The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus

by Jaime Jo Wright

  To know much and taste nothing—of what use is that?

  “Who is it from?” Victoria’s inquiry was needlessly sharp. Probably because she was shaken by the recent exchange.

  Pippa clutched the letter to her chest. “No one important.”

  Victoria’s brow rose, and she swiftly snatched the missive from Pippa’s hand. Her eyes skimmed it. She frowned. “Who is this from?”

  “I-I don’t know.” It was the truth.

  Victoria sniffed. “They quote one of the saints—it’s no coincidence.”

  “Saints?” That they weren’t Catholic was not lost on Pippa. However, she knew of her mother’s superstitious nature, of the way she’d consulted a priest on Pippa’s behalf years before.

  “You’re not—seeing him again, are you? You’ve said nothing . . . for so long, I’d hoped . . .” Victoria sank onto a chair, her face ashen. She clutched the Watchman’s note in her hand. Pippa eyed it. Wishing she had her mother’s skill at snatching things from another’s hand.

  “What saint?” Pippa deflected.

  Victoria stared at the paper. Her spirit and her fight drained from her, with Georgiana a forgotten moment. “Saint Bonaventure. He was a seeker of truth, they say.”

  Seeker of truth.

  “But—”

  “I know.” Victoria waved the message in the air. “Bonaventure Circus. Curious, yes? Where did this come from, child? Who sent it to you?”

  Pippa hated lying. But then it wasn’t really a lie, was it? And she didn’t need her mother fearing that she was seeing spirits, or was possessed, or, God forbid, losing her mind. Of course, it was a very real note, delivered in the physical realm. There was more than superstition behind it.

  “I really don’t know who sent it, Mother.”

  She was certain her mother would read her face, would know she wasn’t being completely truthful.

  “It’s an ill wind that bodes no good.” Victoria stood and handed the message to Pippa. Pippa reached to take it, but her mother held on to the opposite end, begging her attention. “To know much and taste nothing leaves a person very dissatisfied. Precariously so.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Pippa nodded.

  Victoria still did not release the note. “The pursuit of truth often leaves one wanting. It’s best sometimes not to seek it, but rather to be content with one’s lot.” With that, her mother released it and stepped around Pippa. She paused before exiting the room. “The truth has always left me wanting,” she muttered, a sad, almost desperate tone lacing her observation. “It can be remarkably horrid, and horrors are best kept tucked away.”

  Pippa’s sleep that night was fitful. She’d caressed the note from the Watchman with her thumb as she tucked it safely atop the growing stack of messages and tied the red ribbon around them, hiding them in the far back drawer of her bureau. But tonight it had not been a fond, wistful caress as it had in the past. Now, as she lay in bed, even with Penn’s weight lying over her legs, Pippa couldn’t elude the uneasiness as she massaged the muscles in the thigh of her bad leg.

  Leave the truth alone, her mother had implied. A warning? Did she know more than she was willing to say? Or was there only personal angst and life wrapped in her words, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Pippa and from where Pippa had come? One could easily argue that Pippa should be grateful, even feel treasured that the Ripleys had taken her in—an abandoned baby in a basket on their doorstep. That the note identifying her as offspring of circus folk hadn’t turned the Ripleys away from her or made them shun her. That they hadn’t handed her back to the circus they owned and insisted someone there care for the poor, deformed orphan. No. They had taken her in. Raised her. Safeguarded her. It was, one could argue, Pippa’s own fault that she was ostracized and alone in her world.

  Penn shifted, licked her chops as though she’d just finished a steak, then dropped her head with a flop on the blankets and returned to snoring. Pippa’s thoughts took a more sinister turn as she stared through the darkness at her bedroom ceiling.

  If the Watchman had been the one who attacked Jake’s sister, it didn’t fit. It wasn’t consistent with what Pippa knew of him—what little she knew of him. His missives were sentimental in nature, almost gentle. True, they had turned pressing of late. More insistent. And she couldn’t discount the burlap sack she’d seen over his face, with those gaping eyes that threatened to swallow her soul and drag it to a dark place. The visions of winged demons fluttered through Pippa’s mind, and she twisted to her side in a swift motion, startling Penn as she buried her face in her pillow.

