‘How?’ a man demands, but others shush him.
‘It will make all of your names, just to be associated with it.’ He looks skywards, and Nell cannot help sharing that excitement, his energy passing around this circle of battered performers and labourers.
Jasper must sense the attention shifting to him because he speaks quieter, everyone straining to hear him. ‘We will have to sell some of the animals and fakements to tide us over, to fund this venture. Anyone who wants to leave is free to do so. But anybody who stays will be paid double when the new show opens.’
A whispering.
‘Tell us your plan,’ a man shouts. ‘What if you’re all bluster?’
‘It’s your decision,’ Jasper says. ‘Wait and see, or leave and read about it in every broadsheet in the country.’
Nell looks at Toby. He shakes his head. He does not know either.
They drift away, uncertain what to do with the evening. She wonders what Jasper might be planning, what her role will be. Usually, Nell would be rising in the balloon around this time, the crowds roaring. How long will her fame last, without a performance, without a mention in the newspapers?
She returns to her wagon, thinking the child might be hungry. Pearl has built a new dirt castle, decorated it with dozens of mussel shells, the mouse in its cage planted above it. She looks up at Nell and grins.
‘Mama,’ Pearl says.
It is the first time she has called her that. Nell touches her belly as if to find the trace of her there. A queasiness rises at the thought that she might lose the child, that Jasper could sell her alongside the fakements and animals. She remembers Stella’s warning. She isn’t yours to have.
When Pearl busies herself once more, prodding mouse tunnels into the palace, she whispers to Toby, ‘I’ve been thinking. I could buy her.’
‘Buy her?’
‘From Jasper. I have a little saved. Eighty pounds. I could offer it to him.’
Toby shakes his head. ‘That isn’t enough.’
‘What do you mean?’ In her mind, it is an absurd sum. Her own father was paid twenty pounds for her. ‘He can’t want more than that.’
Toby lowers his voice. ‘She cost him a thousand pounds.’
Nell takes a breath. ‘No –’ A wave of panic swallows her, her heart thundering. She pictures the girl, torn from her, sobbing on a podium, prodded by passers-by. She did not know how big a love could be, that she would do anything to protect this child.
Perhaps the girl senses her fear, because she looks up at her. ‘What is it, Mama?’ she asks.
Nell reaches for Pearl, kisses her head with sharp pecks. Her skin is so soft, her hair as fine as a dandelion clock. The child begins to wriggle, sudden sobs rising. ‘What’s wrong? Am I going to be sold?’
‘No, sweet,’ Nell says. ‘I won’t let you go.’
The next morning, the bones of the show are pulled apart. Men take axes to the benches, hack them back one rib at a time. The curtain falls like a jaw. They watch it, Nell and Peggy and Stella.
‘Where will we perform?’ Nell asks.
‘Huffen Black said Jasper was going to use the old tent,’ Stella murmurs.
‘What if he doesn’t want us?’ Peggy says. ‘What if we have to find a new showman?’ She sucks at a bleeding fingernail. ‘I don’t want to be put on a podium. Laughed at and mocked and—’
‘Stop it,’ Stella interrupts. She puts an arm around Peggy’s shoulders, squeezes. ‘He’ll keep us. The crowds say they want novelty, but they don’t really. Any showman worth his salt knows that.’
‘It’s easy for you and Nellie to say. I’m not the main act,’ Peggy says.
But Nell watches the destruction of the grandstand with a growing unease. How will she fly? Her balloon will not fit in that low, domed tent.
‘I’m sure he’s thought of us.’ But even Stella sounds distracted, nails raking a flea bite on her elbow.
She is not afraid of Jasper, Nell tells herself; he is just a man. She crosses the grass and her footsteps creak in the dew. He has his back to her, is ordering wagons to be towed away, marking a sheet of paper. She touches her chest as if to remind herself that she is powerful. Nellie Moon, the audience used to chant, their applause fanning across the city.
He does not look at her, not even when she is standing beside him.
‘Jasper,’ she says, in a voice quieter than she hoped for.
He turns, eyes narrowed.
‘How will I fly in that tent?’
