Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  It would have been easier if Toby had matched his words with a snarl, had even raised a fist, but Toby merely bowed his head.

  Fight, damn it, Jasper wanted to say, show me some temper! Some life!

  But it seemed that his friendship with Dash had only opened his eyes to what his brother lacked, what he wished he would be. They lay on their mattresses and neither spoke.

  That night, he dreamed of rotting bodies, of a dead hand on his neck. He woke up shivering, poured himself a glass of hock. He would not succumb to fear, would not be a wreck like so many of the other men. Like Toby. He and Dash were different, he told himself, more resilient; they had chosen to enjoy this war and it was the only way of surviving it. He pulled on his boots, sneaked out before Toby awoke. He found Dash and Stella eating bread and boiled bacon together, their breath forming icy plumes, their bodies curled into each other.

  ‘I’m going to marry her,’ Dash announced.

  ‘He’s going to marry me,’ Stella said, rouge smudged across her cheeks.

  ‘Of course he is,’ Jasper said, and planted himself between them.

  All the next morning, Jasper watches Toby from the corner of his eye, only paying vague attention to his usual business. When it is scarcely ten o’clock, he sees Toby slip out the gates.

  It is easy work, following Toby. His brother is a head taller than most people. He crosses the Thames and Jasper follows. He turns on to the Strand and Jasper dives after him. Past the Lyceum Theatre where he first saw Tom Thumb perform, through the warren of Covent Garden. And then, Jasper ducks on to New Street and finds his brother has vanished. He runs to the end of the street and back again. There is no sign of him. He peers into the baker’s, the knife grinder’s, a rag-and-bone shop selling filched wares. All empty. Toby must be in the next building. Dirty lace curtains hang from the window. ‘Painted men and painted women’, the sign reads.

  Jasper smiles. A whorehouse! The filthy old dog, and such a low establishment too! That must be why he’s been behaving so peculiarly. He’s been guarding this sordid little secret, sneaking off here each morning. It’s shame that’s drawn his eyes away from Jasper’s, that has made him fidget and wriggle in his chair.

  He could wait for Toby, but he doesn’t want him to know he’s followed him. Besides, he has a show to whip into shape, and he doesn’t like the look of the crowd of children.

  ‘Begone!’ he bellows, rapping his ivory cane, and they bare their teeth at him, faces so thin they look like grinning skulls. Everything is in his control, he tells himself; Toby was wrong to be alarmed at the debt – at the investment – he has taken on. He has assembled his world so carefully and it cannot fall.

  Toby

  ‘Through here, sir,’ the woman says to Toby. She is small and ruddy-faced. She ushers him into a room where smoking bowls of hot oil do little to mask the reek of vomit. His eye is drawn to the soiled divan, the trolley of ivory-handled needles, an opium pipe with burning coals.

  ‘My vivarium,’ she says proudly. Ferns and orchids sit in sooty glass jars, and there is a tank of tiny striped snakes, lizards and frogs.

  He holds his wrist where his pulse hops.

  ‘Now, sir,’ she says. ‘What is it you want?’

  He opens his mouth, but he cannot find the words. In the dark of his wagon, his idea seemed so simple, but now he blushes, stares at the door and considers leaving.

  ‘Sir?’ she asks, tapping out her impatience with her shoe. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I want –’ he says, stammering. ‘I want to be painted all over.’

  ‘It ain’t paint. It don’t wash off.’

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘And all over!’ She pulls a face. ‘You’re a big man, if you don’t mind me saying. A large man. It will take time, and money. At least six of my girls working on you at once, for weeks. More painful than you can imagine.’

  ‘Please,’ Toby says, and when he reaches for his purse, her eyes brighten.

  ‘Very well,’ she says.

