by M. P. Barker
Daniel felt aimlessly melancholy. Normally when he felt that way, he would take Ivy for a ride or groom her. But Ivy was in the barn with Phizzy, and Daniel didn’t want to intrude on Mr. Stocking’s solitude. He finally decided to go up to his room to sort out the things Billy had left behind and to add them to the sack Mr. Stocking had given him. He slipped in the back door and went up the narrow stairway, avoiding the sitting room and Billy and Liam.
When he came back outside, he discovered Billy in the wagon shed, rummaging through the storage bin under the wagon’s seat. “Where is it?” she mumbled to herself. “I know he kept it.” When Daniel called her name, she banged her head on the lid of the bin. She turned to him, her face grimy with tears.
He felt a prickling at the back of his eyes and a leaden weight in his chest. What was the good of making friends if you had to be forever leaving them? Surely it was better when he’d not let anyone into his heart. But young Ethan, and now Billy—both of them had made something inside him go soft, and giving them up was more painful than anything Lyman or any bully had ever done to him.
“Here,” he said brusquely, thrusting the sack toward her. “Your things.”
As she rooted through it, the bag wriggled and jerked as though it held an animal struggling to break free. “Ah!” came her muffled voice, and she emerged with something in her hand. She polished it with a fold of her skirt. “Where’s Mr. S.?” she asked, her head down, intent on wiping the object clean.
“With Phizzy,” Daniel said.
She dashed into the barn. Daniel followed. Mr. Stocking came out from Phizzy’s stall and into the narrow sunbeam that slanted onto the barn’s floor. The peddler and the lass stood apart from each other, poised on the balls of their feet like dancers waiting for the music to start.
Then Billy reached out her hand. The object that she held was somewhat the worse for wear; most of its papery brown husk had broken off, and it had lost several kernels, but those that remained glowed like rubies. “A red ear of corn for the one you love best,” Mr. Stocking had said, it seemed like years ago.
He couldn’t hear what Billy said as she presented her gift, but Daniel had never seen such a smile on Mr. Stocking’s face. The peddler took the red ear and gathered Billy into his arms, then kissed the top of her head.
They came out of the barn, Billy’s arm around Mr. Stocking’s waist, and the peddler’s hand on her shoulder. She was still crying, and Mr. Stocking seemed unsteady on his feet, his glasses fogged with tears.
“It’s not Liam, then?” Daniel said.
Billy shook her head, then came at Daniel so fast that she nearly knocked him over. She threw her arms around him, and the front of his shirt grew damp. “Here, lass,” he said at last. “I can’t hardly breathe.” But what he really felt was as if he’d been holding his breath all afternoon, and now he finally could breathe.
“You’re sure this is what you want, Billy?” Mr. Stocking said.
She nodded as she pulled away from Daniel. “For a while I thought of not coming back here at all, just so’s I wouldn’t have to choose. After I made up me mind, I still couldn’t come back for ages and ages because I didn’t know how to tell Liam.” She let out a hiccuping sob.
Daniel fished his handkerchief out and handed it to her.
She took a long time wiping her face and blowing her nose. “Bloody hell and damnation! I didn’t want to cry. But since I come back and told Liam, I can’t stop.”
“Is he all right?” Daniel asked.
“He has Augusta,” Billy said. “Maybe I’d’a chose different if he was alone.” She tried to hand Daniel back his handkerchief, now sodden with tears and phlegm, but he put up a hand to tell her to keep it. “I love him with all me heart, but I couldn’t stay there. I know it’d be better, now Da’s gone, but it’d still be naught but cooking and sewing and washing up and helping Augusta tend the babies when they start coming, and being trapped in one place all the time. If I stayed, it’d be the death of me. I tried to explain to Liam, but he just couldn’t see.” She fidgeted with her skirt, making the tear larger. “I think maybe Augusta understood a bit, though. Liam didn’t understand, either, when I told him Mr. S. is me proper da, the one I was meant to have.”
