ELIZABETH MACNEAL
Contents
Part One: May 1866
Nell
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Part Two
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Nell
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Jasper
Part Three
Nell
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Toby
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Part Four
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Part Five
Nell
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Toby
Nell
Jasper
Nell
Toby
Nell
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
For Mum and Dad, with all my love.
Part One
MAY 1866
The river
where you set
your foot just now
is gone –
those waters
giving way to this
now this.
HERACLITUS, Fragments
We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein, 1823
Nell
It begins with an advertisement, nailed to an oak tree.
‘Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders!’ someone shouts.
‘What is it?’
‘The greatest show on earth!’
Everyone is shovelling forwards, tutting, shouting. A woman shrieks, ‘Watch your wings!’
Through a gap between armpits, Nell glimpses a fragment of the handbill. The colour sings, bright red edged in gold. An illustration of a bearded woman, dressed in a red doublet, golden wings clipped to her boots. ‘Stella the Songbird, Bearded Like a Bear!’ Nell leans closer, straining to see the whole of the advertisement, to read the looping words. ‘Minnie, the Famed Behemoth’ – a huge grey creature, long snouted – ‘Brunette, the Welsh Giantess. The World’s Smallest Museum of Curious Objects’ – a sketch of a white crocodile in a jar, the sloughed skin of a snake.
At the top of the handbill, three times the size of any of the other acts, is a man’s face. His moustache is curled into two sharp brackets, cane held like a thunderbolt. ‘Jasper Jupiter’, she reads, ‘showman, presents a dazzling troupe of living curiosities –’
‘What’s a living curiosity?’ Nell asks her brother.
He doesn’t answer.
As she stands there, she forgets the endless cutting and tying of violets and narcissi, the numerous bee stings which swell her hands, the spring sun which bakes her skin until it looks parboiled. Wonder kindles in her. The circus is coming here, to their small village. It will pin itself to the salt-bleached fields behind them, stain the sky with splashes of exquisite colour, spill knife jugglers and exotic animals and girls who strut through the streets as if they own them. She presses closer to her brother, listens to the racket of questions. Gasps, exclamations.
‘How do they make the poodles dance?’
‘A monkey, dressed as a tiny gallant!’
‘Does that woman really have a beard?’
‘Mouse pelts. It will be mouse pelts, fixed with glue.’
Nell stares at the handbill – its scrolled edges, its fierce colours, its shimmering script – and tries to burn it into her mind. She wishes she could keep it. She would like to sneak back when it is dark and pull loose the nails – gently, so as not to rip the paper – and look at it whenever she wants, to study these curious people as carefully as she pores over the woodcuts in the Bible.
Tenting shows have often pitched in nearby towns, though never in their village. Her father even visited Sanger’s when it set up in Hastings. He told stories about boys with painted lips, men who rode horses upside down and fired pistols at pint pots. Marvels you wouldn’t believe. And the doxies – oh, they’d do you as cheap as a Brighton girl. In the fields, news of circus disasters passed gleefully from mouth to mouth. Tamers eaten by lions, girls who tiptoed across high wires and tumbled to their deaths, fires which consumed the tent whole and roasted the spectators inside, boiled whales in their tanks.
There is a lull in the shouting, and into that a voice calls, ‘Are you in it?’
It is Lenny, the crate builder, his red hair falling into his eyes. He is grinning as if he expects everyone to join in. Those around him fall silent and, encouraged, he speaks more loudly. ‘Show us a handstand! Before the other wonders arrive.’
From the way her brother flinches, at first Nell thinks Lenny is talking to him. But it is impossible; there is nothing unusual about Charlie, and it is her who Lenny watches, his gaze sliding over her hands and cheeks.
The silence hangs, broken only by whispers.
‘What did he say?’
‘I didn’t hear!’
A shuffling, fidgeting.
