Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She hears Toby’s footfall beside her. She lets him lace his fingers through hers. She remembers the thrill she once felt when he held her hand like this, the warmth of it, passing through her body.

  ‘Can you see Stella?’ Nell whispers.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Hours seem to pass before she sees a figure hurrying towards her. Nell waves at her, beckons, but her heart is a stone in her chest. Stella is alone. Pearl is not with her.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll bring Pearl after the show,’ Toby says, and his voice is so aggravatingly calm that she hates him.

  ‘Where is she?’ she shouts.

  Stella shakes her head, runs the last few paces.

  ‘Where is she? You’ll bring her later?’

  She shakes her head again. ‘I’m sorry, Nell –’

  ‘What? What’s happened to her?’ She grips her friend’s hand, squeezes it. ‘What’s happened? Tell me.’

  Stella looks at her with such pity Nell has to glance away. ‘He’s sold her.’

  ‘No,’ she says, and she writhes free when Toby tries to hold her. ‘Who? Who to?’

  ‘Winston isn’t a bad showman. There are worse.’

  The words zigzag through her head, rearrange themselves. Sold. Winston. A child. Passed from hand to hand like a trinket. What is she supposed to do, to say now? They are staring at her, as if waiting for an answer. She would like to find a sureness in her voice, to dig inside herself and discover something other than emptiness and fury. It is too much. The railings slice into her fingers.

  ‘Has he taken her already?’ Toby asks.

  ‘No. Winston’s here. I saw him. He’ll take her after tonight’s show,’ Stella says.

  ‘She’s in there? She’s there, now?’ Nell leans closer.

  ‘Jasper has her. He won’t allow her out of his sight.’ Stella takes her hands. She is too kind to tell Nell that she warned her this would happen, that this is simply how things are. ‘I have to be back. Before I’m missed.’

  Nell watches her, that proud march, her chin held high. The trumpets sound, and she hears the distorted hum of Jasper’s patter.

  ‘Wonders –’

  ‘Sights –’

  ‘The newest –’

  On any night two weeks ago, she would be fastened into her ropes by now. The balloon would be behind her and she would feel the prickle of anticipation. The others would be alive with nerves too – Stella, stretching her calves; Peggy, hopping from foot to foot. Even the lion would be fidgeting in its cage, Huffen Black feeding it another slab of meat to sate it. They would all be waiting for the twist of the curtain, the sound of the trumpet. Tiny cues, rotating their shoulders, shaking their feet, ready for the moment when they will strike out and sense the scorch of a thousand eyes on them –

  And she feels this now, standing behind these railings. A fizzing anticipation that something will happen. Pearl is still there, within reach. She will find a way to her. The sun lowers, its long light cast like a torch. The dried grasses glimmer like tinsel. Fabric rackets in the breeze.

  When she clambers over the railings, nobody sees her and shouts. She takes the path by the pagoda and the iguanodon bones. It is empty of patrons; they are all in the tent. She nears the wagons, her heart kicking, feet flying out behind her. Jasper has released most of his labourers, and nobody is even guarding the caravans. They will all be inside, settling the crowd.

  ‘Wait,’ Toby calls after her, but she does not stop. She cuts a quick line to the wagons. She hears galloping from inside the tent. The air thickens with late pollen.

  ‘Wait,’ Toby says, but he is slow, lumbering. ‘What if he sees you?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Jasper’s wagon is beneath a tree, close to the tent. She puts her shoulder to the door. It is locked. ‘She might be inside,’ she says, bashing it with her fist. ‘Pearl?’ she shouts. ‘Can you hear me? Pearl?’

  ‘I can do it,’ Toby says. He throws his weight behind it and the hinges buckle. She steps inside.

  What is she doing? What is she looking for? Of course, Pearl is not here. Nell stands there, blinking in the sudden gloom. A thousand Jaspers stare back at her, their mustachios perfectly curled, their mouths twisted into half-smiles. A neat bureau, a ledger. Letters. A monocle and cakes of face paint. Bottles of spirits and crystal glasses. She lifts the decanter, sniffs it.

