Despite the regrettable outcome—Barnum shrieked in pain, smashed the table, and generally caused such a commotion that the audience asked for its money back—he knew enough about curtains and panels to rig up something that would convince everyone the mermaid was real.
And he’d even be able to satisfy Moses and use that old mummy. There could be a separate exhibit with a “scientific” history of mermaids with the monkey-fish at the center of it all.
But first he had to get the public excited about all that. He sat at his desk in the museum, listening to the building settle. The only other sound was that of his pen scratching on paper as he laid out his plan. If he did this right, there would be money falling from the sky.
His mermaid was going to make his fortune. He could feel it.
* * *
• • •
Amelia had never before slept in a place where she couldn’t hear the ocean. The small guest room where Charity placed her had only one small window, and that provided hardly any air. Amelia had struggled simply to open it in the first place. Nobody seemed to have done so before, and open windows were treated with suspicion by Charity, who appeared content to sit in stifling rooms all day.
Amelia could not smell the ocean from the window, not even the merest breath of salt. There were people out and moving about despite the hour, a continuous clop of horses’ hooves or bootheels on cobblestones.
The ever-present stink of pigs and animal waste drifted into the room, and Amelia closed the small window in frustration. People chose to live in this place, a place where all they could see were buildings and animals and more people and more people and more people, everywhere you went.
Barnum told her proudly that more than three hundred thousand people lived in the city, and more came every day. Amelia marveled that so many would choose to abandon the ocean or the forest or the wide-open fields and choose to live stacked on top of one another in a place where pigs had free rein in the streets. She wondered that she herself had made this choice. New York was supposed to be a marvel, but it mostly just felt like there was no space anywhere.
As for Barnum himself . . . she’d seen the way he looked at her as they’d talked. Like a possession. Like one of the dead things the throngs gawped at in the museum.
She’d noticed, too, the way Levi Lyman tried to stand between Barnum and herself, the way he gave her looks that told her it was better if she didn’t speak as much and left it to him, and how he’d so firmly stated the terms of their agreement in a way that would brook no argument from Barnum. It was clear from his manner that he’d designated himself her protector. She didn’t need protecting, but it was touching all the same.
Amelia let him do it, because she wanted a good look at Barnum. She might not be able to read words very well, but she could read faces, and her mind worked just fine, thank you very kindly. She had a fairly shrewd idea of what Barnum intended—to use her to wring out every coin he could get and to give her as few of them as possible.
Well, she wasn’t going to allow him to do that. She was doing this for her own reasons, and she would be damned before she let P. T. Barnum cheat her. She hadn’t crossed the ocean to be taken in by a confidence man.
Besides, she thought with a little smirk, he still thought she was a fake. His face clearly told her he believed her to be soft in the head. She would enjoy the expression on his face when he saw her change. She would enjoy serving crow to him on a platter.
Amelia rolled onto her back and stared at the cracks in the ceiling, just visible in the gloom. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, trying to duplicate the sound of the sea.
If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was back in the cottage, Jack asleep beside her, listening to the ebb and flow of the water crashing into the rocks below.
CHAPTER 5
Amelia wrinkled her nose at the crush of people aboard the steamer. Was there nowhere she could go where she was not surrounded by hordes?
Despite living in Barnum’s apartment for three weeks and taking regular excursions into the streets of New York City (accompanied always by Levi Lyman, who she suspected was following instructions from Barnum to not leave her alone), she was still not accustomed to the feeling of constantly having bodies all around her. Perfumed, sweating bodies, bodies that smelled like wet wool or pipe smoke or starched petticoats. There was never anywhere to get a breath of fresh air; it seemed to her very often that there wasn’t enough air to go around.
At least she could breathe in the sea from the ship deck, though that was nearly drowned out by the belching smoke coming from the belly of the contraption.
On either side of her stood Levi and Barnum, flanking her like the two burly constables she’d seen dragging an intoxicated man along Ann Street.
Neither Levi nor Barnum had touched her other than to offer an arm to assist boarding, but she had the distinct feeling neither of them would hesitate to grab her if it seemed she might slip away.
Though Levi’s reasons are different from Barnum’s, she admitted. Amelia had not failed to notice the looks Levi gave when he thought she wasn’t looking. He had stardust in his eyes, and Amelia was sorry for it.
He had not expressed this feeling in any way, which was a relief. There could be no good outcome from such a thing, not when her heart was still full of Jack. And she could use an ally against Barnum, who would press for every advantage.
Beside her, Barnum scowled as he stared over the railing. He’d been strongly vocal against what he called “this tomfoolery.”
Privately Levi told her that Barnum probably objected to the expense of going to Rhode Island. He loved to make money, but he despised spending it on things he couldn’t see immediately profited. But Amelia had been adamant that she needed a secluded beach and nightfall for a mermaid demonstration, and it was faster to take the ship to Providence than it was to cross to New Jersey and take a train to the coast. There was nothing like privacy on the island of Manhattan. She wasn’t about to change on a crowded beach in daylight. This first time she wanted only Levi and Barnum to see her; she wasn’t ready for the world yet.