  She curled her fingers around the crisp sheet that covered her body with its cool embrace. It had been cleaned and pressed into a geometric and tidy bed before she had retired. Now it was tossed and torn from its tucks as Pippa fought with the hunter that lived inside of her, stalking her peace like its prey, devouring her confidence as though it were merely an appetizer before the main course that would be her value and worth.

  Clive had told her once that one didn’t need to be recognized by humanity in order to creep out of the shadows and expose themselves to life. The dwarf insisted that life was meant to be lived in full vibrance of being recognized by the One who had created them.

  “If I waited to live—to truly, really live—until my fellow man saw me as a whole person, even viewed me as human, then I would die a lonely and broken man.”

  “But you work in a circus,” Pippa had argued. She was the most honest with Clive. He inspired it in her, that honesty that removed all shielding of words, all worry of offense. “People do see you, but they mock or laugh. Don’t you encourage that by your own participation?”

  Clive had smiled, a few stubbly whiskers on his chin and upper lip proving he could try to grow a beard but would never really succeed at it. “Perhaps. But there’s little opportunity for a man like me, Pippa. The world doesn’t recognize me as someone capable. Some don’t even believe I have emotion. They don’t know the truth. But I do, and it’s all right. I know who I am.”

  “Who are you?” she’d asked.

  Clive had reached out and patted her hand, allowing for a long moment of silence. His answer had pierced her and plagued her ever since. “I am Clive. I am seen and loved by God. I was created for a purpose. I need no other truth.”

  Pippa threw back the sheet and sat up. The house was deathly quiet, and truth had never seemed so threatening as it did right now. A conundrum. A swirling vortex of confusion. How could truth be to one, like Clive, a comfort, to another, like the Watchman or herself, a torment, and to someone like her mother something to be feared? Was it possible that truth could wield itself like an unpredictable weapon, healing some and scarring others?

  The Watchman could tell her who she was. He could pull her from the recesses of life into the fresh air of knowing—really knowing—who she was and where she belonged. She knew it. In her deepest heart. Clive might credit his peace with that of a spiritual nature, yet hadn’t God made mistakes? He’d skimped on generosity when He’d created Clive so little. He’d turned his back to her when she came out of her mother’s womb deformed, and then He’d discarded her mother and father to the grave. Those were errors God could have corrected had He wanted to. But He hadn’t. He hadn’t spared Jake’s sister the violence of an attack. An attack by a man Jake now hunted with a vengeance.

  Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Pippa drew in a long breath. Her mother was wrong. She had to be. Truth must be known, seen, and understood. Only then could a person walk forward, no longer blind and ignorant. But educated, even if the truth was, as her mother predicted, so full of horror it threatened a soul’s peace.

  The Watchman was Pippa’s only pinpoint of light in the distance. Her only hope of finding her truth.

  Pippa’s bare feet padded across the wool rug that covered the cold wood floor. A floorboard squeaked beneath her slight weight, but she ignored it as she reached for the switch on the lamp at her dressing table. The electric glow filled
her bedroom with a softness that warred against the wild pounding of her heart. Frustration roiled her stomach and caused Pippa to chew on the inside of her lip. She wanted to be seen. To be seen! Not just be Pippa Ripley the orphan, the nobody, but Pippa Ripley the somebody. Like Georgiana Farnsworth. Well, maybe not quite like her, but bold and vibrant all the same. Confident and passionate. If God wouldn’t take her life into His hands, then Pippa must do it herself. She must be like Jake and fight. Fight until she became like Clive and found peace—however elusive it might be.

  Her fingers were shaking as she slid open the drawer of her table. She pulled out a small pair of gold scissors, then slipped onto the stool facing her mirror. The metal of the scissors glistened in the lamplight. Pippa held them up, looking at her reflection in the mirror. At her delicate features, her eyes that turned up slightly at the corners, her nose that tilted just a bit to the left, and her lips that had a defined bow in the center and a little dimple at the corner. Her strawberry-blond hair spilled over her shoulders. Hair she twisted and curled and pinned every morning in traditional ladylike fashion.

