Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

And then, the girl begins to dance.

  She is ungainly at first, self-conscious, and Jasper lights a cigar. The women around her are dressed in darned frocks, most of them thirty or forty years behind the fashions in the capital. Girls who look as young as fifteen nurse infants. He yawns and doesn’t bother to cover his mouth.

  But when he looks at her again, he rests his hand on his cane to steady himself. Her hair pounds her back. She is wild yet poised, her arms as agile as an acrobat’s. She is magnetic, alive, a moth at a flame, joy radiating from her. He sees the other villagers murmuring, eyes on her. If he squints, he can imagine that the fire is a row of gas lamps lining the ring, the fiddle and drum his own band. Beneath his feet, the dirt turns to sawdust.

  I present, London, a wondrous sight –

  Yes, Jasper thinks. Here is his ticket to the bigger game. She will be brilliant, novel, electric. He has planned his assault on London carefully – it will take a year if he can secure pitches in some of the larger towns like Brighton and Hastings – but with her in his troupe, he might save enough capital within nine months.

  ‘You’ll be good to her?’ her father asks. ‘You promise she’ll be happier?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says.

  You’re a better man than this.

  Rot, he thinks. This is show business. This is how fortunes are made, audiences won. He is elevating her.

  He spent the day furnishing her caravan to an absurd degree, just to prove to Toby he isn’t the monster he made him out to be. He had a zebra wagon cleaned out, sluiced down and painted, and even instructed his butterfly man to take the Turkish coverlets from his own bed. With a paste-pot, he glued peacock feathers to the wall. ‘Even thirty-thousand Commodore Nutts would be delighted with this,’ Jasper said, loudly in the hope that Toby would hear.

  He chose three books for her carefully, remembering how Toby used to treasure their gilt editions, scarcely daring to cut the pages. Even if she couldn’t read, she might enjoy the woodcuts and ink sketches. Ovid’s translated Metamorphoses. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. He placed them in the top drawer of her dresser.

  When his brother rode off to put up handbills in the next town, Jasper tested the metal bolts of her caravan, rattled them until he was sure they held tight. He knew, as he stood in the wagon and pressed its four walls, that she would be frightened at first. His mouth tasted soaped, a tremor in his wrists. But other showmen would have bought her and treated her like a dog. It was fortunate that he was the one to discover her.

  And now, that same wagon is ready and waiting behind him. The horses tussle and clink their reins. One of his grooms is sitting on the box seat and smoking the Indian herb. Jasper will ride on top with him.

  ‘She’s never danced before,’ her father says, and he leans forwards, chin resting on his crook. ‘She’s usually the first to leave. Perhaps – I don’t know – if she waits for her brother, then –’ He bows his head, coughs. ‘She’ll come soon, I’m sure of it.’

  On she dances, faster and faster, a whirl of pale lashing hair, arms thrown out, feet kicked. He cannot stop looking at her. She just knows how to move. He wonders if she realizes that everyone is watching her in admiration, that she is captivating, beautiful. It is little wonder that Toby guarded her so carefully.

  I present, a leopard girl, a wonder, a marvel –

  He would have paid her father twenty times what he asked.

  Her face glows with the heat of it. And then, with a final flounce, she pulls away from the other dancers.

  Jasper’s pulse jumps in his throat. Soon, she will be his. Soon, he will change her life and she will become extraordinary.

  Nell

  Lenny tugs her towards him. His hands grip her waist. Nell pulls back, too fast, her elbow clicking. She will not be a joke, will not have his arm around her because others have put him up to it. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, and she notices other villagers staring, conversations paused, drinks caught halfway to mouths.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she says. She stumbles back, slumps on a bale, and Lenny doesn’t follow her. The hay pricks her legs. Her limbs feel as if they do not belong to her. Drink: too much of it. She ought to have stopped.

  She is sure she catches a small laugh, a smile quickly swallowed. Lucy, the girl with the baby, falls silent, watching her from the corner of her eye.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Lucy asks, but her tone seems loaded with mockery.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, sullen.

