Et voilà la fille, Flambeau said. She was right outside. I think she was just about to enter.
She winked at me.
Is it me, then, or is she perfect? the circus boss asked, inspecting me as he circled me. He plucked at my coat, and I plucked it back into place.
She’s nearly perfect, Ernesto said. I don’t think she can sing. Or speak, either, for that matter. But she may be as good as we’ll get.
He reached a long arm out to prod me. I stepped forward, toward the manager.
The circus boss pouted as his left eyebrow rose up and stayed there. We can’t teach her a song?
She can’t speak, said Priscilla. She can whisper a bit.
Good heavens, he said, and reached for my coat again. Real coonskins. He held up the coat’s hem. We’ll use it. Come on, he said to me, looking at me sternly. You can’t even sing a little?
I nodded yes. I was sure it was only a moment of the voice being caught at by the cold air.
The boss waved his hands in the air in front of him, as if his own smoke were blowing on him. Fine, fine, if she can ride well, we’ll figure it out. This is the horse, he said. Did they tell you?
I nodded yes.
His name is Mela, he yelled. Though I suppose you can’t say his name. It’s because of how much he likes an apple, though it may be he’s had too many—he hasn’t taken one from any of our applicants yet. Here, he said, and I looked up in time to catch an apple he threw my way. Perhaps you’ll be the one.
The horse was exhausted and a little scared. I went up to him from his right side, tilted my head. He whickered as he saw the apple, and his huge teeth closed over it right as I held it out. He was young and ruddy, the long pale mane and tail beautifully brushed. We liked each other right away. His eyes closed as I ran my hand along his brow and tickled the soft hair at the crest of his neck up behind his ears. I waited until he was done chewing and then blew softly down his nose.
As he chewed at the apple, he started a little under my hands, but with happiness, pushing his nose against my face. I slid my hand down his long neck and then climbed into the saddle. I held out my arms and mimed firing a rifle, and the ringmaster laughed and brought me one in a scabbard I could wear on my back.
The tent had filled with more of the performers, tired, hard faced, waiting to be impressed.
When my brothers and I were lost, we took to standing in the saddle to check the horizon to see where we were. But it was so much fun to do, we were always checking. One time our old bay became impatient and began walking while my brother was still standing, and as we laughed, he stayed standing up and gradually got the horse to a canter. This became our new favorite trick, and so, of course, we soon learned to race at it, our mother usually catching us and screaming in fear.
I gave my new audience a long look as they watched expectantly and then reined Mela back so he reared as I swung him into the track of the ring. We started off at a run. My audience screamed with laughter and I felt it please the horse.
After three laps to get him warm to me and to figure out his timing, I swung in the saddle, rolling onto my back, my legs up as I did a half circle, sitting down again backward.
I heard a cheer and waved to the crowd.
He was a good circus horse and kept steady on his pace. I would later miss him, but for now, I rolled myself back around to face front again. I did it once more and then prepared for the real trick, the one I was sure they’d like.
I did not know how to understand the way life was lived here, but this much I knew.
My eyes moved to Ernesto, who was nodding with pride as if we were already friends.
I took one foot and lifted it slightly up Mela’s reddish sides, then the other, until my feet balanced, knees bent, on either side of the center of the horse’s back. My audience cheered. I lifted one hand in the air in a salute and then whipped off my hat, shaking my hair loose. Then I pulled the reins in and drew the horse to a stop in a sawdust cloud. From my place on his back I turned to face them.
They were silent as they watched me, except Flambeau, who still clapped sharp, barking claps.
I steadied myself and raised my arm in a salute. I needed them to feed me, to take me with them. I needed to get to Europe. If they did not take me, I was not sure what there was for me.
I cleared my throat and found my voice then, like a coin suddenly in your pocket that’d been missing when last you looked for it. Ernesto’s eyes went wide with surprise, almost as wide as mine.
The song was, in fact, the one song my mother had taught me that wasn’t a hymn. This was true. I chose it that night as I was homesick and missing her, so it seemed right to sing it now.
Rose, Rose, Rose, Red.
When will I see thee wed?
I will wed at thy will, sire,
At thy will.
Rose, Rose, Rose, Red.
When will I see thee wed?
I will wed as I will, sire,
As I will.
I’d fiddled with the lyrics, and I guess they knew, for they laughed at my second verse.
I sang it slowly and clearly, steadily stronger, thrilling to the moment. I then sang it again, continuing, repeating it until the other performers joined in the round. Soon they were dancing with each other, and I held my hand out to Ernesto, who came to where I stood on the back of the horse, finally taking my hand and holding it up in the air. Standing on that horse, I was only a little taller than he was. As I finished the lyric that time, he lifted me off and held me there.
Can’t speak but you can sing, then, is it? he asked.
The rest of the circus sang around us.
I looked at him, all the terror I’d felt close but not as close, while he held me, and I enjoyed the sensation, new and thrilling, to be up in the air in his arms.
It’s nothin’ to me, he said. We’re none of us made right for this world. But we’re still here, aren’t we? And then he set me down.
