Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  She lifts her arms as Toby instructs, gazes upwards, tries to keep the tremble from her limbs. He fusses with her doublet, uncreasing the silk from beneath the straps, apologizing as his thumb brushes her bare shoulder. Her heart hammers in her ears. He steps back, slots the glass into the camera and ducks beneath a cape, the black eye watching her.

  He counts out the seconds.

  ‘Wheezes ever charming, ever new!’ one of the children shrieks.

  She does not move. She is being transferred on to that piece of glass, a carte-de-visite that people might buy. What would her brother say if she sent it to him? And Lenny – would he admire her or laugh at it?

  ‘Nine, ten,’ Toby says, and then lifts out the plate. He unfastens her wings. She can hear his tight breathing, smell cigar smoke on him. He heaves the metal on to the ground and casts the blanket over them. ‘I’ll bring them to Jasper afterwards,’ he says.

  He starts to climb the steps of his wagon, and she wants to stop him, to have him stay with her a while longer.

  ‘Can I see it?’ she asks.

  He waves the glass. ‘It’s nothing now –’

  ‘Can’t I watch you make it?’

  He twists his mouth. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, and he looks across at the fields. ‘If you’re quick,’ he says, and she wonders who he is hiding her from.

  When he shuts the door behind her, she realizes there is no window, that the gaps between the boards have been sealed. It is so small, so warm and dark. It smells a little like the pills the mountebanks sold, rich and bitter. She stumbles on something soft and a bottle clinks. ‘Careful!’ he says. She can hear the stammer of his breath. He brushes past her and apologizes.

  Slowly, grey shapes begin to emerge. A workbench. Pots. Cork-stoppered bottles, tiny images hanging from a line. Fonts of chemicals. A mattress turned on its side. He must sleep on the floor.

  He tells her how he wiped the glass with egg white, and she repeats the new words he uses under her breath. Collodion, silver nitrate, and then he takes a thimble of liquid and brushes it over the pane.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asks, picking up jar after jar. ‘And this?’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Why are you?’

  The dark feels as secret and forbidden as the church at Candlemas. She sees books on his shelf and squints to read the spines in the gloom. Titles she does not know. And then, Fairy Tales and Other Stories. She pulls it out. An ache in her gut. ‘My brother and I used to read this,’ she says. She replaces it, then leafs through a book of cartes-de-visite. Jasper, hands on his hips, standing on a blurred elephant. A dwarf beside a tall man. A woman with one arm. They feel curiously intimate, the subjects poised but at ease. Their eyes pierce the camera. ‘You aren’t in any of them.’

  ‘Why would I be? There’s nothing interesting about me.’

  She could contradict him, but within this curious world, perhaps he is right. She looks at the collar of his plain leather jerkin, then down at her own silk doublet.

  He turns to the back of the book. ‘This is where I paste the handbills. Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘The Greatest Living Curiosity! A Bear Woman, Never Seen Before!’ He lifts the page. She sees him catch his reflection in a glass and pull a face as if pained.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ she reads. ‘Novel. Wondrous.’

  The corners of his mouth press down, and then he turns back to the bath of chemicals and says suddenly, ‘Look, here you are. You’re appearing.’ His hands shake. She wonders if he is nervous because of her. She has a quick urge to hold him, to soothe him. But she doesn’t move. Instead, she watches the paper with him.

  An apparition. A spectacle. Tonight, Nellie will appear on the stage –

  He lifts the image from the tiny font, holds it – holds her – between thumb and forefinger. It drips. He hands it to her, then lights a match, and she blinks at the sudden flare.

  Her edges materialize first, shining from nothing. The triangles of her wings, her bare feet, her hair. The marks on her. Nell’s breath catches. Slender arms and legs, toes pointing a little inwards. Her chin raised. Eyes wide, a slight downturn to her mouth. Her face half-shadowed with the birthmark.

  It cannot be her, she thinks; this girl cannot be her. It is a trick. For years, she has avoided her reflection in puddles and panes of glass, believing that she would find something ugly there. The villagers treated her marks like a problem to be fixed, an aberration, even an omen. That girl, Nellie the flower picker, made herself so small. She could never have stood this way, could never be somebody a child might long to be.