  ‘Fine,’ the girl says, pulling her child closer.

  A wind is rising, racketing the trees around her. The drum thumps, faster and faster.

  The music seems to change, to shift to a sharper tenor. The violin shrieks. The straw itches.

  The villagers wheel and spin, hard thuds as they hit the ground, forearms like fat cuts of beef. Gone are the girls who dance like moths. She coughs, leans closer to the blaze. Even the fire seems to rise too high, the flames filled with leering faces.

  ‘Who shall we sacrifice to the angry gods?’ one of the fishermen shouts, and then pretends to wrestle his sweetheart into the bonfire. ‘Our sacrifice! Our sacrifice!’

  She catches a conversation between Mrs Pawley’s daughters.

  ‘They begin with a chain when it’s just a calf, just a babe, he told me.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘It stops fighting, and they replace the chain with string. But the elephant doesn’t know how easily it could break free.’

  ‘Like breaking horses?’

  Nell sees Charlie is in the corner with Mary, his hand twisting the cloth at her waist. Soon, they will sneak away to tup in the long grass. Other girls are being led from the fire, boys promising tenderness in the way they span their waists, press kisses to their cheeks. She brushes her lips and they are as cold as the earth.

  Lenny nods at her, his drink raised halfway to his mouth. She tries to shake her head, to communicate that she doesn’t want his company, but he hurries towards her, tripping over a dog basking in the fire’s heat.

  He laughs out his embarrassment, then sits too close to her. ‘I brought you something,’ he says.

  She would like to move away, but she is already on the edge of the bale. She feels the helplessness of it, her own limbs tucked tight, his sprawling and spreading like the tentacles of a squid. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a piece of paper. He unfolds it. It is the handbill, its corners torn where the nails pierced it.

  ‘I took it for you,’ he says. ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  Show us a handstand! Before the other wonders arrive.

  He grins. The advertisement is a taunt, a reminder that she is different.

  ‘Leave me alone, Lenny,’ she says. She would like to find words with bite and snarl, words with the power to wound, but she does not dare. The drink has clouded her head. She must leave; she must be at home under her blanket, safe and warm.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, reaching for her arm, but she snaps her hand free with a violence that surprises her, and stands. ‘I just wanted to sit with you—’

  She does not look back at him. Out, away from the music, her eyes begin to adjust to the gloom. She stumbles. She can see her cottage at the end of the street. It looks squatter than before, bowed in the middle where the roof is half-down.

  The trees rustle like skirts. The fiddle ratchets up.

  One last dance!

  Nell changes her mind. She cannot bear to be alone. She will interrupt Charlie, ask him to return home with her, or she will sit with Lucy for a while.

  She is about to turn back to the circle of the villagers when she feels a hand on her wrist.

  ‘I said, leave me—’

  Her words die on her tongue. It is not Lenny, but her father, and he is smiling, his lips pulled tight across black gums.

  ‘We don’t mean you any harm,’ someone says – another man, who she does not know. ‘We’ve the most wonderful chance for you.’

 
Nothing makes sense. Why her father would grab her like this. Who this man might be. Fear grips her, and she tries to run, but her feet have scarcely moved before she is pulled backwards, a hand across her mouth. A stench of woodsmoke, of oranges.

  ‘Let me go,’ she tries to say, but her voice is muffled. She struggles, kicks. There is her brother – she can see him, barely twenty feet away. His head bowed, kissing Mary’s neck. All he needs to do is look towards her, to understand her fear, even for a second.

  ‘I don’t want her frightened. Don’t hurt her,’ the man says, and she notices his upturned moustache, and she knows – she knows what is happening, what they are planning to do. It is Jasper Jupiter – she feels as if a poison is spreading up her arm, across her body.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nellie,’ her father says, and he starts to sob, and she doesn’t care. She would shatter him if she could, split each bone in his body. She would kill him as easily as a pig. She stamps on his foot, tries to claw him. Her father. Her skull thunders with the force of a punch. She cowers. The world tips, rings.