  The audience roars. Jasper’s voice rises and falls, a crowd held in his grip. She touches her wrists where he gripped her, where he hurled her into the wagon on that night with the bonfire and the dance.

  ‘We should leave,’ Toby says. ‘If he finds us here –’

  ‘He’s in his show. He won’t come.’

  She holds out her arms and spins round, knocking her hands against the walls, against the dresser. A smile rises to her lips, a gurgle that is close to a scream. Glasses shatter. A globe tilts and cracks. She claws at the handbills, paper bucking in her grasp, and Toby is beside her, ripping and tearing, hurling the advertisements into a great pile on the floor. Things are building and building and building and she could not stop them, even if she wanted to. The evening slips through her fingers like a wet fishing line.

  Jasper

  There is a child sitting in the front row. He has orange hair, a rash of freckles on his arms and cheeks. His fingers split the hot shells of chestnuts. He chews them carefully, his jaw working so mechanically that Jasper wonders if he even tastes them.

  Usually, Jasper does not watch the crowd, but he cannot draw his eyes away from this child. He sees the show as the boy must. He remembers Tom Thumb fighting his way out of the pie, and the laughter that rumbled through the theatre. Later, when they went to see Signor Duvalla tiptoe across the Thames, Toby reached for his arm and squeezed it. Standing there, in the tarnished city light, it seemed that all of London held its breath. Even the clouds were still, the wind fallen to nothing. One day, he longed to pinch a crowd between his fingers and hold them there.

  And now, as he introduces act after act – ‘the wondrous’, ‘the marvellous’, ‘the world’s greatest living curiosity’ – as he drops heavy hints at the ‘astonishing’ finale, as he stirs the wonder of the audience – he thinks, I have done it. It does not matter that the show is half its original length, that he only has a paltry menagerie, that a debtor snaps at his ankles, that he is back in his old tent. Stella sits on her trapeze and kicks her legs and twitters like a swift, like a rook, like a sparrow, and the red-haired child widens his eyes.

  Jasper’s life falls to a hum. It is just him and the crowd; that is all that matters. He loves this small tent with its scent of mildew and sawdust and oranges and animal dung. The show is running so well, building so deftly to its climax. Citric oil burns in ceramic pots. The evening light has a pinkish glint. The lanterns are lit, snuffing boys ready to extinguish them when he clicks his fingers. Chandeliers burn with a hundred candles, wax dripping down into silver dishes. Jasper stands on his horse and bellows, ‘This is nothing, nothing, compared to the wonders I will unveil for you tonight –’

  Stella lights fuses in her beard, fireworks spiral into the crowd, and the orange-haired boy claps his hands.

  Behind the curtain, his machines wait, blank-eyed. He has brushed their furs and feathers, neatened their stitches, oiled their joints. They are ready. He is ready. He wishes only that the Jackal were here, that he could see what a sure prospect he is, how right he was to invest in him.

  He nods, and Huffen Black blows a long note on the trumpet.

  The curtains are pulled back, and there they are. His machines.

  As he stands there, he feels his throat closing with the urge to weep. He touches his gullet where the hog’s neck was slashed. He can smell hot sugar, thinks of the molten wax which dripped from the tips of Icarus’s wings.

  The red-haired child leans forwards, squints to look. The bag of chestnuts drops from his lap. Little brown shells scatter across the ground. Jasper has lifted his worries and his fears, turned
his mind only to what is in this ring. He has entertained him. Jasper raises his hands and a laugh breaks from his chest.

  Toby

  There is always a point when the mood shifts. When a finger, held too long over a candle, begins to burn. When a joke sharpens, and a boy throws sugared almonds and another child laughs. When a microscope is shattered. When a story tips into a lie. When a man helps himself to too much –

  I snatches whatever I sees!

  Nell twirls Jasper’s cigars, inspects the box of matches.

  ‘That’s me,’ she says. ‘It’s me.’

  Her pointed toes, the great mechanical wings strapped to her back. Toby remembers sitting on bags of ballast in the quivering basket, carefully controlling her ropes. He could hear her, whooping into the night. Occasionally, he dared to pull himself to his knees to glance over the edge. She swung below him, feet kicking, arms pedalling. The lamps and candles guttered beneath her as though she was swimming through flame. A match was struck, and there she was. Nellie Moon.