  Toby pegs her image to a washing line, in a gap between a hunchbacked woman and a snake charmer. She touches the corner of it. For as long as she can remember, she was told she had little chance of changing her life, that she would only ever be a spinster, her narrative petering out. But here – she could transform herself into anything. A fairy, a queen. A creature flying across the sky. She could make her own money, and a lot of it too, build a life glossier and bigger than any woman of her status might expect.

  It occurs to her that she can never return home. Her life has been irremediably altered. Her father sold her; how could she ever resume her place in that cottage?

  She tests the idea of it, like pressing a tongue to a tooth and finding it rotten. The leaking roof, the narrow routines and stone-celled farms, the sour smell of pease loaves and boiled vegetables – wasn’t it actually unbearable? Wasn’t her life, in fact, as small as those walled fields?

  The image crinkles in her grip.

  ‘Careful,’ Toby says, and his fingers brush hers. She does not let go.

  This girl with the mechanical wings is her, caught in time like an insect in resin. Strangers might buy this carte-de-visite, prop her on the mantelpiece.

  She feels a power then, a whisking deep within her, as if she might be capable of anything. As if this girl in the photograph could soar across that tent with its shivering lamps and feel the burn of a hundred eyes on her, and she would not care at all.

  Nell

  When Nell returns to her wagon, her old dress is not on the floor where she left it. She searches under her mattress, then lifts the drawers. It is not there. It hits her: what must have happened, who must have taken it. She tugs at the doublet as if sleeves might magically grow from it. It upsets her more than it should, the final tie linking her to her past self.

  ‘You can wear some of my shirts. I’ve a pair of trousers that might be small enough.’

  She turns, and Stella is standing in the doorway, her pipe between her teeth, one hand on her hip.

  ‘Bonnie’s roasting a pig. Now the shows are finished for the night.’

  The kindness in her voice is too much; for a moment, Nell thinks of stifling it with a snide word, of slamming the door and settling back into this quiet space once more. She grips the floor with her toes as if to anchor herself in place. That overwhelming desire to let herself fall.

  ‘No need to look so terrified,’ Stella says, and laughs. ‘You’ll eat the roast pig, not the other way round.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here,’ Nell says, and she tries to remember how she looked on that card – the metal wings, the lifted chin – but she can only recall the inward turn of her feet.

  ‘There’s power in it,’ Stella says, twisting a curl of her beard around her finger.

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Performing. You control it. How they see you. You choose to be different. Nobody else looks like me, and I’m glad.’

  Nell cannot meet her eye.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Stella says.

  ‘My brother,’ Nell begins.

  Stella scoffs, but her voice is still gentle. ‘You think he’s coming to find you?’ She cocks her head. ‘You can spend a lifetime with a family that both adores you and sees you as different.’

  ‘He isn’t like that,’ Nell says, too quickly.

  Stella shrugs, picks up a broken feather an
d toys with it. This was the woman whose figurine Piggott bought; who swung across the tent and chattered and laughed, who Charlie pretended to be when he leapt on to the rope swing.

  ‘Join us,’ Stella says.

  The girl in that photograph would not linger: the Queen, with her sharpened wings. She takes a step forwards. It cannot be worse than sitting alone.

  Stella smiles, but Nell cannot return it. Eyes down, the wooden steps chilly under her bare feet. The grass is damp, the May evening cold. The sudden warmth of an arm tucked in hers, the squeeze of Stella’s hand. She thinks again of what the villagers would make of it – what Lenny would think if he knew this woman wanted to be beside her.

  She feels gazes snagging on her skin like fish hooks. ‘Everyone’s looking at me,’ Nell whispers.

  ‘They’re only interested.’

  Interested. She sifts those stares for pity, for horror, but she can find neither.

  By the fire, a few of the performers lounge against carriage wheels, rubbing a tub of grease into their joints. The strongman has a barrel of bobbing apples. He rears up, sodden-haired, apple clamped between his jaws, bellowing his triumph.

