Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She taps his nose, pulls free. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, and even he can hear the ugly desperation in his voice.

  He aches to think she has lived before him, that she exists apart from him. He has a crazed urge to understand every detail about her, to be at the core of somebody else’s story for the first time, to be the hero of her life. Recollections rise, his days spent on the fringes of Jasper’s existence. Sitting in his bedroom and listening to his brother laughing downstairs, his eye stinging from where a sugared almond hit him. Snorts of amusement between Dash and Jasper, a bottle of grog passed from lip to lip, Toby trailing them. What was the joke? What was it? A small shake of the head. Nothing that would entertain you.

  He glances at Jasper, his face a patchwork of bruises, his arm cradled like a bird’s broken wing. What happened to him? What is he hiding? He watches Jasper limp towards the gate.

  He dithers for a moment. Why should Jasper know everything about him, and yet keep himself opaque? Before Toby can change his mind, he slings a saddle over Grimaldi and canters after him. He rides so far behind that he almost loses sight of Jasper, but he cannot risk nearing him. He has a new horse, Toby notes, a ragged bay. Every few seconds, Jasper glances around him, takes quick turns, doubles back on himself. What is he working on, that he must be this secretive, this wary? There was a time when Jasper might have confided in him.

  His brother dismounts at a blacksmith’s shop. Thick smoke billows. Clanging comes from within. Toby cannot understand why he isn’t using his own smithy, what reason he could have for employing a workshop this large. He is in there for hours, so late that Toby begins to wonder if he has left through another door; but when he creeps closer, he hears his brother’s voice, barking commands. Jasper doesn’t emerge until it is almost dark, leaping on to his horse and pushing it into a quick gallop. Somebody shouts at him to slow down, but he is gone, dust rising like mist.

  Toby waits and waits. His belly aches with hunger and the moon is as thin as a wishbone.

  It is late when the clattering stops. Beefy men file out. The last man locks the workshop with a thick chain and crosses the road to a small stooped cottage. The yard is quiet. Toby leads Grimaldi to the wall, ties him to a metal ring. There is a window at the back, shuttered, the wood split. With a quick jab of his elbow, Toby cracks the frame of it, brushes away loose glass. He clambers inside. The coals from the fire are white-hot and he blinks at the sudden brightness. Lanterns hang from the ceiling. The horse puts his head through the window and harrumphs.

  He tiptoes past all of it. Pokers and knives, anvils and cogs. An open piano with tiny hammers. In the corner, he sees what looks like a printing press, its levers poised. He shuffles across the ash-carpeted floor. How will he find what Jasper is working on?

  But he recognizes it the instant he sees it. The microscope slides have come to life. Jasper has formed those creatures – magnified and colossal – in metal. Five of them in a row, nestled in wooden coffins. Iron beasts with jaws and teeth, long gleaming bones and scales made of beaten tin. Each has a lever, a careful system of cogs. One is a vast woodlouse, its body upholstered with leather, built like a miniature steam engine. There is a fly, too, with wings like Nell once wore, its visage stitched with fish skins. Feathers are stuck to it, fine ribs that might be a hawk’s or a rabbit’s. His fingers slide down their spines, span the edges of their wings. His palms are creased with black oil. He brushes his hand against the spider with its long crab-leg limbs, horsehair stippling the joints. It creaks. These patchwork creatures; he stares at the oven, still hot, the forge where they were made from a hundred assembled parts. Victor Frankenstein robbed graveyards, dug up motley pieces of flesh and skin and bone, and sewed them together. A monster, he thinks, staring at the spider’s mouth, cow’s teeth mingled with the metal.

  He steps on a nail and stumbles. He wants to be away from here; he wants to be back in his wagon, Nell’s arm tucked around him, Pearl asleep on the floor. He turns, lunging for the window. Glass scatters across the ground, but he is scrambling into the yard, blood on his arm. He lands heavily, pulls himself to his feet, unties Grimaldi’s rope with trembling hands. He leaps on to his horse, and his boots aren’t even in the stirrups before he urges it forwards. ‘Go,’ he whispers. And he is on the street, flying even faster than Jasper did.