  She touches her shoulder where the cuts have scabbed.

  ‘Light Up the Room Like Nellie Moon’.

  He has grown used to her in such a short time. He has adapted his life to fit around her until, without even realizing it, he can no longer see a future apart from her. And yet, he still feels out of place, in danger of saying the wrong thing.

  It has been the same all through his life: at once settled but also an imposter. In some ways, he grew used to the Crimea, the sight of looting and the bodies and the stink of it all. On the day Sevastopol fell, he rode over the battlefield and scarcely noticed the litter of jawbones and purple intestines and scraps of tattered uniform. When he saw a hawk rising into the sky, clutching a hand in its talons, he merely spurred on Grimaldi, his photography wagon ploughing through the mud. Ahead of him, a woman turned and pointed at the bird and cried out, ‘Heavens!’ He wondered how these ladies would fit back into normal society, how they would sit in scalloped drawing rooms with pincushions and harpsichords and be silenced and forget what they had seen. He did not think of Stella often, but he thought of her then, wondered what Dash’s politician uncle would make of her, if Dash would still love her when she did not belong in his world. He could not picture her away from her small marquee and its silver bowls of fruit, its beeswax candles. In his mind, she lived only in the Crimea, just as he was certain that Dash and Jasper were only friends of circumstance; away from the war, they would drift apart. The circus burnt bright in his imagination, nourished him as he jolted over a half-buried man. Once this was over, he and Jasper would be everything to each other. Racing from place to place, surrounded by novelty. A new village, new acts, the tent rising in the dawn mists.

  In the grey ruins, he set up his camera on its wooden tripod and tried to shock himself into caring. The torn trunk of a man’s body, arm curled into his chest like he was merely sleeping. Maggots writhed in his stomach. Toby stared at him as though to pinch himself. But it seemed that the world had shifted fractionally on its axis, that nothing had the power to surprise him any longer.

  He saw his brother and Dash ahead, riding away from him. The memory of the argument was sour in his mouth, but he still shouted out to them.

  They did not hear him. The rubble was too thick to allow his wagon through, so he dithered for a moment before leaving Grimaldi. ‘Jasper!’ he called again. ‘Wait!’ He hurried down the ruined street but he could not see them. He ducked down the lane they must have taken. And then he heard them on the other side of a wall, Dash’s laugh rising. He was about to shout again when Dash said his name. He stopped.

  He heard it all, the words crashing over him.

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

  It felt as if someone had wrenched apart his ribs and was squeezing hard on his heart. He thought, Dullard, dullard, dullard. The camels shimmered to nothing. The bright wagons rotted and splintered. All that was left was a doll-sized office with a high window, miles of papers just waiting for his hand to fill them. Horizons shrunk to the size of a ticking clock on the wall, a narrow partition between offices. He stepped back, his breath thin.

  Dash would take his place in the show.

  Walls were pulverized, houses abandoned, mortar holes ripped in masonry. The whole earth, shattered. Even the blue sky was knifed with smoke trails like scored pigskin.

  He wished Jasper had never met Dash. He wished Dash did not exist. He wished Dash had died, that a Russian bullet had settled in his heart.

  They did not see him as they walked down the street, as Jasper ducked into a cottage, and Dash strolled on, his rifle clattering against his side. Toby tried to imitate that carefree way of walking, the easy slouch of his body. He tried to see the city as Dash might, dead men glinting in the rubble like specks of gold.

  Jasper emerged from the cottage, and Toby followed them, across a pile of debris towards a staircase, blown open by a shell. They turned and noticed him. Was that a crease of irritation he saw on Dash’s face, of resignation?

  Toby could have left, but to leave would be to admit he had nothing or nobody, so he marched on, his head bowed, heavy feet thudding on stone. He could not accept that his place had been usurped, that they did not want him; if he followed them for long enough, he reasoned, they would have to let him in. At the top, the rampart was half-destroyed. Guns were abandoned. A giddying drop, a blue sky, and Cathcart’s Hill on the distant horizon. Dash planted his hands on his hips.