§
Any relations, then? the boss asked, as we sat with my contract and he named my terms.
I shook my head no, the grief again, like a low bell knocking. I bit my lip.
None at all? I shook my head again. Well, every circus story begins by someone’s grave. Welcome, he said. You’re a natural. Sign here.
Even if you weren’t an orphan, Ernesto said to me, as he led me to the food tent, you’d probably pretend to be one anyway.
When you joined, you were always asked if you had family. If you said yes and the family wasn’t a circus family, they usually didn’t take you. And if it was a family that had rivalries or blood vengeance with another circus family, the answer would be no also.
If the boss still has it somewhere, the contract reads, in careful script, Lilliet Berne.
§
Later that night, after I’d been fed and shown to a cot in Priscilla’s tent, I lay awake, unable to sleep. I took my hands out and touched my throat, as if that could tell me what had happened.
My throat felt the same. But as I lay there, I tried to speak again and could not.
There was only the same low sound, a scratchy whisper.
It was as if I had two voices now, the one strong and clear, the other turned to ash. As if the voice that could speak had been punished for the pride of the one that could sing.
The gift and the test.
I couldn’t tell if this meant I’d been forgiven. I only felt haunted, right down in my throat. No ghostly hands there but perhaps a single phantom finger, pressing in.
A warning.
If my voice had a curse, I was sure it was this one.
Of course, the one I did not believe in is the one that came true.
Six
THE SETTLER’S DAUGHTER, then.
I rode into the ring dressed in their buckskin cowgirl costume with my raccoon coat and rabbit hat, all while the Iroquois made the war calls of several tribes, his own included. I circled twice, firing gunpowder blanks from the rifle, then stopped and stood. W
hile I balanced on the horse’s haunches, I directed the audience like a conductor, singing my round. This done, I dismounted with a backflip and chose a young man from the crowd, handing him a paper rose and leading him to the center of the circus tent, where clowns dressed as parents and priests waited and married us in front of the singing audience.
By the time I reached Paris, I’d been married this way a hundred times, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
In the first month, whenever the announcer told the story of the girl “captured by the Indians as a child and raised in their wild ways,” who spoke no English except a song she’d learned from her mother, I felt as though each time I sang, my mother was listening, watching.
There was no name I could take that would hide me from her, I knew. But as I sang this more, it soon became the song I sang for the show, and it reminded me of her less and less.
My speaking voice had not returned, and the singing voice stayed, which felt like a truce or a sacrifice, depending on the day. I feared that one day it might switch, and I’d wake and find a normal girl’s voice there, the singing voice gone—and find that I was done. While the circus became like a family to me very quickly, I always knew it was a family I’d auditioned for, and I could see that if I was to be injured or the crowd tired of the act I could be left behind. You might get to repair costumes, or take tickets, or cook, but only if there was an opening.
No one ever mentioned the previous girl in my spot. No one ever told stories of her, or why she’d left, or said if she was even alive. I thought of her sometimes, as I had her tent and her gun, after all, and her horse. If Mela missed her, he had no way to show me that I could see. He, like the rest, gamely trotted out his paces.
For all I knew, it was her ghostly hands at my throat.
So it was I sought to make Flambeau my teacher. She, or he, as I was to discover, was our barker and stood by the entrance, blowing gouts of fire into the air and then exhorting the fascinated crowds to come inside.
The first few times I watched him practice, I didn’t recognize him and wondered who the young man was breathing fire in the yard. He didn’t wear the enormous wig for all his rehearsals. He wasn’t young anymore, but the fire had made his face as smooth as a woman’s—all the hair burned off, so he never had to shave, though he could never grow a beard. I thought he was new, like I was, and didn’t mind that he ignored me at first, as I was too fascinated by the fire, and for that alone, I wanted us to be friends. He didn’t acknowledge me until after several days he said, very suddenly, You want to do this? And I recognized his voice.
He held out the jar of pétrole he used. I nodded my head. It was all I wanted.
You don’t want to do this, he then replied, laughing, putting out his palm to stop me. Don’t want to ruin that pretty face! You need your eyelashes to bat at the men in the audience!
It seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world, though, much more beautiful than my eyelashes. To tip your head back, hold the torch to your lips, and let out a stream of fire. I could close my eyes and see it, the bright yellow tongue in the dark, blue right near my lips. The very best trick, my favorite, was the ring of fire. I hoped to use it in my act. I hoped I could learn to blow a ring I could leap through from the horse’s back. Horses hated fire, after all, and if I did it this way, they’d never see it, I told myself. It was a stupid idea, but I loved it all the same.
You don’t want to do this, he would say again and again the first month. But still I came.
It was Flambeau, then, who taught me to smoke cigars. They were my practice. Smoking a cigar required you to keep the smoke from your lungs. Breathing in the fire was the death of the fire-breather, a terrible, painful death as you choked on smoke and your own blood. The ring of cigar smoke was to be a ring of fire someday. And so I kept at it as practice and learned how to blow smoke rings, practicing for my ridiculous, impossible act, but also to someday join him if my voice ever vanished and left the circus before I did.