  “Who knew God had one of me up His sleeve?”

  The words of Patty Luchent from the circus costume house resonated in Pippa’s memory. Yes. Who knew indeed? She lifted a lock of her hair in one hand, the scissors in the other, and with a decisive snip she determined to fight her way out of the shadows of insignificance and be exposed by the rawness of truth. However horrible it might be.

  Chapter nineteen

  My, my, my!” Patty Luchent slouched against the corner of the costume house, a cigarette balanced at the end of her sticklike holder. Her red lips tilted up in a friendly smile, and a knowing twinkle sparkled in her eye like the reflection of lights in a dance hall. “Ain’t you a doll?”

  Confidence. Confidence. Confidence.

  She had very little. Pippa fought the urge to duck her head, turn heel, and hurry back home. Back to the manor on the hill where she could slink up the back stairs to her room and wait for her impulse to grow back. Added to last night’s blatant act, she had also left home this morning to check on Lily the elephant calf’s welfare. Without Forrest. Without her father. Worst of all, without their permission. Her mother hadn’t stopped her. She’d stared vacantly into a corner, her arms wrapped around her as if trying to protect herself from something. She had hardly spoken since the Watchman’s message had been delivered yesterday.

  Patty pushed off the wall of the house and swayed in Pippa’s direction. Her eyes glanced over Penn, who wagged her gray tail and sniffed the air as Patty approached. A mixture of tobacco scent and jasmine perfume clouded around the woman, her cotton dress fancied up with a scooped neckline and a strand of fake pearls landing at her waist.

  Patty walked a slow, studious circle around Pippa, her smile growing wider. Then, without warning, she plucked the navy hat from Pippa’s head and stepped back. Pippa grabbed for her covering. A special kind of panic grew in her. She felt naked. Naked without her heavy curtain of hair rolled into a proper cluster of curls.

  “Please.” Pippa stretched farther for her hat as Patty held it behind her back.

  “Not at all,” Patty laughed. Even her laugh was pretty. Infectious. “I say, honey, you are gonna turn some heads today. And with that dress?” She waved her hand with the cigarette holder up and down the length of Pippa. “You look smashing in jade green. Like a fairy princess who dances in the leaves.”

  Pippa paused.

  Patty’s eyes narrowed and she drew in pencil-thin brows. “Your hair is quite straight, though. Which is fine,” she quickly added. “But I could teach you how to wave it with an iron. Or better yet, we should get you to the barber and have him even this out.” Patty flipped the bluntly cut hair that rested in line with Pippa’s chin. “Add some bangs. Yes. We must.”

  Pippa drew back, reaching instinctively for the comfort of Penn’s short gray fur. She dug her fingers into it, and Penn must have sensed Pippa’s anxiety. Her tongue lapped Pippa’s hand in comfort. “I-I can’t go to a barber. That’s—shameful.”

  “Not shameful.” Patty tossed Pippa’s hat onto the costume house’s porch. “Just not done by most women. You’re a brave sort, Pippa Ripley, to cut your own hair.”

  “How do you know I cut it myself?”

  Patty bit her upper lip to squelch a smile. “Welllll, as I said, it needs some evening out.”

  Pippa let her shoulders sag. This was ridiculous! A moment of brazen insanity caused by the pompous dark night that had the audacity to mess with her mind and allow the ghosts of bravery to tempt Pippa’s sinful nature.

  “I should never have done it.” Anxiousness threatened to close her throat. She’d joined the level of women who frequented dives and sipped bootleg liquor and smoked and swore and were promiscuous and—

  “Stop.” Patty flung her arm around Pippa’s shoulder and pulled Pippa to her side in a gentle but firm embrace. “I can see your fears all over your face. You know, there are all these rules and standards in ‘normal’ society, everything black-and-white”—Patty tilted Pippa’s chin up to look down the road—“but when you live here, you live in color.” A line of elephants was trudging toward them, with Ernie and Jake leading the huge beasts. The men walked them like an owner would casually walk his dog for some afternoon exercise. “When you live here,” Patty repeated, “your life is anything but normal. You see that God has a far bigger imagination than those stiff-backed ladies at your church.”