  ‘Let me try,’ one of the triplets cries, and he holds her head under the water until the girl smacks his arms. ‘Fucker,’ she shrieks, gasping for air and kicking him in the shins. ‘Fucker!’

  There is the piglet, little bigger than a baby. Its skin is blackened and crisp, a cooked apple foaming between its jaws. Fat drips on to the fire and sends up white jets of flame. The girl who ate hot coals turns the spit. Nell thought there was a trick in it, but she catches bright red blisters at the edges of her mouth, her lips bloody.

  ‘Eyefuls are a shilling each,’ she says, scowling at Nell.

  Nell steps back. ‘Sorry –’

  ‘Leave her be, Bonnie,’ Stella says, squeezing the girl into a half-embrace.

  Bonnie saws off a hunk of pork and passes it to Nell. The crackling snaps. What would Charlie give for a meal like this, for a night of no boiled vegetables?

  ‘Sit here,’ Stella says, settling beside two women, and Nell is glad to be on the ground where people will not notice her. The giantess pauses in her needlework, the blue silk shimmering in her lap. The little woman stops stroking the baby’s head. Nell takes a bite of pork, fat bursting on her tongue.

  ‘We wondered what Jasper had in there,’ the woman says, dandling the baby. ‘Huffen said he thought it was a whale in a tank. But then we saw you, pelting across the grass.’

  ‘Is it paint?’ the giantess asks. Her voice is educated, like Piggott’s daughters. ‘Or glued hide?’

  The woman reaches out a hand, brushes Nell’s cheek. Stella swats her away.

  ‘I just want to see.’

  ‘How would you like it if she measured your great bones, without asking?’ Stella asks, but the giantess only laughs.

  ‘She’s Brunette,’ Stella says. She points at the other performers. Violante the strongman. Bonnie the fire-eater. Peggy the little woman. A wash of other names that Nell cannot possibly remember. Some of them exchange tricks, throwing knives and juggling. She watches them, their hands fumbling, dropping, catching, and to her surprise their skills no longer seem impossible but something she might learn.

  ‘Where did he find you?’ Peggy asks, and then Brunette is talking too, questions clamouring. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘What’s your act?’ ‘Do I know you from Winston’s show?’ Faces watching her, waiting for her to speak. Nell draws her legs closer, glances at her wagon. She wishes, suddenly, that she had not come out, that she was safe inside. She thinks of home, the crashing of the sea, the distant lands she imagined when she was swimming.

  ‘Jasper found you in that village, didn’t he? The flower farm,’ Stella says.

  Nell nods.

  ‘A flower farm?’ Peggy asks. ‘Roses? Or hothouses?’

  ‘Miniature flowers,’ Nell says, quietly. ‘For nosegays and candying.’

  They ask her more questions, but gently, carefully, as if afraid they will frighten her away. Nobody has ever asked her about her life before, never treated her like a secret to be unpicked. At first, she stutters and covers her hand with her mouth, a low fear that she will say the wrong thing, that they will turn her words to taunts. ‘Narcissi and violets,’ she says. ‘That’s what we grew.’

  They wait, and her voice begins to rise, steadier. It loses its quake. She tells them about the circus advertisement, and how Toby saw her swimming in the sea. The show’s arrival, how she watched from the back of the tent. There is a liberation in telling it as it was.

  ‘And you wanted to join us?’ Brunette asks. ‘You found Jasper, did you, and he hired you for a season?’

  Nell looks down.

  The sting of splinters, hands bruising her wrists. The fiddle, rising in the night. Her brother, glancing away. How to pour these things into words, to give them shape? It is too much to expose, to make sense of; once a story is unloosed, she cannot summon it back. The lie is easier. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was my idea.’

  Nobody meets her eye, but nobody contradicts her either. On that first night, she pounded on the door until her arms ached, until her throat swelled. They all watched her bursting from the wagon, running across the field. They must know the truth, must have seen it before and understand what she cannot tell them.

