Blood and Circuses pf-6

by Kerry Greenwood

  Phryne boiled with shame. Second-hand garments, hand-me-downs, had been an aspect of childhood poverty that had been hard to bear. She hated wearing clothes made for someone else. But she gulped her humiliation down and accepted a skimpy sky-blue tunic from Miss Bevan. It had been patched.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Phryne. ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Miss Bevan. She lost interest in them and Dulcie drew Phryne on.

  ‘That’s the Flying Bevans. They’re world-class flyers. Everyone wants to be a flyer.’

  ‘Do they?’ said Phryne, folding the tunic. Miss Bevan was right. It was nothing. Phryne was feeling angry and ashamed. She was being ignored. Miss Bevan had not even looked at her or spoken to her directly. ‘Where now?’

  ‘Round here are the sleeping tents. They double as changing tents.’

  Phryne lifted a flap. A long row of beds lined one side of the tent. Each had a trunk or suitcase next to it. The other side was cluttered with costumes hanging over lines, properties, and what appeared to be an elephant saddle.

  ‘Here’s the kitchen,’ said Dulcie. ‘Hello, Mrs T. What’s for lunch?’

  A bent crone scowled up from her covey of kettles. Steam had damped her hair and it hung in witch-locks around her nutcracker face.

  ‘You take your fingers out of me pots, Dulcie,’ she snarled. ‘Lunch is over. You’ll have to wait till dinner. And what are you trailing along with yer? Another mouth to feed?’ She glared at Phryne. ‘Ye’re nothing but a nuisance, girl.’

  Dulcie did not seem at all cast down. ‘Stew again?’ she asked. ‘I dunno what you’d do if them sheep didn’t keep on dying of old age.’

  Mrs T threw a tin mug with accuracy and venom. Dulcie ducked and caught the missile with effortless grace. Then she juggled it with a box of matches and a ladle. She tossed them back, one by one, to the old woman, who caught them easily. Dulcie backed away, taking Phryne with her.

  ‘She’s a good cook but she ain’t half got a temper. You stay out of casting range when she loses her rag, Fern. Even chucked a chopper, once, and missed the old man’s head by a whisker. He was complaining about having mutton stew ten days running. She told him to go kill a horse if he wanted a change of diet. She’s married to a clown, though. That always sours the temper.’

  ‘What, one of the Shakespeares?’

  ‘No, they ain’t married. They’re Jews. They don’t get married like us. No, Mrs T married Thompson, the acrobatic clown. He’s a great performer and he loves his dog, but he’s a real mean old cuss otherwise. Clowns are like that. They waste all their niceness on the audience. Then they ain’t got none left for the rest of us. All right, now, that’s the men’s tent. Instant dismissal if you’re caught inside it, no matter what the reason. Farrell told you that? This caravan belongs to Mr Robert Sheridan, the magician, he ain’t here yet. He don’t lodge with us common folk when we’re in town. Wait a bit. I have to deliver a message. Just wait for me here.’

  Phryne felt in her pocket for a cigarette. There seemed to be no rule against smoking. She lit a gasper and drew in the smoke gratefully. She was feeling off balance. Deprived of her usual props and stays and allies, and having to speak with the accent of her childhood, she was losing confidence. No one seemed to like her, and she was used to being liked, or at least noticed. She closed her eyes.

  A strong hand took hold of her scarf and pulled at it. She gasped, her eyes snapping open. The hand felt rapidly down her body until it reached her cardigan pocket. She let the scarf fall, grabbed for the hand and found she was holding an elephant’s trunk.

  The end was soft, pinkish, and as sure as the grasp of fingers. She sighted up along it to a grey mass of body, tethered by one foot to a picket. Bright eyes in the plane of the face winked at her. Sail-like ears flapped.

  ‘Oh, you gave me such a shock,’ said Phryne as the delicate trunk curled around her wrist with a warm noise like a kiss. ‘My, you are big! What a huge creature you are.’ The elephant gave an absurdly small squeak, the sort of noise that should have come from a mouse, Phryne thought. It rocked from foot to foot. ‘What do you want?’ asked Phryne as the trunk began to quest through her clothes. ‘Oh, I see.’

  There were three peppermints in her pocket, which she had brought to feed the horses. She was about to bring them out when the trunk curled back to the huge mouth and a noise like a concrete mixer offended her ears. The elephant had picked her pocket. ‘I wonder who taught you that?’ she asked aloud.