Nell can feel the familiar burn of eyes on her. When she glances up, they startle, focus too intently on their fingernails, at a stone on the ground. They mean to be kind, she knows, to spare her the humiliation. Old memories split open. How, two years ago, the storm cast salt on to the violets and shrivelled them, and her father pointed at her with a wavering finger. She’s a bad omen, and I said it the day she was born. How her brother’s sweetheart, Mary, is careful not to brush her hand by mistake. Is it catching? The bare stares of passing travellers, the mountebanks who try to sell her pills and lotions and powders. A life of being both intensely visible and unseen.
‘What did you say, Lenny?’ her brother demands, and he is poised, taut as a ratting terrier.
‘Leave him,’ she whispers. ‘Please.’
She is not a child, not a scrap of meat to be fought over by dogs. It is not their fight; it is hers. She feels it like a fist in her belly. She covers herself with her hands as if she is naked.
The crowd moves back as Charlie pounces, his arm pounding like the anvil of a machine, Lenny pinned beneath him. Somebody tries to pull him off, but he is a monster, swiping, kicking, flailing.
‘Please,’ she begs, reaching for her brother’s shirt. ‘Stop it, Charlie.’
She looks up. Space has opened around her. She is standing alone, fidgeting with the hem of her cap. A jewel of blood glints in the dust. Sweat circles the armpits of her dress. The minister hovers his hand over her shoulder as if to pat it.
Her bee stings throb, her hands bruised purple with sap.
Nell forces her way through the crowd. Behind her, the grunt of fighting, fabric tearing. She starts to walk towards the cliffs. She craves a swim, the unbearable pull of the current, that low ache as her limbs fight it. She will not run, she tells herself, but her footsteps soon hammer the ground and her breath is hot in her throat.
Toby
Toby should be riding back to camp, careering down these twisted hedgerows before dusk sets in. But he never can resist the way people watch him as he puts up the advertisements, nails held between his lips. He takes longer than he should, as if this is part o
f the show. His brother would laugh at his theatrical wielding of the hammer, how he steps to one side as if he might be whisking away a cape. Ta-da. But the villagers look at him as if he is important, as if he is somebody, and he pulls back his shoulders, straightens the dandelion crown he made for his horse.
As soon as he arrives back at the camp, he will seep into the background. He is a mere enabler of others, his brute strength the only way to repay the debt he owes his brother. He lifts hay and ferries king poles and oils ratchets. He is tall, but not tall enough. He is wide, but not fat enough. His strength is useful, but it quails compared to those who make a living from it – Violante, the Spanish Hercules, who can lift an iron cannon weighing four hundred pounds by the hair on his head.
As he stands by the inn, and people eye the handbills poking from his saddlebag, sweat dampens his collar. The day is too clear, too hot, to be real. It hovers, as still and perfect as a glass bauble, as if it is about to break.
He watches a blonde-haired girl as she runs towards the sea, dust rising behind her like smoke. A freckled boy limps round the corner of the inn, blood on his nose and mouth. They were so excited about the show that a fight broke out. That is what he will tell his brother Jasper tonight. At least news of such frenzied anticipation will do something to ease Jasper’s temper, which will surely come as soon as he sets foot in this – well, even village would be generous. Timber cottages hunched like dowagers, rib-thin dogs. He thinks of Sevastopol and the burnt husks of dwellings, and the scent of flowers cloys. His fingers shake, the reins clinking. The gulls scream like mortars. A reek of stale bodies, of dried manure. He rubs his cheek.
He clambers on to his horse (Grimaldi, named after the clown), digs his spurs into its side, and begins to head back to their current pitch, an hour’s ride away. Tonight, they will pack up the wagons, yoke the zebras, and begin their slow procession to this settlement. He has arranged a field where they will set up their tent, instructed the grocer to provide cabbages and old vegetables for the animals.
Just past the turnpike, Toby decides to take the longer coastal lane, where the girl ran. As he rides towards the cliffs, he passes tiny walled gardens carpeted with violets and realizes that this village is a flower farm. He hears his first cuckoo of the year, canters past a wheatear settled on a branch.