  ‘It was the same for me,’ Peggy says. ‘I wanted to work at the factory, to make my own way. But they said I was no good for it.’ She shrugs, curses at one of the labourers as a thrown knife narrowly misses her. ‘But Brunette, she had money. The seven-foot squire’s daughter. They used to shut her—’

  ‘I can tell it myself,’ Brunette snaps. She rubs her long shins as she talks. She tells Nell how they locked her in her bedroom when visitors called, in case it damaged her sisters’ prospects. ‘Who’d want to marry them, if they might bear another freak of nature?’ She explains how they used to starve her in the hope it would stall her growth. They called physicians and forced her to drink sour vials of liquid that made her sick and tired. They bound her feet and legs. She squeezes a daisy between her fingers. ‘When the circus came to my village, it was my idea. I thought my family would stop me.’ She falters. ‘They were glad too. They saw I belonged here.’

  ‘And are you glad?’ Nell asks, leaning forwards.

  She is silent.

  ‘I want to be as famous as Lavinia Warren,’ Peggy interrupts. ‘Find my own Charles Stratton, and then I can be on the front page of every broadsheet.’

  Nell watches Brunette. She levers up a scab carefully.

  ‘You liked it here before Abel started sniffing around,’ Stella says.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Brunette snaps back. ‘All those people touching me, watching me. To them, I’m a curious spectacle, but this is my life—’

  ‘Abel’s her admirer,’ Peggy interrupts, turning to Nell.

  ‘He follows us like the damned plague,’ Stella says.

  ‘He says he loves her,’ Peggy adds.

  ‘And she’s fool enough to believe it.’

  Nell stares. Love; it does not seem possible. She glances down at her own legs, at the marks which bloom there.

  Lenny once found her alone in the cottage when her brother was with Mary and her father was away selling his gewgaws. Lenny told her that he was looking for Charlie, but he didn’t leave when she said he wasn’t there. She was sitting on the floor, about to fry an egg, lard spitting in the black pan. He crouched beside her. She rolled the egg in her palm, cool and lightly speckled. He moved his hand over hers. She was so shocked she could not move. This was touch; this was ache, desire, a twisting in the basin of her stomach. His fingers, working their way up her arm, nestling in the hollow of her throat. Tracing the line of her ribs. A door slammed and he snatched his hand away, appalled at what he had done. ‘Don’t tell anyone I was here, and what – what – happened,’ he said, and she nodded, because she knew nobody would believe her if she did. And what had happened, after all?
He had merely touched her, which to anybody else would mean nothing at all.

  ‘He does love me,’ Brunette snaps.

  ‘I saw him doing a deal with Jasper,’ Stella says. ‘For your bones.’

  ‘I know you only say these things because you can’t bear me to have what you lost. Because of Dash—’

  Stella raises her finger. ‘Don’t you dare say his name.’

  Nell watches them, the nip of air between them. And then it eases, Stella taking Brunette’s arm. A sudden fondness once more. Brunette teases a curl of Stella’s beard, presses a daisy through it.

  ‘There he is,’ Peggy says, and Nell follows where she points. The orange flare of a cigar. A shape, slipping out from behind the trees.

  ‘Just don’t let Jasper see him,’ Stella says.

  ‘Why?’ Nell asks.

  Peggy laughs. ‘We’re his. We’re Jasper’s, as long as we’re in this show.’

  Brunette hauls herself to her feet, grinning artlessly. She tucks her sewing into a basket. ‘I knew he’d come,’ she says. ‘I knew you were wrong, Stella.’

  They watch her go.

  ‘No good will come of it,’ Stella murmurs. ‘But she won’t come weeping to me.’

  ‘I think he loves her,’ Peggy says.

  ‘You notice only what suits you, like a buzzard sees only carrion.’

  Later, when everyone has turned in, Nell sneaks out of her wagon. She can smell rotting seaweed. The coast cannot be far. She wants only to see the ocean, to feel its chill presence about her.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  It is Jasper, darkness shadowing his face.

  Behind her, a peewit trills, a smack of bat wings as they flap low from the woodland.

  ‘I wanted to find the sea.’

  He steps closer. ‘You can see it tomorrow. Everyone’s turned in for the night.’

  She moves back, nearer to her wagon.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he says. He reaches out a hand, but she pulls away. She can sense it again, that urge to pin down and possess. ‘There’s no need to be frightened.’