  ‘Rajah, you’re a bad girl,’ said a sharp voice. ‘You ain’t been doing that pickpocket trick on our own folk, not after I told you it was a low mean act.’

  A tiny man with hay in his hair ducked under Rajah’s bulk and blinked into the sunlight.

  ‘I’m Fern,’ said Phryne. ‘I’m the new rider in the rush.’

  She waited for him to snub her, as Lyn Bevan had, but the small man was too busy apologising for his elephant to concern himself with questions of status.

  ‘Billy Thomas,’ said the elephant keeper. ‘I dunno where she picked that up. Did it herself, maybe. Queer creatures, elephants. Sorry about that. I keep moving her picket back and she keeps movin’ it forward again. What did she get?’

  ‘Three peppermints.’

  ‘That’s all right. I gotta be careful. She’ll eat herself sick on fairy lollies, and what that does to her digestion don’t bear thinking about. An elephant with a belly-ache ain’t no laughing matter. You watch her from now on. Elephants don’t forget. Well, they don’t forget someone who has peppermints in their pockets.’ He ducked back under the canvas shade, pulling Rajah with him. Phryne could hear him hammering in the picket, to the accompaniment of a lot of cursing.

  Dulcie returned and Phryne called excitedly, ‘Dulcie, an elephant just picked my pocket!’

  ‘Oh, yair, that Rajah. Nice old cow, otherwise. But she dearly loves lollies and Billy won’t give her more than a few. So she steals ’em. Come along. There’s the jugglers’ caravans. I live there with my partner Tom. Next to us is the Cat’lans. I wish they were further away.’

  Phryne caught the eye of a slim, dark man. He was sitting in the sun mending a pair of much-worn sequined trunks. He did not smile but scanned her with black eyes. She did not know what language he spoke, so she ventured on French.

  ‘Bonjour, M’sieur.’

  Dulcie dragged at her sleeve. ‘I told you not to have nothing to do with them foreigners!’

  Phryne pulled away. She had been pushed around more than she was accustomed to lately.

  ‘Jour,’ said the man, smiling a brilliant smile. ‘Mademoiselle Àgata! ’ he called into the tent. ‘Quelqu’un qui parle français! Someone who speaks French!’

  Àgata emerged, a thin woman holding a suckling baby. She beamed.

  ‘Aaró? Si? I tant! ’ She addressed Phryne directly. ‘Vous parlez français? Et voila—ca me fait plaisir. Do you speak French? What a pleasant surprise!’

  ‘Vous faiters partie du cirque? Are you with the circus?’ asked the man.

  ‘Oui, je suis écuyère . . . Et vous? Yes, I am a rider,’ said Phryne. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Nous sommes des équilibristes. Nous avons perfectionné le castell—la pyramide humaine. We are balancers. We have perfected the human pyramid,’ Àgata broke in eagerly. ‘Vous devez venir vous voir. Nous sommes en troisième lieu à là liste, Mare de Déu. You must come and see us. We have third billing.’ Phryne found the woman hard to follow. She seemed to be thinking in another language. The accent was harsh and definite and she had never heard it before.

  ‘Bien sûr. Mais d’ òu venez-vous? But where do you come from?’ One thing she was sure of. ‘Vous n’ êtes pas français. You aren’t French.’

  Àgata laid the baby over her shoulder and patted its back. It was small and dark and it burped resoundingly.

  ‘Non, senyoreta, nous sommes Catalans. Nousautres aimons mieux parler le français que le castillian. We are Catalans. We would rather spea
k French than Spanish.’

  Her husband interposed, seeing Phryne’s difficulty. ‘Je doute fort que vous parliez le catalan. I doubt that you can speak Catalan.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Les autres nous appellent les étrangers. The others call us foreign. Il n’y a que le nain, M Burton, qui parle français. No one else can speak French, except for Mr Burton the dwarf.’

  Àgata laughed. ‘Un homenet bien enseigné. An educated little man.’

  Aaró agreed. ‘Un petit bonhomme bien savant,’ he said. Phryne wondered if he was being ironic. Savant also described a performing flea. Then again, there was certainly something of the performing flea about the amazing Mr Burton. ‘Voudriez-–vous nous faire le plaisir de souper avec nous? Perhaps you will like to dine some time?’