All of this necessitated staying in a hotel overnight. Amelia already knew that Barnum was terribly tightfisted with his personal expenses. Almost all the money that came into the museum was put by for the museum—either to pay off the loan Barnum had taken out for its purchase or to invest in new acquisitions to exhibit. Charity spent an inordinate amount of time carefully mending her and the children’s clothing. Amelia, accustomed to thrift, saw no shame in this, but Charity clearly felt it was something to hide. People of her station did not mend their own clothes.
Amelia had been unable to hide her embarrassment when Barnum presented her with a new trunk of dresses in Charity’s presence. The look on Charity’s face as Amelia opened the box . . . the mermaid had never seen such hurt, or such longing.
Amelia immediately tried to refuse the garments. She did not want to start her relationship with Barnum owing him anything, and anyway he ought to save such gestures for his wife.
He was quite insistent that she needed to dress presentably, that she owned nothing adequate to need, and “Charity is too fat to wear any of these,” he’d said, and laughed.
His wife’s cheeks had reddened, but she hadn’t spoken a word. Amelia wished she would show some spirit, but she knew Charity would not thank her for saying so.
Amelia rather liked Charity, though the woman continued to view her with suspicious reserve. The mermaid knew Barnum’s wife thought her a trickster, someone out to take advantage of Barnum. There was really nothing more ridiculous than the thought of Barnum getting taken; if there was any taking to do, Amelia knew very well that he would be the one to do it.
She did not like the way he treated his wife and children at all, however. He wasn’t often with them, showed scant affection to his daughters, and actively
mocked Charity when others were in earshot.
It hardened Amelia’s initial impression of a man out to get what he could only for himself, with no concern for anyone but the paying public.
Even without Charity’s humiliation Amelia would have gladly sent away the trunk of clothing. Inside it were things Amelia had never worn before but was now expected to—dresses that required corsets and petticoats (sometimes five or six at a time), bonnets with such deep brims that Amelia often couldn’t see someone standing at her shoulder, capes, black lace mitts that did not warm the hands but were supposed to be flirtatious and fashionable.
Women generally carried a parasol whenever they were outdoors; Amelia felt so foolish holding it up against the sun that it often wound up banging uselessly against her hip.
The first time she saw herself in a mirror with all the requisite geegaws and her hair parted in the middle and pulled into a bun, she’d been unable to stop herself from crying.
Charity, who’d helped her into all the clothing and expected Amelia to be as thrilled as she would be had asked, “Whatever is the matter?”
Amelia, forgetting that truth was not preferred by polite people, blurted, “I look like a human.”
When Charity cautiously asked what she expected to look like, Amelia dried her face and exclaimed (in a patently false voice) that she’d never had such lovely things before.
She hated it all, every string and ruffle and bit of lace. The greatest relief of her day was unwinding the many required layers, removing her corset, and loosening her hair.
She took to lying on her bed, fully naked atop the coverlet, convinced that her garments would slowly kill her if her skin was not allowed to breathe.
The awkwardness of the skirts was exacerbated in large crowds like the ones on the ferry. Women’s dresses were always bumping into other women’s dresses and brushing against men’s trouser legs. Amelia imagined a whole universe of polite “excuse me”s occurring at ankle level.
Levi also frowned at the water as Barnum did. The two of them were a matched pair with Amelia in the center. Amelia suspected, though, that Levi’s distress was related to the forthcoming revelation. She knew Levi believed the truth—that she was a mermaid. It wasn’t anything explicit he’d said to her or even a change in his manner; rather, it manifested in the way he spoke to Barnum about her.
This was apparent when she’d repeated to Barnum the week before that she would not appear onstage without a demonstration.
“Demonstration of what?” he’d asked.
“Of my abilities,” Amelia said patiently. “You should know precisely what I am before you show me to all and sundry.”
It was vital that Barnum know this wasn’t a “humbug,” as he called it. She needed salt water and not fresh in the tank or she wouldn’t change. The only way to convince him to take on the extra trouble and expense of salt water was to show him that she needed it.
She also knew that her true form, her water form, did not resemble in the least the advertisements Barnum was designing. These woodcuts depicted beautiful bare-breasted women with fish tails.
Amelia’s people did not look like these. She did not look like a woman when she was in the water. She looked like what she was—a mermaid, a creature of the sea.
So she’d insisted, and quite firmly, that there would be no performance until Barnum witnessed her change.
“That’s enough of this foolishness,” Barnum said.
The tips of his ears turned red—a sign that he was about to display a rare bit of temper. But Levi cut him off before he could get started.
“It’s not foolishness, Taylor. You’ll want to see this,” Levi said.
Barnum looked from Amelia to Levi. “You buy all this nonsense, Levi? I thought you said you never went near the water when you were in Maine.”
“I didn’t need to,” Levi said.
He wasn’t loud or angry or blustering. He just looked at Barnum with steady dark eyes until the other man relented.
“This had better be worth it,” he grumbled.
