The Emerald Circus

by Jane Yolen

  He put his hand on her shoulder, pulled her to him, held her, now shaking more than she. He knew what she was going to say, knew it was some dread prophecy, knew that the bird was the harbinger of her death, muse of melancholy, knew that he would write this tale on the longest night of his life, knew it all in one swift and awful revelation.

  “No, my darling cousin, my love, my life. Do not tell me what the bird said. That was for your ears alone. Speak of this nevermore.”

  And she never did, for in the morning—like the bird itself—she was gone, winging off to some further heaven than the one he had tried to make for her by his side, on earth.

  Belle Bloody Merciless Dame

  An elf, they say, has no real emotions, cannot love, cannot cry. Do not believe them, that relative of the infinite Anon. Get an elf at the right time, on a Solstice for example, and you will get all the emotions you want.

  Only you may not like what you get.

  Sam Herriot, for example, ran into one of the elves of the Western Ridings on a Sunday in June. He’d forgotten—if he’d ever actually known—it was the Summer Solstice. He’d had a skinful at the local pub, mostly Tennent’s, that Bud wannabe, thin and pale amber, and was making his unsteady way home through the dark alley of Kirk Wynd.

  And there was this girl, tall, skinny, actually quite a bit anorexic, Sam thought, leaning against the gray stone wall. Her long ankle-length skirt was rucked up in front and she was scratching her thin thigh lazily with bright red nails, making runnels in her skin that looked like veins, or like track marks. He thought she was some bloody local junkie, you see, out trolling for a john to make enough money for another round of the whatever.

  And Sam, being drunk but not that drunk, thought he’d accommodate her, even though he preferred his women plump, two handsful he liked to say, hefting his hands palms upward. He had several unopened safes in his pocket, and enough extra pounds in his wallet because he hadn’t had to pay for any of the drinks that night. His Mam didn’t expect him home early since it had been his bachelor party. And with Jill gone home to spend the last week before their marriage with her own folks, there was no one to wait up for him. So he thought, What the hell! and continued down the alley toward the girl.

  She didn’t look up. But he was pretty sure she knew he was there; it was the way she got quiet all of a sudden, stopped scratching her leg. A kind of still anticipation.

  So he went over to her and said, “Miss?” being polite just in case, and only then did she look up and her eyes were not normal eyes. More like a cat’s eyes, with yellow pupils that sat up and down rather than side to side. Only, being drunk, he thought that they were just a junkie’s eyes.

  She smiled at him, and it was a sudden sweet and ravenous smile, if you can imagine those two things together. He took it for lust, which it was, of a sort. Even had he been sober, he wouldn’t have known the difference.

  She held out her hand, and he took it, drawing her toward him and she said, “Not here,” with a peculiar kind of lilt to her voice. And he asked, “Where?”

  Then without quite realizing the how of it, he suddenly found himself sitting on a hillside with her, though the nearest one he knew of was way out of town, about a quarter of a mile, near the Boarside Steadings.

  He thought, I’m really drunk, not remembering walking all this way. But that didn’t stop him from kissing her, putting his tongue up against her teeth until she opened her mouth and sucked him in so quickly, so deeply he nearly passed out. So he drew back for a breath, tasting her saliva like some herbal tea, and watched as she shrugged out of the top of her blouse, some filmy little number, no buttons or anything.

  She was naked underneath.

  “God!” he said, and he really meant it as a sudden prayer because she was painfully thin. He could actually count her ribs. And she had this odd third nipple, right on the breastbone between the other two. He’d heard that some girls did, but he’d never actually seen anything like it before.

  He wondered, suddenly, about Jill and their wedding in a couple of days, and it sobered him a bit, making his own eyes go a bit dead for a moment.

  That’s when the girl stood up on those long skinny legs and walked over to him, pressing him backward, whispering in some strange, liquid language. Suddenly it all made sense to him. She was a foreigner, not British at all.