  ‘Je veu bien. Je vous en remercie. Thank you, I would be delighted,’ said Phryne. ‘Bon, je dois partir. Mon cavalier s’ énerve. I’d better go. My escort is becoming nervous. Je suis bien contente d’avoir fait votre connaissance. A bientôt. How delightful to meet you.’

  ‘Adéu,’ said Àgata. ‘Petite cavaliere?

  ’ ‘A bientôt,’ echoed Aaró.

  ‘You ain’t foreign, are you, Fern?’ asked Dulcie suspiciously.

  Phryne laughed. ‘No. I learned—’ Oops. She had to think fast. ‘I lived in Collingwood when I was a kid. Went to school there. I picked up a bit of the lingo. Enough to get along. Come on. What’s over there?’ She pointed to a row of steel cages under a canvas awning.

  ‘Lions. We gotta be careful. Mr Burton said the lions was upset and an upset lion ain’t nothing to fool about with. But all the newies want to see the lions. I’ll go first.’

  Phryne followed Dulcie into a narrow alley. There was a stench of raw meat and something more worrying, a reek of predator. The hair on the back of Phryne’s neck bristled. An inheritance, she thought, from the days when lions hunted humans. Some small primitive Phryne had streaked across the grassland and up a tree just out of ripping distance of those terrible claws, those long sharp white teeth, that hot red gullet. That cave-dwelling Phryne was gibbering frantically in the back of 1928 Phryne’s head.

  Three men were discussing the racing news, seated on folding canvas chairs. The central figure was big and running to fat, with a crop of longish hair as white as wax. The other two were undistinguished, rather oily, in overalls. One had each finger and most of both palms strapped up in sticking plaster.

  ‘Well, I’m putting my money on Strephon,’ declared the man with the plaster. ‘I like the name. And I reckon the weather’ll suit him. Hello! What have we here?’

  ‘Dulcie and a new girl,’ said the big man languidly. ‘Hello, Dulcie. Who is this?’

  ‘Fern. I’m showing her around.’ Dulcie sounded cautious.

  ‘And of course you could not stay away from Amazing Hans and his equally amazing lions!’

  Amazing Hans stood up. He had just a trace of German accent and was magnificent, his mane of white hair resembling that of the lions. He gestured to them to come under the awning. Iron bars made the occupants of the cages hard to see but Phryne did not want to see them any clearer.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said. Something snarled in the half-dark and Phryne made out teeth and eyes. ‘Sam, Boy, King, Albert and Prince. Presently of Farrell’s Circus, soon to be . . . well.’

  ‘You, too?’ Dulcie eyed him disapprovingly. ‘Ain’t Farrell’s a good show? And ain’t Farrell been good to you? Bought you that new lion and all?’

  ‘He has been good to me,’ said Hans precisely. ‘But he is no longer in charge. And too many things have been going wrong, Dulcie. These beasts need a lot of care, you know. There’s the food and the vet’s bills. It’s costly.’

  ‘Aren’t they hard to handle? I thought that female lions were more fierce,’ said Phryne. Amazing Hans scowled at her.

  ‘What would you know? Amazing Hans does not need advice from a slip of a new girl. They recognise me as their master. Female and male.’

  ‘They’re just big cats,’ sneered the man with the plastered hands. He ran a finger along the steel bars and whistled to the lion inside. It stood up and shook itself.

  ‘You think so?’ Hans laughed unpleasantly. ‘Just cats, eh? I’d advise you not to take them for granted, Jack.’

  Hans approached and Jack stepped back from him. Dulcie took Phryne’s cardigan sleeve and drew her towards the sunlight. ‘Not to be taken lightly,’ advised Hans in a gentle voice. Jack took another pace away and snarled, ‘What’re you doing?’ a split second before the air was wounded by a thunderous roar. A clawed paw shot out between the bars. Jack squealed. The claws had raked his skin, leaving thin parallel scratches as clean cut as a razor-blade. The stout cloth of the overall had been slit.

  Amazing Hans laughed merrily. ‘You’d better go and get Mrs Thompson to put some lard on that,’ he said. ‘Don’t come near my lions again. They’ve got a good memory,’ he added, as Jack scuttled past him into the alley. ‘And Prince has got your scent now.’

  Phryne and Dulcie walked away. Phryne found that she was shaking.

  ‘I don’t like ’em either,’ confessed Dulcie. ‘Nothing that big ought to have teeth like daggers. Still, they’re a draw.’