Barnum still didn’t believe, even though he’d bought the tickets and reserved the hotel rooms. He had to acknowledge there was no mermaid program without her, and with Levi on her side, he’d been close to a mutiny. Amelia knew Barnum wouldn’t risk the whole show, so he’d decided to err on the side of keeping her content.
He’d have preferred, she knew, to be in the museum thinking up schemes and illusions. Barnum had proposed a ridiculous notion that involved Amelia changing into a costumed fish tail in the water of the tank.
“The audience has to see you change from girl to fish, you see? We can use curtains and lighting to do the trick. I was thinking if we showed only your silhouette—”
“You won’t need tricks,” Amelia interrupted. “You only need salt water, and I’ll prove it to you.”
Barnum gave her a dubious look and went on describing his plan to fool the public. She sighed and let him go on talking. He would see soon enough.
She was, she admitted to herself, a little nervous. It was a strange feeling, a queasy shaking in the hollow of her stomach. It took Amelia a long time to figure out just what it was, for she couldn’t recall ever feeling that way before.
This was the first time she’d ever purposely shown someone her water form—the time Jack caught her in his net she hadn’t meant to be seen.
And she certainly hadn’t meant for that fisherman to see her, either—the drunk who’d spread tales of her all up and down the coast of Maine.
Amelia wondered what the villagers would think if they heard she was displaying herself in a tank in New York City. They’d protected her from interlopers like Barnum and Levi, had let her live and grieve in her own way, and she was grateful to them.
But this was her choice now—her choice to be something other than Jack’s wife, or one small town’s mermaid mascot.
What will you be to Barnum, though? What will you be once he sees who you really are?
* * *
• • •
The hotel was nowhere near the beach, of course. Beachfront property was expensive, and Barnum never paid an extra penny unless it was to a purpose. Besides, they didn’t want to bump into hotel guests while about their business. The mermaid was a secret until someone paid for a ticket to see her.
Levi knew that if circumstances were different—say, if they were touring the country to display the mermaid—Barnum would book them in the finest room in town, with all the attendant fanfare. As it was, Barnum grumbled about the cost of two rooms and the fact that Amelia needed her own.
Amelia gave the showman such a look at this that Barnum actually blushed. It was no small thing to embarrass Barnum; Levi thought he’d been born shameless.
Barnum arranged for a coach to take them to the waterfront several hours after dark. The coachman asked no questions, although he did look askance at two men and one woman leaving a boardinghouse in the middle of the night.
Amelia’s face was veiled. Barnum and Levi wore their hats low over their faces. Levi was unlikely to be recognized, but Barnum might be. You never knew who had been to the museum and spotted him at his desk in the exhibition hall.
Amelia was completely silent during the ride. Levi wondered what she was thinking, then wondered if he would ever have the right to know the answer, if that was a privilege she would ever give him.
The horse and carriage stopped on a little rise, and the three of them climbed out. Amelia waved away Levi’s hand when he offered to help her down. Barnum told the driver to return in an hour, and the three of them waited until the coach was out of sight before descending to the beach.
There was a path that led through tall scrubby grass down to the sand below. The moon rose full and high, and the stretch of beach they were on seemed dangerously exposed, to Levi’s way of thinking. Farther down the beach, perhap
s a half mile or more, a large hotel was perched on the rise. But there was no one nearby, no movement on the water or the sand, and Levi thought it would be safe. He hoped it would be safe.
Barnum grumbled about the rocks, the footing, the scratchiness of the grass, but Amelia moved forward with surety toward the ocean. Levi realized he hadn’t seen her this way since Maine; in New York she was just a fraction more hesitant in everything she did. It was as if she constantly weighed and measured every action and potential response for correctness. The result was that she was always sober and distant; he couldn’t recall ever seeing her smile.
Levi had made a game of trying to make her happy—taking her to all his favorite places in the city, bringing her sweets he thought she would enjoy, reading humorous stories aloud in Charity’s parlor.
Amelia’s response was always the same—grave appreciation. It did seem sincere, but there was no joy in it. She reached the beach long before they did. Levi was a little way behind her on the path, and Barnum farther back, not bothering to disguise his curses.
She shed the bonnet and veil first, dropping them in the sand like trash, and unbound her hair as she walked. She’d changed into the same plain dress she wore on her arrival in New York, and now he knew why—the dress was off her body in a flash, a feat she’d never have managed with a gown made for corset and petticoats.
Beneath it she wore nothing at all. He gasped when he saw how thin she was, even thinner than when she arrived, despite Barnum’s edict that she fatten up.
Amelia stopped when she reached the edge of the water. Levi paused at the bottom of the path, staring. Her pale skin seemed luminescent in the moonlight. Barnum stumbled to Levi’s side, muttering under his breath and shaking sand from his pant cuffs.
Amelia glanced over her shoulder, just long enough to be sure they were watching, and Levi sucked in a hard breath. She was smiling.
There was so much pure joy on her face it was like he’d been shown happiness for the first time. Then her feet touched the water and it happened.
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