He does not reply, but looks past her as if she is someone who does not matter.
‘I will still fly, won’t I?’ she asks, more forcefully this time.
And then she sees it, the wicker basket being lifted into a caravan, the folded silk sheet.
It does not make sense, why he would do this to her. She runs towards it, hair beating her back. ‘That’s my balloon,’ she cries. She tries to pull a corner of it, but the men push her away. There are footprints on the soft fabric, a small tear. Her ropes are wound into a ball.
‘Yours?’ Jasper asks, and his face twists into a smile.
She sees a trace of Toby in him, a sharper curve to his lip. His eyes are hard and watery. She remembers his hands on her wrists, pinning her to the floor, and she takes a step back.
‘Nothing is yours.’
‘But the crowds,’ she insists, unable to keep the desperation from her voice. ‘What about the crowds? They want to see me.’
‘I told you, my new show will be different.’ He looks at her. ‘Did you know they call you the hot-air girl? That they say there’s no skill to you. Just a puppet on strings.’
His words might be branded into her skin; she is so taken aback, so hurt by them that she cannot find a retort. It isn’t true, she tells herself. What she does requires agility too. But she feels as if he has a needle and is slowly unpicking her. She would like to thrash and kick as she did on that first day, to rend the silk in two, to smash her fists against the wagon until her palms are stippled with splinters. But she cannot bear to let him see how much she cares; and what’s more, she needs him. There is nothing to do but walk away, walk back to the wagon, to where Pearl fits herself into her arms and shows her the seeds she has dried for Benedict. Toby is sitting in the middle of the bed, carving her a whistle from a piece of wood.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened?’
He is Jasper’s brother. He is there in the line of his nose, in his eyes. She turns away from him.
When she hears the wagons process through the gates, she does not join the milling grooms and labourers. Her balloon is gone. She hopes only that Jasper has a new idea for her, a different way for her to rise.
Overhead, she watches geese leaving for winter, skimming low over the city. One of the triplets aims a pistol at them. Nell jumps at the crack.
‘What was that?’ Pearl asks, reaching for her hand.
‘It was only birds,’ she replies.
Geese plummet like rocks. Someone screams at the triplets to stop it.
Jasper
It is the departure of the animals that Jasper cannot stand. The sea lions meant little to him, but he turns away when the largest leopard and the bear are sold. He feeds Minnie five cabbages, laughing as she reaches her trunk behind his back and plucks them from him. He pats the thick bristles on her head, strokes the ears the traders shredded with hooks.
‘One day I’ll buy you back,’ he tells her when she is loaded into the wagon, door slamming shut. She bucks, whinnies, and he feeds her another cabbage. He watches her go, standing at the entrance of the pleasure gardens, hands on his hips. The bright caravan, bumping down the road, his little elephant inside.
Beside him, labourers lash the container of reptiles to a van, the sea lions barking in their slopping metal tank. His grandstand has been dismantled, the wood sold to a shipbuilder in Greenwich. His old tent is stretched out on the grass, and men are on their knees, scrubbing it with beeswax and pitch to make it wate
rtight.
If he had known this would happen two weeks ago, it would have broken him. To his surprise, he finds he is curiously calm, almost relieved. Tomorrow, the shipbuilder will pay him, and this will give him enough to reimburse the Jackal. He wrote to the debtor yesterday, assuring him that his instalment would be delivered, just a little late, explaining his illness. He has heard nothing. No letter in reply, but no threats either. Still, he finds himself flinching at the slightest movement, and he has even fitted a lock to his wagon door.
‘I’ll look after Minnie,’ Winston says, and Jasper straightens. ‘She’ll be the star of my show.’
‘Heaven knows, you need something to entertain your audiences of three peasants,’ Jasper replies, watching as the llamas are herded into a small caravan.
He has a few animals left – some monkeys, a lion, a snake, some of his birds – but only because Winston doesn’t want them. His show will be different, he reminds himself, better. It will be unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.
‘I’ve recently acquired a pair of leopard twins,’ Winston says. ‘Vitiligo. It’s a shame for Nellie Moon. My heart breaks for her, truly it does.’