  Nell

  Everywhere, there are eyes on Pearl, labourers watching her. After dark, Nell sees only the burning tips of their cigars, knows that they are close. She is certain it must mean Jasper is selling the child, that he has her worth in mind. Nell’s fingernails are shredded, the skin around her lips dry and flaking. Sometimes, in that blue hinterland between sleep and waking, she thinks of the knife she stole from the apartments and imagines dragging it across Jasper’s throat. She thinks of Julia Pastrana, her and her baby’s stuffed bodies shown around the world, dressed in the red frock her hands once sewed. She thinks of Charles Byrne, his bones stripped and displayed against his will. It is so horrifying her mind numbs. She cannot imagine how such existences must have felt, cannot grasp the texture of these people’s lives beyond the rudimentary facts. If Stella were here, she knows her friend would tell her about other acts – those who enjoy performing or at least its spoils. Chang and Eng Bunker, the farmstead they bought, their many children. Lavinia Warren and Charles Stratton, married with a mansion and a yacht and a stable of horses. But still, she cannot stop thinking of Pearl, alone on a podium, a physician circling her. She pulls the girl tight against her.

  One evening, when the tent is raised and the sun is low and Jasper has ridden out, she and Pearl wander through the pleasure gardens. The sky is grey like chewed gristle. Pearl swings on the ribs of the iguanodon. Nell flicks her finger against its bones. Toby told her that the creature which gave rise to this mould died thousands and thousands of years ago. Its skeleton was picked clean, rain eating away at the soil, exposing the glossy bowl of its pelvis, a black jaw. And then pickaxes and scalpels prised away the rocks around it, unsettled it from where it had slept for so many centuries. A body, laid bare. Gentlemen catalogued it, named it after themselves, tied labels to bones, wadded it into wooden crates, all seventeen feet of it, their miniature hammers knocking at clavicle and skull.

  Nell imagines a bolt of lightning, a lowering storm. The grass, lit white. She pictures a stone finger flexing, concrete splintering, the cries of alarm as the creature breaks free of the metal pins which hold it in place. A monster, lumbering through the park, shucking Jasper like an oyster. It would pounce on her and Pearl and gather them up, embrace them, carry them away.

  ‘Did you see me jumping?’ Pearl asks, shuffling over tree roots. She hops and skips, hops and skips, and Nell claps. Behind them, the square-jawed labourer kicks the earth.

  ‘Am I the newest spectacle you’ve ever seen?’

  She takes the girl by the hand. ‘You aren’t a spectacle at all,’ she says. ‘You’re a girl, a perfect little girl.’

  Pearl frowns, uncertain what to do with this sudden earnestness. She lowers herself on to Nell’s lap.

  Should they have run away when Jasper was sick, as Toby suggested? But she could not bear to flee, to feel hunted as Brunette must. And in doing so, she would be turning herself into only a mother and a wife. Toby wants her to be those things, and she wants them too; but she also wants to perform, to feel that hum of brilliance as a crowd watches her and cheers, to be someone. The Queen of the Moon and Stars – anger snaps through her, but it has nowhere to go, no way of being let out. She relies on Jasper, cannot confront him. It retreats into her, brims in her chest.

  Nell sits there, rocking the girl, playing with her toes. She smells of boiled milk, of fresh hay. A miracle, Nell thinks. This child is a miracle.

  There is a sudden commotion, raised voices, the blast of trumpets.

  Nell grips Pearl’s hand and together they take the woodchip path back to where the tent sits. It squats among the trees like a giant toadstool, wagon
s lined close beside it, newly made papier-mâché fruits dangling from the branches. Two caravans roll through the gates, stop in the mud where the grandstand once was. Jasper sits on the box seat and, in the sunset, his topper blazes.

  Wagon doors and discarded pans clatter, performers and grooms and labourers pressing forwards. She finds Stella and Peggy, and does not release Pearl’s hand. She cannot see Toby; he must still be in the city, carrying out the errand Jasper sent him on.

  ‘Can I stay?’ Pearl whispers, and Nell nods, keeps the child close to her where Jasper will not see her.

  ‘What’s inside?’ Peggy asks.

  ‘I heard it’s a mermaid,’ Huffen Black says.