  “Aren’t you cold, lass?” he asked, thinking that maybe he should just cover her up, here on the hillside, and never mind the other stuff at all. Because Jill would kill him if she knew, the girl so skinny and foreign and odd.

  But the girl put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back till he lay on the cold grass staring up at her. It was past midnight and the sky still pearly, this being Scotland where summer days spin across the twenty-four hours with hardly any dark at all. He could see faint stars around her head, and they looked as if they were moving. Then he realized it wasn’t stars at all, but something white and fluttering behind her. Moths, he thought. Or gulls. Only much too big for either.

  She lay down on top of him and kissed him again, hard and soft, sighing and weeping. Her hot tears filled his own eyes till he could not see at all. But all the while the wings—not moths, not gulls—wrapped around him. He did not feel the cold.

  He woke hours later on the hillside and thought they must have had sex, or had something at any rate, though he couldn’t remember any of it, for his trousers were soaked through, back and front. He felt frantically in his pocket. The safes were still there, untouched. His wallet, too. His mouth felt bruised, his head ached from all the beer, and he could feel the heat of a hickey rising on the left side of his neck.

  But the girl was gone.

  He stood slowly and looked around. Far off was the sea looking, in the morning light, silvery and strange. He was miles from town, not Boarside Steadings at all, and there was no sign of the thin girl, though how she could have disappeared, or when, he did not know. But leaving him here, alone, on the bloody hillside, drained and tired, feeling older than time itself, must have given her some bloody big laugh. Well, he hoped she got sick, hoped she got the clap, hoped she got herself pregnant, little tart. And all he had to show for it was a great white feather, as if from some bloody stupid fairy wing.

  And brushing himself off, he started down the cold hillside toward—he hoped—home.

  The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown

  June 1875

  “Why, they are quite barbaric,” the queen said to her prime minister, making small talk since she wasn’t actually certain where Zululand was. Somewhere in deepest darkest Africa. Of that much at least she was certain. She would have to get out the atlas. Again. She had several of Albert’s old atlases, and the latest American one, a Swinton.

  Thinking about the problem with an atlas, and how—unlike the star charts, which never varied—it kept changing with each new discovery on the dark continent, she sniffed into her dainty handkerchief. She was not sniffing at Mr. Disraeli, though, and she was quite careful to make that distinction by glancing up at him and dimpling. It was important that he never know how she really felt about him. Truth to tell, she was unsure herself.

  “Barbaric in our eyes, certainly, ma’am,” he said, his dark eyes gazing back at her. She did not trust dark eyes. At least not that dark. Give her good British blue any day. Or Albert’s blue. But those dark eyes . . . she shuddered. A bit of strangeness in the prime minister’s background for all that she’d been assured he was an Anglican.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Disraeli?” she asked. She thought she knew, but she wanted to hear him say it. Best to know one’s enemies outright. She considered all prime ministers the enemy. After all, they always wanted something from her and only seemed to promise something in return. Politics was a nasty business and the crown had to seem to be above it while controlling it at all times.

  A tightrope, really.

  She thought suddenly of the French tightrope walker at Astley’s Amphitheatre who could stand on on
e foot on a wire suspended high overhead and dangle the other foot into the air. She and Albert had taken the children to see the circus several times, and it had occurred to her then that speaking with a prime minister felt just like that. She was dangling again today with only the smallest of wire between herself and disaster.

  Disraeli was master of the circus now, and he frightened her, as had her very first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who had been careful to try and put her at her ease. It took her a long time to find him amusing.

  She thought dismally: It will take even longer with Disraeli even though this is his second tour of duty. She barely remembered that first time. It had been only seven years after dear Albert’s death and she was still so deep in mourning nothing much registered, not even—she was ashamed to admit—the children.

  “To the Zulus,” Disraeli answered carefully, “what they do, how they live their lives makes absolute sense, ma’am. They have been at it for centuries the same way. Each moment a perfection. Perhaps to them, we are the barbarians!” He smiled slowly at her over the flowered teacup.