The sea is gin clear, rocks as sharp as bayonets. Sea meets sky in a pale blur. He stops, turns his fingers into a rough square, as if he might capture the scene with his photography machine. He lowers his hands. Pristine images have held no charm for him since the Crimean war. Instead, he draws out a cigar and a pack of lucifers.
It is in that moment, as he strikes a match and inhales its fresh scent – camphor, sulphur – that he sees the girl poised on a rock, as though she is about to walk on to a stage. The drop to the water must be six, ten feet high. He cries out, ‘No!’, as she throws herself forwards, toes pointed, pale hair streaming behind her like a flame. The sea swallows her, gargles. She rises briefly, arms high, fighting. He loses sight of her. Waves thunder.
She is, he is quite sure, drowning. She has been under for too long already. He tumbles from his horse, charges forwards. Down the steep cliff path, stones skittering, ankle twisting beneath him, Grimaldi staggering behind. No sign of her. Pain like a blade. Her hand appears as if grown from the sea itself. He tugs at his shirt, and crashes into the shallows. It is cold but he does not care.
And then, she surfaces, and her arms slice the waves. She twists with the sea, basking as easily as a seal. She kicks her legs, dives down and then breaks the water, hair stuck to her face. It feels private, somehow, as if Toby is intruding; but he finds himself arrested by the quiet ecstasy of her movements, how she carves through the water as smoothly as a hot knife in butter. She cuts her way to the boulder she jumped from, waits for a swell, and clings to it, dress stuck to her. He half-expects a scaled tail to emerge, not legs.
When she is on the rock, she notices him, and he sees himself as she must, calfskin jerkin half-off, water soaking his trousers. His shirt open, his belly so loose and pale. A foolish bear of a man. He blushes, shame spreading up his neck.
‘I – I thought you were drowning,’ he says.
‘No.’
She cups her chin in her hands and glares at him, her face half-shadowed. But he realizes that something lies beneath her anger: a yearning, as if this place is too small for her, as if she wants more. He feels a corresponding tug in his own chest.
She looks away from him, towards the horizon, and there is something about her which he cannot explain. The shadow, he notices, has fallen on the wrong cheek. He must be mistaken. He peers more closely. A crackle of electricity seizes him. He steps forwards, waves swilling around his knees.
It is as if someone has taken a paintbrush and run it from her cheekbone to her chin, splashed tiny flecks of brown paint across the rest of her face and neck. He should look away, but he can’t. He cannot believe that this quiet village could contain someone so extraordinary. Here, among the nettles and the dirt and the crumpled cottages.
‘Have a long look, why don’t you?’ she says. There is challenge in her eyes, as if waiting for him to flinch.
Her words rip a hole in him. He flushes. ‘I –’ he stammers. ‘I – I didn’t –’
Silence takes over. The waves spit at him and thunder over the stones. The sea sits between them, as if protecting her. He should leave. Already, the sun is lowering and he will have to ride an hour in the dark. He doesn’t know these parts. He touches the knife at his thigh where it waits, ready to sink itself into any brigand who might pounce from a tree.
There is a shout from the cliffs, a man’s voice. ‘Nell-ie! Nell-ie!’
She slips behind the rock, out of sight.
The man might be her husband; she looks old enough to be married. He wonders if they have argued, if this is why she is hiding down here.
‘Well, goodbye,’ he says, but she does not reply.
He ambles towards the shore. Sea anemones flaunt themselves in rockpools. He mounts Grimaldi and, as he crests the path, he comes across the man calling her name. He raises his cap.
‘Did you see a girl down there?’ he asks.
Toby pauses, and the lie is easy. ‘No.’
As soon as he is at the top, he glances back, but she is gone. Slipped into the water, perhaps, or still crouched behind the boulder. Spray lifts from that small hip of rock. He shakes his head and presses his horse into a gallop.