  He lies on the bed and the woman begins to trace the outlines of flowers with an ink pen. A garden will blossom across his thighs, an enchanted forest over his back. All his life, he has shrunk into the background. He has nailed spikes and taken photographs and carried boards and fixed wagon yokes, his neck cricked with the weight of the debt he owes. Always, his eye behind the lens, watching and never participating. Resentment has churned in him. But Nell has made him crave more, a different life, a different history. He wants to be equal to her, equal to Stella, to Jasper, to Violante. He is transforming himself into a spectacle, stepping out of Jasper’s shadow. It is an act so defiant that it makes him sick just thinking about it. Will Jasper be furious, grateful, horrified? Perhaps he might give him a chance at last. Now he might ride in on a camel as they once imagined, his skin glowing and shifting in the light cast by oil lamps. He could wear a red cape and golden boots, and as the audience rumbles with applause, he might glance across at his brother. There they would be, equals.

  The woman holds up a mirror, and he twists his head to see. ‘Peonies and orchids,’ she says proudly, pressing to the right of his spine, the back of his ribs. ‘Pomegranates. A thrush. A robin’s egg. And a snake for Eden.’

  After that, she lights the opium pipe and makes him suck it. ‘For the pain,’ she tells him. She rings a bell and five other girls appear, bed-tousled. Whores, probably, and he remembers the girl with the black hair in Varna.

  When the first spasm of pain fires up his back, Toby groans, legs twitching. This garden will free him. He thinks of the Little Mermaid, her tongue cut out for love, each footstep like stepping on a blade. She exchanged that tail for legs and feet because of love, because she ached for something she did not have, because she wanted a new body and a new life with it. The needles rip through his skin. This will make him extraordinary.

  His head on one side, he watches their alchemy, his mind clouded with the sweet poppy smoke. Ash mingled with bright powder, as delicate as the fluids he mixed in his photography wagon, pristine scenes frozen on to paper.

  ‘A picture speaks a thousand words,’ a commander said when Toby handed him his fifth packet of images. The public disapproval was abating, the man declared. When they pored over these photographs, any fool could see the troops were having a splendid time, that any concerns were a pile of old rot and nonsense. It was astonishing, he added, what a difference modern machines made. They could offer an exact impression of how things were, and have it delivered to thousands of drawing rooms within a fortnight.

  Toby nodded, the praise warming him. He had curated his images as carefully as tableaus for soaps or perfume bottles. He had arranged sunny scenes of plump men, well kitted. But instead of slogans like ‘Bonnie’s Sulphur Soap! It Beautifies the Complexion’, it might read ‘England’s Crimean War! It’s Better than Christmas!’

  But that night, Toby trembled in his tent and heard the groans of the dying, the steady boom of the guns. He shut his eyes and imagined their house in Mayfair where they grew up, how each night Jasper would sidle into his room and climb into his bed, their little bodies hot under the covers.

  He jumped at the sound of a shell exploding. His brother’s mattress was empty. He was still out carousing with Dash and Stella. They had stopped inviting him; he’d long let go of the sliver of hope that Stella and Dash would exclude Jasper, leaving the brothers together again. In fact, the three were inseparable. He began to wonder if this wasn’t just a phase, if it wouldn’t pass when the war was over. He turned over, half-asleep. Images flickered across his mind – Dash, killed by a Ruskie sniper. Dash, torn apart by a shell. The comfort Toby could give his brother.

  The circus, he reminded himself, to lighten his fear; one day that would happen. He clung to the idea as a drowning man clings to a raft. Every day after that, he imagined the scenes as his brother had described. The sea lions, balancing balls on their noses. A sideshow, with acts like Charles Stratton and the Bunker twins. He and Ja
sper, linking arms, dressed in matching toppers. For minutes at a time, he was able to forget the sound of the mule litter, ferrying the dead to mass graves. Tiny fragments of light and colour and music exploded in his mind, as beguiling as a showman’s trick.

  On Christmas Day, no cheer, but dull swearing as men struggled to spark their patent stoves, the thin sheet iron too flimsy for their charcoal. He kept his eyes down as he walked to Stella’s tent, where she’d paid a French soldier to cook a goose. ‘I shot it down yesterday morning,’ Stella announced.

  ‘There’s my girl,’ Dash said. ‘Can you believe my father would have me marry a mute waif with a harpsichord?’

  ‘You don’t need to dismiss the charms of another girl just to flatter me,’ Stella said, tickling him under the chin.

  ‘You haven’t met Lady Alice Coles.’ He pulled a simpering smile, crossed his hands daintily.