  She will not give up. With a quick dart, Nell pulls her head free, screams. It comes out choked, but it might be enough. It might be enough for her brother to look up, just for a moment.

  And he does; she sees it.

  He stares at where the noise has come from, but he is in the light and she is in the dark. Her heart scurries, faster than the fiddles.

  Notice me, she begs him.

  For the first time in her life she wants to stand out, she wants a dozen eyes on her. But Mary taps his leg, and he looks away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ her father says, again and again, as they pull her down the street and her feet scrape the ground. ‘You’ll be happier there, Nellie. There’s nothing for you here.’

  The threshing machine, she thinks, as she’s lifted higher, as hands grip her waist, her legs, her hips, as she writhes and kicks and scratches. Her fury is a relief, that she can give into it at last and become exactly what they expect of her. She thinks of pounding metal anvils, blasts of burning steam. She bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood.

  ‘We don’t mean you any harm,’ the man says again, and she roars at him.

  ‘You’ll give me the twenty pounds, won’t you?’ her father whispers, and perhaps he thinks she can’t hear him. ‘Seeing as she’s genuine?’

  Twenty pounds?

  She looks back only once, just before she is pushed into the wagon and the door is slammed behind her. She rakes her fingers against wood, feels the sting of splinters. There was her brother, yellow in the firelight. He was resting his head on Mary’s shoulder in the same way he once did to her, and their faces glowed as unreal as a pair of fairies.

  Part Two

  It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

  DOROTHEA LANGE,

  quoted in SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography, 1971

  Toby

  The last candles are snuffed out in the wagons, and still Toby feeds the fire. Damp wood smokes and pops. As one stick greys, another flares. The animals shift in their cages. The lioness paces.

  Nellie, he thinks, and tries to blink away the thought.

  He adjusts the corpse of the zebra. It is an old buck that died on the road. Their menagerie is often thinned by disease or because creatures cannot adapt to the climate. In the morning, the triplets will skin it, and scrape and dry the hide so that Jasper can sell it to a grand London shop. They will roast the good cuts over the fire, stew the rest. Toby wipes the glass plate with egg white and slides it into the photography machine. The light is probably too dim, but it feels important to mark this, to bear witness to the truth of life and its ending, its ugliness and trauma. He ducks behind the cape and counts out a minute. The zebra’s mane is cast to one side, its lips black and split. Flies crawl over the creature’s eye.

  A few miles from here, his brother will be riding over a potholed lane towards them, his cargo a frightened girl. He knows that Jasper will have succeeded, simply because he always does.

  Toby stares at his brother’s caravan and he is seized by a sudden impulse to punish him. He wants to tear down his handbills. He wants to set loose the animals. He wants to hurt him as he has hurt this girl. He thinks of the night he smashed his brother’s microscope, the dials buckling, glass shattering as easily as ice, the shameful pleasure he derived from knowing his brother would be distraught.

  For weeks, they had hunched over that machine, and Toby felt gilded by his brother’s attention, as if a very special light were falling on him alone. It had always been the way with them; for as long as he could remember, Jasper’s character had been a shelter, a shade. When their mother died of scarlet fever when they were small boys, Toby turned inward, and Jasper turned outward. If Jasper could answer every question for him, and order the servants to prepare the right cakes and dainties, and entertain every guest and busybody, why would Toby do anything but sit back and let him? Soon, he almost stopped talking altogether. When it came to making friends, his voice felt creaky and unfamiliar, his gestures a poor imitation of his brother’s. Jasper did so much for him, that soon Toby believed he could do nothing for himself: there was an art in knowing the right food to request, the correct thing to say, and it was one he was sure he could never master. Sometimes, it felt as if there was only air in the room for one brother, but he did not begrudge it – how could he, when he loved Jasper so absolutely?