He races as if pursued. He races as if to outrun himself, his own thoughts, as if to open up the distance between him and her. Little flies lodge in his throat. The saddle creaks. He wants to leave her there, like a child who has lifted a stone and replaces it without killing the woodlouse beneath it. He wants to forget her. But she lingers, as though pressed on to glass.
Have a long look, why don’t you?
He blinks, rides faster. He misses his brother with a sudden ache, a need to be with him, to winch himself back in, to be assured of his silence and protection.
Scutari, Scutari, Scutari.
Those cold nights, the screech of bullets. Soldiers shivering beneath ripped tarpaulins.
That is the past, he tells himself; nobody knows what he has done except Jasper. Nobody knows. But his heart is racketing, and he leans closer to the horse for fear he will tip himself off. A gull eyes him, shrieks as if to say, I know – I know – I know –
He is a coward, a liar, and a man died because of him. A thousand more might have perished by his hand.
Sparrows dash from low branches. He passes a single carriage. A hare is almost caught under Grimaldi’s hooves. Toby, who is usually so cautious, has never ridden so fast in his life.
He will bring his brother news about the girl, and Jasper’s face will crease into simple delight. It will ease his debt, just a little. That is the first thing he will do when he arrives back at the camp. If he doesn’t, he knows his brother will guess anyway. Sometimes, it feels as if Jasper holds
his mind in a jar. He is a book to be read, a plain machine whose parts Jasper can easily assemble. He ducks to miss a low branch, his thighs burning. He has a memory of Jasper, prising silver rings off dead soldiers, gripping a bagful of Russian crucifixes. I snatches whatever I sees! This will make our circus!
If he tells Jasper about the girl, about Nellie, what then?
Others could appreciate her worth too. She’d earn far more than she does here.
But as a pheasant scrabbles out of his path, he has an image of himself as a wide-eyed bloodhound, fetching his brother a dead bird in his mouth.
Nell
‘Nell-ie, Nell-ie.’
Her brother is calling her name, but Nell does not reply. It is the man she watches, galloping across the clifftops, neck bent to his horse’s mane. She has a contrary urge to beckon him to return, to have him look at her as he did before. The sight of him, water crashing around his knees, his startled horse with its saddlebag of handbills. I thought you were drowning. The memory is so acute it is a surprise when she looks at the beach and finds it empty. And then she digs her knuckles into her thighs, remembers how he watched her fooling around in the water. He might be laughing at her even now, just as Lenny did.
Show us a handstand! Before the other wonders arrive.
It is only her here, only her and a thousand barnacles and a rockpool of scuttling crabs as transparent as fingernails. Her brother’s shouts fade. The brine has made her birthmarks itch, and she lifts up her sodden skirts and inspects them, longing to rake them with her fingernails. Some are the size of freckles, others so large she can span them with her fingers. They cover her torso, her back, her arms. She has never thought of them as blots or stains as her father calls them. Instead, she likes to think of them as rocks and pebbles, tiny grains of sand, a whole seashore dimpling her body.
She remembers the fair in the next town when she was a young child – the cart heavy with flowers, her and Charlie whooping as they bounced over potholes, the rattle of those tall metal wheels. Her brother was five; she must have been almost four. It was when they drew into the marketplace that she began to notice murmurings around her, stares, sudden drawings-back. Townsfolk she didn’t recognize and who didn’t know her. Hissed questions. Her father pulled to one side. What’s wrong with her? It’s a tragedy – she thought perhaps she was dying and nobody had told her. She asked her brother, her voice high in panic, and he shook his head. ‘It’s these,’ he said, pressing his fingers to her hands. ‘Only these. I hardly see them.’ But still, she did not understand, did not see her birthmarks as any particular sadness, any problem that needed to be fixed. A small crowd gathered, fingers pointing. Someone reached out and flicked her cheek. Her brother’s hand in hers, his fast breath. ‘Don’t listen to them,’ he whispered. But after that, she started to notice it more, to imagine her friends regarding her with mockery or confusion, until she began to isolate herself from the other children, to choose solitude.
Circus of Wonders Page 1
