The courtier returns with a spaniel on a pink ribbon. The dog is white, spotted with large liver marks. Its docked tail swings like a pendulum.
A dog, she thinks.
‘They are quite twins! My pets of the Palace.’ The Queen leans forwards, claps her hands. ‘Oh, how amusing! If only Vicky and Bertie could see this. Shake her paw.’
Nell reaches forwards as if she is a puppet, as if she can do nothing but submit. She grasps the dog’s tiny foot.
‘How do you do,’ the Queen says in a curious high-pitched voice which, Nell realizes, is supposed to belong to the dog. The animal whines, squirms, itches with discomfort. Everywhere, eyes on her, as if she is a pilchard on a plate. Something to be devoured.
‘Wondrous! Simply wondrous,’ one of the ladies-in-waiting says. ‘What an entertaining little monster she is.’
She means the dog, Nell tells herself, and yet everybody is looking at her. She has still not uttered a word. She pats her chest, as if hoping to find the words tamped down there, ready to gurgle up. She hears only the racket of her pulse.
Jasper has taken my voice, she thinks, but she shakes her head as if to rid herself of such an absurd thought. She thinks of the sea witch, her house built from the bones of shipwrecked sailors. She cut out the Little Mermaid’s tongue with a gutting knife.
I belong to the public, Stella said.
Her shoulders are raw from the dig of the wings. The mermaid’s feet bled as though she trod on sharp knives.
‘You must visit me again,’ the Queen says. ‘I should like that.’
And with that, Nell is dismissed, left to retrace her footsteps down that staircase and along those long corridors. The pillars have the speckled look of manufactured meat. She pictures flesh fed into a grinder, turned to mince. Feet bleeding. Bonnie the fire-eater’s mouth, singed with hot coals from where the leather mouthpiece has worn thin.
A carriage is called, and rain smashes the roof, as biting as hail. She can see nothing through the steamed-up window. When the horse stops at the pleasure gardens, she jumps down, dodges streams. The grounds are turned to quagmires. A sharp slice of lightning. Her hair sticks to her face. There is a candle burning in her wagon, and when she pushes open the door, she finds she is not surprised that Jasper is waiting for her.
She is knocked to the side. A smack as she hits the floor, wind forced from her lungs. And then Jasper is above her, pinning her hands to the ground. The meaty reek of his breath, hot on her neck.
The wagon blurs. She does not think of the pain on her wrists; she does not think of how she should be fighting, how leaden her body feels. But her mind reels back to a small pebbled beach, a lamp and a net and a slippery sea creature, pulsing in her hand. You have to stun a squid to kill it, drive a skewer through the gap between its eyes. It doesn’t fight or thrash, not like mackerel. Those are dispatched easily, with a thumb placed gently in their mouths and pulled back, the dull crunch of a broken spine.
This is what the girls felt, she thinks, those seized by pedlars in the lanes. Pinned down like moths, like squids on rocks. This is a fight women have always fought, their soft bodies turned to battlegrounds, slim bones crushed beneath the solid weight of men.
She realizes, with a fleeting sadness, that this is all Jasper has ever wanted – to bring her body under the control of his own. That she has overstepped herself without meaning to; that he has accidentally raised her higher than himself.
‘I created you,’ he spits, fingers fumbling for her doublet. ‘How can’t she see that?’ A sound of ripping fabric, and it is curious to her that it is this that snaps her from her stupor, the thought that her outfit will be torn open and ruined. Without it, she is nothing – she is just a freckled girl in a dress. She bites, kicks. She is a mackerel, breaking free. Her elbow meeting cheekbone, her head butting against his chin. Her hands, her knuckles, a knee, driven up. He cries out in pain, and she is free, scarcely harmed, and she grasps her side, finds her costume is only a little torn. Her legs remember how to run, and she dashes down the steps, between the rows of wagons. He does not follow her.
She could go to Stella, tell her what happened, have the woman stroke her hair. But she does not want sympathy, does not want to be told how to feel, for her body to be touched like a fragile pot that might break. She fears, too, upsetting Pearl, the child seeing her so frightened.