Until my departure from the show, I never left the confines of the tent village wherever we were. Some days it was as if the world shifted around us in the night, the foreign cities each time nearly as nameless to me as the men I picked from the ring to meet me beside the clowns.
The Cajun Maidens adopted me and taught me my falls and tumbles, how to walk on my hands, how to understand their mixture of French, Russian, Spanish, and English. They gave me a knife to wear on my thigh, a dagger. They called it a circus dowry, and they never took theirs off except when bathing, and even then they set them on the edge of the tub, and soon I was the same.
I pulled it out of its sheath at night, testing the edge.
The knife came with lessons on how to use it. If a man was attacking me, I was to cut for the places they’d have to hold shut—the underside of a wrist, the throat—not to try to stab for the heart first, they said.
The heart is a difficult target, Priscilla said with a smile. Laughter came from her sisters as she said it. But everyone forgets to protect their hands. This is a mistake. A grim satisfaction crossed her face. Also, you may not want to kill them, she said. But only teach a lesson. And then she paused. But it may be you want to kill them, and there was more laughter.
For your future husband, said the circus matron. To give to him however you might choose. She winked and patted her own.
§
While at first I was frightened of trying to speak, I soon took to trying once each day. For who could say when would be the day I was forgiven? What if the voice was only to be gone three years, or ten, and not forever? This was the way to know. The first times I tried, I felt as though I were sneaking up to God to see if He was still angry, but soon I was at ease trying.
Soon the voice began to whisper back.
That first morning I made a sound; the sound of my voice felt like I had fallen down a well in my own throat. But I took it as the beginning I had waited for.
Understand, I had no love for Paris when I chose to leave that day—it was only another place to pass through, a station on a train. It was enough for me that I could speak again, enough to ask questions. The voice sounded odd but could be understood. The morning I could say “a ticket please” clearly and loudly in English and French was our third morning in Paris, and with that, I hatched my plan.
Seven
THAT DAY I first stepped out onto the streets of Paris was the day I was to perform for the Emperor, and it began with my sneaking out to buy a train ticket dressed in a ridiculous costume borrowed from the costume mistress.
If I had succeeded, I can’t imagine the tale I’d tell here now.
I had told the costume mistress I wanted to go out to see some sights but didn’t want to wear my buckskin. She found me the costume for the clown who we hid in the audience, playing at being the kind of wife never allowed anywhere but brought out to the circus for a bit of fun. The other clowns typically carried her off screaming, and the performer who played her later returned to the ring wearing the same dress, complete with clown makeup, and an enormous clown kiss painted along her cheek.
Don’t tell a soul, the costume mistress had said to me, to which I gave an exasperated sigh. Of course I would tell no one. They won’t mistake you for a Parisienne, she smirked. It might do you good to spend a coin or two on some Paris fashion while you’re there.
I greeted this suggestion with bewilderment until I stood almost in the street.
I was dressed in a dun-colored day dress, the skirt full of crinolines; leather boots laced to just below the knee; a gray bonnet. I don’t know that the average citizen of Paris had ever seen a colonial farm wife before, but I’d hoped that day, because of the Expo and the many other more strangely dressed people, that I blended in. Once I stood in the glassed entrance to the Expo, unable to enter the crowd, I knew I did not.
A strange pressure was crawling on my skin. What I wanted to do seemed as likely to happen as turning to the wall and passing through the solid stone.
; The costume mistress had told me the omnibus would have a flag. Look for the signs for the Gare de l’Est, she’d said.
In the distance I saw the omnibus flag she mentioned above the horizon line created by the tops of the heads in the crowd. Above that still, I saw the street and the strange machines and carriages flying back and forth. Young men mounted on vélocifères, phaetons, landaus, fiacres, victorias, all moving at terrific speeds and not, somehow, running into each other.
The omnibus was a beast all its own when it finally came, an enormous viewing stand set on wheels and drawn by three horses with metal sides and windows enclosing the lower levels. The men sat on top, the women inside, forbidden from the upper level, I suppose, to prevent them from showing to the entire street what was under their skirts. Each omnibus was thus typically crowned with two rows of top hats, the men sitting back to back.
As I stood in the line for the omnibus, I became anxious. I knew my costume stood out enough that any member of the circus who saw me might know it was me dressed as the clown bride. But I soon forgot this particular ensemble when I did first see with my own eyes the woman I would come to know as the Comtesse de Castiglione.
She was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. She had just exited the bateau mouche of some foreign royal, and as she walked through the gaudy international crowd of the Expo, they pulled back. Even the incredible machines all came to a stop to let her cross, all startled into a silence. She was dressed in mourning, a black veil over her eyes that still allowed you to see their green flash, a hat of black ostrich feathers with a single sapphire glinting at the top. A velvet cape covered her black silk gown, floating behind her with a train held aloft by crinolines, the like of which I’d never seen. Jet beads flashed along her jet shoes, answered by jet beads flashing along the edge of her veil. Another sapphire, this one with diamonds along the rim of its setting, held the cape at her neck.
The Queen of the Night Page 6