  They had come to a small patch of grass outside a neat green caravan, where a shirtless, tanned man was plaiting leather bootlaces into what looked like a leash.

  ‘Give me a hand with this,’ he grunted. Phryne sat down and took the four ends from his hand and watched as the deft fingers moved like shuttles. After a few minutes, he tied off the end and looked up.

  ‘Thanks. Who’s this, Dulcie? I thought she was Andy. Want a cuppa?’

  A kettle was singing on a small fire. Phryne was thirsty. So was Dulcie.

  ‘Thanks, Bernie. Her name’s Fern, she’s a new rider. I’d kill for a cuppa, Bernie, thanks.’ Dulcie flopped down onto the grass. I never realise how big Farrell’s is until I take a newie around.’

  Mr Wallace made mugs of strong tea with milk and sugar and opened a tin of ginger biscuits. He accepted one of Phryne’s cigarettes, without thanks, as though it were his due. Phryne had been bolstering her courage. Now it was leaking away like sand out of a sandbag. She sat down on the grass, ignored, and feeling utterly forlorn.

  ‘This is the life,’ said Bernard Wallace, smoking contentedly and blowing on his tea. ‘Nice day, sun shining, no show tonight and Dulcie the juggler to talk to.’

  A dog inserted its head under Phryne’s elbow soliciting attention and biscuits. She managed not to spill her tea and stroked the smooth head absent-mindedly.

  ‘Just Bruno, he’s all right,’ observed Mr Wallace. ‘What’s new, then, Dulcie?’

  ‘Nothing much. You heard about Mr Christopher?’ Bernard nodded. ‘Lots of ’em are thinking of leaving. Even Mr Burton. How about you?’

  ‘Nah. Farrell’s I started and Farrell’s I’ll end. Got a couple more years’ work and then I’m off to the country with Bruno. I reckon Farrell’s will last that long.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Dulcie. ‘Who would a couple of greasy fellers be, one with his hands all bandaged up?’

  ‘A couple of fellers, I s’pose. There’s a lot of newies this time round. And a couple of the worst roustabouts I ever saw trying to put up a pup-tent this morning. Talk about cack-handed! Give him a bit of your biscuit,’ he advised, speaking directly to Phryne for the first time. ‘He loves ginger biscuits.’

  It was at this point that Phryne finished her tea and looked down. Instead of the dog she had expected, she found that she had been caressing the round furry head of a bear. He had black, twinkling eyes, almost buried in deep cinnamon fur. His ears looked to be insecurely gummed on and his nose was cold and wet at the end of a long snout.

  Her hand fell from the domed forehead and the bear nudged her. She kept stroking and he rumbled blissfully and leaned on her. Phryne leaned back as hard as she could till they established an equilibrium.

  ‘That’s Bruno. He likes you,’ commented Mr Wallace
with some surprise, as though the creature should have had better taste. ‘Bears always take likes and dislikes at first sight. Some people they hate, some people they love. Some they just ignore.’

  ‘He ignores me,’ said Dulcie. ‘Thankfully.’

  ‘He likes me,’ said Phryne, honoured but rather hot and squashed. ‘Get off now, Bruno.’

  She shoved hard and managed to scramble to her feet, still holding the ginger biscuit. As she came up off the ground, so did Bruno. He stood considerably taller than she and opened his mouth, begging. Phryne found that he had a remarkable array of what looked like very sharp teeth. His paws, resting on her shoulders, weighed her down. Phryne noticed that he was curling up the ends of his paws so as to keep his claws away from her skin. She was not afraid. She dropped the biscuit into the gaping mouth.

  ‘There, good Bruno.’

  The biscuit vanished instantly and Bruno sniffed at her for any others concealed about her person. When she opened both hands and he snuffled up a few crumbs, he dropped to all fours again and looked around hopefully for more.

  ‘All right, you beggar, here’s another biscuit,’ said Mr Wallace, getting up. ‘But you gotta dance for it. Hup!’ Before Phryne’s enchanted gaze, Bruno lifted up onto his hind legs and solemnly circled three times. Then he sat down and waited for his reward.

  ‘There you are, good bear. He’s as good as a wife,’ said Mr Wallace, scratching Bruno behind the ear. ‘Cruel to make him sleep in a cage next to the lions. But shire councils will be shire councils and they just don’t understand about bears. Old Bruno fetches and carries and is as good as gold and he don’t talk. What more could a man want? Have another cup, Dulcie?’