  I am no barbarian, she thought testily. You might be one. She sniffed again and this time cared little if he guessed she was sniffing at him. All Jews are barbarians. Even if they—like Mr. Disraeli—have been baptized.

  There, she had said it! Well, only in her head. And having made the pronouncement, she went on silently. It is something they are born with. Eastern, oily, brilliant, full of unpronounceable magic, like that Rumplety fellow who spun straw into gold in the story Albert used to tell the children at bedtime.

  Part of her knew that what she was thinking was as much a fairy tale as the Rumplety one. Her mama used to say that Jews had horns, if you felt the tops of their heads. But now she knew that Jews had no such thing as horns, just hair. Albert had taught her that. It was an old story, long discredited, unless you were some sort of peasant. Which I am certainly not!

  She looked directly at Disraeli, which was another thing dear Albert had taught her. It always disarmed the politicians. No one expected the queen to look directly at a mere jumped-up nobody.

  But Disraeli seemed to be paying her no mind, looking instead at his polished nails rather than at her, his ruler, which was rude in the extreme. She recalled suddenly how attentive he had been the first time he was prime minister. What had he said? Something about “We authors . . .” comparing his frothy romantic novels to her much more serious writing. She remembered that she had not been amused then. Or now.

  She glared at him, willing him to look up. Those silly tangles of curls hung greasily almost to his shoulders. That arch of nose. Those staring eyes. She gave a little shudder, then quickly thought better of it and rang the bell for the server.

  When the girl arrived, the queen said, “I have caught a chill, please bring me a shawl.” Then she leaned back against the chair as if she did, indeed, feel a bit ill.

  Disraeli finally looked up briefly, then looked at his nails again and did not ask if there was something he might do for her.

  Jews! the queen thought. No matter how long they have lived in England, converted, learned English, they remain a people apart, unknowable. She did not trust him. She dared not trust him. Even though he was her minister. Prime. Primo. First. But she would never say so. She would never let him know, never let them know. Instead, she would make everyone think she actually liked him. It was for the best.

  He may be prime minister now, she thought fiercely, but soon he will be gone. All prime ministers disappear in time. Only I go on. Only I am England. It was an agreeable thought and made her face soften, seeming to become younger.

  “Ma’am?” he inquired, just as if he could read her mind.

  “More tea, Mr. Disraeli?” She was careful to pronounce all the syllables in his name just as the archbishop—who knew Hebrew as if it were his mother tongue—had taught her.

  Just then the girl came back with the shawl, curtsied, gave it to the queen, and left.

  Disraeli smiled an alarmingly brilliant smile, his lips too wet. Those wet lips made her shiver. He looked as if he were preparing to eat her up, like some creature out of a tale. An ogre? A troll? A Tom-tit-tot? She could not remember.

  “Yes, please, ma’am.” He was still smiling.

  She served the tea. It was a homey gesture she liked to make when sitting with her gentlemen. Her PMs. It was to put them at ease in her presence. If they were comfortable, they were easier to manipulate. Albert didn’t teach her that. Long before they’d met she had figured it out, though she was only a girl at the time.

  Disraeli sat back in his chair, crossed his grasshopper-like legs, and took a long, deep sip of the Indian tea.

  Does she really think, his mind whirling like a Catherine wheel shooting out sparks, that I do not know about her atlas with all its scribbles along the sides of the pages? Or the pretense at being the housefrau entertaining her “gentlemen callers”? Or what she thinks of my people? He knew that in the queen’s eyes—in all their eyes—he would always be tarred by the Levant.

  He thought about an article he’d recently read in Punch, that rag, something about a furniture sale which outlandishly mocked Jews: their noses like hawks, their money-hungry ways. He remembered one line of it where the good English Anglican buyer wrote: “Shall I escape without being inveigled into laying out money on a lot of things I don’t want?”