“’Scuse me.” The peddler snatched Daniel’s handkerchief away from Billy and wiped his eyes and his spectacles, but only redistributed the damp smears on the glass and his cheeks.
“I’d not have understood, meself, a few months ago,” Daniel said. “I’m sorry for your brother, though. He’s a good man.”
“Aye, he’s grand,” Billy said. “I’ll write to him, and I’ll visit every chance I get. Anyway, if I stay, I can’t help him, can I? If I go with you, I can send him some of me wages.”
“Here.” Daniel picked up the sack that held Billy’s things. “I s’pose you’ll be pleased to have your trousers back.”
“Aye, that I will.” Billy tugged at her skirt as if she wanted to rip the dress off then and there. Then she stopped herself and smoothed the fabric out. “But maybe I should wear this a while yet. Augusta was up an entire night making it for me—all new cloth, though I told her I’d be fine with someone’s made-over castoffs.” She frowned, rubbing at the stains. “And look, I’ve spoiled it already. It’d be ungrateful, I s’pose, did I put it aside before we take our leave.”
Daniel exchanged surprised looks with the peddler.
“That’s mighty thoughtful of you,” Mr. Stocking said.
“I hardly see the virtue in all this thinking you’ve been wanting me to do,” Billy said, running a hand through her short curls. “All it does is give me a powerful headache.”
“I know what you mean,” Daniel said with a grin. “Sometimes I’ve felt me head would burst with all the thinking I’ve done since I’ve joined the two of you. But still and all, I been doing a bit of thinking on me own about your trousers.”
“Me trousers?” Billy repeated.
“Aye. You know there’ll come a time when trousers and short hair and bad manners can’t hide that you’re a lass, don’t you?” He braced himself for her angry denial, but she just nodded grimly. “Don’t be looking so sour. It mightn’t be as bad as all that,” he continued. “I was just thinking that it’s grand and all for a lad to be riding like the devil and tumbling and doing tricks and such. But for a lass to be doing it, that’s something really out of the ordinary, isn’t it? I think folk’d like seeing that even more than what you’re doing now.”
“You mean I could be like—like Francesca?”
“Better, I’d say,” Daniel replied.
A smile flickered across Billy’s face, then quickly faded. “So long as Mr. C. doesn’t throw us out of his show and take away our ponies. After all, I didn’t choose him, now, did I?” She took one of Mr. Stocking’s hands. “I chose you.” To Daniel’s surprise, Billy took his hand, too.
Daniel stood a moment in stunned silence, his ears and face reddening. Then he shook his head and laughed. “You never. The truth is, you were really choosing Phizzy.”
“Haven’t you learned anything being with me, son?” Mr. Stocking said. “You don’t choose a horse like Phizzy, or like your Ivy, neither. A horse like that chooses you.”
Author’s Note
Readers often wonder how much of a historical novel is fact and how much is fiction. All the characters and events in Mending Horses are fictional, except for Jerry Warriner, his tavern, and his household, but the situations are as accurate to the time period as possible.
With the exception of Farmington, Massachusetts, and Chauncey, Connecticut, all the towns and villages mentioned in the book are real places. The names of some villages have changed over time. Cabotville and Factory Village were villages of Springfield, Massachusetts, and are now part of Chicopee. Jenksville was a village of Ludlow, Massachusetts, and Bethel, which in 1839 was a village of Danbury, Connecticut, is now a separate town.
A fortuitous coincidence was my discovery that the opening of the Weste
rn Rail Road in Springfield happened on October 1, 1839—perfect timing for my story. I’d known that the railroad was under construction in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but it wasn’t until I’d already chosen the date for my story and decided to make Hugh a railroad worker that I learned of the October 1 event, which fit in perfectly.
The “Paddy camps,” like “the Patch” where the Fogartys live in Cabotville, were a brutal fact of life for Irish immigrants in the 1830s. No housing was provided for the Irishmen who dug canals, built mills, and constructed boardinghouses for Yankee mill girls to live in. In milltowns and along rail lines, the first homes of the Irish were usually makeshift shanties built with construction rubble scavenged from work sites. Brian C. Mitchell’s The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–61 provides an excellent and grim account of the conditions under which Irish workers and their families lived.