  Stella snorts. ‘Those fakeries barely duped the masses a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Is it a new performer?’ Nell asks. She pictures a girl bound inside each caravan, fighting to free herself.

  ‘I want to see,’ Pearl whines. ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘Wait –’ Nell says, but the child has snatched her hand away and wriggled forwards. Nell moves to find her, but the crowd is too tight, elbows beating her back when she attempts to push through. She tries to breathe evenly.

  ‘She just wants to see,’ Stella says. ‘Let her go.’

  Nell glances at the wagon and Jasper is grinning, conducting the trumpet with a wide swing of his arms. She wonders again what is inside – people? Animals? A magician? The wagons are padlocked with chains. Perhaps the creature is dangerous. Perhaps it is a real plesiosaur in a tank, netted by fishermen.

  ‘The hacks are desperate for novelty,’ he bellows. ‘And tomorrow they will discover its true meaning.’

  ‘What’s inside?’ Violante shouts.

  A murmuring of agreement, feet shuffling, necks craned.

  The call, louder. ‘What’s inside?’

  ‘I’d wager it’s a giant. A real giant. Bigger than Brunette ever was,’ Huffen Black says.

  Every eye is on the wagon, as if expecting the creature to buck free of the wood, to cast the iron struts aside.

  Nell forces herself to look away. She cranes her head for a flash of white hair, that little blue frock.

  Stella squeezes her hand. ‘You can’t watch her for ever. I warned you not to get too close to her.’

  The truth of it stings Nell’s eyes.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ Stella whispers, linking her arm through hers. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Tomorrow you will see my newest trick,’ Jasper continues. ‘Tomorrow, the world will see these creatures for the very first time. You will be startled, amazed, incredulous. We will be the greatest show in the world!’

  Pearl will be with the triplets, Nell thinks. Stella is right; the child will be safe.

  ‘I’ve printed handbills, notices, taken advertisements in The Times. Hacks will flood to our show tomorrow.’

  Jasper talks on, and Nell watches him, the fire globes now lit beside him. He speaks with the confidence of a man who is imagining an audience greater than the one laid before him, who expects, even here, for his words to be recorded and remembered.

  She thinks of the books on her shelves: all their tales of transformation, of joy, of death. A monster hunted across the world. A mermaid, caught in the liminal state between girl and fish. The yearned-for feet that bled whenever she stepped on them. But these characters are not real. No book could capture the truth of what she feels.

  ‘My creations are marvellous, magnificent, the most extraordinary thing you will ever see –’

  Every writer, Nell thinks, is a thief and a liar.

  Jasper

  Jasper’s machines will not do a bunk, or demand more money, or fight or die. They will not eat their way through crisp piles of pounds and guineas; they will not be pursued by the law. He need only run an oiled cloth over their joints, tighten their couplings, polish their skin. And most importantly, they will not eclipse him, because he is their inventor. They exist within his outright control.

  He balls his fists, punches the air. ‘Our show will be the greatest in the world!’ he bellows, and they all cheer, all raise their arms as if he is turning a great lever. Bats fly low like sparrows, scream in the trees.

  He stands on that wagon, and he sees the hungry eyes of his troupe – labourers, performers, grooms – and he feels a fleeting stab of sadness that soon he will require so few of them. But this is the machine age. Steam engines belch their way across the country, printing presses churn out identical journals, cotton mills spin bobbins the size of cartwheels. And human beings are the collateral of progress – jobs lost, skills fallen away. Soon, there will be no need for most of mankind, the world ruled by those who have had the ingenuity to innovate, to evolve.

  His press agent wrote to say he had found Brunette living in a small cottage near Whitstable. She was married to a fisherman, he said, no longer wanted to show herself. The agent expected Jasper to drag her back, to force her before crowds with threats of debtors’ prison and blackmail, but he waved his hand and said to leave her. There will always be a stranger person to be found, a show eclipsing his own. When he heard that the Queen had declared Winston’s leopard boys a finer sight than Nellie Moon, he felt nothing but satisfaction. Nell’s career will end with the abruptness with which he began it.

  When Victor made his great monster and it grew too strong, he had to destroy it.