  Pippa swallowed. There was something about the elephants. Their majesty. Their regal heads and their billowing ears. They were kind, obedient even, and yet in their eyes they were wild. Wild and strong, brave and savvy. Could God possibly mix such reckless beauty with order and control? One must choose between the two, mustn’t one?

  Patty tugged on Pippa, pulling her toward the house. “Come. Bring that dog of yours too. If you’re not gonna go to the barber, then let me help. There’s no shortage of scissors in this place.”

  She’d done more than trim Pippa’s uneven self-bobbed hair. Patty had taken rouge papers to Pippa’s cheeks, a lip tracer to her mouth for that perfect plum pout, and even performed some sort of cosmetic magic around her eyes that resulted in a darker, more dramatic look. Without a curling iron and a bed of hot coals, Patty had taken it upon herself to slash a thick fringe across Pippa’s forehead, and now her straight, strawberry-blond hair was a perfect frame for her delicate features.

  “Good gosh, you’re straight out of a magazine!”

  Pippa couldn’t help the little smile that tilted her lips as she peered into the handheld mirror Patty all but shoved toward her face.

  “Yes, that’s right, doll.” Patty nodded. “You like what you see. There ain’t anything wrong with that. Of course, your momma will probably go to an early grave, but it’s about time someone shakes up those stiffs on the hill.”

  “Who?” Pippa thought she knew who Patty referred to, yet she was distracted as she ran her hand down the silky shortness of her hair.

  “Sorry, love. It’s what we call your parents. The ‘stiffs.’ You’d think people who owned a circus would have some sort of imagination and free spirit, but the Ripleys sure don’t act like it. You, on the other hand . . .” Patty laid the mirror on the table. “You’re a step up and don’t they know it? You’ve got circus in your blood and a shine in your eyes that is going to dazzle everyone once you take off that bushel basket and be yourself.”

  “I was taught to be obedient.” Pippa heard the tremor in her voice—and hated it.

  “Sure.” Patty plopped onto a stool, leaning against the sewing table, her elbow knocking into the sewing machine. The costume house was quiet today. A day off for the seamstresses. “Weren’t we all? And we’re supposed to be submissive and follow our men and all that. But how does that account for girls like me? I ain’t got no father, sure as heck have no husband, and don’t even have a brother. So, what am I to do, huh? But I do have a mind. And, I do have . . . well, I
have my ways to support myself, I do, and I know I ain’t perfect, and maybe I don’t do everything to make God smile, but I still believe in Him. And I try to make good choices, when I can. We weren’t all born with a silver spoon in our mouth.”

  “And I was.” Pippa finished the obvious comparison.

  Patty leaned forward, her own kohl-lined eyes mirroring Pippa’s newly sculpted ones. “Does it matter? Don’tcha think that if God had enough creativity to throw red and blue and purple and green all together with a bunch of other colors and call it a rainbow, that He might have a way of making the thunder and rain meet the sun and create something beautiful? They got to work together, not apart. The sun doesn’t follow the rain, and the thunder isn’t in charge of the sun, but together they make color. A masterpiece. All playing a different part.”

  Patty leaned back and reached for her cigarette case. “That’s what I think. I think we all play different parts. I don’t think one dominates the other. We all bring something to the sky to make it beautiful.”

  “It’s a lovely thought,” Pippa murmured.

  “Isn’t that right, fella?” Patty shouted out the open window.

  Pippa jumped, her arm knocking over a spool of thread. One quick look out the window and she caught sight of Jake Chapman. Jake, who stood patiently by Agnes, the elephant calf’s mother, as she paused on the road. Her trunk reached for some leaves dangling from an oak tree, wrapped around the branch, and pulled.

  Jake must not have seen Pippa. The grin he cast in Patty’s direction was just shy of stunning. It transformed his masculine features from brooding to that of humor and even fun.

  “Isn’t what right?” he shouted back.

  “Come.” Patty tugged on Pippa’s sleeve. Pippa resisted, but Patty yanked harder. Rather than tumble from her chair, Pippa followed unwillingly, not missing the small whine from Penn as the dog scampered to her feet to follow also.