  At school, he watched his brother stride through the grounds, making the masters laugh, while Toby scurried with his head down. ‘Jasper Brown is my brother. My brother, you know,’ he liked to say, ‘and we’re going to own a show, one day. A magnificent show!’ When he sat alone at his desk and walked alone to class and ate alone in the refectory, he thought of the circus they had planned – their matching red capes and silver toppers, how they’d ride into the ring with a blaring of trumpets. It was enough to pull him through the ache of solitude; enough for him to think the future might promise more than his own small present.

  One afternoon, when Jasper was out riding with a friend, Toby sneaked into his room and lifted the microscope cover. The metal was so cold, like the pipes of a miniature organ. He polished its brass dials, buffed the tiny slides of glass that Jasper left gummed with squashed insects. He imagined that it was his own, that his whole brother’s life was his own; that he was quick-witted and instantly likeable; that his father thought he might deserve a microscope as a gift, not a photography machine which made him a mere bystander.

  Downstairs, he heard his brother and his friend returning, and Toby ambled into the drawing room to join them. The boys were shelling walnuts, cracking them with a brass hammer.

  ‘Pick that up,’ the friend said, pointing to a fragment of walnut shell.

  At first, Toby thought he must have been addressing their butler, but Jenkins was in the hall.

  ‘Pick that up,’ he repeated.

  Toby jumped. ‘Me?’ he asked.

  The boy began to laugh, a harsh ack ack ack.

  Toby looked at Jasper, but his brother was staring intently at the mantelpiece.

  A walnut shell bounced off Toby’s shoulder. The second hit him between the eyes. Sugared almonds were next, like tiny silver pebbles.

  Toby watched Jasper. He opened and closed his mouth, said nothing.

  ‘He’s as fat as a London alderman,’ the boy said, howling with laughter. ‘What a fool! A prize fool!’

  Toby saw how his brother shifted his gaze to the rug, how he fiddled with the tassels on his red velvet frock coat. Toby thought of how proudly he used to say, Jasper, he’s my brother, you know, but Jasper’s cheeks were pink with shame.

  Twenty minutes later, Toby was standing in his brother’s room and the microscope was in pieces on the floor. The long brass funnel was bent from where he’d smashed it against the desk, the lens splintered. He could hear the boys laughing in the drawing room downstairs. At him, he was sure. When it wa
s dark, he took the broken machine and abandoned it in a nearby alley.

  He did not sleep that night. He was haunted not by fears of punishment, but by the discovery of the violence of which he was capable. In the morning, he waited for his brother to find the microscope missing, for a scolding to follow. Nothing was said for a week, a restless time of long nights, his remorse a weighty thing. At last, their father asked Jasper where his microscope was, and Toby sat at the breakfast table and bit his cheek.

  ‘I lent it to Howlett,’ Jasper said. ‘He wanted to examine a particular leaf from his garden.’

  Toby flinched. Jasper had covered for him so casually, so easily, that it might have been true, that it became true. Perhaps Jasper understood that one betrayal had been exchanged for another, and this was his way of making amends. But somehow, as Toby cleared the table and his father lit his pipe, this felt worse than a beating. The truth of his story had been snipped about, suppressed, until he began to wonder if he had imagined the entire incident, and his whole life might never cast a single ripple.

  It is hours later when he hears the rattle of horses. The sound sets a baby cawing. Toby does not look up. He catches the soft crump of boots on wet grass, the clink as the mares are unyoked and led away.

  ‘Toby,’ his brother calls. ‘Drink with me?’

  Toby pretends he hasn’t heard him. He thinks Jasper will ask again, but the door of his caravan slams.

  Soon, even the sounds of the animals fall away. Nothing moves except a barn owl, floating low over the fields. Her wagon is still, a black hulk in the darkness. Faintly, he hears crying.

  The sound winds him. He sneaks closer. The crying intensifies, becomes guttural and throaty.

  He fingers the long bolt of the lock.

  He could lift it from its catch and release her. There are so many things he could do, so many different forks her life could take, if he helped her. They could escape together. He could saddle up Grimaldi and take her home. The horizons about her would contract until nothing stood but a careworn cottage, a tumbled-down wall. Her life shrunk to pin-size.