While Mr. Chamberlain’s traveling show is fictitious, the stunts that his players perform are based on accounts of circuses of the time period. The famous John (a.k.a. James) “Grizzly” Adams (1812–1860) rode one of his trained bears much the same way as Mr. Lamb rides Griselda in the story. Popular equestrian acts included Billy Button, the Drunken Cossack, and the Incombustible Horse, while “learned” animals from pigs to dogs to horses were all the rage. Like Mr. Stocking, circus clown Dan Rice (1823–1900) would ask his learned animal (a pig rather than a horse) to select the biggest fool from the audience. Performers like the Ruggles family and Mr. Sharp and Mr. Dale were often multitalented, with acrobats also doing duty as jugglers, horseback riders, or comedians. Joe Pentland (1816–1873), who is mentioned by one of the performers, was a famous circus comedian of the 19th century. He was also a ventriloquist, a singer, a juggler, and a magician.
The 1830s was a time when circuses were just beginning to evolve into their present form. Circuses of the 18th century were primarily exhibitions of skilled horseback riding, and did not tend to travel. Traveling acrobats, magicians, singers, and jugglers generally performed separately from such shows. Menageries also tended to be distinct entities; at first they were more like traveling zoos than collections of performing animals. By the 1830s, however, show managers had started to bring together menageries, equestrian acts, acrobats, comedians, and singers into large traveling shows. Shows might include things we don’t normally associate with circuses today, such as opera singers, displays of artwork, dramatic performances, or panoramas of historic events. Traveling tradesmen, peddlers, teachers, exhibitors, lecturers, and performers—what we might today think of as “sideshows”—often followed a circus in order to take advantage of the potential customers drawn by the larger show.
Like Mr. Chamberlain’s Peripatetic Museum, shows that traveled through New England in the 1830s often advertised themselves as museums or educational programs in order to evade laws that either prohibited traveling performers or levied heavy licensing fees. In spite of such laws, newspapers, diaries, and other records show that acrobats, menageries, trick riders, and other traveling entertainers roamed throughout New England. Advertisements emphasized the educational merits of a show and assured readers that performances would be morally uplifting, artistic, and “chaste.”
Entertainers usually stayed in local taverns, inns, and hotels, rather than in tents or wagons. (Mr. Chamberlain is an exception because of his desire to maintain his disguise as Prince Otoo Baswamati.) Circus tents, called “pavilions,” could accommodate audiences ranging from several hundred to a couple thousand. Some circuses would perform evening shows as well as afternoon shows. If there was no evening performance, members of the company might put on “house shows” at the inn or hotel where they were lodging. A house show might include music, dramatic recitations, or magic tricks.
Going to a show would be expensive: twenty-five or fifty cents in an era when a day’s wage for a laborer might be a dollar. While most performers would earn about six or seven dollars a week, a star performer could make a very good living—eleven to twelve dollars a week. Some shows traveled around New England from April to October, and then headed to a large city like New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore for the winter, where the show (often in a smaller format) might have a semipermanent home in an enclosed venue like a theater or an arena-like building. Others would spend the winter traveling in the South, or they might disband for the winter and reassemble in the spring.
Much of the information on traveling shows came from research at the Museum of the Early American Circus in Somers, New York, which has an amazing collection of posters, account books, and other material from shows of the early 19th century. Another excellent resource was the website of the Circus Historical Society (http://www.circushistory.org) which includes many firsthand accounts of 19th-century circus life. Most important of all were the works of Stuart Thayer (1926–2009), who wrote wonderfully detailed books and articles about pre–Civil War American circuses. His descriptions of circus pavilions and performances helped me create my Peripatetic Museum, and his transcripts of itineraries from early American shows helped me map out my performers’ journey.