‘Good,’ Jasper says.
‘Good?’ Winston asks, surprised.
‘I don’t care for her any longer,’ Jasper says.
‘How curious,’ Winston smiles. ‘You pipped me to that albino girl. It was very sly of you.’
‘She’s yours, if you pay me enough.’
‘Truly?’
Jasper has barely seen the girl since he bought her, just a glimpse of her disappearing behind wagons, sitting quietly by the fire. He is vaguely aware that she sleeps in Nell’s wagon, that they have formed an attachment to one another, that Toby dotes on her too. Their own little happy family. He suppresses a grin, remembers the courtier’s polite smile, the moment his world tipped over.
‘How much do you want for her?’
‘A thousand.’
The man laughs. ‘In your wildest dreams. Only a clown would pay that much.’
Jasper is so very tired. ‘Very well. Five hundred.’
They shake on it.
‘When will you pay me?’ Jasper asks. ‘I can come to your show tomorrow and collect it.’
‘Not for another week.’
‘A week?’ Jasper is aghast. ‘I need it sooner than that. You can’t empty my menagerie and half my wagons and—’
Winston shrugs. ‘Show me another man who’ll buy them sooner, but by then I shan’t be interested.’
It’s bluster, Jasper tells himself; it’s all bluster. But what if Winston means it? He’s right; he’d struggle to find another buyer, and it might take weeks to arrange. If only the Jackal would acknowledge his letter, would forgive the delay –
‘Very well,’ Jasper says, unable to look at Winston. An idea forms. ‘You can come to my new show, pay me, and fetch the child afterwards.’
‘Your new show?’
Jasper smiles, savouring the panic on the man’s face. ‘You’ll see.’
‘The suspense is unbearable.’ He yawns, but his eyes dart to the side, as if to discern a clue in the paltry animals Jasper has kept.
Once Winston has gone, Jasper begins to pace. He must concentrate on his future. He thinks of the intricate ink drawings which wait for him on his desk. Metal lungs, patchwork bodies. Tomorrow he will have enough to pay the Jackal; today, even with Winston deferring most of his payments, he has enough money to begin work.
He binds his plans into a tight bundle and saddles his horse. He pushes her into a trot, leads her down narrow roads towards Battersea. It is a hot day and thirst only tightens his anxiety. Dirt sticks to him, and he chokes on the fumes of burning tallow and a thousand roadside fires.
What if the Jackal isn’t content with the delay? What if he is following him, even now? He digs his spurs into his horse’s side, checks behind him.
Up ahead, he sees the wide workshops that his blacksmith told him about. He jumps from his horse and rings the bell, the papers gripped in his hand.
The owner takes a while to arrive, wiping his palms on a scrap of old leather. He ushers Jasper inside. There are carriage yokes scattered on the floor, a box filled with metal candlesticks, blades and axe ends and machine cogs. It stinks of hot oil, of woodsmoke. Iron clangs like the tolling of a great bell.
Jasper smooths his plans on a workbench, and the man grunts, traces his thumb over each part. His fears retreat, a certainty settling in. He thinks of Victor Frankenstein and the monster that ruined him; his problem, he realizes, was that his creation was endowed with a soul. What if that lightning bolt had never animated his beast, what if his patchwork creature existed within his absolute control?
‘And that wing is yoked to that socket,’ the man says.
Jasper corrects him, gestures and talks quickly, at home in this language, in this world. If he’d been born poor, he’d have worked in a place like this, where things slot neatly together and machines are built. He might have raised himself as an engineer, a bridge maker, a rifle manufacturer.
‘It’ll take two weeks,’ the man says.
‘Impossible,’ Jasper says. ‘I’ve already sourced the bones from Smithfield, and the fish hides from Billingsgate, so you need only make the structure. I require it in a week, sooner if you can.’
The man shakes his head, begins folding up his notes for him.
He needs to be making money soon to pay the Jackal again, and the tent’s capacity is smaller than the grandstand. ‘Please,’ Jasper begs him. ‘I can pay you double. Anything.’