  He searches for her, sees her standing there with Stella, her eyes on him. His stomach tips, queasy with triumph. It is easier than he thought possible; the child is not even beside her, but standing at the front with the triplets. He gives a slight nod, and a labourer pushes through the crowd, coaxes Pearl away with a brown mouse in a cage. Soon, he will show Nell what it means to be eclipsed, what it means to be forgotten.

  ‘Let us see,’ they cry, clawing forwards. He cracks his whip. The wagon shudders.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he shouts. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow he will unveil the creatures as the finale of his show. He has ordered fireworks, Catherine wheels and hundreds of twinkling candles. In their reflected light, the machines will gleam like oil. The tent will fall silent. Mouths will gape, eyes widen. A hush will descend. Jasper will stand there, his arms raised, as the monsters begin to flap their iron wings, to open and close their mandibles. A man will stagger to his feet, and then another beside him, and the tent will roar with the force of their wonder. He will rake in the money then, pay off the Jackal in weeks.

  P. T. Barnum owned whales captured near Labrador. He stored them, alive, in fifty-foot tanks in the basement of his museum. The walls were lit with gas, but the light frightened the creatures and they skulked at the bottom of their containers, rising only to breathe. A woman told him that she knew it was humbug – that the sea monster was fabricated from India rubber. It was a machine, operated by steam, she said, the bursts of air blown by bellows.

  How much better, Jasper thinks, to create actual machines, to have the crowds look not for the seam or trick, but to marvel in what is real, in what he has created. To stare as they stared at the first locomotives.

  Jasper Jupiter, they will cry, and he wishes only that the machines might speak, that they too could proclaim his name.

  ‘Tomorrow, you will all perform as usual, and then I will unveil my new act,’ he announces. He watches Nell carefully, struggling under his gaze like an insect beneath his microscope. She looks about her, eyes landing where the child was an instant before. ‘With a single exception. This finale will replace the one that ran before it.’

  A pause, as the troupe takes in his words. He watches Nell’s expression change. A murmuring.

  ‘You may surmise,’ Jasper intones, his heart quickening with daring, with delight, ‘that this means Nellie Moon is gone. Faded. Vanished.’

  She is beginning to panic, he sees. She can sense the net tightening around her. She is forcing her way through the crowd, searching for the child. She almost knocks over one of the triplets. This is the sort of spectacle that he craves; those who
fly too high will always be brought low.

  ‘The truth is,’ Jasper says, ‘that the public have grown tired of Nellie. She has been eclipsed by Winston’s leopard boys.’

  He sees Stella shake her head at him and the shame is hot but fleeting. You’re a better man than this, he thinks, recalling Toby’s words of more than two months ago, back before any of this began, before he had even seen Nell.

  He nods at the labourers, and three of them move forwards, seize Nell by the arms. She gives a small cry. He wonders, for a moment, if he has misjudged this, if this is excessive even for him. If, perhaps, his troupe will side with her. He jumps from the wagon, carves his way through the crowd. He speaks more softly now, his lungs choked with a feeling he does not recognize.

  He watches as her eyes search the crowd for Pearl, as she sees the triplets standing alone. ‘Pearl?’ she calls, and then she looks at him with an expression close to terror. ‘Where is she?’ she demands, fighting against the men who bind her. ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘I don’t want to make a spectacle,’ he says, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘I just want you to leave.’

  She snaps her head up. ‘Leave?’

  ‘You can join any other troupe you choose.’

  The grass makes a ripping sound under her feet.

  ‘You bought me.’

  ‘And now I can dispose of you.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Nell’s voice, rising.

  ‘You’ll only frighten her if she hears you.’

  He is stunned by how helpless she looks, how lost. Can this be the girl who held London spellbound? She looks nothing more than a gutter wretch – he tamps down the nausea that rises in his chest.

  ‘Pearl,’ Nell shouts, and the labourers grip her by the waist, by the arm. She thrashes, kicks, bites. ‘Pearl!’

  ‘Send her out,’ Jasper says, clicking his fingers.

  ‘Pearl,’ Nell calls, frantic now.

  Hatred simmers in her eyes, a loathing so acute that Jasper looks at the sky instead, at the narrow smirk of the moon. He remembers when he desired her, when he was bursting with plans for her.