There, ahead, is the black wagon. ‘Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fades. Tobias Brown, Crimean Photographist.’
Toby pulls himself up when she bursts in. ‘What is it?’ he asks, and she shoves him, seizes him. It is a collision rather than an embrace, as if she is trying to rid herself of what has just happened, to push him away rather than draw him in. Teeth and hair and nail. She wants to share her hurt, throw it on to somebody else. She grips him with her fingernails, scores them down his back, bites his shoulder. The power of it, as if she is felling a giant; the relief of it too. Oblivion – that is what she wants, to lose herself, to find herself; to feel. She would like to hold something in her hand and see it shatter.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.
She realizes she is crying, tears silent on her cheeks.
‘What’s happened?’
He wraps his big arms around her, binds her tight.
A sudden sound, just outside the wagon, the door pulled open. It sways on its hinges.
‘What was that?’ Toby whispers, but he does not let her go.
‘Just the wind.’
‘There was someone there. I heard it.’
‘It might have been a branch, or the rain,’ Nell says, though she is certain who it was. She presses a hand to her ribcage. Tendrils of anger root deeper within her.
Part Four
Is it possible you are Barnum? Why, I expected to see a monster, part lion, part elephant, and a mixture of rhinoceros and tiger!
P. T. BARNUM, from an encounter with Mr Vanderbilt in The Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, 1869
Jasper
Jasper remembers it as if through fog. The rain, as sharp as bullets, the water that trickled down his spine, the cold that lodged itself in his bones. Standing in the middle of that sodden ring, the curtains sagging, the sawdust wet beneath his boots. Fast breath, his palms tight and sore.
The courtier, his apologetic pause.
Ah, you misunderstand me.
He has lost control of his story, has watched as it has spun and built and gathered without him in it, no longer about him but her. Everywhere he turns, she is there. Her name, in the courtier’s mouth. Her bite and kick, her refusal to submit to him. And then, that light glimmering in Toby’s wagon. He stumbled towards it, and there they were. Four legs, four arms, writhing. The sickening pulse of ecstasy, its ratcheted breaths. Toby’s patterned arm, moving across her waist. His brother’s allegiance made clear. A cold understanding settled on him. He tried to mop his forehead, but his hand was too heavy. He was tired, so tired. He slumped to the ground, and he could not pull himself up. A heaviness, a curious calm. He was alone, adrift, and everyone had peeled away from him.
He should have been prepared for this – Icarus, that moment of soaring amidst the molten heat of the sun, the slow drip of melting wax. Victor Frankenstein’s ferocious ambition, his monster living outside his control and dismantling his life. Stories echoing through time, of men who have strived too hard, built towering bastions that can only fall.
He passes in and out of consciousness. He knows only that days are turning to nights and the rains are not stopping, that there are no shows, and without shows, there is no money. How long, he wonders – how long can they live on nothing? Every day, he must pay rent, he must buy food, he must pay his troupe – every day a drain, and nothing coming in! The fever of it: white-hot. Throat parched, eyes filmed, cool linen on his forehead.
A man he does not know prises apart his jaw and forces a cold instrument between his teeth. He spits, tastes bitter powder on his tongue.
‘No,’ he cries, thrashing his arms, hitting small silver dishes, glass bottles, powders. ‘You’ve made a mistake –’
‘A chill,’ someone says. ‘He caught a chill –’
He feels his skin lifting, his bones pulled from his sockets, catches the scent of preserving fluid. Hears the Jackal’s voice. Little teeth, a smile which shows too much gum.
‘Shh,’ a man says. ‘Shh.’
At night, he dreams of Nell, her body splitting and growing, filling the whole grandstand until the benches scatter like matchsticks. No room for him; no room for anybody else.
He thinks he wakes, but when he opens his eyes, he looks at his hands and finds them shrunk, the size of mouse paws –
Is this madness, he wonders, the inability to distinguish between what is real and what is illusion?
He hears murmurings. ‘Don’t tell him; he can’t hear; he’s insensible, can’t you see?’
But he hears it all the same. The wagons are robbed, one overturned. A zebra has been found dead, a coin under its tongue.
The Jackal, he thinks, another missed payment.
