? She has visited the Queen. She has a wagon crammed with gifts and dried flowers and perfumes; why can’t she keep this child too?

  Pearl places five mussel shells around the dirt castle. ‘Mussel shells. Stones. Oysters,’ she announces. ‘He’s a mouse prince.’

  ‘With the finest castle I’ve ever seen.’

  Nell has learned this girl. Pearl likes patterns, shells arranged in size order, marbles in long rows. She sticks out her tongue when it rains, and she prefers wet weather to sunshine which makes her scrunch up her eyes. She counts her steps as she walks, tries to hide how she shuffles her feet to check for branches, for anything that might trip her. When she falls asleep, she clutches Nell’s hand in hers, and it gives Nell a liquid feeling, of knowing she is needed. Nell’s chest pummels when the girl vanishes behind the wagons, for just a minute. If she could, she’d bind the child to her, never let her go.

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bsp; ‘What’s that?’ Pearl asks.

  A dull, rhythmic beating. It is the drum Jasper uses to summon them. She stands. Her heart quickens, with hope and fear. Her life will resume as it was and she tells herself that is a good thing. ‘Come,’ she says to Pearl. ‘You can make another castle under our wagon.’

  ‘But Benedict wants this castle,’ Pearl says, pouting, but she follows Nell, promises not to move until Nell fetches her.

  Performers hurry from all directions, labourers hauling themselves to their feet. She finds Toby, Stella and Peggy, settles on the grass near the back. Jasper is there, standing in front of the bonfire ashes. He is thinned by fever, his face little more than a skull. She remembers the weight of him, pinning her down, how she writhed and fought and kicked. Rage stirs within her; that he can recover so quickly, behave as if no harm has been inflicted. Toby takes her hand. Jasper sees it. A flinch, rapidly concealed. She is glad to see him flustered, even briefly. She would hurt him more if she could, would snap that smile from his cheeks.

  ‘I have a way out of this,’ he says. ‘But we shan’t put on another show for a week.’

  ‘A week?’ Peggy whispers. ‘But how will we live?’

  ‘We want our pay,’ a groom shouts.

  A shuffling, a rustling. A week ago, nobody would have dared to speak up like this. She looks behind her, and the labourers are barely listening. They whittle grass into whistles, nudge each other.

  Is this the man, Nell wonders, who once stood on the back of an elephant and held a thousand people spellbound? Is this the man who tried to suppress her will beneath his?

  ‘We will need to make changes before we rise again. You will need to be patient.’

  ‘Our pay!’ A chorus, building.

  He takes his whip, cracks it. There is Jasper Jupiter once more, electric, a snarl on his face. The men fall silent. ‘Our show is not at an end. My idea will bring us to greater heights than ever before. Our show has become dull, a mere imprint of the thousands of other shows across this country. My idea will make us different, unique, a true novelty.’