  ‘And I don’t particularly want to.’ She poured them flagons of brandy. ‘Will your father like me?’

  ‘Heavens, no.’ He said it so forcefully that Jasper laughed. ‘But I’ll be damned if I care.’

  It was curious, the hatred that spiked through Toby. If Jasper had said this, he would have admired it; but in Dash it seemed like posturing. Always so damned gallant. He wished Dash would say something vile; something that would make them all draw back in horror, that would prove him the villain Toby felt him to be. How could Toby despise somebody everyone else thought was so good, so heroic? And yet he did, a feeling so sharp it made his chest tighten.

  More troops arrived, paying a shilling to enter. Stella lit the stove and the tent steamed. Cantinières carried tureens of wild duck and a leg of clove-studded lamb. Stella sliced the joint of meat and it bled gently into the carving tray.

  ‘I’ve a gift for you,’ Stella said, after the men were served. She handed Dash a small blue box. ‘To thoroughly ensure your father never speaks to you again.’

  He unwrapped it carefully. Toby leaned closer. It was a gold signet ring, likely pinched from the pocket of a dead Ruskie. She had carved new initials. E. W. D.

  ‘You mean to mark your territory?’ Dash asked, and he kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘I can be your witness,’ Jasper said. ‘And then you can find a dissolute wench for me too, beard or no beard. I could do with livening up my father a little.’

  ‘I’m not in love with Stella because I want to enrage my father. I can’t help it, any more than I could help the setting of the sun,’ Dash said, and it sounded so much like a line cut from a romance that Toby’s jaw clenched, his finger whitening on his fork.

  ‘How very poetic,’ Jasper said, and made a sound of vomiting.

  After the meal, there were flasks of wine, ruby port and sherry, and Toby lay back against the cushions. The others were playing a card game he didn’t understand, and he thought he might take a short nap. Someone began to sing carols, and the men rolled about with wine-blackened lips, words slurring. He half-listened to the conversation beside him, about telegrams and cut wires. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll write home to your beloved Times about this feast,’ one man said, turning to the other.

  Toby almost dropped his glass of port. Could this be him? William Howard Russell?

  ‘Abuse me if you will, Thomas – I’m familiar with all the slurs you can level against me.’

  ‘No slurs,’ someone interrupted.

  The officer dabbed his lips with a napkin and spoke over him. ‘I’d hardly say it’s a slur to point out that your croaking—’

  ‘Croaking! Is it croaking to state the facts?’

  ‘The facts –’ The man wafted his hand. ‘What on earth are facts?’

  Russell speared a duck wing and jabbed it at the man. But at that moment, a sergeant took out a small trumpet and began playing it, and everyone fell silent. It was a mournful tune, and Toby found himself beginning to cry.

  The room swirled around him, his brother’s arm around Dash, Dash’s arm around Stella, all these men swaying backwards and forwards. All of these friends. He was alone in the corner. Hopelessness overwhelmed him.

  Facts, he thought.

  All of history is fiction.

  He looked at his brother, and the small patch of rug might have been a ravine between them. He did not know how to make it right, how to find his way out of the dark and lonely maze he was trapped inside.

  Nell

  Once Nell has been in London for another month, Jasper begins to offer private audiences at houses in Mayfair and Chelsea. A duke writes to her, begging for a lock of her hair. She is sent lavish gifts – silver necklaces, posies, bottles of perfume, a fine champagne with four crystal glasses shaped from the breasts of Marie Antoinette.

  One evening, Jasper asks Toby to drive Stella and Nell to a party in Knightsbridge. It is almost midnight when they leave the pleasure gardens. Toby sits on the box seat, picks at the varnish while she climbs inside. It is only Jasper who watches her, Jasper who touches her wrist for too long when he helps her from the carriage an hour later. He adjusts the smaller feather-and-wire wings that she wears for engagements like this.

  The apartment looks identical to those she has visited recently, like an elaborately iced cake. Robin’s-egg walls, white plastering, a parade of tinselled butlers and tiny morsels of food. Crab on toast and parfaits and miniature meringues, whose names she only knows because they are announced to her.

  When they walk in, the baron claps his hands, his blubbery lips black with wine. ‘Here are the wonders! Here they are!’