‘How long?’ he mumbles. ‘How long?’
Seven days of rain, they tell him. Too wet for the crowds. No money. Hunger, the performers restless, impatient to be paid. They have fed the sentient sheep to the lion, as they had nothing else to give it.
‘Shh, shh,’ Toby says.
Jasper realizes his brother has been there all this time, that he has not left him. He grasps Toby’s hand, holds it to his cheek.
Shh, shh, shh.
Waves brushing against shoreline. Toby’s chest, beating for him.
Shh, shh, shh.
He reaches for the ring in his pocket.
The night stretches. Light, bright pronged, and when he wakes, he is in the Crimea. He is there, in Dash’s tent, with Stella sprawled beside him, Toby in the corner. He flicks open a knife in rhythm with the tu-whit tu-whit of canister, round and shell. There is a low beat of fear, the knowledge that tomorrow they will continue the assault on Sevastopol, that they might not survive it. That many men will not. It sharpens their laughter, the novelty of being alive. They rustle their hands through their small chest of chains and watches. Stella presses a crucifix to her throat. ‘What do you think? Would this appease your father? Have him believe me an angel?’
Dash laughs and kisses her.
Jasper looks away. ‘You might spare me this sight –’
‘On our last evening on earth?’ Dash says. He pulls Stella down beside him and she lets out a whoop of pantomime horror.
‘The masons can wait a little while to carve your gravestone, I think,’ Jasper says, laughing into his cup of porter.
‘You don’t know that.’ Dash’s expression is suddenly grave.
‘Pfft,’ Jasper says. He swallows, thinks of how his regiment has been named the Verloren hoop. Forlorn hope. He forces a smile and turns to Stella. ‘I beg you, snap him out of this. If he carries on any longer, I’ll be begging for a sniper to finish me off.’
‘I just have a feeling about it. An uneasiness.’ Dash taps his chest. ‘Here. As if I can’t quite breathe.’
Stella pulls his hands away, kisses his knuckles. ‘Enough,’ she says. ‘I won’t hear another word of this morbid prattle.’
‘Would you miss me?’ Dash presses.
‘Terribly,’ she says, with a strained lightness, but Jasper sees how she turns from him, how she wipes her eyes on her sleeve when she thinks nobody is looking. She stands and gathers Dash’s uniform and begins to polish the gold buttons with salted lemons, to scrub at old stains on its fabric. Jasper has never seen her perform any domestic function before; she leaves any cleaning, any washing, to her charwoman. She takes an oiled cloth to his discarded boots and rubs them in slow circles. Dash watches her, his hand resting on her ankle. It is in this moment that Jasper feels that he is intruding, that this is a ritual as private as if Stella had taken a bowl of water and begun to soap his feet.
Outside, horses are being packed up, commands issued. The hasty crump of boots on earth. A man is crying, a humiliating caw-caw that digs between Jasper’s ribs. An army readying itself, a cat about to pounce. Stella takes a thread, sucks it, and begins to repair a hole in Dash’s trousers. Jasper would like to say something to shatter this sudden sombreness, an intimacy he has never seen before between Stella and Dash. For the first time, he believes that Dash truly loves her, that he will marry her, and he will not care if he is disowned. But it is the sight of Toby that tips him into the relief of irritation, to the beginnings of rage. His brother is lying there, his knees pulled into his chin, a look so pathetic that Jasper almost laughs.
‘I’m tired,’ he says, standing, because he understands that Dash and Stella do not want him there. Toby trails him back to their tent. Jasper has a longing to needle him, to thrash out their differences in the open, to demand why his brother does not worry about him like Stella does Dash.
‘Why don’t you say anything?’ Jasper asks, turning on him. ‘Why do you always sit in the corner like a damned fool?’
Toby scuffs his shoe. ‘You brought me here,’ he says, miserably, ‘and now you wish I was gone.’
‘Why do you glare at him like that?’
‘Who?’
‘Dash. Like he’s some sort of villain!’
Toby juts out his lip, ducks after him into their tent.
‘Well? Or are you going to stay silent as you always—’
Toby looks at him, his voice choked. ‘He thinks he deserves everything he’s given. That he can take whatever he wants.’