  He made an effort to become calm, breathing deeply and taking another sip of the tea before letting himself return to the moment.

  Is the queen really so unaware of all the house spies who report to me? The gossip below stairs? Her son who will tattle on Mama at the slightest provocation? Does she not recognize that I am the master of the Great Game?

  Without willing it, his right hand began stroking his left, an actor’s gesture, not a gentleman’s. But his mind never stopped its whirl. He remembered that he and the queen had had this very same conversation about the Irish the first time he’d been her minister. And then a similar discussion about the Afghanistan adventure. To her they were all barbarians. Only the English were not.

  Well, she may have forgotten what we talked about, but not I. It had been his first climb to the top of the greasy pole of the political world, straight into the Irish situation. There was no forgetting that! He had a marvelous memory for all the details.

  Leaning back in the chair, he stared at his monarch, moving his lips silently, but no words—no English words—could be heard.

  Across the rosewood table the queen slowly melted like butter in a hot skillet. A few more cabbalistic phrases and she reformed into a rather large toad dressed in black silk, with garish rings on either green paw.

  “Delicious tea, ma’am,” Disraeli said distinctly. “From the Indies, I believe. Assam, I am certain.”

  The toad, with a single crown jewel in her head, poured him a third cup of tea. “Ribbet!” she said.

  Though—Disraeli mused—that is really what a frog says.

  “Oh, I do agree, ma’am,” said Disraeli, “I entirely agree.” With a twist of his wrist, he turned her back into Victoria, monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, before anyone might come in and see her. It was not an improvement. However, such small distractions amused him on these necessary visits. He could not say as much for the sour little black-garbed queen.

  The queen sat quietly while her lady’s maid pulled the silver brush through her hair. Tangles miraculously smoothed out, since she insisted that the maid put oil of lavender on the bristles.

  “No one, ma’am, still uses lavender,” the woman, Martha, had said the first time she’d had the duty of brushing out the queen’s hair.

  But Victoria had corrected her immediately. Best to start as one means to go on, she had thought. “I have used oil of lavender since I was a child and I am not about to change now. I find the very scent soothing. It is almost magic.” She had suffered from the megrims since dear Albert had passed over, and only the lavender worked. Albert would have called that sci
ence and explained it to her, but she was quite certain magic was the better explanation.

  “What do you think of Mr. Disraeli, ma’am? Have you read his novels?”

  “I do not have time to read novels, Martha,” the queen scolded, though she had indeed read Vivian Grey and found it lamentably lacking and exceedingly vulgar, and the ending positively brutal.

  “But you read people so well, it must be like reading a book,” Martha said, her plain little face scrunching up as she worked.

  “I do indeed read them well,” Victoria said.

  “And Mr. Disraeli. . . ?”

  “He is a puzzle,” the queen said, a bit distracted. Normally she would never discuss her prime minister with a servant. But she knew that Martha was discreet.

  “Puzzles are meant to be solved, ma’am,” Martha ventured.

  “Sometimes I think you are less a lady’s maid and more a fool, Martha.” Victoria turned and smiled. “And by that I mean no offense. I use the word in the old sense, like the fools who entertained the kings of England, with their wit and their wisdom.”

  “I couldn’t be that kind of a fool, ma’am, being a mere woman.” Martha swiftly braided the queen’s hair and tied it with a band.

  “Martha, did you not know that Queen Elizabeth had female fools?”

  “No!” Martha’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. “The blessed Elizabeth!”

  “And her cousin Mary of Scotland as well. In fact she had three.”

  “That baggage!”

  “I am tired. It has been a long day,” the queen said. “Leave me.”

  “You will solve the puzzle of Mr. Disraeli, ma’am,” Martha said, helping the little queen to stand and easing her to the bed.

  “Indeed I will,” Victoria said, nodding her head vigorously. “Indeed I will.”

  Martha was pleased to see that the band held the braid’s end. Some things she could do very well. Even though she was a mere woman. Especially so.