  Everything is pink, from the food to the candles and finger bowls. A salmon is exposed on the table, scaled with sliced beetroot. Ladies help themselves to its soft flesh, knives grazing tiny bones.

  Nell tightens her grip on Stella’s hand, stumbles forwards. Eyes on her, fingers pointing, gasps.

  ‘We had the little monster here,’ one of the men says. ‘Tom Thumb. We threatened to bake him inside a pie, even wrestled him down to the scullery.’ He laughs heartily, and his hands rest on Nell’s bare arm, his stubbled cheek pressing against her ear. Stella steps between them.

  Over the hours they spend there, titles are dropped like loose hairs – the Duke of Belford, the Duchess of Kinnear, Baroness Rothschild – but they mean nothing to Nell. Stella slips knick-knacks into a little bag and Nell shields her from view. A miniature clock, sugar tongs, a gilded fan, which they’ll sell at a rag-and-bone shop tomorrow. ‘I snatches whatever I sees,’ she whispers, and winks.

  A woman sitting on a chaise longue snaps her fingers. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘Or ought I whistle for them? You always have such exquisite lusus naturae at your parties, Coles.’

  ‘I’d like to strangle her with her own pearls,’ Stella whispers.

  The woman clicks again. ‘Someone fetch Alice more wine, she looks quite out of sorts. Coles, Your Grace, your daughter –’

  A pale woman sinks back against the cushions.

  Stella inhales sharply.

  ‘It must be the fright of these creatures,’ a gentleman says.

  ‘There, my sweet Alice, there.’ A woman fans her cheek.

  ‘Pigs, aren’t they?’ Nell whispers, but Stella pulls her arm free, hurries across the room, almost tripping over a low table.

  ‘Please excuse me –’

  In the hallway, Nell calls after her. ‘Wait!’

  Stella takes the stairs two at a time. Nell follows. They never leave each other alone, especially not when the men are this drunk.

  ‘What’s the matter? What is it?’

  Stella pulls her into a small room. It is dark, no candles burning.

  ‘They’re fools,’ Nell says. ‘Don’t you always say not to heed them?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ Stella says. ‘As if I’d give a fig for what they say about me.’ She dabs under her eyes as if expecting to find tears there.

  If this were Peggy or Brunette, Nell would wrap her arms around them, would shush them. But Stella is so – Stella. She hovers her hand over her shoulder,
but Stella knocks her away.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘That girl,’ Stella says. ‘That girl. Her name was Lady Alice Coles.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She was engaged to marry someone I knew. Someone I loved.’

  ‘Dash?’ Nell asks.

  Stella nods. ‘He was killed when Sevastopol fell.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He said he’d marry me instead. He said he didn’t care for her.’ She looks up at Nell, and her eyes are brimming with tears. She wipes them away with the back of her hand, slaps her cheek. ‘Rot, isn’t it? Isn’t that what men always tell you? That they’ll marry you? Perhaps if he’d lived, I’d have realized truths about him that I never knew. He’d never have married such a freak, even if I had plucked this out.’

  Nell stares at her. ‘Stella –’

  ‘Save me your pity.’ She pulls at the wisps of her beard. ‘And I belong to the public, don’t I? What business would I have in taking a husband?’

  ‘He might have—’

  ‘You know nothing,’ Stella snaps. ‘You’re a greenhorn. You’re just like Brunette, who believes the world can change. But it’s not going to.’ She looks up. ‘I thought, once, that I’d have my own show. That I could be the showman.’

  ‘You could –’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’ There is fire in her eyes. ‘Only men like Jasper hold the reins, and that’s the truth. It’s only their voices that matter.’ She leans closer to Nell. ‘That woman called us lusus naturae. I’d wager you don’t even know what that means.’

  Nell blinks back tears. ‘Please –’

  ‘At first, I thought lusus meant light. It sounds like it.’ She pauses. ‘Joke. That’s what it means. Joke of nature.’ She stands, and there are watery lines tracked through her rouge.

  Nell stays in the dark room, her friend’s footsteps thundering away. She kicks at a dresser. She jumps at the sound of it and breathes steadily, trying to calm herself. She slides open the drawer.