Jasper stares. It is a struggle to see how anybody could be so mistaken about his friend – how Toby can fail to see his generosity, his utter lack of deceit. ‘Takes? He gave you this position, Toby! He found it for you. After everything, I think you’d be a little grateful –’
There is a spot of colour in Toby’s cheeks. ‘Grateful? You’re just blinded by his money and connections. You can’t see him for what he is.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Jasper says, tugging off his shirt. ‘It’s pitiful how wrong you are.’
They lie down on their mattresses, facing away from each other. He cannot sleep, cannot bear the snotted sift of Toby’s breath. Verloren hoop, he thinks. After a few hours, his brother speaks, his voice small and contrite.
‘We’ll have our show, won’t we?’ Toby whispers. ‘We’ll still have it?’
Jasper does not reply. There are spiteful things he could throw back, but he finds he is tired of it all. He wants only to be back beside Dash, to be galloping down the hillside, saddles creaking, hooves pounding as sharply as their hearts. He wants to see this war won, the Ruskies crushed beneath his weight. He wants to be able to say he was a part of it. He dresses quickly, fingers twisting the unpolished buttons of his jacket, and the morning air is cold and sharp. Stella and Dash are already up, a pan of water on the boil, their legs entwined. The sun is not yet risen, the fortress of Sevastopol grey and ghostly in the early light.
‘Will we take it, do you think?’ Dash asks.
Jasper raps his temples. ‘Easy,’ he says, and Dash laughs at his bravado. ‘Shouldn’t have emptied that bottle of rack. My skull feels like it’s breaking in half.’
Stella excuses herself, turns into the tent. He can hear the sound of her piss hitting the pan.
Jasper sips his drink. ‘I think Sevastopol’s ours. I really do.’
D
ash is quiet, disassembling his rifle, dipping a cloth in oil. ‘If something happens to me, you’ll look after her, won’t you?’
‘What?’ Jasper is so surprised that he spills his flask and curses quietly.
‘If something—’
‘I heard you,’ Jasper says, with a quick laugh. ‘If anything happens to you! Really, I don’t know what’s brought on this sombre turn. Should I arrange a few mutes, too, to gurn outside your tent?’
Dash runs a cloth on a wire down the barrel. ‘I know it’s easier to make light of it.’
‘One thing’s for certain, Stella’s the last person who needs looking after.’
‘She’s softer than you think.’
‘Ha,’ Jasper says. ‘The Ruskies would have surrendered within the hour if she’d been in charge. It’ll be yesterday’s drink.’
‘Yesterday’s drink?’
‘Knotting your chest.’
Dash pulls himself to his feet. Jasper squeezes his shoulder, and they walk into the rising dawn, the smell of rot wafting over those low green hills. Stella follows them, straightens Dash’s jacket.
‘Dash thinks he’s going to die today,’ Jasper says, because he wants to turn it into a jest, to unravel the anxiety which has settled about him.
‘Never,’ Stella says. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘That’s exactly what I told him.’
Dash smiles, kisses the tip of her nose.
Before they saddle up their chargers, he looks for Toby, but his brother must still be sulking in the tent. He shrugs, checks his rifle. There is a restlessness in the air, as raw as the scent of rust. Some of the soldiers have tied tickets around their necks, marked with their name and address so their families might be informed of their deaths. The iron smell of fear. The horses, muscling forwards. The men silent and watchful, awaiting his command. He’s craving it already, almost as much as he’s dreading it, the rush and thrust of battle, that feeling of detached oneness with the men around him.
It isn’t until dawn the next morning that they occupy the Great Redan, the Ruskies retreated, the city lit with bright flashes. Terror and chaos; a city smoking and burning, explosions splitting the air. The Great Fire of Sevastopol. Three days later, they sweep into the shattered shell of the city, ash hot under their boots. Standards blaze. Everywhere, the roar of infantry, the quick step of the regiment’s brass band. Dash is at his elbow, and together they clamber over the remnants of the dead, rush into that broken fragment of a fortress.
Circus of Wonders Page 22