  ‘To the victor belong the spoils,’ Dash said. ‘Do you think Stella can see us from here?’ He waved with a broad sweep of his arm.

  Toby tried to see it again through Dash’s eyes, to view a landscape as if he himself had won it. Thousands of lives pulverized for this small patch of territory, and to feel that as triumph! He shook his head. They scrambled on, and Dash slipped on a piece of scree and Toby’s heart thundered. The man laughed. ‘Close,’ he said. Rocks plummeted off the edge, landed a few seconds later with a sharp crash. ‘Watch your footing,’ he said, but it seemed that he only said it to Jasper, as if he did not care if Toby tripped and fell.

  Dullard, he thought. Dullard, dullard, dullard.

  He caught his reflection in a puddle and pictured himself as Dash, staring back at Toby. A dismal lump of a man, trailing them like a bad smell. He began to imagine the worst things Dash might think about him, how he might laugh about him with other soldiers.

  Why won’t he leave us alone? We’re sick of him, can’t he see it?

  Dash’s voice ricocheted across his skull, the deep pitch of it, the easy rise at the end of the sentence in expectation of laughter.

  He’s worse company than a lame carthorse. A drab beast of a man.

  The curious thing was that he could see these words pouring from Dash’s mouth as if he had really said them.

  He’s as dull as a parish priest on a wet Monday morning –

  He pictured a roaring of approval, Dash breaking into a laugh, smacking his thigh.

  Did I tell you, he thought he’d own a circus! That dullard, in the circus!

  He imagined screams of laughter.

  The only thing he’d be good for is if you dressed him in grey and called him your elephant.

  He followed them, tripping over the stones, his breath sharp in his lungs. He watched them slashing the pockets of a dead Ruskie, shovelling trinkets into their pouches. They scrambled over the casements and Toby climbed after them, queasy with vertigo. The battle plains were laid below them, grass charred and pocked with mortar wounds, dead men spread like the debris of a ruined picnic. It was probably not safe here; the mortars had shattered these walls, and they might topple with the lightest of footfalls. Dash jumped on to the edge, tiptoeing like a tightrope artist, holding out his arms. He tilted his chin upwards, closed his eyes.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Jasper said. ‘Step down from there.’

  Or –! Or –! The only thing he’d be good for is if we
lashed him to the wagons and had him pull us from town to town.

  Toby moaned, as if to shut out real words. He could picture his brother laughing, uneasily at first, then louder, admitting the truth of what Dash said.

  Imagine his shows! I’d rather have a London alderman say grace in Latin for twelve hours than watch him for five minutes in the ring.

  Dash paused, a monarch surveying his kingdom. It was so unfair. A childish thought, a pitiful one, but it brought the beginnings of tears to Toby’s eyes. Dash believed that the world was a feast spread before him, that he could pluck and discard Toby as easily as a sour fruit, that he could quickly displace him. And he had; Jasper preferred him, Jasper had moved Toby aside so carelessly.

  Or a harlequin, a harlequin – hand him a tricorn hat, a goose and a string of sausages and the tin would pour in. He’d assume the cap and bells as if he’d been born wearing them –

  Perhaps it was carelessness. Perhaps it was the tears, blinding him to the rock that jutted out at shin height. Perhaps it was deliberate, calculated in a tiny nook of his brain that he didn’t recognize. Toby did not know then and he does not know now. He took a step forwards and there was the rock, the rock that he had not seen. That he did not think he had seen. He found himself falling forwards, arms spread out before him. Why was the angle at which he fell so exact, his hands finding so precisely the centre of Dash’s back? The man did not teeter, he did not reach out. He was there, and then he wasn’t.

  It was strange, in that moment of suspended time, when a bird crowed and the sun continued to shine, that Toby felt a scrap of gladness within him. The stories he had read often ended with the villain killed. Harmony restored. Jasper’s old words cut across him. I might say Dash is a jolly good fellow, and the wife of a soldier he shot might call him a monster. In Stella’s mind, might it be Toby who was the Devil, who deserved to be punished? But how could he help it? Misery had driven him to this, had rubbed the soft edges off him.