More money, promised away. Jasper runs his thumb across the ridge of his gullet.
The man cocks his head. ‘Triple,’ he says. His eyes have the dull, glazed look of a partridge. At last, Jasper folds the paper into his pocket and agrees.
The moment Jasper leaves the workshop, he is set upon. Arms bind him. A fist smacks his teeth. A rush of blood in his mouth. Pain, searing, his wrist wrenched back. He is hauled down a narrow street where there are cinder heaps and old ashes.
This is how it ends, he thinks, and the sun gleams and dances in elaborate patterns.
He is shoved to the ground and kicks land with a force so sharp he feels only their impact, the air crushed from his lungs, a low crunch that might be his nose or a tooth. A seam of a boot, the stitching loose, the leather rimed. A foot on his neck. He waits for the gleam of a blade, tugged across his throat. He tells himself he will stare death in the eye, as he did every day in the Crimea. But as he lies there, the knife twisting and flashing in the man’s hand, a desperation grips him, and he finds himself beginning to cry.
‘Shall we slit his squeaking pipe, then?’
‘No,’ Jasper gasps. ‘Please, please.’ Here he is, face in the dirt, begging for his life.
Every second, he expects the slide of a coin on his tongue, a cool metallic taste.
‘The fucker’s pissed himself,’ one of the men laughs.
The Jackal crouches to his level, his little teeth punctuating a smile.
‘The money,’ he says. ‘You assured me you would have it. You promised me you would be a success.’
‘Tomorrow,’ he croaks.
‘We agreed,’ the Jackal says, ‘that you would pay on time. And this is the third payment you’re late on.’
Jasper spits out a tooth, sucks blood from the cavity. ‘I have a way of making more. An idea. More than an idea. I have the answer.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
He tells the Jackal about his plans, the instructions he has just delivered to the blacksmith, a task too great for his own smithy to take on. A leaner show, an easier one, almost empty of human wonders. No performers absconding or fighting or demanding more money, no animals to feed and water. He tells him about the showmen who’ve pulled themselves back from the jaws of ruin. He tells him he can do it too. He tells these stories with a yearning that cuts into him, as if their lives are his own.
The Jackal nods, and says
he will wait another day, but if he defaults once again – he pauses. Jasper sinks forwards. The ash is as soft as a pillow. His horse is gone, run off or stolen.
He breathes in thick, life-giving gasps, touches his heart where it thunders. Alive.
He cleans the blood from his nose in a barrel of filthy water, dabs at his damp britches.
Toby
Everybody, it seems to Toby, has a secret. The trees rustle messages to each other, birds pass titbits of gossip. The labourers seal themselves in tight packs. Everyone is brittle and fractious. A tumbler breaks her arm when practising flip-flaps. Huffen Black drops a tray of dishes. Scuffles break out with scant provocation, children beaten for doing little more than talking. Whispers pass, The show, what’s his show? A few performers leave. Jasper keeps only five labourers, a slim pack of those most loyal to him.
Once again, Toby ferries and lifts. He secures those old king poles, just as he has done for years, pulls the tent as taut as a drum. He hammers stakes into the ground, and each lift of the mallet drags his shoulders down, as if he is being pulled beneath the surface of the sea. He wears his shirt tightly buttoned, his tattoos concealed. His brother weaves between the labourers, bellowing instructions. Lift, pull, yes, there. Less than a week ago, Toby stood in the middle of the ring, his skin rippling and flashing as the crowd roared. Already, it feels as though it happened to somebody else, that he could never have done it. He is a dullard, he tells himself, raising the hammer above his head. The iron sings. A dullard.
‘Faster! I want the tent secured by dusk!’
Toby narrows his eyes, casts the stake to one side. His brother cannot force him to work, cannot wind him up like a tin toy. He unfastens the top buttons of his shirt, walks to where Nell is slicing cabbages. She looks at him, as though daring him to do it. He wraps his arms around her and she makes a small, contented sound. He feels the scorch of Jasper’s gaze, but only draws her closer. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he whispers. ‘You were smiling at something.’
Circus of Wonders Page 25
